2
25
50
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/840/10832/AGouldWP180619.2.mp3
03e6c6b88b0419886cb537eb12bf4e07
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
Gould, William Paul
W P Gould
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with William Paul Gould (b. 1925, 1818674 Royal Air Force). He flew operations with 622 Squadron).
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-06-19
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Gould, WP
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
DH: Right. Ok. The numbers are turning over now so I apologise, we’re going to start again.
WG: All again.
DH: All again. But at least we haven’t got very far. Right. Because I’ve just, I thought the numbers aren’t ticking over. Right. Ok. Right. Ok. Right. From the top then. Here we go. This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Dawn Hughes, the interviewee is Mr William Gould. The interview is taking place at Mr Gould’s Home in Telford, Shropshire on the 19th June 2018. Thank you, Bill, for agreeing to talk to me today. Ok. First of all can I ask you again about the lead up to the war and how you came to join the RAF?
WG: Well, I, obviously I was at school before the war and my interest in flying was started probably when I was around about the age of seven or eight and I made little gliders to start with and, with balsa wood and little bits of well sticks for lighting the fire were carved down to make bits of planes and models of course. And I suppose I was influenced to a great degree by people like Amy Johnson to go and fly to Australia and —
DH: Wow.
WG: But there were an awful lot of difficulties that she got over. She was, she were really, was bitten by, by flight I think. Anyway, from there of course you leave school and eventually you start work. The war came before I left school and I started at a local motor engineer’s at Stafford. So I got on the train every morning down from Stoke Station down to Stafford. Then it was the same ride back to go to the Technical College which is right by the station. And again I got interested there in, in other people’s model making but the old urges were still there, you know. You don’t lose it. As I said, I joined the Air Defence Cadet Corps at the Grammar School. We were the first ones in Stoke on Trent to have that. The other school, High School had the Army Cadets. I don’t think we had a Naval version in those days. Anyway, it was from, from that we learned all about flight and air movement. Practical so far as the construction of aircraft are concerned but not of engines. And then of course I had a friend who was with me in the Air Defence Cadet Corps and we were I suppose sixteen and quite a bit and decided we’d go along to the Recruiting Office and volunteer for the Royal Air Force. Of course, they had a bit of a laugh when they found out we were still sixteen but we didn’t expect to go straight away. Next week perhaps [laughs] Eventually they, they sent for us to go down to Birmingham for a bit of an interview and medical and then we were virtually a little selection as to what type of job we were expected to be proficient at in the Air Force and my friend got flight engineer straight off. I was unfortunate. They shipped me in as a wireless operator/air gunner. Now, I, I had a little difficulty with the Morse Code in the Air Defence Cadet Corps but they didn’t take any notice of that. They wanted wireless operator/air gunners so you were in. I eventually survived to get out of that and remuster to flight engineer. They took me, took me down to Eastchurch on the Isle of Sheppey. Anyway, so I remustered there and went then from there to Locking in [pause] just south of Bristol and started the [pause] what is the first step from ITW? Training for a flight engineer. And then it was the next posting was the little bit further up the line to go to St Athan, South Wales to really get down from the, well the nitty gritty of being a flight engineer and we actually had aircraft to play about with [laughs] From there of course eventually you pass out and it was seven days leave and report back to a flying station. And we’d no, no crewing up there but we did a bit more ground training and one or two of us were lucky we got off the deck a few times. And then I got posted to Initial Flying Training Wing and initially at Bottesford, Lincolnshire and it was there that I was crewed up to a crew who had already been together for a considerable time. My skipper was an Aussie. He was thirty four and I gathered that he really did want to be thirty five which I thought was a pretty good thing really. So, we got a skipper that was from Australia. We got a navigator from Clitheroe, Lancashire. We got the bomb aimer from, well the first one was from London but he had problems. He was airsick most of the time. We’d only got to get the wheels of the ground and he was violently sick so he was stood down, and we had another bomb aimer that joined us. As a rookie he’d just come from Canada having done his bomb aimer’s course in Canada and a part of a pilot’s training course as well. The wireless operator again after a little bit of a hick-up with the crew. Again, another one that was not as well as he thought he was so he was, he was stood down in favour of a laddie to finish his tour off because he’d, he’d flown on Blenheims. First of all in the United Kingdom and then he was posted out to India and on his way back from India he was on operations in North Africa when the push, a push was on. And then he came to, back to the UK to eventually find himself at Bottesford and we, he crewed up with us and he was very, very good. He really, he was a laid back airman. Really laid back. He had a motorbike and his girlfriend was in the Land Army and he used to leave the camp on the motorbike and go and see his girlfriend and of course you need petrol. He was very adept at finding out where the local Army bases were. Always the Army. Never the, never pick on your own Force and he used to go in to their camps, find out where the petrol depot was and just arrive and get them to fill him up with petrol and then he’d sign for it and off he’d go.
DH: Cheeky.
WG: He was. He was a W/O by this time. Of course, he’d done an awful lot of service, and he was a warrant officer so whether they thought the very smart uniform that he’d got was extra special I don’t know but they certainly served him with the petrol. He didn’t always use the same base but he, invariably he did. He was the most laid back person I’ve ever met. We, we, had a lot of fun after the war. I did manage to get his name and address and I went out with his wife to France with the Blenheim Society and we went to their, their old base which was a place called [Virieux] in the Champagne country. Oh, the Royal Air Force certainly picked some very nice places. It’s a pity we couldn’t have defended it a bit better but it was a very nice spot and a very hospitable local community. We had some lovely times going out to [Virieux] as the Blenheim Society. Yeah.
DH: The squadron that you were put on to. That was 622 Squadron.
WG: 622.
DH: Yeah.
WG: 622, that I eventually went to from Bottesford. But before we left Bottesford and we were in the, it was not good weather whilst we were there, and I used to pass it regularly after the war because I used to go up to Grantham every weekend and, working. And from Stoke on Trent you go straight past or straight through the village and the village is on reasonably level ground but there is a mound of which the railway put a line across the top of it and then at the beginning, virtually at the beginning of the village there’s a very nice church with a spire. It had three red warning lights on the top so that, you know you could really see it because it just pipped the top of the embankment from the railway and it was just to the right of the line that was the main runway. So when you were going on the runway at night you got the red beacons on the top of the steeple. Well, one night we took off and how we, just how much clear it was of the top I don’t know but I’m certain that had there been a train on the line we would have knocked it off. Or they would have knocked us off actually because we, we hadn’t got enough airspeed and anyway I looked up at those three red warning lights. I can remember it now so well [laughs] And then we were posted. I think they thought they’d get rid of us before we did some real damage.
DH: Yeah.
WG: Anyway, we were put on the train to the station near to the Mildenhall camp and then the lorry fetched us two. My rear gunner was from America. The USA. His residence was in New York. His father worked for the Underground. Yeah. And my mid-upper gunner was from Lowestoft, and the son of a butcher so they had a butcher’s, family butcher’s business in, in Lowestoft. And he was, he was quite laid back. We got a guy out of the armoury on one occasion, and he decided that we’d, he had a car and he decided we’d have a little bit of shooting practice. He did the shooting. We drove along the country lanes and if a pheasant or a partridge or a rabbit or whatever showed its face well it was as good as dead. And then he tried with, he tried with the proprietor at the Bird in Hand which is right by the aerodrome [laughs] he tried to get him to do the bit of culinary work. And then he found out that, ‘Where did you get these, this game from?’ You see. And he happened to be one of the members of the local Shooting Society. So anyway he got around that one. Talked his way out of the pot. Anyway, I had, we had a very lucky tour. One of my early trips was to, dropping mines. And we seemed to do an awful lot of mine dropping. Usually briefed by the Royal Navy who did the fusing. Especially when they were after something particular, they’d set these things up just to put the right vessel. We had, we had a very lucky tour really. No, no nasty things. We got peppered a few times but they soon put a patch on [laughs]
DH: What was the Lancaster like to fly in? What was the Lancaster like as an aircraft to fly in?
WG: Oh, wonderful.
DH: Yeah.
WG: Wonderful. It was an aircraft with no, to me with no vices.
DH: Oh.
WG: You could do things with it that with a lot of aircraft you’d be in trouble if not serious trouble with. But they seemed to say look have another go because you didn’t quite get it right, you know. Yeah. It was a wonderful, wonderful aircraft.
DH: So on an operation as flight engineer what, what, because some of them would last anything up to eight hours wouldn’t they? So what would you do during that time? Can you just describe that?
WG: The brief time in between.
DH: The time in between take off and —
WG: Oh.
DH: Actually dropping the bombs and then coming back.
WG: Well, most of my, most of, if it was a night attack you were on your own. And it’s just a matter of really speaking once you’ve taken off you do two things. You’re keeping a check on your own petrol consumption particularly, the state of your engines and if anything else was untoward. As did happen on the odd occasion and you had to do a little bit of, ferret around to see where things weren’t quite what they should be. But mainly it was a matter of keeping your eyes open and making certain that if there was anybody about it was a friendly one and not too close. I saw the first, my first experience was over Belgium with the V-2s. I mean you suddenly saw a vapour trail go right in front of you. Just a little bit disconcerting.
DH: God.
WG: It was just a massive, well, you’ve seen the rockets go off and it’s just that massive vapour trail. We were up at about twenty thousand feet and this thing suddenly passes you.
DH: When you were dropping the mines, the ones that the Navy —
WG: Yes.
DH: So can you describe what the targets were?
WG: Well, the targets are just a landmark or a sea mark.
DH: Right.
WG: It’s just pure straightforward navigation, and you studied your maps before and you knew what little nooks and crannies you were looking for to drop these things on the shipping lane. It’s mainly stuff coming out of Kiel but you know warships that we were after.
DH: Yeah.
WG: But we did drop them way up to the Skag, to get to iron ore vessels I think they were. We were never told. We were just given a location and fortunately we dropped them on the locations but with, when the Navy had briefed you or at least they’d done the setting up of the mines they would come back and tell you that yes you were successful, you know.
DH: That’s good.
WG: We had that. Yeah, oh yes. We got what we were after.
DH: So did you, can I ask what the date was when you joined 622 Squadron? What, what year and month? Doesn’t have to be exact.
WG: Oh, it had to, it does seem funny saying nineteen doesn’t it?
DH: I know.
WG: Yes. You were on to [pause] Yes, 1944 local flying. Yes. When the, I’ve got two here. One is a local familiarisation. That’s, you know you just arrived at the place and you want to know where everything is round you. That was on the 17th of December. On the 17th again we did a cross country. That would be in the, in the evening. And then a fighter affiliation. And then we did an ops on Trier. This is when the, we, we had the Battle of the Bulge. When they were fetching all their equipment through the railway yards at Trier. So we were called in to bomb. Bomb Trier, yeah.
DH: So, that was bombing, that was the Germans at Trier.
WG: The Germans at Trier.
DH: Yeah.
WG: Yes. And then the 24th of December we’re coming up to a very interesting time at Christmas. And we did another one on the airfields at Bonn. That was quite peaceful and we were diverted on the return because of fog and we landed at a little place with beautiful aircraft, Mosquitoes. And that was at Little Snoring, which if you look it up on the map you’ll find it’s, well north of Norfolk. And we landed there and of course the Air Force being what it is, trying to look after you properly and take care of Christmas Day we were, we were at Little Snoring you see and we couldn’t take off because of fog at one end or the other. If we were clear Mildenhall had got fog. When they were clear we’d got fog. So we were there from the 24th until the 29th, 28th when we flew back. But they came and picked us up with five others and brought us back to have Christmas dinner [laughs] Lovely. Lovely. Yeah. And then we, again we did a night. A night. A night job on Koblenz and we dropped that with instruments, on Gee. Yeah. And we, we virtually jettisoned the load. In fact, it was just dropped. It was not put on to a pinpoint target. It was just get rid of them because we’ve got problems with the Gee. GH equipment.
DH: Can you explain that a bit more?
WG: Well, it’s instrumentation that put you in the right place and it gave you a marker that you’d got to drop the bombs, you know. And with a bit of luck they all went down in the right spot. Nothing really untoward. It’s just the fact that the equipment we’d got was not fully serviceable and we had to jettison. We were a little more fortunate on the 31st of December because we actually did one on Vohwinkel which is on the marshalling yards. So you’d got a fair, a fair target to spread eagle your bomb load. Yeah. [pause] That’s something like nine, nine hours. Nine hours flying time. Not bad. Four and a half there, four and a half back. It was all the usual targets really. Places we’d heard of from 1939 when we’d gone out with Blenheims and Fairey Battles which a squadron had in ’39 out in France, Fairey Battles. They got minced. Minced up because they were attacked on the floor. We’d arranged them all in nice little parking lots so it makes an easy target to come down in one swoop and, you know you get the lot. Do you want any more?
DH: Yeah. Can you name some of them because you said some of the places that you recognised?
WG: Oh, I remember some of the names. You see, Dortmund. Well known to everybody. We’d all heard it on the news from 1939.
DH: Yeah.
WG: Munich. A lot of things went on there. My little note here there were no serious opposition. In other words we never saw any night fighters and the flak wasn’t that heavy either.
DH: Right.
WG: Krefeld. You see we’re coming now to December of, and January. January of ’45. Well, the war was, really speaking it was on its way out, you know. The Germans had got enough to do to try and stop the Army. They still put up a very serious opposition with night fighters because they could, their radar was so good.
DH: Oh right.
WG: They could vector people in. Tell them where to go and then I think they’d even got you on, well they’d got your number marked really. That’s one thing that [pause] whether it was better radar than ours I don’t know but it certainly, it certainly enabled them to put fighter aircraft too damned close to you and they could see you.
DH: Did you ever have any close shaves?
WG: These were all night.
DH: Yeah.
WG: All my early ones were night. Night attacks and then we started to do daylights and that was lovely. You could see where you were going. And by the logbook I don’t think we wanted them to have any heating because we were doing coking plants. They were making up, they were making petrol so [pause] Yes, little though, we got the, we got the coking plants alright. And it just says here complete cloud cover and flak moderate. Sometimes you felt if it had been put out as a paper you could have walked on it.
DH: Really.
WG: Sometimes it was very, very heavy. Yes. Oil plants. We’d gone on to synthetic oil plant here at Wanne Eickel. Then we had a little bit of practice and we did sort of a low level attacks on Ely Cathedral. It’s a wonder it’s got any glass in it with people passing over so low.
DH: Yeah.
WG: But they were nice little local runs you see. Take off, do a couple of little circuits on it and then back to base. It was back in time for tea. Yeah. I had quite a little spell in late January with local, local flying. We put it to good use because we used that as the test flying for when we dropped the food and that’s only three months away but all these were low, low level exercises. Oh yes. We were doing a photo shoot on at low level as an exercise and then it was hindered by a snow storm. Yes. [pause] Then one or two, well certainly one raid here that I didn’t like to be on. Coming from Stoke on Trent going to Dresden which I’d been taught as a boy on the wonderful ceramics that had been made there. To go there was almost like dropping it on, on [unclear] you know. But I think that’s about the only time I had any conscience at all about dropping bombs. Yeah, it’s funny that’s come to light. I haven’t looked at this for an awful long time. Little name here. Wiesbaden.
DH: Right.
WG: When we had [pause] that was using our Gee equipment, and we were up at twenty six thousand feet taking notes. And then we got on the 13th Dresden. As I say this really did bring it home as a pottery lad. It was a bit naughty, but it was the worst flying weather that I’d ever experienced.
DH: In what way?
WG: All the way, well for a considerable time across France we were in thick cumulus cloud and being thrown about like a cork in a rough sea. It was wicked. But it got us. Well, it partially relieved my conscience because we were, we had to abandon it. Yeah. There. The ice coming off the propellers and bits of aircraft, and flak might have been flying outside. It was hitting the aircraft and it really gave you a thumping.
DH: So that was bits of ice coming off other aircraft.
WG: Yeah. Yeah.
DH: Flying out. Wow.
WG: Which were the worst conditions that I ever flew in.
DH: Yeah.
WG: And then the following night we did the adjacent city of Chemnitz. And yes, that was done with marking the target with flares and we took, you know target markers and we dropped on those. Then we came a little bit closer to home with Weisel. Which is where the Canadians and ourselves, the English made the crossing across the Rhine.
DH: Right.
WG: And we went there sort of three days. The 16th, the 19th and the date we went, or when the Army crossed. I know there were three. Yes. On the 23rd and they really gave it a peppering going in and coming out. It was very heavily defended. When we, my neighbour from Oakengates, he said when they crossed, they crossed when we bombed it, he said we made such a damned good job, he said you couldn’t get down the streets for masonry. We flattened it.
DH: Oh my God.
WG: They had to get the bulldozers across quickly to clear the path to get the troops across. But they’d peppered us for certainly two of my trips were very heavy.
DH: Your specific target that time for those three was it the German Armed Forces? Was it marshalling yards? Was it —
WG: The target was preparing the ground for the Army to go in and take the, take the town.
DH: Right.
WG: But it was very heavily defended both from a point of view of anti-aircraft fire and for ground fire to meet any opposing troops.
DH: Yeah.
WG: Yeah. Weisel. Weisel. Dortmund. Gelsenkirchen. That was a nicer one [pause] and then one I did with another, another skipper and we were brought back to, because of fog we had to land at Tangmere on the south coast. And then it was Dortmund again. They liked that place didn’t they? And Gelsenkirchen. Yes. Both very well clouded over. My note here. Ten tenths cloud. Yes.
DH: You mentioned where you’d had quite a peppering and it’s been heavy flak. Have you ever had any really close shaves?
WG: One at night that really did rock us because the gunners, my mid-upper gunner swears that he was trying to get us on the radio, on intercom, and he, bellowing down it and checking his connections and, before I reported that we’d got an aircraft on the starboard side and we took a little bit of evasive action. Just dropped perhaps fifty feet and he was very relieved after. When we, when we were out of trouble his intercom started to work. It was funny that. He said, ‘I’d seen the darned thing and I was trying in fury to tell everybody.’ That’s Cologne. And Gelsenkirchen. Ham. Weisel, and yes [pause] Kiel. Kiel Canal. The German Navy. Naval base. And then we did another little gardening trip. We called mine laying gardening. And we were in the Kattegat so it’s sort of a nice little area out of Kiel and yeah, the thing was you’d got to keep, you’d got to keep low all the way from England. You were virtually skimming the tops of the waves all the way to the target and you’ve got to go up above Denmark and then down. You didn’t, you wouldn’t climb to get over Denmark. You’d go around the top and then down. You planned it all to stop the night fighters finding you. We were lucky. We were very, very lucky. And then we come to the very happy events really. Then we come to the supply drops. The Manna. Operation Manna which gave the, certainly the Belgians and the Dutch a lifeline, because they had, well they just had no food.
DH: Yeah.
WG: And they, they used to go out along the railway lines in the hope that they might get enough coal to light a fire and it was bitterly cold. A bitterly cold winter. Aye, there was people that suffered and they were eating, eating the fruit of their wares, tulip bulbs. Dear.
DH: How many runs would you do across to Belgium and Holland?
WG: Food drops?
DH: Yeah.
WG: How many did I do? That’s one [pages turning] Yes, two. Three. I did two on Rotterdam there. One on the Hague. Yes. Dropped them on the football ground. Oh, the racecourse. Yeah. That was nice but it was totally the ingenuity of the ground crew to lash up this mesh across the bomb bay.
DH: Yeah.
WG: That you could drop the lot all at once, you know and it was all, all the food. It was all obviously in its packages, but it was put in two sacks and if, if one sack broke the idea was that the other one might save it and fortunately most of it did.
DH: Good.
WG: They [pause] Yeah. I remember these. I remember looking down and you could see the faces and they had pieces of cardboard and on it they’d [laughs] it’s funny. They were eating their livelihood, their tulip bulbs. They were eating those as food. They’d got nothing [pause] and they’d got little notices. Whether it was in chalk or what I don’t know but it just said, “Cigarettes please.” [laughs] so —
DH: Did you take them cigarettes?
WG: We, we, on the second trip we did get some, the gunners to drop through the slots in the, in the rear turret. We pitched a few packets out. We kept them in the cellophane wrappers, you know and just, I mean we were low. I mean we were not much above the height of these houses.
DH: Really. So the cigarette drops were unofficial then.
WG: Oh, it was totally unofficial. You know what you’d done one these appeals for cigarettes and you smoked yourselves in those days. You realise what they were perhaps going through. The pangs. So it was a matter of an easy way out. And the rear turrets had hardly got any, you know there was a big hole because the gunners didn’t like to see the Perspex. If it, if there were specks on it you’d think it was an aircraft. So most of the gunners had part of a cover unspoiled with the removal of the Perspex. Yeah. That was, that was one. I must, yeah. It was, it was upsetting to see these people down below. We knew they were starving. You don’t do the type of drop that we did without food. And to lash it up in a matter of a few days and get the supplies to the airfields because there was an awful lot of, you know you’re dropping seven hundred tons. A lot of. Not one aircraft [laughs] but it’s all got to be got the aerodrome. And —
DH: How many aircraft would there be doing that?
WG: Well, we [pause] I suppose 15 Squadron at Mildenhall were putting fifteen aircraft in the air and we were certainly putting fifteen out of 622 Squadron.
DH: Wow.
WG: So we, somewhere I had the tonnages but I’ve lost those. Yes. And then we were called on. We did the last food drop on the 7th. And on the 10th, this is in May we were asked to go to, or ordered to go to Juvencourt in France to pick up ex-prisoners of war. Now, this was, this was doubly emotional really. The first one that I was able to speak to we’d loaded them in, we carried about twenty and I got one up right by me. But you tell them, ‘You’ll have to stand back there when we are going to take off because I shall be, I might have to come back here quickly.’ And no problems with him. The rest of them were sitting, sitting down on what is the bomb bay. The roof of it. And we sat them down there, a couple of them along the flight bed and they were, they were fairly close together. No, no ‘chutes of course. No harnesses. Just whatever they were standing up in outside. That’s what they flew in. And this boy, he didn’t look much older than, well he certainly wasn’t. I didn’t think he was anywhere near thirty, put it that way and he was picked up very, very early in the war. Before, way before Dunkirk and he said, ‘We were told to go out — ’
[telephone ringing – recording paused]
DH: Ok.
WG: I got him up by me and explained what would happen on take-off. That I would be assisting the skipper and where if you, you know put him in a nice safe little spot. And in the conversations before we’d taken off it was that he’d been sent out on a night patrol to pick up a German prisoner and find out, so that the intelligence could find out where he, where he was in the way of the German Army. Obviously, they would know his rank but they were after his regiment and what the regiment was equipped with and so on. Anyway, this lad found himself on the wrong side of the wire and he was picked up instead of him taking the prisoner and he did the rest of the war as a POW. He was in reasonable state. He was a bit, you know the worse for food or poor food, and he said overall he hadn’t been too badly treated which wasn’t quite the case as we came to the finish, because there was an awful lot that were trying to get away from the Russians and they were force marched really. Anyway, this poor lad was, had served most of his military career in a German POW camp. Yeah. It’s, it makes you wonder afterwards where all these people went to.
DH: Yeah.
WG: Because I’ve, we fetched a fair few back from, from Juvencourt. I’m just wondering how many more I did there. The food drops by the way and the returning, the POWs, ex-POWs. They don’t count as operations.
DH: Oh right.
WG: Yeah.
DH: So, at an operation you’ve got to be being shot at.
WG: Yes. Although, the first few aircraft that went out to Belgium were fired at but only, I mean you’ve got Germans that were being hassled. They were told not to fire. But the news didn’t always get to the men did it?
DH: No.
WG: You know, it would be back in the billet. One, two, three, four, yeah. There were four there in quick, quick succession. Eleven, fifteen, sixteenth, twenty first, twenty third. Just a [pause] yeah, and then that brings us safely to the end. The end of the war. And then I was posted very quickly. ‘Get your kit together. You’re posted.’ And I never had chance to say thanks a million to my skipper, my navigator, my bomb aimer, wireless operator and the two gunners. Never. I regret it. It rankles a bit.
DH: Yeah.
WG: It was close as close and then you were [pause] I was, I don’t suppose I was the only one but there were too many that never got really to say cheerio or even get addresses.
DH: Not like today is it?
WG: I managed to through, through the Blenheim Society, and I don’t know how I was contacted by them but I went out to the base that 15 Squadron were on out in France. They were there in 1939. And through that I met my old wireless operator, and he had obviously had more time, he was able to furnish some addresses and again I picked up crews from them.
DH: Yeah.
WG: From him. And when I go to Mildenhall I always go over to, for the reunion. I go over to see my mid-upper gunner at Lowestoft.
DH: He’s still there? He’s still alive?
WG: Yes. He’s ninety three. We were, we were the two juniors in the crew, yeah. My skipper as I say he was, he was thirty, thirty three when we met him and he wanted, he wanted to live to be thirty five so [laughs] And then Paddy. Paddy, I picked up oh very late when he’d finished his, he’d stayed in the Royal Air Force and he’d flown on Javelins which was Delta Wing aircraft, you know. Yeah. And he’d flown, flown on those. And I rather think the rest of us we’d all finished up as ground crew.
DH: Before we started the interview you were telling me about the bomb aimer. You told me a little story about how he was, he didn’t do what he was told and and, and what sort of bomb aimer he ended up being really. Can you explain that for us please?
WG: He was a bit of a naughty lad. He was sent out to Canada to train as a pilot, and he liked to see what was on the ground I think and particularly when it was in front of the CO’s accommodation. And he sort of did his little bit of aeronautics low level, fast in front of the COs offices and whether he got annoyed with the noise through his windows I don’t know, but Paddy was hauled up a number of times and told stop the low, you know to stop his low flying antics. And I think it was the third attempt by the CO he decided the best thing he could do for the Royal Air Force was to ground him. Take him off flying. Paddy said, ‘Well, if you won’t let me train as a pilot I’ll train as a bomb aimer,’ he said, ‘But I’ll be the best — ’ blankety blank, ‘Bomb aimer you’ve turned out.’ you see. Which I believe he was. He was very, very good. We only, I think one day on the Ruhr we had to go around twice and the skipper told him off when he got back. He said, ‘Don’t ever you do that again.’ [laughs] So he always made certain he got it well lined up before we got too close. Yes. He was, he was quite a boy. I took him, I had a little two fifty side valve motorbike and no lights, no dynamo. No nothing you see. So, it was all daylights for me. And Paddy was courting a girl. One of the nurses at Ely. Ely Hospital. And one day he came, he said, ‘Can you take me to Ely this afternoon?’ So, we’d got nothing on anyway so yeah fair enough. I said, ‘But I’ve very little petrol Paddy.’ So, ‘Oh, don’t worry about petrol. I’ll get you filled up.’ Which he did. And coming back they’d just been resurfacing roads in patches and there was a lot, quite a few corners and one of them had got quite a build-up of pebbles or crushed granite or something. A little motorbike didn’t handle too well when it’s, half its wheels, or half the depth of the tyres are buried in loose shingle. So I thought I was losing the front end and Paddy heaved himself, oh I’d stooped down. I was flat on the tank. He sort of heaved himself up off the two footrests and barrelled over me, and then rolled right in to a lovely clump of nettles. I mean it was a lovely, lovely bunch. But no hard feelings. His wife said afterwards I tried to kill him [laughs] but I’d never do that to Paddy anyway. Anyway, it was one of the family things that he remembered after the war to tell her.
DH: Did he marry that girl he was courting?
WG: Oh, he married the nurse, definitely. Yes. Yes. Oh, I admired his choice. Lovely girl.
DH: Looking back, apart from you said about Dresden with the Stoke on Trent.
WG: Yes.
DH: That connection. Have you got any regrets about the war?
WG: They’re all a total waste of human resources [pause] but unfortunately they become a necessity. I can’t think how we could have ever have got a peaceful Europe with the likes of Hitler.
DH: Yeah. What are you most proud of with your time in Bomber Command?
WG: I’m proud to have taken part in [pause] in so much of it. [pause] Yes. Overall, I think the Royal Air Force did a fantastic job and I’m proud of, proud of that side of it. And the humanitarian side at the end of the war because that certainly saved hundreds of people’s lives in Holland and Belgium. Holland was —
DH: Can I ask were you ever scared?
WG: Not, not scared. You’re trained to do a job and you were the crew that have trained to do a job and you realise that if we all do our job to the utmost of our ability and that’s all you can expect of anybody then ok, if we’re unlucky we get shot down. But we were, we were, when you think of the short period of time that people were together in training we were very well trained. I mean it takes an age now to get people from —
DH: Yeah.
WG: From Civvy Street to virtually to get them in uniform. To do a useful job flying takes an age. And you’ve got people with a far better education than we had and of course technologies. It hasn’t just jumped, it’s [pause] gone over. Who’d have thought twenty years ago that you could have a little thing in your hand, no, not as big as a packet of cigarettes that would communicate you, or give you communication to any part of the world and take photographs at the same time.
DH: It’s amazing.
WG: It’s just, you know one little thing. I mean, you, you have something today by the end of the week it’s redundant. I don’t altogether agree with it. [laughs] But it’s a fact. Technology has gone sky high.
DH: You said earlier on that once the war finished you ended up as ground crew. How long were you in the Air Force for after that?
WG: I came out in 1947. So I did two years after the finish. Then I was overseas.
DH: What did you do overseas?
WG: I was MT.
DH: Yeah. Did you —
WG: I was, supposedly I was in charge of the paperwork for the, part of the Air Ministry Works Department in Singapore. But I was never a pen pusher. I liked to get my hands dirty at times and I would go, I would go driving. Because you could pick somebody. Air Ministry Works Department wanted architects or perhaps quantity surveyors up at the north end of Malaya. ‘Oh, that will be very nice. Yes. I’ll go. I’ll take you.’ You see, and leave somebody else to do the nitty gritty back home doing the paperwork. That’s, that’s what I did. Do paperwork when you get back or [pause] Yeah, I had, I had a very easy passage. I just wish that it would have been a little bit better organised before and had at least a couple of days with the crew.
DH: Yeah.
WG: The poor lad from New York. I never got to say thank you or even bye bye.
DH: What did you end up doing in Civvy Street?
WG: I came out and I went out with my brother in law who had also been in the Royal Air Force. He’d been training wireless operators strangely. Yeah. Down in Compton Bassett and then up at Madley, Hereford. Yeah, I went with him because he’d started a china and glass retailing. Well, wholesale and retail, and stayed for the rest of his life.
DH: Did you continue doing that?
WG: I continued. I did about two years of it and then I came down from Stoke on Trent down to Shropshire then. This is where I settled and [pause] Yes, came down and I worked on an engineering works for a very short time and then I found a real niche in the gas industry on sales, and went eventually doing heating and air conditioning.
DH: Do you think your experiences during the war shaped how you, how you became?
WG: No, I don’t think it did. I think it made me pretty tolerant of a lot of things really. I don’t like bad behaviour in people. But perhaps it’s made me a little bit more tolerant than I was.
DH: Is there, I’m going to bring the interview to a close in a moment. Is there anything else that you can think of your time in Bomber Command that we haven’t already talked about that you wanted to mention.
WG: No. It was, well it was very fulfilling at the time. I think it was. I think it was wonderful how with so little knowledge even though I was passionately interested in aircraft, when you get in it you realise how precious little you know. But it does help to round off the corners I suppose. I think it’s marvellous how both Air Force, Army and Navy were able to train people from all walks of life to do specific jobs and do them damned well. I don’t know. I really think that’s, that is marvellous that they can put training programmes in which had been the basics of a lot of training in civilian life in all types, types of companies. Whether that some of them have learned it from there I wouldn’t know. Sometimes you — [pause] Yeah. To make somebody safe and safe enough to put with other people with very dangerous things in their hands or in control of. I think it’s, I think that’s a, that is a fantastic achievement from whichever Force it might be. And look at the technology that we’ve had. Crikey.
DH: Ok. It just remains for me then to say thank you very much for talking to me today.
WG: Oh, thank you [laughs]
DH: Very enjoyable.
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 William Paul Gould
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Dawn Hughes
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
2018-06-19
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AGouldWP180619
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
01:26:16 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
William Gould joined the Air Defence Cadet Corps at his Grammar School in Stoke on Trent. After selection to join the RAF as a wireless operator/air gunner he went to RAF Eastchurch to remuster as a flight engineer, and from there did his training at RAF St Athan. He joined his crew on 622 Squadron at RAF Bottesford. From there the Squadron moved to Mildenhall to commence bombing operations on Lancasters. At the end of 1944 and beginning of 1945 he flew operations in support of the Allied armies advancing on Germany. He witnessed V-2 rockets at close hand. He took part in three Operation Manna drops to the Dutch people, and also took part in repatriating ex-prisoners of war back to the UK. His regret is that at the end of his tour of operations he was reposted so quickly he didn’t have the chance to say goodbye to his crew.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Great Britain
England--Kent
England--Lincolnshire
England--Suffolk
Wales--Glamorgan
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
1945
622 Squadron
aircrew
bombing
flight engineer
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
RAF Bottesford
RAF Eastchurch
RAF Mildenhall
RAF St Athan
training
V-2
V-weapon
wireless operator / air gunner
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1166/11731/PTrappSV1602.2.jpg
443e0c534de38a79f813a6eb5cd84076
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1166/11731/PTrappSV1601.1.jpg
13bbfb007925149e773d77f3bb9218d5
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1166/11731/ATrappSV160405.1.mp3
4f41b08244813c9ff4f04dad3fb96c65
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
Trapp, Sylvia
Sylvia Vera Trapp
S V Trapp
Description
An account of the resource
Five items. An oral history interview with Sylvia Trapp (nee Needham) (b. 1922, 488420 Royal Air Force) and four photographs. She served as a wireless operator in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force at RAF Waddington.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Sylvia Trapp 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
2016-04-05
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
Trapp, SV
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
AM: Ok, so today is Tuesday the 5th of April and this is Annie Moody for the International Bomber Command Centre and today I am with Sylvia Trapp and we are at Sylvia’s home in Mansfield. And Sylvia was a WAAF so we are going to get Sylvia’s story now. And just to start, no, go.
ST: I wasn’t Trapp until the end of the war.
AM: Right, I’ll get your maiden, well, right, you tell me then if we start off with your maiden name.
ST: Needham.
AM: Leedham.
ST: Needham.
AM: Needham. Needham. Ok. And we’ve already got your date of birth so we know that you are ninety four.
ST: Ninety four.
AM: Ninety four and can you tell me where you were born, Sylvia?
ST: I was born in Mansfield, 216 Victoria Street. Mansfield.
AM: Right, there we are. What did your parents do?
ST: My dad was a miner. My mum, before she was married, worked at the Lawn Mills.
AM: Right. And what, did you have brothers or sisters?
ST: I’ve got, I had two brothers and two sisters. My brother, John Thomas was the oldest, and he worked at Hermitage Hosiery factory, on Hermitage Lane. And my next brother Fred, he worked, he was a butcher, [unclear] the butcher on Regents Street and my sister Eirene she worked at the Hermitage Hosiery factory and me, I worked, oh, I went, Hosiery Mills, I was in the sales office [unclear]. But before, the war started, I worked at the Quartex, up Sutton Road, a big hosiery mills that was owned by Germans. And when the war started, they turned it into a munition place.
AM: Right.
ST: And that’s where I worked, yeah.
Am: Where did you go to school?
ST: I went to Moor Lane School and then up to High Oakham School.
AM: And how old would you be when you left?
ST: How old, fifteen when I left.
AM: Fifteen?
ST: Yeah.
AM: Right.
ST: Then I went to work at the hosiery mills.
AM: Yeah. What did you do there?
ST: I was in the quality control.
AM: Right. Checking the stockings.
ST: No, jumpers.
AM: Oh, it was jumpers. Alright.
ST: And I didn’t tell you, the Germans, when the munition came to the Quartex, the Germans were taken away, the boss was taken away and they were on the way to being deported to Canada and the boat was sunk by a U-boat. So after that
AM: But you were there from being fifteen?
ST: I’m trying to think, I
AM: Cause
ST: Yes, I worked at the Quartex from being fifteen. Then when I grew up to twenty I, my brothers had been called up, Tom went first, then Fred, then my sister went and she went into the Air Force and I asked if I could go into the Air Force and they wouldn’t let me. But I did. They wouldn’t let me join my sister where she was, they kept us apart and I went into the Air Force and we had to meet, we had to meet this officer on Nottingham Station and there was about ten of us, all met on the station and they took us down to Innsworth in Gloucester and then we did the basic training and we had to sit these written exams, and everybody was being allocated and then he told me to stand on one side and there was about six of us had to stand on one side, and we kept wandering, what on earth are we going to do? Anyway he came to us and he says, I’ve chosen you because I think I can rely on you. As you know, we are losing men and they are getting very short, and I’m going to put you onto a man’s job, he says, and I put my faith in you, that you will be able to do it. Then we were allocated to, I was sent to Bottesford, was sent to Bottesford and we, no, no, that’s wrong, I was, we were sent to Compton Bassett and we learned all about radio, how to send messages and code words and things like that and we did about five weeks there and then went up to Blackpool to learn the Morse code and I was there from, I can’t remember how long I was there but we learned the Morse code and how to print, you know, the messages and what have ye and after that I was sent to Bottesford and from Bottesford I stayed there for a while and then I was moved to Waddington.
US: You know Bottesford, was that the Bomber Command base? Were you actually on a base?
ST: Yeah. Isn’t it a base now?
US: Bottesford, no, it’s just fields. So, you were actually sent to Bottesford?
ST: Yes.
US: As a wireless
ST: Wireless operator.
US: Operator.
ST: Yeah. You know, Bottesford is not on the map now, then?
US: Well, Bottesford is on the map, but it’s not a Bomber Command base, it’s not an RAF base anymore.
ST: Oh, ok.
US: So, what happened when you got to Bottesford, obviously there were Lancasters or Stirling bombers flying from there.
ST: Ah, there were Stirling, yeah.
US: Stirling. Yeah.
ST: There weren’t Lancasters and then we were sent to Waddington and I think that was, was that an Australian base? I can’t remember. There were Australians.
US: 44 Squadron. Yeah. There could have been Australians there.
ST: Anyway I was there and
AM: Can I ask you about the training. You know when you said you did the training, and first on the radios and the Morse code, what was it like doing that?
ST: Oh, you know, I was a bit, I was really scared going into the Air Force. I’ve never been away from home before in my life and anyway, it was, no, I thought I was determined to prove to him that I could do it so I
AM: I’m on this job.
ST: Yeah. Yeah, I thought, if they can do it, we can do it, sort of thing.
AM: So, what was it like, how did you start to learn how to, the wireless?
ST: Wait, that was down in Compton Bassett.
AM: Compton Bassett, yeah.
ST: Yeah, no, we had classes, we had to march to classes, used to play these [unclear] marches, you know, we marched to class and but they were mixed classes, mixed, and yeah, we, they taught us how to sort radios out and
AM: What do you mean by sort them out? You mean, built them into bits and put them back together?
ST: Yeah, if there was any wires lose to solder them on, you know, we were taught all that and then, I think I can’t remember how long we were there but it must have been weeks. And then once we were able to do that, they sent us up to Blackpool and
AM: Where did you stay in Blackpool? In digs?
ST: Private digs, you know, like boarding houses and she was very strict, we had to be in at ten o’clock at night. Well, you know the ballroom where we used to go dancing and what [unclear] and there was every nationality in the world, out of Europe and everywhere and so
AM: What did you get up to then?
ST: So, we used to take it in turns to, if anybody didn’t go they would unlatch the window down, one of the windows so we would get into the window [laughs] and, yeah, she was very strict she was. But I guess she had to be, you know
AM: Were you all girls in your boarding house?
ST: Yeah, we were all girls. Yes.
AM: What was it, what was the ball dancing like then?
ST: Oh, it was marvellous, you had that many partners when you were dancing, you know. You never did a dance with one person, you were excused and then next one.
AM: They cut in all the time.
ST: Oh, we had a lovely time there, yeah.
AM: What did you, did you have to go in uniform or could you put a dress on?
ST: No, I went in uniform.
AM: In uniform. Smart girls in uniform.
ST: Yeah. I don’t think, I don’t think we were allowed to go in
AM: I don’t know
ST: I can’t remember that. Or perhaps I didn’t have any [layghs]
AM: Maybe not. Did you have to do marching up and down the front? I know the men did.
ST: Yeah, that’s right, yeah. [unclear] uniform. Yeah, we had a great time there.
AM: And you said this was the first time you had been away from home as well.
ST: Yeah. When I was down in Gloucester, I wasn’t the only one who cried all time [laughs] but you could hear everybody crying. You know, cause I suppose we all lived in the same boat and. But then, after Blackpool, I really enjoyed that and I, when we passed our, we had to sit these exams and pass them and
AM: Was it, when you said sitting the exams, was it a written exam or did you have to literally put a radio together and
ST: Oh, we did that, yes. After we’d been taught, we did that, yes. We had to do that. It sort of got into me then, you know, I knew I’d got to do this sort of thing though. That was great.
AM: Did anybody not manage it? Could you not
ST: Yeah, yeah, quite a lot, yeah.
AM: So what happened to them?
ST: They were put to other jobs. Maybe in the cook house or driving or something like that. Yeah, they [unclear] dropped down, yeah. After we, when we got to Blackpool, we learned the Morse, you know, it was, we were there way to go at eight o’clock in the morning, we’d have Morse all day, it was headphones on and in fact when we used to go home on the train, every time I passed a station, I’d been doing it in Morse. I must admit, I began to enjoy life after that, yeah. And then, after, Bottesford, I guess, then Waddington, and then, oh, I know, then I was in the air traffic control, you know, in the air traffic [unclear]
AM: At Waddington.
ST: And there was Canadians, they were all Canadians and the sergeant Canadian in charge said to me one day, I’d like you to come with me, as you are going to learn something new today so we went into this great, this hangar, you know how big hangars are, and they’d fixed up, there was sort of a line, oh, on the floor was a big map of Newark and Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire and the rivers were all in like silver foil and the bush, the trees, they’d made like little trees, so that you looked at the land from up there sort of thing and they’d got this wire going along and this machine, supposed to be the aircraft I should think
AM: In the air.
ST: And as it went over the, they were able to see what they were bombing, if you know, you could [unclear]
AM: Like a bird’s-eye view.
ST: Yes. That’s right, yeah. And that was interesting but there were all aircrew and me and this sergeant, I was, I think I was scared, you know, petrified, cause he asked me to switch something on and I couldn’t move, where is it? I forgot. And, because he’d showed me but I forgot and then this nice young Scottish man came and he did it for me.
AM: I’ll see about the Scottish man in a minute. Just, let’s go back to the beginning of Waddington. How did, so you’ve done your radio training, you’ve done your Morse training, how did they then decide where they were going to send you? Did you just, were you just told where you were going?
ST: We were just told, yeah.
AM: So you were told Waddington.
ST: Yeah.
AM: How did you get to Waddington then?
ST: Do you know, I can’t remember.
AM: No?
ST: I guess they took as there, yeah.
AM: Yeah? And what was it like when you got there? What did you think when you saw it? How did it look like?
ST: Strange. We had to go up a spiral staircase to, you know, up into the air traffic control [unclear].
US: So you operated out of the control tower?
ST: Yeah.
US: Were you actually talking to the bomber crews?
ST: No, no, no. They, as I say, they are all Canadians and
AM: Yeah, describe what you actually did in the tower.
ST: What we did, I just sat at this table with earphones on and received messages and sent messages.
AM: Received them from where? From whom?
ST: From the aircraft.
AM: From the aircraft.
US: So you didn’t [unclear] Morse code?
AM: So you’re receiving the message in Morse
ST: Yeah. Yeah.
AM: And you’re translating it and
ST: I didn’t translate it, I just passed it on.
AM: No. You just passed it on. By radio.
ST: Well, to the sergeant in the room. The sergeant and officers in the room. Mostly it was the sergeant that dealt with us and
US: So the aircraft would send a message back to Waddington in Morse
ST: I would take it down
US: So and the radio operator in the plane is tapping out a message in Morse, which you receive and then it’s passed on to be deciphered. So [unclear] plane
AM: So, did you know what the messages were saying or did you not have time to even think about that?
ST: Not a clue
AM: How long were your shifts? What were the shifts like?
ST: Eight till four. Four till midnight. Midnight till eight.
AM: And what were your digs like?
ST: Oh, we were in a hut, there was about, I don’t’ know, about ten of us I think in this hut, yeah.
AM: All girls.
ST: We had our own bed space and our little cabinet, you know. Yeah.
AM: And what about eating. Where did you eat? Did you eat with the men or were you kept separate?
ST: We were quite good, we were separate, you know when all the ground crew went in, we went separate and we seemed to get nicer meals [laughs].
AM: How many of you would there be in comparison to the men? Ish.
ST: Gosh, well, up in the air traffic control there were just two of us and about six men.
AM: Right.
ST: And I never met anybody else after that, you know, we just, unless you went to the dance at night, when I was on the right shift, we would go to the dance.
AM: Right. Where was the dance?
ST: In the
AM: On the base.
ST: On the base. Yes.
AM: On the base. So, I imagine there were a lot more men than women at the dance.
ST: Oh, hundreds more, yeah.
AM: What was that like?
ST: [unclear] Four of us to the whole base sort of thing.
AM: What was that?
ST: There was the cooks [unclear] everybody.
AM: Yeah. I bet you danced off your feet, weren’t you?
ST: Well, it was lovely, yeah.
AM: It was lovely [laughs].
ST: I had never been to a dancing. [laughs]
AM: And you mentioned to me that you’d actually been in an aircraft, what
ST: We used to climb in to see if, when they came back, if we had to go and check the radio, see that it was [unclear]
AM: When you say we, you girls from the control tower.
ST: Yes. We went, yeah.
AM: So, what was that like then, climbing into a plane [unclear]?
ST: There were no steps, you know, we had, I don’t how I got in, I used to hang onto things that somebody had thrown in [laughs]. I was only about seven stone seven when, you know, I was only little and I could never manage up there. Anyway it was fun and we had fun.
AM: You had fun. So tell me about this Scottish person then.
ST: Oh well, yeah.
AM: From the beginning.
ST: Oh well, we were, oh I told you, we watched this thing work and take pictures
AM: Ok, the bird’s-eye view of the map
ST: And then we were dismissed and we went to the naffy and the sergeant went into the naffy and then this nice young airman came in and said, come and sit with me, would you like a coffee? And I said yes please and he says, come and sit over here with me and that was the beginning of romance [laughs], yeah. We went on the bus into Lincoln and he proposed to me and I bought a ring there and everything. We went to the jewellers and there were no rings there for me, only about three earrings in the whole shop [laughs] but there were a lot
AM: How long did this romance last before you were married? Because he would be going on operations all this time.
ST: Oh yeah.
US: What was his name, Sylvia?
ST: I only knew him six months before
AM: What was his name?
ST: But we were married [unclear] for our fiftieth wedding anniversary. We went to New Zealand and
AM: What was his name?
ST: Harold
AM: Harold
ST: Harold James Trapp. Yeah.
AM: So what was it like then, when you first met him and he got you a coffee and then you went straight to the jewellers, but it must have been a bit in between when you went to dances and stuff like that? What was it like when he was going off on operations?
ST: Ah, not very good.
AM: No?
ST: You used to pray that they came back.
US: Can you remember what squadron he flew with?
ST: [unclear]
US: What did he do on the plane? Was he?
ST: He was a bomb aimer.
US: Bomb aimer.
AM: Was the bomb aimer. But he obviously came through it. If you were married for fifty years.
ST: Yeah. Thank goodness, yeah.
AM: Watched him go out and watched him come back.
ST: Yeah. We used to wait, [unclear] we used to wait for him coming back, yeah [unclear]
AM: So, when did you get married? Did you get married during the war or?
ST: December the 4th 1945.
AM: Alright, so just after the end.
ST: Yeah. 1945, yeah.
AM: How long did you stay in the WAAFs for?
ST: Well, the year after we got married I was expecting [laughs] so I came home. Our daughter was born.
AM: You must have lots of other stories, things that have happened. Come on, let’s hear some of them.
ST: [laughs] well, another thing. They used to, there was a firm from Mansfield that repaired the runways, kept the runways in track. Well, Mansfield was my hometown, so, I got talking to and, I can’t remember, it must be when they went at four o’clock at night, when I was eight till four and I used to get a lift home and then come back with him next morning and [laughs]
AM: Were you allowed to do that or was that a secret?
ST: I don’t think so, no, they didn’t know [laughs]. No, they didn’t know. But it was handy, you know, it was quite handy, I knew they [unclear] went straight to Mansfield, came back the next day and my friend, oh, I had a friend in the hut named Pearl and she used to look after my, you know, if come round
AM: She just [unclear]
ST: She was just standing in for me [laughs]
AM: [laughs] Did you do, another WAAF I talked to, Bassie, she talked to me about everybody about the WAAFs doing each other’s hair and makeup and stuff. Did you do that or were you not into?
ST: I didn’t do it, I didn’t use, you know, we just rolled our hair up and we had to roll it up
AM: Yeah, and [unclear]
ST: Grips [unclear] cause [unclear] straight, you know,
AM: Roll [unclear]
ST: I think [unclear] a lot of makeup in those days. No, I wasn’t into that.
AM: No, Bassie definitely [unclear]
ST: Pearl and I, we used to, perhaps go for a walk, she came from Coalville in Leicester and we were really good friends straight away, you know, and
AM: Was she a radio operator as well?
ST: Yeah.
AM: Yeah.
ST: Yeah. But she was sent to a different place after a while, she was sent to
AM: Were you ad Waddington the whole time?
ST: Yeah.
AM: Yeah. You stayed at Waddington. So you get to know lots of the men and obviously you had [unclear] you get to know lots of the different.
ST: Yeah, yeah, but, you know.
AM: Did you go out with him and his crew?
ST: No, no.
AM: Did you not?
ST: No, I didn’t, no. Cause I say, I kept nipping home to my mum [laughs]
AM: What did your mum and dad thing about having two dancers in one?
ST: My dad died, [unclear] he died, that’s why I kept going home.
AM: Ok.
ST: She liked it when [unclear] but she used to do my washing [unclear] the next time I did [laughs]
US: What happened to your two brothers? You said you had two brothers. Did they?
ST: Oh Gosh, the oldest brother was stationed, he went to India, he went to India, but my
US: In the Royal Air Force.
ST: No, in the army.
US: He was in the army.
ST: He wasn’t fighting, he was
AM: Engineers?
ST: Yeah.
AM: Royal engineers?
ST: And then my younger brother, we never saw him for five years. He just got married because like the dough and he went into the army, he was put into the Essex regiment and he was sent abroad and we never saw him again for five years, never came home, he was in the Eight Army.
US: Right.
ST: And never saw him, he was so different when he came back. Nobody waving [unclear], when he came back he was bald and spoke a different, you know, sort of a different accent.
AM: A different accent. They both did come home, though.
ST: They came back, yeah and she had a baby while he was away. He’d never seen his dad for five years. Never didn’t even
AM: When you said he was away for five years I thought you were going to say he was a prisoner of war. But he wasn’t. He was just far away in the army.
ST: He was in the Eight Army. They just moved them place to place.
US: In the desert, probably in the western desert and then Italy and [unclear]
ST: Yeah. You see
AM: Too far to come back.
ST: Professionals you know, they wouldn’t let them come back, they kept using them until
AM: Yeah.
US: Your sister, was your sister?
ST: My sister? She went near Sheffield and she was a parachute packer [laughs], she was ok, yeah. When she got married, her husband [unclear] and he was sent to Norway fighting, they were fighting in Norway, their regiment, yeah.
AM: Crickey!
ST: So, I don’t know how my mum, I don’t know how she [unclear]
AM: [unclear] especially If your dad had died, early in the war did your dad die? Or did he die before that?
ST: ’36 he died.
AM: So before the war
ST: 1942
AM: But you said he was a miner.
ST: Kidney, kidney trouble.
AM: Yeah.
US: So it was good that your mum had you in Waddington
ST: Yeah,
US: [unclear]
ST: [unclear] that’s why I kept going home
AM: Well to [unclear] four children away,
ST: Yeah.
AM: This was unheard of before the war
ST: Yes it was and she tried to get me to stay at home, she tried to get me out of it and I wouldn’t listen to her.
AM: No.
ST: And then I tried to go with my sister and they wouldn’t let me [unclear]
AM: They wouldn’t let you do that. But all in all you sound like you enjoyed most of it.
ST: Oh, I did, I did. [unclear] different, if I hadn’t gone I was really very shy and never mixed much but that did me good going in the Air Force, it really did, yeah. And I spread my wings, you know, I’ve been everywhere now, so.
AM: Tell me a little bit about what, you met Harold and Harold was in the, a bomb aimer and obviously you got married in 1945 and then you had your [unclear] by having your daughter and what did Harold do at the end? Cause how long was it before he was demobbed?
ST: What was it, he was before he demobbed [unclear]
AM: Yeah, how long, because quite a lot of them went for another [unclear], weren’t they, before demobbing.
ST: He didn’t come out till ’47 because they were bringing VIPs back from Far East, you know. Yeah, they were bringing
AM: Where did you live then, if he was still in the RAF? While he was still there in ’46 and ’47?
ST: Where?
US: Did you go back to your mum’s or?
ST: I went to my mum’s.
AM: You went back to your mum’s.
ST: And then I went up to Scotland to live cause he worked for the electricity board and they were building a big hydroelectric scheme on Loch Lomond and so we moved round to, lived on Loch Lomond side for about three years. And then it was very lonely [unclear] so I wanted to come home to my mum so we got a transfer down to Mansfield, yeah. So
AM: Right. And then, because you were telling me you’ve lived all over the world, how did you end up?
ST: Yeah, the same crew as Harold was Joe Bradshaw, he was a flight engineer, and he was an Irishman, my husband was Scottish and they were buddies, you know, friends, and in fact he was my daughters godfather when she was born but he went back to Ireland, then he went to Canada, he emigrated to Canada and he met a lady there and got married in Canada. And then he worked for a car industry or something and he got a chance for a job down in San Diego in America so he was always saying, why don’t you come over here, this is the land of opportunity, so we did [Laughs]. We, first of all, my daughter went over for a holiday and she met a young man while she was there and she was a schoolteacher she had got [unclear] and she wrote and said, mum, I’m getting married and she came back, gave a notice and went back. So, then we went over to see her in San Diego and a younger daughter and her husband went as well so he liked it in San Diego, so he got, Joe got him a job in San Diego so they went over to San Diego, so I was living, we were living in a little [unclear] there and [unclear] my husband retired, he was sixty five and he said, we may as well go, so we packed up and went. So we were all in San Diego which is, have you ever been there?
AM: No.
ST: Paradise there. I don’t know why I left. And daughter and husband lost his job in San Diego and his mum lived in Burbank near Los Angeles so they went back and then my youngest daughter, he wasn’t getting very much money and he was offered a better job in New Jersey so they went over to New Jersey and we were left in San Diego so then we moved up further up California to Simi Valley, where that’s where my oldest daughter was, up at Simi Valley and we bought a house there and we live there and I’m twenty six years there.
AM: Wonderful. In retirement.
ST: In retirement. It was wonderful.
AM: You sound like you’ve had a lovely life.
ST: Yes, I have.
AM: You have a lovely life.
ST: And it’s while we were in San Diego that it was our fiftieth wedding anniversary and I said to my daughter, we don’t want any, we don’t want a party because all the family is in England. I said, we are going away, we are going by ourselves and we are going on a tour around New Zealand, cause we are doing bus tours, you know. So, we went and booked and we went, well, on December the fourth, that was our wedding anniversary. We got on, this coach, we were on the same bus and there were people from all over, you know, South Africa, Holland, everywhere, on this coach and we got on and everybody started singing happy anniversary to us [laughs]. So I said to the bus driver, how did you know? Cause we never said anything. And he says, a little bird told me that. So I think we went to see those hot things
AM: Springs.
ST: Yeah, hot springs and we went to see them and when we got back and went into the hotel and dinner, dinner was late that night he said, so went down for dinner. When we got into the dining room, it was decorated [unclear] happy anniversary.
AM: Wonderful.
ST: My daughter, my oldest daughter had sent a fax over, cause there were faxes then
AM: Yeah. The emails now, but faxes then.
ST: Sent a fax to the hotel. I don’t know if she sent money but there was the biggest wedding cake, three tier wedding cake and you just couldn’t believe it, [unclear] I just wanted a quiet
AM: A quite wedding
ST: We didn’t want to, no. [file missing] And I hadn’t asked for leave and I got two weeks at the same time and married December the fourth and we travelled, my mum and my sister and me, we travelled up to Glasgow by train which was full of troops, all, you know. It took as about eleven hours to get to Glasgow but when we got to Glasgow we’ve got to get to Gourock to get the ferry over, so we got to Gourock, it was dark, pitch black, not a thing and ferries had stopped running because it was gale, the gale blowing and I thought, what do we do now? So we stood there in the dark and I just didn’t know what to do and this American came over and he said, where are you heading for? I said, Dunoon. He says, I’ll take you. And there was in the Clyde of Dunoon there was a big submarine base, you know, American submarines and some of the crews had gone into Glasgow for a night out and he was, got the liberty boat waiting to take him home [laughs]. He says, I’ll take you across, well, there’s my mum, me and my sister and the gale blowing and we are going up and down, my mother was ever so sick, she says, I’ll never come here again, never again, she said. Anyway, got to Dunoon, and he got a car, they were allowed petrol, you know, and he came and met me, I phoned him and he came and met me. And then I got into trouble for not going to look for a hotel but we couldn’t see, it was pitch black, you know and anyway. Got married on the Tuesday and on the, on the Tuesday, maybe next day, Harold had booked a sleeper down to London, cause Harold’s sister had married a sailor and was living in Portsmouth. So we got on this sleeper and we went down to London but we had two bunks, one on top and then [unclear] me, if two army officers, they come in and [laughs]
AM: So that was your honeymoon.
ST: That was my honeymoon night. I got two army officers, my husband up there and me down here. Anyway we got to his sister’s and my leave was off so I sit down, I’m not going back, I’m not going back, I said. So he says, you’ll have to go back, I said, no, I’m not, you know. Anyway, we got a phone call from his mum and then [unclear] police had gone up to Dunoon for me [laughs]. So, I thought, well, I better go back, I said, I’ll get my husband in trouble, you know, you’ll get worse trouble [unclear]
AM: You were still in at this point.
ST: So, he took me back, he took me, we went back and I thought, oh God, I’m going to go to prison or something [laughs]. Anyway, I went in and it was, commanding officer was a woman and she came round and she put an arm round my shoulder and she says, you know, my dear, I would have done exactly the same [laughs].
AM: Brilliant.
ST: So, apart from having military police after me, I really [unclear] [laughs].
AM: [laughs], so, but all the way up to Dunoon?
ST: Yeah.
AM: Which is a long way [unclear] west coast of Scotland. And all the way back to Portsmouth.
ST: Yeah.
AM: Crickey! I knew there were stories in you.
ST: [laughs] you didn’t care in those days, did you? It could have been his last leave.
AM: He’d gone through the war, yeah, and he was still flying.
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 Sylvia Trapp
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Annie Moody
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
2016-04-05
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.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ATrappSV160405
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:38:17 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Description
An account of the resource
Sylvia was born in Mansfield where her father was a miner and her mother had worked at Lawns Mills. She had two brothers and a sister. Sylvia was 15 when she left school to work at the hosiery mills and recalls the German manager being deported. She joined the WAAF and completed basic training at RAF Innesworth. Away from home for the first time, she cried a lot.
She was selected for wireless training and trained at RAF Compton Bassett and Blackpool, where she used to go dancing. As a wireless operator Sylvia was posted to RAF Bottesford and then RAF Waddington, working shifts in the Air Traffic Control tower. She also had to check the aircraft radios.
Sylvia's accommodation hut had ten beds and on many evenings, she was able to get a lift home to Mansfield and back with a contractor. At RAF Waddington, she met and fell in love with Harold, a bomb aimer and says it was hard to watch him depart on operations. But he survived and they married when the war ended and they had two daughters.
In 1947 the family moved to Scotland for three years but Sylvia found it very lonely so Harold transferred to Mansfield.
Harold's flight engineer emigrated to North America after the war and was always suggesting they do the same. Sylvia's daughters both went first and then, when Harold retired, he and Sylvia went to California
Sylvia says they celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in New Zealand and then recalls how she had spent her honeymoon on a train to Glasgow with two army men, before travelling all the way down to Portsmouth, where she became absent without leave. Worried that she might be imprisoned, she returned to RAF Waddington where her WAAF commanding officer took sympathy on her.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Peter Schulze
Andy Fitter
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Gloucestershire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Yorkshire
England--Wiltshire
England--Mansfield
Scotland
Scotland--Loch Lomond
United States
California
California--San Diego
California--Simi Valley
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1945-12-04
1946
1947
Absent Without Leave
aircrew
ground personnel
love and romance
military living conditions
military service conditions
RAF Bottesford
RAF Compton Bassett
RAF Innesworth
RAF Waddington
training
wireless operator
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/571/11419/PFraserDK1608.2.jpg
866d8286004a902d9137e06841b7b081
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/571/11419/AFraserSM180702.2.mp3
baceab81b63c922e43aef6a50ed7ebba
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
Fraser, Donald Keith
D K Fraser
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Fraser, DK
Description
An account of the resource
12 items. Two oral history interviews with Warrant Officer Donald Keith Fraser DFM (1924 - 2022, 1566621 Royal Air Force), a memoir, his log book, photographs and service material. The collection also contains an interview with Sylvia Fraser, his wife. He flew a tour of operations as a flight engineer with 101 Squadron.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Donald Keith Fraser and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-11-04
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.
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 2nd of July 2018 and we’re in Whitchurch in Shropshire speaking with Sylvia Fraser, having spoken already to her husband Donald Fraser. Sylvia, what are you earliest recollections of life?
SF: My earliest recollections are living on the farm in the outskirts of Long Bennington. That’s Nottinghamshire. My father was in farming with my grandfather. He was my mother’s father. And it was a very very long village. That’s why it was called Long Bennington obviously and every British Legion Day which was November the 5th. Was it the 5th? The 11th.
CB: The 11th. Yeah.
SF: Yes. The 11th. There was a very big turn out for people that were in the British Legion and they marched through the village to the church where there was a church service and also the small War Memorial they had. Just a prayer sort of thing there and a salute of course. So that is some of my earliest recollections.
CB: And did you go to school locally?
SF: Yes. I went to school in Long Bennington. I think my school teacher, if I remember right, was a Miss Clark. She was tall. Extremely tall to me of course but I mean she was tall and very slim. Very dark haired. But she was very strict, and so was the head master. The headmaster used to walk with his cane up his sleeve. He never used it that I remember but it was there and you could see it pointing in the top of his shoulder. I think that was enough [laughs] for us small children.
CB: What were your favourite subjects?
SF: I think hand crafts and [pause] Chiefly hand crafts really.
CB: Brothers and sisters?
SF: Yes, I had. There was five of us in the family. My brother was the eldest. Roy. Then Eileen. And there was only, I think something just over a year between them but then I didn’t come along ‘til five years later. And then I had a young sister which was three years younger than me and the baby of the family was Brenda and she was another three years younger than Gert. So that was our family.
CB: And mother was busy running the family but did she have any particular interests?
SF: Well, we had a Mrs Mayfield. She, as mum was confined at home for her children she was a nurse and she stayed, oh probably two to three months at least because previously dad was away from home quite a bit because of his coaches and of course he couldn’t have mum on her own with children. The doctor was in the village, a Dr Wilkie, and he was a very nice fellow.
CB: And when did you leave school?
SF: I left school at the age of fifteen and, but by this time we had moved from Long Bennington to Marston in Lincolnshire.
CB: That’s near Grantham.
SF: Yes. Seven miles from Grantham.
DF: The Thorold Arms.
SF: Pardon?
DF: Thorold Arms.
SF: Yes. We went to the Thorold Arms. My father was a proprieter at the Thorold Arms but he also ran his bus on Mondays, Wednesdays, Saturdays.
CB: For what reason?
SF: Through the villages to take people to market and to do their shopping because there wasn’t much in the villages.
CB: So, you talked about earlier grandfather’s farm. Was there a link between that and the coach arrangements?
SF: No. No.
CB: Quite separate.
SF: Quite separate.
CB: So, he worked on the farm but he also worked with the coach.
SF: Yes. But at that time it wasn’t called a coach. It was a charabanc.
CB: Oh yes.
SF: Which was, they could take the seats out and they could put milk churns in.
CB: Ah.
SF: So, he collected milk from the farms, took them to, to Newark and then he thought well why should I just give somebody the easy work and me do the harder work? So he employed someone that would deliver milk from door to door in Newark and that went on, I don’t know for a couple of years I suppose. At that time I think we had three buses. My dad was lucky in the sense that he had been out in Canada and he was in the Canadian cavalry.
DF: During World War One.
SF: Pardon?
CB: In the First War.
SF: In the First War. And —
DF: Went back there to be demobbed.
SF: Oh, he said to mum, ‘Well, I’d like to go back to Canada to get my release because I don’t think I’ll be going back there again.’ Because mum did not want to emigrate to Canada. So that was agreed and [pause] I should have said in the first place that my grandfather, dad’s father, he was a lay preacher. Wesleyan, and he was very domineering and the family had to kneel as he sat and they had to say their prayers to him every night and every morning. And I think [pause] John, his eldest son, and dad, and his eldest sister they all went to Canada at the same time.
CB: To get away from him.
SF: Yes. Dad never said that but I think it was pretty obvious. My Uncle John, he married out there. He wanted to come back to the UK but his wife didn’t want to so he came back for some time and then dad said, you know he would give him half the business if he would stay. But being as his wife wouldn’t come he said no he would stay here for, I think it was several years hoping his wife Bertha would decide to come but no. She didn’t. So he went back.
CB: So, how did your father get in to running coaches?
[pause]
SF: I don’t really know. I think he decided with the cash that he got sort of redundancies as it were. It wasn’t redundancies because, I mean he came out of the Army on his own accord.
CB: Canadian Army.
SF: Yes.
CB: Yes. And then returned to Britain.
SF: Yes. But he had made quite a lot of money because he’d been in the log camps before that.
DF: And they had horses.
SF: Pardon?
DF: They had horses and ploughs during the winter.
SF: Oh yes. The farmer who he was working with he said, ‘George, if you want to take a team of horses,’ he said, ‘You can do that and work on your own in the winter.’ So that’s what he did. And he did acquire quite a lot of money but I think it was stolen.
CB: How did he come to meet your mother?
SF: Well, he met mother long before that.
CB: Because with the teams of horses I gather from what you were saying he was working those on the farms.
SF: Yes, but that was when he went to Canada and he met mum before.
CB: Oh right.
DF: Heckington, she came from.
SF: My mother came from Heckington which is just outside Lincoln. And her father [pause] he was born in, in a pub and that pub was mentioned in the Domesday Book.
CB: Really?
SF: So, it’s strange really.
DF: She was, her name.
SF: Oh, mum’s name was [Southan]
CB: [Southan]
SF: Yes.
CB: Right. We’ll just pause there for a mo because you need a break on some of these things when we, so the point of the questioning here in a way is how dad got in to the distribution bit.
[recording paused]
CB: So just quickly going back we talked about the charabanc. Which is really a French word, of course but what was the vehicle like because it was adaptable? What did it look like? It had open sides and seats that were removeable, was it?
SF: Yes. Could you just stop it?
CB: Yes.
[recording paused]
CB: It sounds as though it was quite an adaptable vehicle.
SF: Yes, it was. Very much so. And I think at times he would bring various sizes of wood from the woodyard in Newark which was just on the outskirts of Newark for people. So, he was a very busy man.
CB: Yeah. And then socially how did it, how was it used?
DF: For the wedding.
CB: So, the lady who worked for him when she married.
DF: When she went to the wedding in it.
CB: Did you say she went to the, to her wedding in the charabanc?
SF: Yes. She did. And that was in Long Bennington.
CB: Right.
SF: There was an unfortunate incident which occurred when the Lincolnshire Roadcar Company started a bus service. They took dad’s colours and of course it was very difficult in the winter to see what bus was coming so he had a little blue light put on the roof. But it’s all a little bit hazy, I’m afraid.
CB: So he was quite enterprising, wasn’t he?
SF: He was. He was very enterprising but he, he was taken off the road.
DF: And he went to court about it.
SF: He went to court about it and his solicitor said to him, ‘Oh George, you’re very able to defend yourself.’ And dad thought about it and, ‘Well, I can speak for myself.’ And when he got to court who did he meet was his solicitor working for the other side.
CB: Good lord.
SF: And dad said to him in the court, ‘When you can do this to a man with family you will never prosper.’ And he didn’t. He lost both of his children. They died. I don’t know how. You know. It was just a normal sort of death. It wasn’t accidents or anything but he didn’t. And the people in Long Bennington and all around signed petitions to get him back on the road. I don’t know how many.
CB: Did that work?
SF: It did. So he got back on the road and he did excursions then with the buses to the seaside which was all around Lincolnshire. Mablethorpe. Cleethorpes.
CB: Skegness.
SF: Skegness. Chiefly Skegness because that was, well it was the biggest beach wasn’t it? But, and also school trips when we were living in Marston. He was asked to arrange coaches to take the school children. So at this time I think just, we had just two coaches and dad organised with a Mr Searson who used to run through the village at a different time for him to take his vehicle and also a Mr Palfrey from Gonerby which was just outside Grantham to take his small bus and that was the three that took the school children on their summer outing.
DF: And he used to, at the weekend take the air, Air Force people to their stations.
SF: Oh, at [pause] on a Friday he used to pick up airmen from Cranwell and take them to Grantham Station for their weekend leave and he picked them up on Monday morning and took them back to the station. Oh, sometimes it was just on a Sunday night though.
DF: Ok.
CB: So how did he come to get hold of a pub?
SF: Because his route was through Marston he would occasionally call at this pub and I suppose have a glass of beer I would think and [pause] and the, the owner of the pub at that time was a Mr Bristow. His, he had the farm and the pub and he was keen to get rid of the pub and so dad decided to buy it because he could still run his bus in the normal way from there.
CB: And he employed people to run it.
SF: Yes. Only in, only in the evening, on a Saturday. He wanted Roy to become a driver when he was old enough but Roy didn’t want to do anything about it.
CB: Your brother, Roy.
SF: Yes.
DF: Your mum ran the pub during the day.
SF: So mum ran the pub during the day because I mean, it wasn’t terribly busy.
CB: Did the family live in the pub then?
SF: Yes. It was one, two, three [pause] I think there was five bedrooms plus a sitting room upstairs which was quite a large room. And the furniture —
CB: So, he bought this before the war then, did he?
SF: Yes.
DF: 1934 or ’35.
SF: Pardon?
DF: Around about 1934/35.
CB: We’ll just pause there again.
[recording paused]
CB: So, we’ve established you moved. The pub was bought in 1934. You moved school then to Marston where the pub was. What was that like?
SF: I was very happy there but the idea was when I was twelve I would be going to Grantham so I would have to [pause] there was no buses as such that would be suitable for going to school so I’d have to cycle. Which was no trouble to me because I loved cycling. But the war had broken out as I’ve said and Grantham had quite a few factories in it. One was Ruston and Hornsby’s where my brother worked and —
DF: Marcos.
SF: Marcos was the ammunition people. And Eileen, my sister, she worked there on crack detection. And —
DF: Cracked shells.
SF: She finally became —
DF: An inspector.
SF: Pardon?
DF: An inspector.
SF: An inspector.
CB: This is cracks on shell cases.
SF: Yes. She used to have very very sore fingers until she became the one that was the overseer to see that the girls were doing a good job.
CB: So they were feeling for the cracks were they?
SF: I think [pause] they had some liquid or something that they put the shells in and of course with turning them around and around.
CB: Oh, I see. Right.
SF: They would be very sore. Well, when I should have been going to Grantham, to the Secondary School there of course the bombing had started hadn’t it and dad said he didn’t want me to be in Grantham at that time. So —
CB: We’re talking about 1940.
SF: Yes. So that was really the end of my education. But I’d always wanted to be in fashion.
DF: A buyer.
SF: A buyer for a large store.
DF: That was your first job.
SF: And that was my first job in Grantham which was a drapers by the name of Sharpley. And he was a JP, one of the brothers. There was two brothers. Harold and Henry and there was a sister and they owned that and ran it.
CB: In Grantham.
SF: In Grantham.
CB: So your father’s concern, can I just recap there was that if you were working in the munitions or the engineering factories then you might get bombed but in fashion that wasn’t a concern. Was that it?
SF: Yes. The thing is that the, those factories was at the top end of Grantham and the marketing place was a bit, quite a bit lower down. Mind you I don’t suppose that would make a great lot of difference [laughs] because the bombing wasn’t as good as that, was it? But —
DF: You didn’t stay there long anyway and [you went home] [unclear]
SF: No. My wages were seven and six pence a week. And you can imagine what my father thought of that. He wanted me to come home and to help at home and to just go on the bus to take tickets and such like. But I didn’t want that and I said no. And I saw an advert for a sales assistant in a very nice little shop on the High Street in Grantham. It was hosiery and lingerie and the name of it was B&M which was owned, I think by [Blindle and Mead]. Now, [Blindle’s] was known for shoe shops weren’t they? And when I told Harold that I would be leaving he said, ‘You can’t.’ And I said, ‘And why not?’ He said, ‘Because you are apprenticed here.’ And I said, ‘I’m not an apprentice here. Show me where I signed to say I was an apprenticed here.’ And of course, he couldn’t. I was a bit belligerent [laughs] those days, I think. At least I could stand up for myself. And I got the job at this lovely little shop. It was very small. It had two Lloyd Loom wicker chairs and a beautiful walnut table. You know, a small round one. And that’s all there was. The sides was where all the stock was in boxes and the lingerie was in larger cases. The, there was three chandeliers. I don’t mean the glass type. I mean just the bowls and the — [pause]
DF: [unclear]
CB: Pardon?
DF: Not’s much. That’s when all the rationing things came out.
CB: So, materials were rationed in those days as part of the rationing programme, weren’t they?
SF: Yes. They were.
CB: How did that affect the shop and people’s purchases?
SF: Well, we did quite well and the airmen used to come in and the WAAFs. And they had clothing coupons. And sometimes you’d say, ‘Oh, how lovely to see all these coupons.’ You know. And they’d probably give you two, three. So that was great. We had to bank the coupons at the bank. We got little plastic, well cellophane bags and we were allowed to put ninety eight in each which was counted at the bank as a hundred.
DF: Of course, you had all that in the shop. You could then barter with your neighbours.
SF: Oh yes. That was very good. We were never short of food or anything because one side of us was Lipton’s and we knew the manageress very well there and the other side was a gent’s [pause] but they weren’t hairdressers but there was, they sold all the things that men would require. You know, shaving things and [pause] and I used to get Brylcreem. It was a way of bartering in a way.
CB: So, who did you sell the Brylcreem to? The Air Force people, was it?
SF: No. I didn’t sell. I just gave it. There wasn’t all that much about to get anyway so you used to have it, didn’t you?
DF: That’s why I’ve still got hair.
CB: So, the key I think, the thing about rationing is that it covered food and more or less everything you bought.
SF: Yes.
CB: And so for us to understand the importance of it I wonder if you could describe why, first of all why would the Air Force people be coming in to buy clothing. What sort of things did they buy and why did they have ration cards because they were always in uniform weren’t they when they were out and about?
SF: Yes, but the WAAFs used to buy stockings.
CB: What were the stockings made of?
SF: Rayon.
CB: Man-made fibre.
SF: Yes.
CB: Not silk in other words.
SF: Not silk.
CB: Did you sell silk stockings?
SF: No. They weren’t available. The pure silk ones, oh when did they come in? [pause]
CB: You didn’t have the Americans nearby so they weren’t supplying the girls with silk stockings.
SF: Well, there were quite a few Americans about but [pause] well, they were somewhat [pause] paratroopers, weren’t they?
CB: Were they? Right.
SF: And they were, they were horrible in every way.
CB: Oh.
SF: The airmen themselves was fine but well somebody said that if you could suck as hard as you can blow then there would soon be no water in the sea.
CB: Do you want to enlarge on that a bit?
SF: Well, everything in America was great. In England it was very little use. But there was quite a number of girls who would go out with them for the pure silk stockings when they were available. But there was one incident. We used to go across to the Red Lion. This was the manageress and I, on a Saturday for our lunch. We closed for an hour and we could get our lunch in that time because the Red Lion was just across the road. And there was a a man there that was very inquisitive. Wanting to know all about things really we thought a spy would want to know. You know, where was the airfields and such like, and we weren’t prepared to tell him. The, the outcome of that we didn’t know really how it happened but he was a spy and he was picked up but before they could interrogate him he bit on a lethal thing. Now, that was very hush hush. It wasn’t known by a great many people around.
CB: What had he been doing then? Had he been in the shop a lot? Or how did you come to meet him and get this interrogation?
SF: We only met him when we went over to the Red Lion for our lunch.
CB: Right.
SF: And we thought he was too inquisitive and wanting to know too much. And it wasn’t until, it was only about a week or two after we’d met him though that this happened. He was picked up.
CB: Had you reported the incident? Or —
SF: No. We had nothing to do with it.
CB: How do you think he was rumbled?
SF: We never found out and I really couldn’t say. Not unless it was the police in Grantham.
CB: Where did he bite on the pill? In the town somewhere or, what happened there?
SF: Yes. When the police took him.
DF: Arrested.
SF: Pardon?
DF: Arrested.
SF: When they arrested him. He did it immediately.
CB: Oh. Now, in the background you’ve got all these Air Force people around. How did you come to meet Donald Fraser, who became your husband?
SF: Well, he came to the pub. The Thorold Arms. I I just remember him coming in. I thought actually there was a group of you but you said there was only two, didn’t you? Or four. There was four of them came in then and [pause] I served them. I don’t know how many times I served them because there was just dad and myself. I wouldn’t have been able to have done this if my father hadn’t have owned a pub because you weren’t allowed I think until you were seventeen.
DF: Christmas 1944 you are talking about now.
SF: Yes.
CB: This is 1944.
DF: Yeah.
SF: Ahum.
DF: I could butt in here but if you were stopping I could give you —
CB: We’ll just stop for a mo.
[recording paused]
CB: So clearly there are two sides of this story because we’ve got Donald in the room and you wouldn’t have known what he was doing there but he was at Bottesford and they’d been doing various tasks there and came to Grantham which is how you met. So, Donald what was the background of this?
DF: The background to that was we had just finished operations and been posted to [Lindholme] first of all. Then I went on an instructor’s course and then we were moved to Bottesford. And Bottesford was such a mess we had to clean it up. And this was our first time the 24th of August 1944. My 21st birthday so I remember it. So, we went down to the main road and as I say Newark was to the left. Grantham was to the right. So most people used to go on to Newark. We decided we would go on the Grantham Road. About three or four miles down the road was the A1 at that time. Still is. But we turned off down a small road for about a mile and here was a crossroads and on the side of it was the Thorold Arms, Marston. The Thorold Arms. We didn’t know what it was at that time so we decided we’d stay there and have my first beer. The rest of them had a bit more than me I think, even that night. We were cycling so we stayed there for two or three hours and then we went back to, to base.
CB: Oh, you cycled did you?
DF: Yes.
CB: Oh right.
DF: And from then on we decided that was our pub and we went there and somehow I got caught up with Sylvia.
CB: Right. We’ll stop there for a mo.
[recording paused]
CB: So, let me just restart. So here you’ve got some lads who are energetic and needing a bit of a change. And how much beer can you allow them to have because there’s rationing going on?
SF: Well [pause] dad used to just open. We got our beer in on a Wednesday so we had beer Wednesday night. He would sell so much and then it was just minerals.
CB: Oh.
SF: And we used to have some beautiful real grapefruit mineral and it would only keep for something like I think a fortnight. So if we hadn’t sold a great lot of that because there was no refrigeration in those days but of course your cellar was very cool. As children you used to drink it up, you see. And our pals.
CB: Of course. So in 1944 here you are aged seventeen. These chaps come in. What can they do? What are the activities in the pub?
SF: Oh, play darts. And I was quite a good dart player at that time and we used to have dart matches with a pub at Barkston. They’d play one week in Barkston, one in Marston. But dad used to transport these people free of charge in the bus.
CB: For the matches.
SF: Yes. For the matches and Mr, Mr Dodd was our captain and once or twice he would make a team up within the people that was in the, in the bar at the time and once or twice he would say, ‘Oh, Sylvia, I need an extra. You can be on this side or that side.’ You know. So I got to be quite good at darts. And then when it came to this dart match at Barkston we’d already played them in Marston, in the Thorold Arms so we had to go to Barkston. Well, when my mum heard that they wanted me to go to Barkston to play darts, ‘No daughter of mine was going to do that.’ I said, ‘What’s the difference mum?’ I wanted to go. I said, ‘My dad will be there. Mr Dodd will be there.’ No. So, anyway, Mr Dodd had to really talk and say, ‘We really need her.’ So I was allowed to go. So it seemed that mum was so strict in one sense but not all the way through, you know.
CB: Had she met Donald by at time? Because he’d been in the pub.
SF: Oh yes.
CB: So she thought he was a likely lad for you?
SF: Oh yes. She knew you very well, didn’t she? And your friend, Jack Boulton.
DF: Yeah, we met him also at Bottesford. He was one of the ones at Bottesford. There was also another chap from Glasgow. A bit older than us. He was, that was the three of us kept going to the pub afterwards. But on a Saturday night there used to be a good singsong going in the, in the pub.
CB: So, what entertainments did the pub run?
SF: Well, there was a piano and there was a singsong could break out anytime really.
DF: Her dad used to keep so much beer for the weekend so that locals also had a share of it.
SF: Yes. Well, there was that paratrooper. He was in the Signals, wasn’t he? He was, he could play anything by ear.
CB: American?
SF: You know.
CB: American paratrooper?
SF: No.
CB: No. British. Right.
SF: British. He was in the Signals, wasn’t he?
CB: So how did you, your father control the beer because you said that deliveries were on Wednesdays? Were there other deliveries or only the Wednesday one?
SF: No. There was only the Wednesday delivery.
CB: So how did he spread it out? Or did you run dry fairly quickly?
SF: No. He used to keep some for the weekend, didn’t he?
DF: He probably had to close down Thursday and Friday.
SF: Thursdays and Fridays we were closed.
CB: Because you didn’t have beer.
SF: Well, we were closed only in as much as we didn’t sell beer. Lemonade and the grapefruit as I said was sold.
DF: But also, at one time when you wanted more, some of the Army people in the area wanted to have a night out before they were going abroad.
SF: Oh, no.
DF: You went to the —
SF: Oh, that’s a different story. The [pause] we had airmen from, oh gosh [pause]
DF: It doesn’t matter. Nearby.
SF: Nearby then, and airmen as you know from the Bottesford end but these were ground staff.
CB: You had Spitalgate on the doorstep.
SF: No [laughs] it wasn’t on the doorstep really [laughs] It was —
CB: Barkston Heath.
SF: Yes. There was Barkston Heath which was where the paratroopers came from. The Signals Division. They came from Barkston Heath and they used to cycle down so it must have been a pretty good pub for them to all congregate there. But they wanted to, to have a final get together and so they said to dad could they do it. He said, ‘Well, no. I’m sorry but I’ve got to think of my locals.’ So, I worked in a small —
DF: You’ve said that.
SF: Ah, but that’s not the same one. Shop, at the top of the town and that was lady’s fashions and all the things that goes with that and across the road was the brewery.
CB: Oh.
SF: Marston’s.
CB: From the shop.
SF: Yes.
CB: Nice.
SF: Marstons Brewery. And I said to dad, ‘Look, I could pop across and see if I could get a little extra.’ And he said, ‘You’ve no hope of that.’ And I said, ‘Well, let me try.’ So, he said, ‘Oh well. You can. But don’t be surprised if the manager won’t even speak to you knowing what you would want.’ So I went across and in to reception, said, ‘Could I see the manager?’ ‘For what reason?’ So I said, ‘Well, I would like to see if I could get more beer for a special occasion.’ And she said, ‘You can try but I don’t think you’ll succeed.’ So, there was this great big, it was an extra wide door about like that I would think but it was covered in green baize and you know, the brass studs and actually my heart did sink into my boots for a minute or two [laughs] But anyway, I went in and I said the reason I was there. So as these airmen could have a last drink together and he said, ‘Well, supposing I could find a small amount. How would I get it to you?’ I said, ‘Well that would be no problem at all.’ I said, ‘Mowbray’s beer lorry comes past our pub, the Thorold Arms in Marston,’ I said, ‘Every Wednesday and every Thursday delivering to other villages around abouts.’ ‘Oh.’ So, in the end I got my small barrel of beer. I think it was something like, was it nine gallons?
DF: Or fifteen gallons.
SF: Oh, that was a big ones. No. I didn’t get a big one.
CB: Well, a firkin is seventy two pints.
DF: That would be it.
SF: That would be what I would get I would think. Anyway, I came out really very happy that I was able to tell my dad I’d got some beer after all [laughs]
CB: So, how did your relationship with Donald progress because you were busy in the bar and he was busy in the RAF?
SF: Well, we just —
CB: Were there parties around that you could go to? Dances in Grantham because there were lots of people about?
SF: Yes, but I wouldn’t go to the dances in in in Grantham. They were a bit wild. In fact, you said if I’d ever gone with my manageress he wouldn’t have gone out with me. But I didn’t know that at the time. It was only later that you said that wasn’t it?
CB: You said that the pub had to think about its own regulars. Did you get, did the pub get many, a lot of local people there and who were they?
SF: Well, there was the farm workers, there was the farm owners and we had a very big corporation farm and the manager was a Mr Kerr.
CB: They were farm people but did you get people from the manufacturing activities in Grantham or did they not come out your way?
SF: No. They wouldn’t come that distance because you see the only way they could come out really was on cycles. Well, they weren’t going to do that when it was on their doorstep.
CB: Yeah.
DF: We became regulars.
CB: Yes.
DF: Just as if we were one of the, there for a long time you know.
CB: I’m wondering what the balance between local people and RAF people was in the pub as clientele.
DF: There wasn’t many more RAF than what we were. Occasionally there would be an extra one but we were about the only RAF that came at certain times, weren’t we?
SF: Yes. We also had a lot of paratroopers, didn’t we?
DF: Yes, but they weren’t regulars. They were just passing through, weren’t they?
SF: Well, I don’t know. There was [pause] there was the two dispatch riders. One from the artillery and one from the signals and they were pretty regular, weren’t they? One of them came from Spalding.
CB: Right.
SF: His name was Johnny [Pick]. Do you remember him? And another one came from London and he was Pete [Augustine] I think his name was. So, they were fairly regular.
CB: Yes. Just changing the subject now. All these airfields dotted around created a lot of flying activity. Coming with that is noise. So, what was the effect of that?
SF: We didn’t notice the noise so much but it was the planes. They were circling around and around and around. I couldn’t understand this until I spoke to Donald about it but you see there was twenty eight, was it airfields?
DF: In Lincolnshire.
SF: In Lincolnshire. So they were all needing to gain height before going over the coast.
CB: Bomber Command airfields. Yes.
SF: Yes. And [pause] and that’s why they were circling.
DF: There must have been a bit of noise because if they were putting up twenty planes, they were all spiralling up. Four engines in each plane.
CB: Well, up to thirty on airfield wasn’t there? Well, more sometimes.
SF: I don’t remember the noise somehow.
CB: Don’t you?
SF: No. There must have been noise right enough.
CB: Then Donald was posted away so how did you keep in touch?
SF: Well, I had also moved before you moved away. I took up a position in Stamford.
CB: So that’s twenty miles south.
SF: Yes. So I would only be home at weekends but —
CB: What did you do in Stamford?
SF: I [pause] I was at Parish’s which was —
CB: Ah yes. In the High Street.
SF: That’s right. You knew them, did you?
CB: I know them well. Yes.
SF: Well, I stayed with a Mrs Franklin who, her husband had died some, I think about two years or three years before I went there and [pause] what was the secretary’s name in Sharpleys? Oh, she was a Plymouth Brethren.
CB: Oh, was she? Right.
SF: Yes. But she was awfully nice and she said, ‘I know someone who would look after you, Sylvia.’ So she took me to see Mrs Franklin and that’s where I left. It was just a small terraced house. Two bedrooms.
CB: She was a war widow, was she?
SF: No.
CB: Just getting on a bit.
SF: Yes. She was.
CB: And what, you were getting more money there. Is that why you went?
SF: Yes.
CB: So how much more did you earn when you went there?
SF: I think it was one twenty five or one seventy five. One seventy five I think to begin with and then you got commission on selling various things.
CB: How was it —
So, I used to see Donald then.
DF: At weekends.
SF: Hmmn?
DF: Just at weekends.
SF: Just at the weekends.
DF: Until we moved from Bottesford to Cottesmore. And that was the same. It was just weekends because I could travel.
CB: That was closer.
DF: Yes.
CB: Really.
DF: I used to get lifts on on the main roads across.
CB: Down the A1.
DF: Yeah. Just down —
CB: Straight down to Stamford.
DF: Stamford.
CB: Yeah.
DF: That’s right.
CB: What did it cost you to have digs with Mrs Franklin if you weren’t [pause] you ended up with more money in the end did you?
SF: Yes, I did. But not very much [pause] because by the time you’d paid for your train fare.
CB: Oh yeah.
SF: To get back to Grantham where your father picked you up. Well, as he said I’d be better if I’d stayed at home but I didn’t want to stay at home.
CB: You’d had enough of the pub life had you?
SF: No. I quite enjoyed that really and meeting people but I really, my aim was to be a fashion buyer. Even if it meant moving further south.
CB: And you wanted independence.
SF: Yes. I wanted independence too.
CB: We’ll just pause there for a mo.
[recording paused]
SF: You used to bring some and give to dad from time to time. Or mum. Whoever was at the bar at the time, you know.
CB: Yes.
SF: Oh, I —
CB: And the Americans had the resources, the money and the food.
SF: They did. They did.
Other: I can remember orange juice. Can you? Chris.
CB: Hmmn?
Other: I can remember that orange juice.
CB: Can you?
Other: Yeah.
CB: I can’t remember. Just going back to Donald a mo. At Bottesford they were Airborne Division. 81st Airborne Division were they? Rather than gliders. Troop carrying aircraft in other words.
DF: The Americans used it as a holding base.
CB: Oh, it was a holding base was it?
DF: Just, just for D-Day.
CB: Yes.
DF: All came in probably a fortnight before and were held there.
CB: Oh, I see.
DF: And then went over to the south coast before they went over.
CB: But they got a bit over exuberant about their —
DF: Yeah.
CB: Method of leaving.
DF: That’s true. Before that it was a Bomber Command station flying Lancs.
CB: And then it reverted to that when you went there.
DF: Yes. It came back in to a unit coming from the light aircraft to heavy aircraft training unit. Yeah. And we came and opened it up again.
CB: Yeah.
DF: But it was still not a very good accommodation. It was, it wasn’t as bad as Ludford but it was still huts.
CB: Yeah, because it had been, just been knocked up in the war.
DF: Yeah. It was a wartime base the same as Ludford but it was made of wood instead of Nissen huts.
CB: Oh, they were wooden huts were they?
DF: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
DF: And Ludford was Nissen huts and we used to get, in the winter drops from the condensation dropping on the bed.
SF: Yeah. Horrid [laughs]
DF: Around the summer it was so hot we used to have the field mice coming in and the earwigs coming in. It wasn’t very nice. And in the winter one, one fire for the whole unit.
CB: Yeah. A coke fire in the middle.
DF: In the middle.
CB: With a chimney straight up.
SF: That was it.
DF: That was all the —
DF: Yeah. All the heating. And if you think of coming back there at night.
SF: Freezing cold.
DF: Freezing cold. I joined, one of the reasons I joined the Force, the Air Force was because I thought well I’ll always have —
SF: A fry up.
DF: A good unit to come back. Clean sheets and that. Well, we always had clean sheets but that was about it [laughs] because on Ludford there wasn’t any paths or anything made.
CB: Right.
DF: The unit was built in six weeks by Wimpey.
CB: Was it really?
DF: And then that was the flying side of it.
CB: Yes.
DF: But they forgot about the personnel needed to get from A to B and it was called Mudford. Not Ludford.
CB: Yes. Yes.
DF: Because of the mud. Rubber boots was—
SF: Horrible.
DF: The only thing you could —
CB: What you had to have.
DF: If you were going, say in to Louth in the evening you had your rubber boots on and you hid them in the hedge side before you put on your shoes to, to go on the bus to Louth.
CB: How often were you allowed out?
DF: Well, there was two sides of it. You were flying usually when it was dark.
CB: Yeah.
DF: So you had a fortnight on and a fortnight off, you know. The dark side of it. The moonlight side you weren’t very often flying when it was a full moon or anything like that.
CB: No.
DF: So you had more or less then a month. Two weeks on, two weeks off of flying. I think that’s what it was but you never never knew when something was just going to come. I mean, like going to, across the Alps. We went in full moonlight and everybody was taken by surprise because doing a moonlight flight against the normal dark was a surprise. So a lot of the crews weren’t fit to because they were having a good time in the pubs thinking there was no flying tonight.
CB: No. Quite. No. But taking the other side of the question to Sylvia about the rationing of beer to what extent did you need to move between pubs simply because the pubs were short of beer?
DF: I suppose they did. I was never in a pub during my flying time.
CB: No.
DF: On the station I was never in a pub. There was two pubs in Ludford. There’s one now. There’s one closed. But I was never inside either but listening to the, well two or three of the crew didn’t drink either but the wireless operator liked his drink and so did the mid-upper gunner and they used to say many times there was no, no beer in the one and they had to go to the other, you know. But I think they did very well. The ground crew used to complain about them having to pay the same amount of money as the flying ones for their beer. I think it was put up by a penny in those days for the flying crews and they decided they weren’t going to have that and they took all the, all the chairs and tables outside and put them in the canal next door until the landlord said, ‘Oh, well we’ll take the penny off again.’ [laughs]
SF: [laughs] Oh dear.
CB: Would you call it sort of destructive inc — [laughs]
DF: As I say I wasn’t involved with these things.
[recording paused]
CB: Well, Sylvia we’ve been talking about a wide variety of things. We’ve talked about you being at in Stamford and at Parish’s.
SF: Yes.
CB: So at that stage we’re talking about the end of the war you’re seventeen coming up eighteen. What did you do next? Because technically at eighteen you could be called up.
SF: Well, I wasn’t called up.
DF: The war would be over by then.
SF: It would be over, wouldn’t it?
DF: It was over in May 1945. Yes. Oh, you were still at home because we went to Buckingham Palace on VE Day. I did.
CB: Did you? You both went.
SF: No. Just Donald.
CB: So, VE Day was the 8th of May 1945.
DF: That’s right.
CB: What did you both do then?
DF: Well, I was still at Bottesford at that time.
CB: Yeah.
SF: But your mum and your auntie, that was his mum’s sister, they were travelling down.
DF: This was to collect the DFM.
CB: Ah.
DF: Of course, we didn’t know it was VE Day at the time.
CB: No.
DF: When it was all arranged.
CB: Of course.
DF: But VE, that was the day we went to London and my mother and her sister travelled down from Edinburgh and I caught the train in Grantham about 5 o’clock in the morning. So we got in to London about the time, I think it was 11 o’clock, eleven fifteen we had to be there. It was the King at that time, of course.
CB: Yes. Of course.
DF: And then spent a couple of hours there or so and then [unclear] at the hotel because they were staying in London overnight and I made my way back to Bottesford. Well, to Sylvia and she —
SF: To Grantham.
DF: To Grantham.
CB: What were, what were you doing on VE day? Or what did you do? Were you still in Stamford?
SF: No. No. I was back home and I was, I don’t actually know what I was doing on VE Day.
CB: Some people had huge celebrations. Other people didn’t do anything.
Other: Huge in London, weren’t they?
SF: Well, I had said that I would meet Donald with a bicycle somewhere outside Grantham because I was quite comfortable riding a bike and pushing the other one. And someone that lived at the petrol station on the M1 —
CB: A1.
SF: A1 that was. His name was Ronald [Ebert] and he used to go to the Kings School in Grantham and I saw him on his way home. He was on his bike and I said, ‘Have you passed an airmen walking?’ And he said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘But you’ve just come back from school haven’t you?’ ‘Yes, that’s right.’ Well, there had been a lorry full of airmen that had passed me going towards Bottesford. Well, you know what they were all like. Whistling and all the rest of it. I stopped and turned around and there was one lad in particular was waving like this and I thought that must be Donald. So as Ronald said there was no airmen that he had seen I decided I’d go back to the end of the road and see if he had got off there. Well, no. There was nobody there. And I waited around a little while and I thought well, its stupid waiting here. You know. He’s not walking all the way from Grantham.
DF: Grantham Station.
SF: And he’s not got off the lorry here. So, I don’t know what he’s decided to do and in the end I cycled home. My next sister Gertrude she was an awful tease. Always a tease. And she was looking out the window and she said, ‘Oh, Sylv, Jock’s walking down the road now.’ I thought that was another tease. However, she turned. She said, ‘It is. Come and have a look for yourself.’ And I did. I felt about that big because he’d walked all the way from Grantham station.
DF: Seven miles.
SF: All the way home.
CB: Good thing he was a fit man.
SF: Yes, he was a fit man. There’s no doubt about that. And [pause] anyway, the cycle was still there the next morning. Did dad take you back?
DF: No. I don’t think so. I stayed there anyway. But you had a good evening. It was one of those jolly nights where there was plenty to drink wasn’t there?
SF: Oh yes.
DF: One of the things they were doing was cutting the ends off people’s ties.
SF: Yes. You know the short end, the narrow end. They were cutting anything from about two inches to five inches.
DF: Until they came to one couple and she had just bought him this new tie for his birthday that day and that caused a bit of an uproar.
CB: Could have been injured by the scissors for doing that.
SF: He could really. I don’t know how you got hold of the scissors either.
CB: So, after VE Day then what because you’re working in Grantham again now.
SF: Yes [pause] Oh, yes. We got married.
DF: Yeah. That was ’48.
CB: 1948.
DF: You must have stayed in Stamford. You didn’t come back to —
SF: No. I did stay in Stamford.
DF: You stayed in Stamford.
SF: For quite a time.
DF: At the time. You were still in Stamford when I went north in ’47.
CB: Right.
DF: And then 1948 I travelled down to Marston to get married there and you were still in Stamford at that time. In fact, you were still in Stamford the year after. In 1947 was when it was a very bad winter.
CB: Yes. Extremely.
SF: Oh, it was.
DF: All the roads were closed.
CB: Yeah.
DF: And I had decided to come from Scotland for a few days to Stamford and then we would come back to Marston but all the traffic on the roads were blocked up and I got off and I got transport down and got off in Stamford and I was going to see Sylvia where she stayed with Mrs Franklin. But this was 1 o’clock in the morning and of course I couldn’t make them hear. I went in a cell.
SF: Well actually Mrs Franklin did hear you and she said to me, ‘Sylvia, I think there’s somebody at the door. Would you get up and see if you can see anyone?’ Because I was at the front of the house. And I looked and couldn’t see anyone and the knocking had stopped.
DF: I had thrown, thrown a few snowballs at the window.
SF: But he had been throwing snowballs at the window.
CB: Disgraceful [laughs]
SF: Yes, it was, wasn’t it? [laughs]
DF: As you know I ended up in the police station.
CB: Yes, I can imagine. Yes.
DF: I got in a cell for the night.
CB: It was warm, wasn’t it?
DF: It was warm.
SF: I bet you were frozen, weren’t you?
DF: It wasn’t so bad inside the police station. It was warm in there.
CB: So you got married in ’48. Just pass backwards to that or forwards to that. Then what? Because where did you actually settle down in your married life.
DF: About a year after that.
SF: Oh.
CB: Were you still, did you stay with your parents, Sylvia?
SF: Yes.
CB: When you were married.
SF: Yes. I stayed with my parents for a time.
CB: After you were married. Yeah.
SF: Because you went to the Botanics, didn’t you?
DF: Yes. I went to the Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh. Did a course there and then I joined the Forestry Research Branch and was travelling the country for two years looking at plantations and taking records of the trees and all that for making the tables for the cubic feet and the, each tree after that, you know. So I was travelling a fortnight here a, month there visiting many places. And then after we got married we decided that we should try and get a place to have a base. So we got married in the autumn and I think by the next spring they said, ‘Well, if you want a base to be at there’s a base at Tulliallan, which was one of the large nurseries and what I was interested in was research on small trees anyway so that sounded right unbeknowning that where I was born was on Tulliallan Estate in one of the cottages just next to this large nursery. And the manager of the nursery who had been in the First World War and came through it and then took a a course on nurseries to do that. He was still there. That was twenty five years later. He was still there at the nursery as in charge of it. And I don’t know. It’s going to be funny coming there. Anyway, when we, when we got there Mr Simpson was his name. He didn’t like the people in —
SF: Research.
DF: Researchers coming in to research because they were all usually people who hadn’t been through the war. They’d been on, obviously forestry was a restricted —
CB: Yeah. A Reserved Occupation.
DF: A Reserved Occupation.
CB: Yes.
DF: So, he didn’t like them and we found out later the reason why. His son was a conscientious objector so that caused problems.
CB: Yes.
DF: So, when I got there and met the research people there right enough none of them had been in the war you, know and we had a discussion and said, ‘Well, what are you going to do?’ And I said what I wanted to do and they said, ‘Well, you’ll have to get permission from Mr Simpson, and he won’t give us anything.’ I said, ‘Well, I’ve never found that in anybody yet.’ So the next morning I went down to his office to see him. I went in there and he said, ‘Who are you?’ I said, ‘Oh, I’m a new research person coming in the top there.’ ‘I suppose you’re another one of these that’s never been in the war.’ I said, ‘No, I’m not.’ I said, ‘I’ve been in the war.’ You know. ‘What were you doing?’ I said, ‘I was flying on Lancasters.’ He said, ‘When?’ I said, ‘From ’43.’ And he was up off his chair. He had lost an arm in [unclear] got off his chair, shook our hand and that, you know and he said, ‘What was your name?’ I said, ‘Fraser.’ He said, ‘Oh, about twenty years ago,’ he said, ‘I bought, there used to be a Fraser staying in the lodge down there. I bought his chickens when he left.’ I said, ‘Yeah. That was my dad.’
SF: Strange, isn’t it?
DF: So, after that he hadn’t been on a holiday for a long time but a month or two months after that he came and said, ‘Are you doing anything the next week or two?’ I said, ‘Not a lot. I’m just doing the work here.’ He said, ‘Would you look, and Sylvia, would you look after our house for three weeks. We want to go and see our son.’ I said, ‘We’ll do that alright for you.’ So we stayed there three weeks and the people in the nursery were entirely, didn’t know what to say because none of the staff got on with him because, I think mainly it was because his son was a conscientious objector.
CB: Yeah.
DF: And we had broken that down for him and we became very good friends.
CB: Amazing.
SF: Yes, and in the end he wouldn’t have anything to do with his son.
CB: Wouldn’t he?
SF: It was just his mother.
CB: Yeah. Terrible embarrassment.
Other: Yeah.
SF: Yes, and in the end we did get them together.
DF: In the end I told him —
SF: We said, ‘It’s silly you know. You losing your son just because of your principals and your son losing his mum and dad.’ I mean she used to speak to him on the phone but not very often because well, there weren’t that many phones about was there?
CB: No.
DF: We used to go up and our, my family stayed in [Aberdour] and used to go across to see them at the weekend and if there was a high gales and that because at that time there was no road bridge it was just a ferry. So coming across on the ferry you had to around by Kincardine and back again we used to call and see him. And this weekend when we called in we didn’t know we were going but the weather was such that we had to go round that way. He’d just had a heart attack a few hours before that.
CB: Oh, my goodness.
DF: And he wouldn’t let his wife phone the doctor. And she said, ‘I knew you were coming tonight. So, I wasn’t very worried about Arthur.’ That was his name. ‘I knew you would come tonight so’ —
SF: Oh, but it was a shock though to see him lying on the settee.
CB: Unattended.
SF: Yes. And you could see he was very ill.
DF: But he wouldn’t get further, the office was where the phone was. It wasn’t in his house it was just ten yards away from there but he wouldn’t give us the key or tell her where the key was for the office so she could go and phone. We got there and we we got the key from him and —
CB: Sylvia, when you after you got married how soon did you give up work?
SF: I didn’t give it up until I went to Scotland. So —
DF: About two, two years after.
SF: Two years I suppose. And then we went in to a friend’s house. We had rooms there. We had the run of the kitchen. We could do what we liked. They had a parlour and we could use that for our breakfast or whatever. Then we had another small room which was really the library. It was covered in books.
DF: It was —
SF: And —
DF: It was two sisters who had it. [they were leasing it] they stayed there. They were two schoolteachers weren’t they?
SF: Yes. And their brother stayed there.
DF: Yes. Their brother. He was in the headquarters of Scotland during the war or something like that you know. Government.
CB: We’ve covered lots of things. Can we go fast backwards to your earliest days when you were in the farm and the pub as well? We have a lot of links in the countryside with farms. So you controlled, your diet is controlled by a number of things. One is the rationing but actually the farmers were able to supplement that. How did they do it?
SF: Well, my mother always bought her butter pre-war and during the war from a farmer. Mrs Wright wasn’t it? She used to make the butter and sell it and mum always bought that from her. So she continued to do that. She had to give her butter coupons up but that didn’t matter and we got more than what we should have done. The, there was a small shop in the village which was run by two sisters, Miss [unclear] I can’t remember the names.
DF: [unclear]
SF: It doesn’t matter really. And they knew that we used to buy a lot of cheese from them. Well, we couldn’t buy a lot of cheese from them because it was rationed but anybody that didn’t take their full amount of cheese they sold it to mum.
DF: They used to have it in the pub then.
SF: So on a darts match we used to hand round the bread and cheese and that was it but there was bread and cheese and they were all you know got a piece of two or four. Whatever was there because it went round once and then what else was left. In fact, I’ve still got the plate because well it’s worth a little bit of money. Not a lot. But its, its one about that size. And well —
DF: And you had the pigs.
SF: Pardon?
DF: And you had the pigs.
SF: Oh. We had. Dad had a sow and he used to breed from her. And the last time I suppose we’d had two or three sows during that time but the last time he decided he was going to finish and he would have her killed for our own purposes. Well, she’d had what they call a sort of, they called it the purples but I think it was like a pig flu.
CB: Oh.
SF: And she wouldn’t eat. And I started washing an apple and feeding her that. And she came and she was ok. But there was a butcher that used to kill pigs because in in those days the cottages often had a small pig pen at the end of the gardens.
CB: For slaughtering.
SF: Yes. and Mr [Rodding] used to come down and do the necessary for them but —
DF: You used to chop it up and then pass round the neighbours and when they had —
SF: Oh yes.
DF: A month later. Whatever it was they were using.
SF: You know, the liver and the small piece of the pork and that. Whenever anyone had a pig killed they would just hand it to one or two friends and they would reciprocate. So that was fine.
CB: What about the wild animals in the countryside? What did you do about those?
SF: Oh gosh.
CB: There was a bit of shooting going on.
SF: There was.
CB: Rabbits and hares.
SF: Not so much hares. I don’t think there were so many hares about but rabbits, dad used to go up to a friend’s farm. There was two brothers by the name of Tindall. They he used to go up there shooting what once a month or so.
DF: He needed cartridges.
SF: Oh yes. He needed cartridges and of course they were in short supply but there again I was able to get a few cartridges for him because I could get fashion stockings. And if I got fashion stockings for the man that had the gun shop, for his wife then I would get a box of cartridges. Paid for them obviously but that’s what happened. Well, somewhere along the line there was a searchlight station not far from us. In the next village actually and rather strange because it was on the[pause] no. The searchlight station was in our village at the end of the village and —
DF: You used to take them there on your bike.
SF: No. Then —
CB: Did you deliver them yourself?
SF: I I took rabbits because the cook came in and was talking to dad and saying they were very short of meat and it was difficult to know what to feed the lads on. So, dad once, when he’d had been shooting he decided he would send some rabbits up to them. Well, he would gut them and slit the flesh there and, you know put one in to another so as they hung together. And I was dispatched this day to go to this camp and there was nobody on sentry duty and I didn’t know how to attract their attention because I was up here which was the railway bridge and they were down below. So, I was quite a good whistler at that time and my grandma used to say, ‘Stop whistling. A whistling woman and a crowing hen was never fit for man or beast.’ [laughs] Well [pause] I whistled and I attracted someone’s attention. But in the meantime, cycling with [pause] I don’t know.
DF: Six or eight rabbits.
SF: Pardon?
DF: Six or eight rabbits.
SF: Yeah. Yeah. There would be six on one side and six on the other I suppose but I came off my bike didn’t I because one rabbit, one lot of rabbits slipped slightly and of course it caught in the wheel and it got in between the forks of the bike that held the wheel so I came off. Didn’t hurt myself. Picked myself up and got there. But that’s how I attracted their attention and they were very very pleased with their rabbits.
CB: I think we’ll just stop there for a mo.
[recording paused]
CB: I think we’ve done extremely well.
SF: Yes.
CB: So when the family settled down and your son was born when was that?
SF: That was —
DF: 1955 ‘56.
SF: It was [pause] Oh come on Sylvia. It was in Edinburgh.
CB: And you moved there in 1950 did you? Roughly.
DF: We moved from Tulliallan to Bush Estate which is seven miles south of Edinburgh.
CB: Yes.
SF: In 1953.
CB: Right.
DF: The spring of 1953. So it was after that. So it was ’65 then because —
CB: 1955.
Df: ’65.
SF: ’65 when Brian was born.
CB: Oh, ’65, yeah.
DF: ’65 he was born.
CB: Right.
SF: Oh yes, because —
DF: I was about forty or forty two. Something like that.
SF: Because I was in the Scottish Women’s Institute and I was on the committee. I was treasurer for it and it was such a small group that we had to do various things to get money to spend. So we thought we would put on a concert and [pause] and that was just at the time I became I pregnant. And I was the person that was to open it, you know be on the stage in my dressing gown and I said to the doctor that we had known, he was a Yorkshireman actually because he used to say, ‘There’s not many Yorkshire doctors in Scotland but you found one.’ And I said to him, ‘Oh, when the district nurse comes will you tell her not to come to visit me until —’ Because I didn’t want other people to know I was pregnant at the time I was going to do the sketch to get money for the Institute. So he thought that was funny. So we had a laugh about that. He was lovely. And he decided I should go in to the Nursing Home previously. I think I’d just gone over my time and he said, ‘Because you are an elderly person we need to take good care of you and your baby.’ So I went in and they started things moving. In fact, you came to seem me didn’t you?
DF: The night before I went away?
SF: Yes.
DF: When Brian was born I was in Lanarkshire or something.
SF: Yes. He went and left me you see [laughs] terrible. He —
DF: That was the 23rd of September.
SF: Yes. It was the 23rd of September. It would be the 22nd that I went in and I, well I’d had pains and then after you left that evening you went home and you said you wouldn’t come in the next morning because you were going to Lanark and the pain stopped. I don’t know. Never felt any more for ages. In fact, they decided that they would break the waters themselves and they did a Caesarean section. And Brian came in to the world, I think it was about 3 o’clock. And you couldn’t come in that night, could you?
DF: No.
SF: So it was the next day before he saw his son.
CB: And time went on and he decided to follow his father into the same sort of business.
DF: That’s right. Yes.
SF: Yes. Yes, he did.
CB: Well, we’ve covered so many things. Thank you, Sylvia. Absolutely fascinating.
DF: When he was at school he was a very good, he was captain of the rugby team
CB: Oh was he?
DF: Captain of the cricket.
CB: Yeah.
DF: Captain of the riverboat team.
CB: Right.
DF: And he used to run.
CB: Talented man.
DF: Yes. He was on county running.
SF: Yes, because for Paul’s wedding —
DF: He’d rather run than go to it.
SF: He rang his cousin did he mind if he didn’t come to his wedding because he wanted to run for the county.
CB: Right.
SF: And he never finished that run because he pulled —
CB: Oh.
SF: A tendon. Oh, he was so disappointed. He said, ‘I missed my cousin’s wedding. I missed what I wanted to finish and do, you know.’
CB: Yes. Yeah.
SF: But however, that’s, that’s life, isn’t it?
CB: Yes. All spoiled. Yes. Thank you very much indeed.
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 Sylvia Fraser
Description
An account of the resource
Discusses her father's pre-war charabanc business and the pub he ran during the war. Also mentions her work in a factory in Grantham and the occasion when a possible spy took his own life when he was arrested. One day an airman and his friends decided with his friends to celebrate his twenty first birthday in the pub and he met Sylvia and became a regular visitor. Donald and Sylvia married in 1948. There are occasional interjections by her husband Donald Fraser and they also discuss their post war life.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Chris Brockbank
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-07-02
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AFraserSM180702, PFraserDK1608
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
02:10:59 audio recording
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940
1944
1947
1948
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Grantham
England--Stamford
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Royal Air Force
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
home front
love and romance
RAF Barkstone Heath
RAF Bottesford
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/248/3396/ADownesS160806.1.mp3
ed272f76a7ad055f3dc1f08217bda59c
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
Downes, Steven
Steven Downes
S Downes
Description
An account of the resource
One oral history interview with Steven Downes (430647 Royal Australian Air Force).
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Steven Downes 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
2016-08-06
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Downes, S
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
SD: Can I take you back to the word go. I always wanted to join the air force and at sixteen joined the Empire Training Course subsidiary. Air Training Corps it was called, at sixteen. So we stayed going to school, high school until I was eighteen. Then went into the air force and more or less did all the elementary things again back at Bradfield Park when we went there. So that’s my story starts.
AP: That’s where it starts. Alright.
SD: 1943.
AP: So this interview for the International Bomber Command Centre is with Steve Downes who was a wireless operator.
SD: Correct.
AP: In Bomber Command during World War Two. It is the 6th of August 2016. The interview is taking place in Steve’s place, at Steve’s house at Preston Bay.
SD: Thornbury.
AP: Thornbury. I was close. North. It’s all the same.
SD: North Thornbury actually.
AP: My name’s Adam Purcell and we may as well start from the beginning Steve if you don’t mind. Can you tell me something of what you were doing before the war?
SD: I was, I was working as a wages clerk at Raymond’s in Collingwood. Webbs of Abbotsford. And I was just doing the wages clerks there every, every week. [unclear] back in those days. And we had I was set up wages clerk for the whole factory. And this was a good, a pressured job. I had to get it right every every Thursday night to collect the money on the, on the Friday morning and then put it in envelopes. So that was my start as a, before that I’d been, worked in a [pause ] a roustabout boy if you like in a mercers office shop in [indecipherable] Then I went to Raymond’s. I was apprentice devil there. Ordered all the paper for the purchase and finally I got up to be the clerk in the wages department. And eventually when the men there went into the army I moved up as the chief. So that’s briefly how I started off. And from there I went to — in Sydney. I went to Bradfield Park and did a two month course there testing the [pause] the skills of of mass of aircraft reconnaissance [unclear] Drill. Lots of drill. A few games of basketball which I’ve never seen down here. Of course in New South Wales it was rugby as far as they was concerned. That didn’t grab me at all. It wasn’t football. It was running ball. I got through that alright. Went up to — came home. Oh God. No, we didn’t come home. Went to Parkes in the middle of New South Wales. We were there for a few months training as a wireless operator. Well, I had done some Morse code back as a trainee in the Air Training Corps. It was still hard to get but eventually it twigged. I mean twigged. But two fellows I always, they both failed. One was, he’d been a leaving certificate. Me, I was a Melbourne High School boy. Only got as far as year ten. And so those two chaps went to England as air gunners because they didn’t qualify as a radio operator. So being a wireless air gunner here in Australia worth really both jobs up north. They sent me off to England which was where I wanted to go in the first place. So I ended up over there. Again more, more training. And one of the tricks as I’m trying to remember is we were down on the promenade outside the Metropole Hotel or the Grand. I’m not sure which one was now, hotel in Brighton and we were taken out every morning. Morning drill by a guardsman. A former guardsman. Anyway, he gave us the changing step on the march. What a mess it was. Everyone did it differently. We didn’t do any good. Everyone laughed at us. I say most people laughed because I couldn’t help myself for laughing because it was so ridiculous and I was only nineteen. So it was all a game. It was. And from there we went up on leave in Wolverhampton. We were there with some people for three weeks or two weeks. Two weeks. Then back to Brighton. And because D-Day was about to start which we didn’t know but we knew it was coming. Something would be coming up. We were put back to a staging camp not far from Wolverhampton [pause] No, no. Yeah. A staging camp. All of us. So here we were. About a hundred or three hundred of us all stuck there. Nothing’s happening because there were four lots of aircrew there and we, while we were there they sent us off on a course up at North Shields and we did some shooting on a range with a Sten gun and also gave us a [pause] we were in, we were in these, these acquired houses. No. Acquired is the wrong word. Something like that. Acquired houses. And from there we went on a game, or I call it a game because we were all supposed to group as a group supposed to get to the final part by means of various pickups and all that sort of thing. Find, find the [pause] what? Yeah. Just find the place where finalising was happening. I said that before we started, ‘Do you want to win this?’ I said. They said yes. So we commandeered a car, and the lady there took us in a car to the next point and the rest came along in a bus. And I [unclear] the next, cabbed to the next place and we were also going on a bus there and some, some of them were riding on the back of hay carts. Another air group who were on the bus. From there we had to walk over the fields to the final meeting place and we went there. We went there. Which was good because we took this two groups at the second last meeting place. So we took off from there in a group across the fields, bulls not withstanding, went across the fields, over the gates. And we went straight as if going around the quick way. So we went. We got there before the other crowd. So we were the first there.
SD: Was that an escape sort of exercise was it or —
AP: Yes. Or seeing if you could map read. All that sort of thing you see. So we did that. Went back to North Shields by bus or we marched back. I don’t think we did. I can’t remember that now. So yes. And from there we went back to [pause] North Shields. I can’t remember. We went back to where I was. Met a chap there. I’d been dancing and I came back home walking across the street and it was his street. He came up behind me and said, ‘Would you like some supper?’ I said, ‘Yeah. I’d like some supper.’ So it was an experience. All this was at initial training but no sign of the staging. We were just waiting. So I met a girl there. [unclear] he invited me into his home to have bacon and eggs, I know it was something like that which was a big deal back then. It was all rations and everything. So she played the piano because I was invited back for dinner. She played the piano then. She’s since died. She went back to Malaysia. Her boyfriend was in the foreign [pause] foreign what’s the right word. The scope of doing some work in Malaysia. Probably to do with rubber. I can’t remember now because I never met him. Anyway, she took a girlfriend with her when we went to the movies so that was good. So eventually we went from there back to Brighton. And I was in 38 course and I think we were, I ended up with 41 course. I got three courses when I studying for the Morse code but I picked up my pass and passed through and that served me alright. I liked that. Eventually the radio went alright. I eventually acquired a bit of a skill to operate it. Not at any great speed but just operating. And from there we were [pause] oh yes we were sent to a place called Halfpenny Green. And that was where that lady in the hotel charged the duke of [pause] one of the dukes, there was a war going on so she fed all the horses at a halfpenny each. That was the thing. Different to Ireland. They’ve got a bridge there. Halfpenny Bridge. So there we were. It seemed like, to be about four months we were there I think. And we finally, having passed the course we were due to come home at Christmas ’43 and because we would have been on a train overnight I organised a taxi and there was five of us in a taxi. We reached Cootamundra the night before. Caught the train down so I was home for Christmas. There was, all this was all pre-Bomber Command but still. I went from home for three or four days leave or something like that. Then up to Sale to do the gunnery side of it. No dancing there. It was all fields and not many girls. So the dancing had to wait until I got back to, to Melbourne and off to England. So what are we up to? Ok. We were at, we were a long while at Church — no. Church Broughton. Yes it was. Church Broughton where we crewed up. We went to Glenfield Park first which was Lichfield. Lichfield. Where I got another uniform because I’d worn the bottom out of mine. I was at [pause] what do you call it? Where is the nearest to Park? Church Broughton, as a crew and from there we — we were at Lichfield first. Then we transferred to a satellite airfield for Lichfield. We spent a lot of time there skilling up to four engine aircraft. Big ones. Not the, not the Avro Ansons that we’d been flying which the wings flapped as you went. And I spent a lot of time there. And then we went to Bottesford. Bottesford was where we had our first trip was by Lancaster from there out across the North Sea. We had an experienced pilot familiarising our flight. This Scotty. Scotty. Our pilot. Well, Lachie was our pilot and all the others were there except the engineer. So we sort of got a little bit of time on Lancasters there. Not long because the war was going on. They were marching up through into, into, up through France. Up and through Belgium then. So we were pretty free of any danger coming up from the ground like. We were told not to fly over there. It was still risky. And so we were in Church Broughton [pause] That’s my son Adam. Adam. Meet Adam. Two Adams.
[recording paused]
SD: Where am I up to?
AP: Where were we? We were at Church Broughton I think.
SD: Church Broughton. Then we went to Bottesford, and from Bottesford we did a lot more flying from there as a, as a crew. And I was there and then the war finished [laughs] So we were there, fully trained, nowhere to go. So they said everyone goes on leave. We went for a fortnight’s leave and by that time I’d met a girl. I was in their home quite a bit of time. Being a wireless operator I guess you were sitting in a little closed off section. You couldn’t see out. You didn’t see a thing. There was no window. You just sat there and looked at a screen, and what they call listening out for signals coming through. And just going out on these training trips. From there we went out again to various places. Around England mostly. One of the, one of the trips home, so my pilot tells me, he didn’t tell us because he was told not to tell us we were followed in by a German night fighter. And the, the [unclear] the reason about this, it was dangerous, and the base phoned through by telegraph to the, and said, ‘We’re being followed.’ Before he finished the message about we were being followed they said, ‘Ten thousand feet, angels high. Get out of it’ In other words get away. So that was one of those night fighters that were coming over and shooting down planes coming in to land when they were most at a disadvantage because everyone is tired and all that sort of thing. So we got down alright from there. But the war finished. And that was before the war finished. Now, all this time I’d been to lots of dances. A lot of the fellas were going to the pubs. I didn’t like the pubs. I wasn’t a drinker. I was happy with cups of tea at home. Anyway, yeah I went to [unclear] and met another girl. And her father was a policeman. I didn’t know at the time but it didn’t take him long before I knew he was a policeman. And I used to spend some nights there. This is way back at Church Broughton. Some nights there. I got to know the son there and the mum and dad. I was, I was made very welcome there which suited me because I was a home bloke. I wasn’t a fly by night fella. I didn’t go to many dances there. I know I went to a village one before I met this girl. Anyway, when the war finished and had to go on leave I went back there for leave which was alright. Now, as far as experiences now back to the air force days. The main one was that following by the fighter, night fighters. There were various other times when we were lucky as we were training. I was taken out by [pause] we were training in the Morse code. We were training flying so that navigators being acclimatized and we got lost one night. I didn’t know anything about it until the plane went there. We went through a hole in a clouds. We went through the hole and found out where it was. The pilot. We were over Wales and he recognised the big mountain there. I knew they were there, they came back when he came back he wasn’t he couldn’t get the wireless to operate. His wireless as it were. He couldn’t get that to work. So I used the Morse code and got us down from ten thousand, a thousand, that’s right ten thousand, brought us down to a thousand through the cloud to where the field was. So we landed alright there eventually. So again we were out of that. And mostly we were there over Christmas. Over Christmas ’44 that would be. I got on my bike and rode up to people that used to be in Australia at their home for Christmas Day. After Christmas Day I rode my bike about eighteen miles. I got on my bike and rode all the way up there to Flint in North Wales. And from Flint I went to a dance there. Where he was, the son, selling the house sale. Now, other experiences are mostly wrapped around not very big experience in the aircraft. Mostly off, off the aircraft on the ground. And nothing exciting happened except my dancing and keeping fit. Oh we played soccer over there and basketball and down in the field [unclear] and of course they were fields, not paddies. No. I can’t tell you much more than that. Rocky, our — for the formation of the crew for me was most significant. We were, there was about a dozen of us. We were in our training place not far from Wolverhampton. Not far from Stourbridge. And we, yeah [pause] So we did the Morse code to get, to get us back down. What else?
AP: Can you tell me —
SD: Oh Lachie. Yeah. Lachie. That arose when we went to Lichfield as a group. We were in the crew in Lichfield and we did a bit of drill there did a little bit of waiting around and we then paraded for selection of a crew. So there was twelve of us and each one of the pilots picked up a fellow as a, as a, as a navigator, a bomb aimer and I was a wireless air gunner but I didn’t have to fit that because I had two, eventually had two. A mid-upper and a rear gunner in, in the Lichfield and we were meant to be selecting a pilot. The pilot selected us. There was a group of pilots come down along the line and I was the last on the end of this line. So Lachie had never picked anyone and he was, he was left with me [laughs] So that was my luck. I get Lachie. My pilot was Lachie McBean and we spent about [pause] no we didn’t go on any air flights from there. Yes we did. We flew Stirlings. Big aircraft. A big tail. Stirling. From there we went to Church Broughton. There we were on our up to a point. Always had the radio to get us out trouble. And we did some long flights from [pause] no. Lichfield. Which one. From Bottesford. We had some long flights from Bottesford. Overnight. Mostly night flying because we were Bomber Command. Night flying. And from the night flying we had a few scares in as much as we got lost once that I didn’t know about. We were followed in. Because I’m in this little cubicle I didn’t know what was going on. All the others knew because he was on touch with base on his radio telephone and was told he had ten thousand and that was involved with flying Lancasters. The best time was had with Lancasters, at that time was the most beautiful aircraft I’d flown in. It was a lovely four big powerful Rolls Royce engines. I thought it was great. But then I was sitting there nothing to see. Once I was going on a long trip I got up out of the, out of my seat and where the radio equipment was and I got the mid-upper, the mid-upper gunner to swap places in as much as he didn’t have the radio but I did. But as I got up there and had a look outside. Only time I did with the big crew but fired a few shots way over a field. Just so as I’d fired a gun. Once anyway.
AP: Yeah.
SD: And so that was about my experience. We were sent on leave and we were told while we were off the station get a job. Something I could have when I went back to Australia. Well clerical works was still operated by the ladies and women. Fellows like me didn’t get a job that was permanent. So I ended up getting a job working in a brewery there in Derby. A brewery. And what we were doing was rolling barrels around but we had a morning tea of beer. We had an afternoon tea of beer [laughs] had a lunchtime too if you wanted it. So that was an experience. So afterwards the war was finished by then and some of us men were coming back home. Our crew had broken up. Lachie went one way. When we were at a place near Bottesford we had to throw away our flying gear out in a pile. Getting rid of our flying gear. So we went on leave and I was home with this family. At that stage I was going to bring her home, we hadn’t married but I was going to get her out to Australia afterwards. Well when I got back to Australia Australian girls were different to English girls and — but father had said to me before I left, ‘Don’t bring home an English bride.’ I’d forgotten all about that. So there we had leave there. Went back in November to [pause] where? Warrington. That’s where we were. First station camp. I think we were there. From there we went to Brighton in a big group. They wanted to bring us home to Australia on the Orion. The SS Orion. A big ship. Now, we were taken aboard and our quarters were over the top of mess tables. And they said, ‘You can sleep in the mess or you can sleep on the floor.’ We had officers saying, ‘Don’t stay. It’s not good.’ So we didn’t stay. So it was a bit of a rebellion if you like. A passive one because all, everyone was outside. Everyone who wanted to stay was outside on the wharf. And we there two in a group overnight. We slept on the train or played. The die hards played with the dice. Whatever the dice were. I forget now. And they went through this. Ok. Eventually we went to, I was coming home. At one point we went from Australia, this is coming back now in March ’44. We travelled from Brisbane. We got off at Brisbane. They put us on an American Liberty ship and took us very far down the coast of Australia below New Zealand I’m sure and it was cool, and up the coast. Took us a fortnight to get to San Francisco. We arrived there on the, this was 1944, we were on the, on the wharf in San Francisco. They welcomed, the American band welcomed the Australians there with a [unclear] A story I’d never heard myself before, [unclear] and do si do, a simple memory thing. We travelled over America for five days. We had three days in New York and then went on the Queen Elizabeth to England. We travelled across to Glasgow but we must have gone up to Greenland. Some of our fellows went up on the top deck manning the machine guns up on the top. I didn’t know if they I reckoned I couldn’t shoot much, I suppose. I didn’t end up there. Anyway we got to England. We travelled down. We went to, actually we travelled to Gourock in, just out of Glasgow and then come back down to Brighton by train overnight. And that was a long trip. So we ended up in Brighton overnight. That was earlier on, before all this happened. Anyway, having come back we come back to Brighton. We were going, we were on leave again for a fortnight. And we were brought back to Brighton and eventually put on the [pause] do you know I can forget that. The Stirling Castle. One of the Castle liner ships. Other people had been brought back by the Durban Castle about a month before us. We were on the Stirling Castle and the Orion of course came back to England because something happened to the engines in the Bay of Biscay and they came back. So all the fellas were supposed to go on the trip back on the Orion. Well those Stirling Castle ships, some of the ships came around the Cape through Durban, South Africa. We came through the Mediterranean. We picked up a whole swathe of New Zealanders. Army. They were army fellows. And they must have been down in the hold because we were on decks up on the ship to come home. So it was a seven, seven week trip. Or a six week. I can’t remember now. And we dropped off at Perth. And from Perth where we caught the train from Fremantle into Perth for six hours and back again to catch the ship home. All this is peripheral, got on the ship to Melbourne and all the people from South Australia got off there with us at Melbourne. And my mother and father and my big brother who was a big tall guy arrived on the Station Pier. They were late. They’d been walking on the wharf itself. Other people were up in the, high up in the observation part. A lot of people were up there yelling and screaming. Yeah. Waving. And there was my mum and dad and my uncle and they were late which suited us, suited the party, so. They saw me eventually. I threw my hat down to say. Well there used to be as saying if you threw your hat in your, and it wasn’t thrown out, you were welcome. That was an English trait. And then I came home. And going back to Lachie. We sort of broke up from Bottesford. We all disappeared. The crew disappeared. All different ways. We had two English fellas. Two English fellas went back to, to where they play tennis. They went there, another chap went home to Gloucester. The other two were Scots. They went back to Scotland. Oh [unclear] so that’s about me in the air force I think. About all I can remember. I was not, not real big stuff at all.
AP: There’s, there’s plenty in there.
SD: Yeah.
AP: One thing you mentioned a lot were dances.
SD: Yeah. Right.
AP: Can you tell us some more about the dances in England?
SD: Oh yes. Yeah. Well as much the same as here.
AP: Well, I’ve never been to a dance in the 1940s but you have.
SD: Oh yeah. Well back in those days that was, it was the modern waltz, the foxtrot, a faster dance. And then there was an English dance. You could dance with a whole load of people. You had to know where you were going because you had to do the same thing. You were going backwards and forwards. So that was, that was great because you know it suited me. It was just something I could do and I enjoyed. And of course I had the English ones. I can’t remember now. No. I can’t remember. So yeah, so I enjoyed the dances that I went to. And mostly they were a small group of musicians. It was never played over the radio. It was all by three or more. Went to Derby a couple of times, a few times and stayed overnight in one of the places. So I’d go there on a Saturday, down Saturday night go back to the bed and breakfast in a big place. And the next morning go back to, on a Sunday go back to Church Broughton back then. So yeah dancing was something I enjoyed. [door sliding open] Yes thank you. You want coffee? Tea?
AP: Tea would be nice actually.
SD: Yeah. I used to be in the tax office after the war. Eventually the tax office. I was over there because I had cups of tea. No milk. No sugar. I was welcome because I wasn’t using any part of their —
AP: [unclear]
SD: Would you like a bit of [unclear]
AP: Say again?
SD: Would you like a bit of life into it?
AP: Yeah. That’s alright. Give it a moment.
SD: Yeah. Sorry yes. As I said there were girls there. Even though there were a lot of Americans were around they didn’t go to the same dances I went to. So I was fortunate that way so I always had a girl to dance with. Oh yes, one experiences they were the [emphasis] experiences of my trip over there was we’re at Lichfield. And we’d gone in to town to, to the go to the pubs. From the pubs I was going to the dance. I’d had a couple of drinks down in the pubs then went to the dance hall. Or the big hall. As it turned out there were a lot of girls there. I paid my money and walked in. I looked at all these girls all around. They had seats all the way around. I’m the only fella there. So I walked in and they started playing the music. No one got up to dance. Oh this is silly. I came for a dance. So I picked on a girl on the other side of the room and she must have been fifteen. She was there with her mother. She might have been well lower than that. Might be fourteen. So I picked her up and did the dance with her and that sort of, everyone else got up then. The fella had made up his mind so he got up 10 o’clock, and the pubs shut and they were all coming up from the pub then to the dance hall. And of course the girls had plenty of people to dance with then. So that was [pause] now there was always a girl to take home. Always took a girl except the first dance I went to near Church Broughton. I found out, I found out that I’d been there and I didn’t have the girl out there but strangely enough a fellow said to me thanks for not, thanks for not taking his girlfriend out. At the end of the dance I just went off on my bike back to, back to the camp. Because they were small English village dance. I didn’t get back there but when I was going with a girl later on who was a policeman’s daughter her mother had mentioned that their auntie had said he was, he was at the dance way back. So nothing secret. So that was, that’s another experience I guess. But again nothing, nothing demanding as far as — no action at all. The other fellows got in to action. Went over Germany and got shot down and some walked out. A few walked out and weren’t captured. Another went back through, back through, through Spain and there I was over there dancing with the girls.
AP: So —
SD: I was, I was, no. I came home virtually. I was lucky. And Lachie will tell us the same. Even now he says to me he always regarded himself as being lucky. I do myself feel I was lucky to go all that way. All those miles on water and not be troubled by submarines or anything like that. No foreign aircraft flying over us. So, I was safe in England. I was safe coming back because the war was over. Arrived back home two years since I’d left there. Come back in, arrived back in Australia in 1946 so that’s something. I mean on the trip arriving home. Coming up in the ship that goes up at 3 o’clock in the morning , pack, pack, get packed up ready to go ashore. We come through the Heads, down towards Rosebuds and then up the, up the channel, up to Melbourne. And we passed by Marines Pier and then, and then you could see Melbourne and the Luna Park stood out well. And then we, I can’t remember. We had a, we were towed in, and we were lucky. That’s the way I think of it. I was lucky.
AP: Why did you pick the air force?
SD: What?
AP: Why did you choose the air force?
SD: Because I didn’t want to go in the army. My dad was in the army in the First War and he’d given us stories about that. He was a trumpeter. He was also an artillery man later. And it was, it was a tough life in the army. So I reckoned with the air force you were safe. Home to a bed at night and have three meals a day. And relatively safe. But no we weren’t safe when we got to England. They were lucky to get thirty missions up. Very lucky. Those that went through their first, first flights. Some of them died on their first trip. Like my two mates. They’d become gunners and they crewed up and the last letter I got from him he’d written the words, ‘Hurray we’re flying.’ He posted it and I tore it up which I shouldn’t have done because it was his last letter ever. What else is there?
AP: What, what can you tell me about the enlistment process and interview or a medical or something that you had to do to get in to the air force?
SD: Yeah. Again it was easy. I already had a uniform. I got a uniform for twelve months in the Air Training Corps until about the February 23rd, I guess. All my stuff’s in the back there. The 23rd we went into train from Spencer Street to Bradfield Park overnight. So, I wanted to be in the air force because I wanted to be a fighter pilot. We all wanted to be fighter pilots. Young and silly. Anyway, at the end of our time in Bradfield Park I wasn’t sure if we were two months or when. It was a week before a category selection board where they chose people for pilots, navigators and gunners, radio operator. The gunnery came along later. So we went to Parkes and I spent my last two months, three months there before I got the taxi home. that’s about all. Anything else I could help you with?
AP: Yes. Plenty. What about the first time you ever went in an aeroplane? What did you think?
SD: Before that I’d already been on an aircraft at Essendon. A de Havilland aircraft. Room for about four or five passengers. I went for a flight from Essendon down surround around towards St Kilda. South Melbourne. And then I went in the air force. The first trip in an aeroplane in the air force at Parkes. We did our training there on single, single engine Wacketts. I think it was Wacketts and did the basic radio work from there. And eventually at Parkes we all had to get to twenty five words a minute in speed. Like my two friends didn’t make it, although he’d been in the Air Training Corps before, one of them [unclear] from Sydney. And he was a beautiful dancer and he was, he could run like the wind too. We both were going out that night to [unclear] because it was cold. We were going home to people. I wanted to go home with the girls to meet their family, and then go back for a cup of tea or sit by the fire. You see, looking after the young men pretty well. So that happened in Parkes. It didn’t happen in Sale. What else is there? Went, went to Brighton and at Brighton we danced at [pause] the Pavilion I think we called it. It’s where the King George the third built this big palace with towers and everything. Chinese influence. So we’d go to the dances there. I went once, got a girl to take home and that night the German bombers came over the top and we were in the street so we didn’t hear from any, that was the closest [unclear] they didn’t drop any bombs over us but they shot, someone shot down a German fighter because they crash landed. He was shot. He ended up in a cemetery on the top of the tombstones if you like. And the other time I went home. Something else. No. It’s gone out of my head. You won’t bring it back.
AP: What, what were your early impressions of wartime England?
SD: Everyone seemed to be alright. They were fed but only just. They [pause] and as I said with the dances went to most places where there was a tourist sort of thing. I got on my bike. Oh yes, the chap had got, where I went, he was a mate eventually I asked him get me a radio and get me a bike. They were two things I needed. I had twenty five pounds, English pounds then, and so I used to ride my bike to these dances. So I had the means of moving around and a radio of course. I had all the music I wanted. In the hut. No one objected to the radio going.
AP: What sort of radio was it?
SD: The one sitting outside under the house that’s been pulled down since then. It was called a lease lend. Lease lend radio. Wooden. Wooden. Wooden casing around the radio. It’s been it was home for a while. Came to my brother in law up the road and from there back here. Not a very powerful one. Had to break the temperature down. Had to break the voltage down from 240 to 120. So it had a [pause] had a power cord to the plug back this way to the unit at 120 by the time it got across there. And that meant it was Americanised. And they operated at 120 rather than 240. Now luckily I stayed mostly in the country with these people. And they seemed to be managing on what they had. As I said a cup of tea. No milk. No sugar. That was a big plus. And no tea except when it went in the water. That’s about all. So England was doing very well as far as their civilian population was concerned. And this was long before I met Lachie. Because when we crewed up when I go back a bit there when we crewed up from Lichfield and they decided, the crew decided we were going to go to the homes of the other members of the crew. So we went up to Scotland and a place called Burntisland which is just across the bridge from Edinburgh. And from Edinburgh we went across to Glasgow, or near Glasgow. A place called Stepps which is a throwaway. From there we came back. We didn’t go to any more. Oh yes we went down to where they play tennis. Must have gone before. Where they play tennis. Do you remember?
AP: Wimbledon.
SD: Wimbledon. Yeah. Close to Wimbledon, that’s right.
Other: [unclear] country.
SD: Nothing. No. Nothing.
Other: Supplement their diet.
SD: They were lucky to live in the country. Yes. They had all those sort of things. The people I was staying with they were, their great grandmother, grandparents lived in the village further down towards the river. While I was there I did a little bit of work with the son of the household and I helped him with his electricity. I helped him with that. They were always had plenty of eggs. And the rest. I didn’t eat much when I was there. I still don’t eat much. No. There’s not much. Not much there to put in a story. Sounds like a long story but a story about coming back here. I always have read the births and the deaths part in the newspaper and lo and behold there was a McBean. Now that was very foreign to me. McBean. And sure enough it said Lachlan [unclear] and sure enough his name was Lachie as the husband. Lachie. So it rang a bell with me. We organised it through the through the, through the funeral people. And said was he a pilot or anything like that and it turns out he was. So, I wrote. I wrote him a card of sympathy which, it’s not good to lose your wife so young. There you go. She was [unclear] Anything else? Oh yes. We went to Wimbledon and stayed overnight there and then back up to camp again. Went back to Lichfield. So that was an incident in the air force. Nothing dangerous about getting on a train or, train travel was pretty easy really for fellas like myself. We went as a group. Went as a flight or unit. [unclear] we just a group of air force bloke so we could travel anywhere. We didn’t seem to put anyone out or anything like that and the people I stayed with were pretty well organised. But the people in the city they would have suffered. As I say I stayed in a place where they could grow some vegetables themselves.
AP: So you were saying about Lachie. About sending him a card.
SD: Oh right. Yeah. Ok. Yes. That notice was in the births and deaths. My daughter, Suzanne rang the, the funeral people to find out if he was a pilot and he was a pilot so it must have been him. So I wrote him a card of condolence. Condolences because he’s lost his wife. And I knew damned well how he’d be feeling because I’d lost my wife some several years before. She was in a nursing home. Went through dementia stage. [unclear] So went up there. Went on the 26th of April last year. Yeah. 26th April last year after Anzac Day and he was pleased to see me because he thought I was dead. I’d been killed in a motorbike accident or something like that. That’s, that’s how I got to know him because he rang me back then over the phone and we organised we’d go and have a day. We’d meet up there the following Sunday as a reunion. So there we were after seventy years of not knowing where either of us were. And there we were. So that was a gift from a higher higher people upstairs.
AP: A couple, a couple more questions if you’re, if you’re still happy to —
SD: Yeah.
AP: Keep answering them. Just interested, your story of the radio sparked off a bit of a memory for me because —
SD: Oh yeah.
AP: Because another pilot I knew had a radio as well but I was never able to ask him about it. So what sort of music were you listening to?
SD: Oh modern stuff. I was never interested in the classical stuff then. It was all the dance music and all that [coughs] which fitted in with the dances. I used to like to listen to the big bands. To Glenn Miller bands. Tommy Dorsey and his brother’s bands. Who else? Stand. No. I can’t remember [coughs] Yeah. So used to listen to all the big bands and the other music that we played. Mostly American music.
AP: There was a lot of that on, on the radio?
SD: Yeah.
AP: Did you have that to listen to.
SD: Yeah. Much the same as young people here listen to the radio now. Music I don’t like particularly. But then I came home and my parents would have said, ‘Turn that off.’ Because I was dancing. I was listening to dance music rather loudly which [coughs] which suited, which suited me because I was, I enjoyed dancing. I enjoyed that music. And they actually took me to a stage show [pause] and that was where? It must have been His Majesty’s then. I can’t remember now. That was after I came home.
AP: And you continued dancing when you got home as well.
SD: Oh yeah.
AP: OK.
SD: Yeah. I met another girl up in Sale. That was alright. She was a schoolteacher up there. She has since died. At the time we had fairly, got on pretty well together. Then I met my present wife Lola. She’s still here. In ‘46. And from her, meeting her I was then a member of their wedding party at their marriage in ’48. And then we were married in 1949. So here again we had the band with quite a number of this band and that was at Tudor Court. Reception. We were married in All Saint’s Church down in South Yarra.
AP: So just moving back to England just briefly can you tell me about VE day? What if any experiences did you have then?
SD: You got it right. It was the VE day. So [pause] I can’t remember. I don’t think it was at the camp. It must have been sort of celebration at the air force station Bottesford then. So I got on the train and went back to a place where she was at. The family I was living with. I was back there. Do you want some more tissues?
AP: No. No. That’s alright. I’m good.
SD: At Church Broughton so that wasn’t far out of Derby. A place called Hatton. H A T T O N. I spent a fair bit of time there. Hatton. Of course the trip into Derby took a long, travelling around by bus, took a long, fairly long time so it was quite handy having a girlfriend near the station and I stayed there some nights in the, with her mother and father and the son at the time. I was in a double bed with the son. That was before the war. That was before we went to to Bottesford. So that was alright. So the son of the house then went to, up country to do some clerical electrical work up country. So I had the bedroom to myself then. But I was pretty green. Young and not very bright family wise or anything like that but I knew they were looking after me pretty well so I still stuck with it and the dances.
AP: What did you do after the war, Steve?
SD: I came back to Australia. Went back to the old job. Job. Like most people went back to the same. The old job then. If they were lucky. But I was there twelve months and then I put up a shilling a day away for my time in the service. So I I can’t remember how much you got. It was a shilling a day and maybe in twenty days I got a pound back then. I was, I had worked that out. Worked out alright. Now, so I didn’t [pause] I came back to that job. Then I went into a business. A trucking business. With a chap that I met through a fellow at work. And the two of us went into partnership in this big truck. A Studebaker. And we were carting wood from [unclear] back to Melbourne. I know I learned to drive virtually on the truck because my uncle had said to me, ‘You’ve got to learn to drive.’ So he was teaching me. Learning to drive. And it’s amazing that in the air force days we had these guys who had never driven anything before in their lives piloting big heavy aircraft. It’s a bit of a thinking back now they were very brave people. I guess we are too actually. Pardon me. By the fact that we were flying too. Because we lost quite a lot of fellas in aircraft accidents.
AP: Did you ever have anything to do with an accident? Or did you see one?
SD: No.
AP: The aftermath of one or something.
SD: No. Once we, there was half a dozen of us selected to go as pallbearers out of respect of a Polish airman. I can’t remember where. Gloucester I think. Gloucester somewhere. Round about there. And there was a trip down there and drove back. That was all. Took some time to bury him and that was it. It wasn’t really worrying me much because it wasn’t me that was getting buried. So I was rather blasé about it then. I was young and didn’t really know. But it was amazing the number of young people who were all mostly well not more than twenty. My group and then as you got further up the line they were older then. But I was pretty young. Some of the fellas had driven cars and all this sort of thing. Which I hadn’t had the experience. So it was a bit, a bit of an attitude which I didn’t have to to fly or operate machinery. So all I had to do was do the Morse code which eventually of course I got expert at it. And I wouldn’t have been able to pick up messages from ships because they were very fast. Aircraft. At twenty five you were pretty ok. As I say I brought one plane down and through the clouds at ten thousand, nine thousand, eight thousand. Down and we were the last to land. But they were bringing down all the other aircraft down before us. Every Avro Anson and we had an Avro Anson here. I reckoned the wings flapped as it flew. Avro Ansons. And from the Anson we went to Stirlings. From Stirlings we went to the Lancasters.
AP: What was your first impression of a Lancaster?
SD: Beautiful ship. Beautiful. The engine. The engine — I didn’t know much about engines but they sounded great to me. Sounded beautiful. And as far as I was concerned they were invincible. Of course they weren’t.
AP: Yes.
SD: So I enjoyed my time in Lancs. I’m sorry. The tea went down the wrong way before. Have you got any other questions?
AP: How did you live on the, on the station?
SD: Oh. There was a bed. A bed there. Meals there. Lunch as well as morning and evening meals. Yes. When I was there I appreciated that. These fellows that didn’t ever want to stay there very much. I gave up the evening meal. I’d get on my bike and away I went. I didn’t stay around for the groups who were going to the pub anyway. I wanted to go the dances. If there were any dances. On my bike. Other times I would catch the bus in to Stourbridge and go to the dances there. We’d all been warned about the girls that went to the dances in Stourbridge. Keep well clear. Don’t get mixed up with them. You’ll end up with venereal disease. That’s coming from the station commander. So at night there was, there were a few girls there I would take them home after the dance and then back to get my bike and ride back to the camp mostly. Sometimes I went on the bus. Not very often. I rode my bike most of the time. Which was about twelve miles from Halfpenny Green to Stourbridge which was mostly what I did. But went there. I put my bike there on the long grass. A village tree. There used to be long grass everywhere. It wasn’t any danger of getting pinched or anything from there. I knew it was there. Now, I was telling you about the bacon and eggs earlier on when you got on to the bike. I was over there when I first arrived in Warrington which was not far from Flint in Wales. I used to go to Flint by train. I was welcomed there pretty much. We went to a dance there on a Saturday night. I was down at Rhyl which is further along the coast. Always had a group of girls going with the fellas. I lined up with a girl there who was just to kissed them goodnight and away I went because I was living with these people and I didn’t want to be out late or anything like that. So what else was there? That’s about all.
AP: Can you tell me about your bike? Your bike in England.
SD: I wanted a racing bike didn’t I? Didn’t want one of the bikes you see on television there with the handlebars stretching out. Handlebars went down. The fastest bike it was. It was painted black. Earlier it was painted, bikes there were all painted black so there was no glint from the air. Yeah. So I left my bike behind me and I got on a ship to come behind. Come home. And we wrote together for some time and then she realised I was still dancing. She took umbrage about going dancing with other girls. There she was in England at sixteen and a half. She was fifteen when I first met her. And sixteen at a half. Very young. But at the time I didn’t realise. She was four years younger than me. I’m jumping around a bit.
AP: No. That’s fine. That’s the nature of memory. It does tend to jump around and that’s, that’s exactly what we’re after to be honest otherwise you don’t dig in as far as you want.
SD: Well the main thing is I got into the air force. Not the army. And the air force was good to me with three meals a day, training and a bed to sleep in. Which was entirely different than the army. It was great to not be in the army.
AP: What err — yeah go on.
SD: Somewhere on there you’ve got there how I met Lachie. That’s one. The last one of the line. He was the last pilot. I was the last radio operator. He already he had his navigator. He had his bomb aimer. So he was ready. He had three, three members of the crew. And he didn’t get the air gunners until later. In the Stirling. We were flying Stirlings. That was later. At [pause] where was that? I don’t know. I know we flew Stirlings. But I don’t know whether we flew Stirlings or Lancasters at Church Broughton which was close. Fairly close to Derby. I enjoyed my radio. I enjoyed my dancing. And I enjoyed the air force. And I got to a place where I soon woke up to the fact there wasn’t many fellows that made the grade. They, they went out and got killed. Or killed in crashes. Some, some fellas didn’t last. Coming back from Derby this girlfriend when I was getting off the bus and this Australian airman was on the bed in the house. [unclear] he knew before I came along that she told me she when the war had finished and he apparently came back to England. I don’t know whether it was Brighton. Whether he was a prisoner and escaped or was sent home. Anyway she didn’t want anything to do with him so that was a bit of let down for him. Not for me. What else is there? Better stay with your questions.
AP: I’m starting to run out of them actually. [unclear] Alright. What, what for you was the legacy of Bomber Command and how do you want it to be remembered?
SD: The fact we were in the, at Bottesford and heading for, heading for action. Real action. We were this far away from it. We were still flying over Germany. dropping bombs while the ground forces were coming up through France. Up through Belgium and Holland. [pause] So there was no, ok in my way of a young fella thinking I was twenty year old. I was twenty year old then. I think it was from day to day really. So as far as memories are concerned I was just pleased to be in the air force and safer than most days I could get up and I’d be safe. Most days. [pause] One thing I did notice between the two. England where we were living mostly had these ordinary, ordinary people living in houses made of brick. The people I stayed with were in a house in brick. Coming to Australia quite a lot of houses there more so were billboard houses and different to England. They were well built up out Camberwell way. I didn’t know much about that. I was pretty green as far as, in fact I wanted [unclear] we wanted to buy a house when we, when we came home. So yes we did want to buy a house. A lot of people over there wanted to buy a house and of course I didn’t have any money. Well, my mum had been a saviour because I allocated some money for her which she put in her bank and my bank until I came home. Until I wanted the money. And she, she’d actually had this five shillings, five shillings a week for up to two and half. Two, two fifty pounds roughly. So that’s a bit of a plus to come home and you were still getting air force money. We didn’t get flying pay though because when we were in England we got extra money by way of flight pay which was more than the soldiers were getting. All the aircrew. People on the ground floor didn’t get anything. I forget how much it was. So I didn’t want for money ever. There was always some money there. As a matter of fact I lent a chap ten pounds. He came from Sydney. I lent him ten pound. Where? Where? Halfpenny Green. So that was about, about the size of it. I don’t know if you’ve got enough there.
AP: Yeah. I can’t, I can’t think of too much else to ask.
SD: Yeah.
AP: So do you have any final thoughts on Bomber Command in general? How it’s remembered.
SD: As far as I’m concerned Bomber Command — it was, people were getting killed in Bomber Command and it never occurred to me this was the case. I thought it was unending safety at that stage. And as I got closer towards flying on Lancasters I realised it wasn’t a game anymore. It was fair dinkum because I lost two mates. That didn’t, that didn’t mean much to me at the time. They went out on their first flight and didn’t come back. They’re still missing. God knows what happened to them. And I was ok. The air force for me — I was safe. My mother must have worried a fair bit because she, she died in 1948. I was back in 1946 and I was a different bloke living at home to what I was in the air force. Again, I was a bit selfish. I had turned twenty one and I was quite happy about going to dances, playing loud music. Not worrying about mum waiting at home for me because no one had been waiting home for me before. Back to the camp to sleep. So it was a big, big step back to civilian life from air force life. What I’d been doing anyway because my air force life was mostly tied up with working in day time and dancing at night. Obviously at night. But there was never a twenty four hour, a twenty four hour job. It was from 8 o’clock in the morning until about 6 o’clock at night. Then dinner and then back to bed or go dancing. That was all. So all in all because I had this freedom I felt safe whereas in the army you were under threat all the time. And I was told they were fighting the Japanese here and that didn’t grab me one bit. That’s about the size. What else is there? Yeah. I arrived home and I was close to what it was part of must have been part of. 1946 Australia Day holiday which was [unclear] I didn’t know about that. A group of people here wanted me home which I didn’t really want. It was 3 o’clock in the morning. Got out of bed. It’s not my mother got up early to wash my clothes. My grandma got out there and was washing. And my wife, wife my mother went crook because my grandma was doing my washing and my mum was there. That sort of thing went on. Then after that my mother looked after most of my clothes and my mum got the photograph. [unclear] That’s about all. There’s not enough meat there. I went, I went back to the girl’s place. The police sergeant’s home. And Lachie as I found out later went up to Queensland but had been up in Scotland. I didn’t know that. But yeah I found out and after arriving home he went back in Melbourne and then gong to Ballarat. Started two years ago. So that was a bit of an experience. Meeting up with someone who didn’t know what had happened to you in 1946. Here we are in 2006 and it came out of the blue. Seventy years. So that was a big experiences. My daughter wanted to go to further back so she got in touch with Lachie’s girls so the girls fixed up this meeting with going to the Shrine on Anzac Day. After Anzac Day met after Anzac Day up at his new home because he’d given up, he was over seventy like myself, and he stopped farming and passed that on to his son. He lost his wife and he was up there on his own except for the people in the, in the complex. Various small homes. A house but two bedroomed home. A kitchen, dining room and a lounge. And so he come down from his home farm to a home in Ballarat. So that was his thing. It was a big thing after seventy years. Meeting someone right out of the blue like that. Not that we were very close in the air force because he was on the intercom and he’d be speaking to the other members of the crew except me because I wasn’t connected to the system. I was just plugged in to here. Plugged into home base plus I also used to listen to American Forces Network when we were not listening out. So I had modern music as it was then. So yeah. I was lucky. I was lucky to be alive. And there was a lot of fellows came home on the same ship. The Orion. So I was lucky to get through that. So virtually it was 1943 I went into the air force. Late 1943 and was there until April 1946. So what time was that being in the air force. And in that time I got my boat to America. Got to England by boat again. The big ship. So pretty safe. I was lucky enough that my ships weren’t torpedoed or danger of being torpedoed. Which was at the back of your mind when you were travelling by ship. Am I going to be safe? Will I get out of this? No. I never felt that way. I always felt safe in the ships. Whereas when I was flying I always felt safe up there too except [unclear] German fighter followed us home and I didn’t know anything about that. So from, I was lucky from that point of view. I never faced the dangers that I knew about, the bomb aimer and the navigator yes. They did. And we had two gunners by then. The mid-upper gunner he was from, he lived close to Gloucester. And the other fellow was he was an old man of thirty something or other. He lived with his wife in Wimbledon. Wimbledon. So that’s about all. Not too great. Not great. I was lucky to be alive then. I’m lucky to be alive now. So we were going up to Ballarat and then back to the Bomber Command Memorial Service. Yes it was a big experience. And from the point of view of [pause] I was lucky this happened. To have been in Bomber Command. There were fellows there that flew in Bomber Command in England. There’s not many fellows left that had been in Bomber Command. And I was part of Bomber Command but didn’t see any action except a near miss. How about that?
AP: Sounds pretty good to me.
SD: Ok. I don’t know what sort of story you can make out of that.
AP: Thank you very much, Steve.
SD: That’s alright.
AP: It’s been great.
SD: And would you like some tea or some orange?
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ADownesS160806
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Steven Downes
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
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
01:33:18 audio recording
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Adam Purcell
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-08-06
Description
An account of the resource
Steven Downes grew up in Australia and worked as a wages clerk before he volunteered for the Royal Australian Air Force. He arrived in the UK and after spending some time in Brighton, he was posted to Church Broughton and then RAF Bottesford. The war ended before the crew could become operational. He served as a wireless operator. While in the UK Steve loved listening to the big band music on the radio and attended as many dances as he possibly could.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Australia
Great Britain
England--Derbyshire
England--Lincolnshire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
1944
1945
1946
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Carolyn Emery
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending OH summary
aircrew
entertainment
Lancaster
Morse-keyed wireless telegraphy
RAF Bottesford
RAF Church Broughton
sport
training
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/914/11156/AKnottS151001.1.mp3
378d56e9297935f50b102ccca94f5736
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
Knott, Sidney
S Knott
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Warrant Officer Sidney Knott DFC (1268143 Royal Air Force). He flew 64 operations as an air gunner with 467 and 582 Squadrons.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-10-01
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
Knott, S
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
AS: My name is Adam Sutch. I’m conducting an interview for the International Bomber Command Centre. I’m interviewing Mr Sidney Knott. A Bomber Command aircrew member of 467 Squadron during the Second World War. Also present is his daughter Mrs Jean Mangan. Sidney, I’m really grateful to you for agreeing to this interview. Could we start by discussing your time before the war? Before you joined the Air Force. When you were growing up. Schooling and that sort of thing
SK: Yeah. Yeah. Well I was a, I was a youth of the 20s and 30s and I lived in Southend on Sea. I lived in Leigh on Sea which is in the borough of Southend on Sea, Essex. And [pause] things were quite, you know, you imagine what things were like between the wars. It wasn’t very [pause] My father was a joiner. He had his own business. He worked for his father and he, when grandfather died my father took his business over. Just a one man business. And my mother ran a fruit and greengrocery shop. And then when I came up, I left school at fourteen but I lost about fifteen months schooling when I was ten and eleven through an operation. And I worked in in the greengrocer’s shop. And then, of course in 1940, when invasion was imminent, where we lived notice was, I remember, I can see it now. It was on a Sunday and they put up notices on the shop’s windows and saying that we were to be prepared to leave within one hour and only allowed to take one suitcase with us. And as soon as people read this notice, well in twenty four hours from being a busy area full of people suddenly there was hardly, there was only the shopkeepers left. And the Battle of Britain was going on and my father came to me and said one day, well you know we had nothing to, had hardly any work to do because there was no people, many left there. And I used to do my paper round and that was how I got my pocket money. So my father came to me and he said one day, of course he was in the First World War and he was wounded twice and he was in the Essex Regiment. And when he got wounded the second time he was sent back to France in the Suffolks, and he come to me and he had a rough time in the army being wounded several times. And he, he come to me and he says, ‘You don’t want to go in the army.’ Because he was worrying about being called up. This was before I was eligible to be called up and he said, ‘You won’t get in the navy. You’d better see if you can get in the Air Force.’ So I said, ‘Alright.’ He said, because he said, my father was quite a proud man, he never went outdoors without a tie on and he used to say, ‘In the Air Force they wear a collar and tie all the time.’ So, [laughs] so he said, ‘See if you could get in the Air Force.’ So I found out they were, in Southend there was no recruiting for the for the Air Force in Southend so I had to get on a bus and go to Romford. And there was a, there was a recruiting office there, it recruited all sections and I, that’s how I joined the Air Force. And my education was very poor because I lost a lot of schooling and left at fourteen. I did do a little bit of after school work. You know, night classes when I was about sixteen to eighteen. And because I was, what was I when the war started? I was [pause] how old was I when the war started? Eighteen?
JM: Eighteen.
SK: Eighteen. That’s right. And so, you know, that was the background before then. That’s how I joined the Air Force. But they were recruiting for wireless ops at the time. This is ground wireless ops you see. And then I wasn’t good enough for that so he said, ‘We can have you for general duties.’ So I jumped at it and I joined the Air Force as a general duties wallah.
AS: In 1940.
SK: I got my number in 1940. I was sent home on deferred service and was actually called up on the, I think it was the 6th of January ’41. Went to Blackpool, you know, for to do my square bashing. And that was my early life. And then I was, after square bashing we were, a group of us were posted to Horsham St Faiths in Norfolk. And we were only there twenty four hours and they pushed us out to the satellite and we was on a, well we were sent to Blickling Hall. We was living in the cow sheds and things like that. In the outbuildings of Blickling Hall. But the airfield, the airfield was at Oulton. And it was just a grass airfield and we had two squadrons of Blenheims there that were really only just forming from being kicked out of France. And of course some of the crew, the ground crews were still wandering back after being got home from France and had a bit of leave and had been assessed as fit to go back to the squadron. And as I say the Blenheims were doing, that was 2 Group then and they were doing such things as Channel sweeps and things like that. And bombing the coastal ports like Brest and other French coastal docks and so on.
AS: Against the barges and things like that.
SK: Pardon?
AS: Against the barges and things like that.
SK: Oh yes. Yes. You see. That sort of thing. Yes. And then, while I was there doing all sorts of things I was put on, I was on the fire section while I was there and while I was on the fire section I had two duties. One was the fire section to look after Blickling Hall. And we had to eat at Blickling Hall. There was no, on this airfield, all there was on the airfield was two, about two Nissen huts where the fitters were and we had one little brick building where we had, there was no flying control. They had a duty pilot and he just used to have to log the aircraft as they took off and landed and that was his job. It was one of the aircrew that was grounded at the time and that was his duties. And I was put on a crash tender, and we used to stand alongside the duty pilot. There’d be the crash tender, the blood wagon side by side and we had to attend all, any crashes. We were, well I had to attend three crashes while I was there but that’s, that’s going to longer stories. But then, from there during the time, it came up on daily orders that we were to, they were recruiting for air gunners because in the pipeline four-engine bombers were — that was going to be the future. And so they thought, well I mean they had the Wellington bomber and they needed a gunner. And of course the Blenheim had three crew and they had a gunner on them. It was wireless op/gunner. And then the Wellingtons had, excuse me, Wellingtons had five crew with one gunner. But the wireless op was also a spare gunner. And they asked for volunteers so I volunteered and two of us went from this camp, were sent to Horsham St Faiths to see the station commander there.
AS: Who was that?
SK: I don’t know who it was at the time. I can’t tell you anyhow [laughs] I’ve got no record of that.
AS: No worries. Sorry. Go on.
SK: But we didn’t have to go, no test or anything like that and he said, ‘Oh you want to,’ he said, ‘Alright,’ he said, ‘Ok,’ and it was assigned to us and we awaited our call. And then we, that’s how we joined up. I didn’t have to pass any tests or anything there. And then from there we waited our call and it was the end of 1941. Somewhere about October I would have thought, may have been September, I was called to go to Regent’s Park in London because that was the recruiting centre. The initial centre for aircrew. And then from there we were sent to a, after a short course there we were issued with our white flashes. That means aircrew under training which we wore in our forage caps. And then we went down to St Leonards. Part of Hastings and we was in the big marina. Marine Hotel it was. It belonged to Southern Railway at the time but it was commandeered and we, we were posted there at the Initial Training Wing to do the ground work for an air gunner. And the initial gunners, we had quite an extensive course. We had to learn basic navigation. As regards to signals you had to learn the Morse code and read the lamp at, I think six words a minute and there was, you know, you had lots of extra duties. All to do with being a good crew member. And then when that came to the end of that course well of course I didn’t pass the maths you see. They said, ‘You failed on the maths.’ My maths. And of course I wasn’t very good at that sort of thing. So anyway our next posting to go on, they weren’t available to take us, that was to an air gunnery course, because the weather was bad and a sudden influx of people, there was nowhere to put them. So they said we are going to put you on an extended course to do — for several weeks we did just maths, drill and PT [laughs] And from there there was, I wasn’t the only one I must say, I was pleased about that, that didn’t pass on the first issue but they passed us on the second time. And they said, well, and then we were posted to a Gunnery School and I went to, to Manby up here in Lincolnshire to the 1 Air Armament School as it was called and I did my gunnery course there. And I passed my course at gunnery. This course. And I remember it because when we had to do, because Manby was very strict. A lot of bull at Manby. And on passing out parade we had to form on the parade ground where every Friday, every Friday we reported on the parade ground but this one was the passing out parade when you were awarded your brevet. And, and I remember I had to be marker because I was two thirds down the course. And so that’s my position. I passed two thirds down the course. But they were a grand lot of chaps. And then we passed out from there and then I was sent to, from there I was sent to an OTU and that was to Finningley in Yorkshire. I forget the number of the OTU but that’s where we went to. Finningley. And we had to do quite an extensive course there and that’s where I got crewed up. And our crewing up was quite funny really because there was quite a few of us sent to, there was about twelve gunners sent down there because most of these crews that were there we found out were Blenheim crews, which had three crews. They had a pilot, they had a navigator, called an observer and the wireless op/air gunner. And then they were posted to the OTU to take the conversion course on to Wellingtons. And then [pause] so they had to take on two more crew and that would be the rear gunner and a bomb aimer. Right. And the crewing-up procedure was, after about a fortnight because after the fortnight we were just doing section work where the gunners were in one place, pilots, engineers all in their own sections. Then we had to meet all together and the CO of the station said, ‘Well, now you’ve got to get crewed-up. So sort yourselves out.’ So we all just stood there and, you know one or two had got in mind who they wanted, you know to crew-up with and so on. But I remember one of the chaps, one of these gunner friends that I’d got to know said to me, ‘Well you’d better,’ you’d better, you know, ‘Get going.’ He said, ‘Otherwise you’ll be left with that young kid over there.’ You know, he was a pilot. ‘That young kid over there.’ Because he could see some of them getting crewed-up, ‘I’m crewed-up.’ But I’m not, I wasn’t one to push forward so I just waited. And then quite, at the end a chap come over to me and I see he was, he was a wireless op/air gunner and he said to me, he introduced himself like, and he said, ‘I’m Johnny Lloyd,’ and he said, ‘Would you like to join our crew as a gunner? And would you like to come and meet my pilot?’ So I said, ‘Oh yeah. Ok.’ You know. So that’s how I met my first pilot. That’s him there. And he was eighteen months younger than me. And that was the young kid [laughs] they said I’d be left with. And I’ve often thought afterwards of those twelve chaps that were there I wonder how many of us got through, you know. And, you know he was the young kid you’ve got to put up with so I was quite pleased about that. So that was our, so we did all our training there on the Wellington and then we had to go over to, now what was that place called? Near Bawtry it was. A satellite to Finningley, to do, to do cross country’s. Right. Where you, you’re left on your own to do the cross country’s, you know. That was big deals. And so we, that was about a three or four week course over there. Then you go back to Finningley afterwards and await a posting. Well, we waited at Finningley for quite, we were sent on leave then for a while and then when we got back to Finningley we were still hanging about. Finished our course, waiting for a posting and we was quite, there quite a long time and then suddenly it came through that we were posted to, to Scampton. Right. And so I thought oh yes, yes. This was, what’s the time now? It’s about, it’s about, I don’t know, May, June, July. Somewhere about July or August. Something like that. August perhaps, ’42. Yes. And he said, he said [pause] so we gets to, so we gets to Scampton and we find out that Scampton where we are forming a new crew, a new squadron, sorry. A new squadron. And there was already two squadrons already there fully operating. And we was the juniors coming in and as I say, and we found out our first part of forming up we had no aircraft. We had no ground crew. But our leaders were there. We had some leaders. We had to get to know our leaders and our section commanders and so on and we got to know people for the first couple of weeks and then, then we were sent — we’d got to join this Flight. 1661 I think it was. Conversion flight. That was at Scampton. And it was only a grass airfield at Scampton and there were two fully operational aircraft there err squadrons there. 49 Squadron and 83 Squadron were there. And then we found out we’ve got to do this course because we were posted to 467 Squadron. An Australian squadron. And so anyway we, we trained on Manchesters and then after, of course Manchesters were the forerunners of the Lancaster but it only had the two engines. Well when they put the four engines on it they called it the Lancaster and took off the third fin to make it look nice. And so that, that was, you know that was how we got crewed-up there and of course when we were there from a Wellington crew we had to take on two extra people again to make a seven crew. So we had to take on an extra gunner and, and a flight engineer. And then we flew in the Manchesters and there was quite a few on the course there. And then we had to do some bullseyes. Bullseyes are mock operations where we, like mock, they were raid diversions in a way because we used to fly within reach of the Dutch coast and then turn back and come home. But you did everything as if you was going on an op and you would divert. We were diverters to draw the fighters up to us so the main force could creep in and perhaps go in through southern France. So we had a good training there and we used to come over to, of course Scampton as I said was still grass. But unknown to us we were going to be posted to Bottesford, right. Which is just in Lincolnshire but it’s in three counties. The actual airfield I think was in three counties because Bottesford was a very dispersed sort of airfield. So it was Leicester, Nottingham and Lincolnshire. The postal address I think was Nottingham. But we were quite, we were quite close to [pause] what’s the town called? Grantham.
JM: Grantham.
SK: Grantham. And so, anyway we used to go over to Woodhall Spa to do our landing on, on the runways because the satellite stations, as Bottesford was called was built during the war and they built them as dispersed stations. They realised the stations that were built during the war period in the 30s were all quite cramped and in one section they found that was a dangerous thing so they built these dispersal stations. Well, when they built them of course, I mean aircraft were going to be bigger so they wanted more space so they had bigger airfields. And so that’s why we went over to Woodhall Spa which was, had runways to learn the different way of landing on runways as to, to grass. And then, anyway when we got to the, we were [pause] got to Bottesford, we left Scampton a few days before Christmas. That’s ’42. And we first flew at Bottesford about two or three days before Christmas. We had a lot of training to do when we got to Bottesford because unknown to us, the ground crew, they’d sent new aircraft into Bottesford, new Lancasters, into Bottesford and they sent ground crew there to, to learn their trade on Lancasters. And they had a month to do it. Like we was learning at 1661 conversion flight. We were learning from the aircrew side. They were learning it from the ground crew side. And because we thought that how can we be a squadron with hardly any, with no aircraft. No ground crew. Anyway, so we got there and we, I talked to one chap and he said, ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’d only, I’d only been a mechanic on Magisters,’ which was a single engine aircraft. A little tiny thing, you see. And of course when he come to see the Lancaster, a great big thing, it frightened the life out of him [laughs] you see, and we had a lot to learn. Anyway, the squadron became operational and we operated from there. I finished my first tour and the squadron, the crew I was with we were the first crew to finish a full tour on 467. We, we, there was two other crews that we were quite friendly with. They finished one trip behind us so we beat them by three days. But we claimed that right to be the first then to finish a full tour. And that, that went on to the concluding the, my first tour there. And this was taking place between, shall we say the 1st of January and my last one, my last trip was on the 30th of May. And we were posted away on the 6th of June. And we were posted away. Do you want me to carry on? As screen gunners. As screen gunners. And we said, ‘Well what’s a screen gunner?’ We’d never heard of it before. They said, ‘Oh, you’ll find out.’ So we didn’t know. So five of the crew were posted to the same place. I think it was 17 OTU, I think that was the number, to, to Silverstone. And the navigator was posted to Wing. And he said that was the saddest moment of his life when he had to leave the crew. And we got posted by air and I remember when we got there we had dropped him off at Wing first and then our aircraft flew on and landed us at Silverstone. Well, Silverstone was only just, the OTU at Silverstone had only just moved there and it wasn’t really organised properly. And it took them a month to get organised and when they did get organised they found out they had a satellite as well which was called Turweston. So as all gunners were sent over to Turweston because the gunnery courses and I think the bombing courses were going to be sent from there. And we found out what a screen duty, what a screen gunner’s duty was. We were to be instructors without being taught by — not, not classroom instructors. Field instructors. To pass on our knowledge and, and to take new recruits, new crews coming through from their OTU because that’s what Turweston was. An OTU. And to take them on air firing and, and cine camera work. Well, we had a little training aircraft attacking us as a fighter and so on and so forth and we used to take them up in the air to do that sort of thing, you know. But that’s what a screen gunner was. And of course you were supposed, that was supposed to be a six month rest. Well, we had casualties while we was on there. But after that, so we were posted away in early June and I stayed there ‘til the middle of January and you were supposed to have a six months rest. And then a chap come to me who was one of the staff pilots there. Like us he was a screened pilot. He was an officer, and he said to me, ‘I’m forming a new squadron,’ He’d obviously been told he’s got to go back on ops and he said, ‘Would you be interested in joining my crew?’ So I said, oh you know it came quite out of the blue. And I thought, well I’d done about seven and a half months I think it was and I felt well I’ve gone over my six months. I could be called back at any time and, mind you we had a good bunch of lads, of air gunners there. We all lived in one hut as screen gunners. And it was, I thought well, you know what do I do? But I thought I’ve got to move on I think because if not [pause] So I liked this chap anyway. Although he was a flight lieutenant I liked him. Right.
AS: What was his name?
SK: Walker. Flight Lieutenant Walker. Clive Walker. He came from Bolton. He was the son of a known name in Bolton that had a big tannery works up there. And anyway, he, he approached me and I said [pause] and he said, he saw I was hesitating a bit. He said, ‘Well look, can you think it over? Can I give you twenty four hours to think it over?’ So I said, ‘Oh thank you. Good.’ And at that he approached me because he, I’d just been on, taking some air gunners on air firing and we used to take about four or five air gunners in one aeroplane and then change the gunners in the air and, you know they would be firing at a drogue, you know. Towed by a little light aircraft. And then we could, we were controlling the, the you know it was whilst we were in the air we was in control of these gunners. Well, so anyway when I got back to my billet I kept thinking about it. And I went to a friend I was quite pally with, one of the gunners and I said to him, ‘Clive, Clive Walker’s just approached me about going back on ops with him and I keep thinking, shall I go?’ And the chap said to me and that was Bill Harley, his name was and he said to me, ‘He’s asked me as well.’ So anyway we sat down on our beds and we had a chat and I said, ‘Well, if you go I’ll go.’ So he said, ‘Alright, we’ll both go.’ So the next day we told him yes, we’ll go with him. Alright. I think Bill err Clive Walker, he had a dog on the station. It was a corgi, you know. I didn’t like it. A yappy little thing. I didn’t think much of him as a dog but a nice looking dog but Bill loved this dog. He used to look after the dog a lot. He liked the dog anyway. And he, I think, I don’t know whether the dog swayed the argument [laughs] but we went, we went, and said the next day, ‘Yes. We’ll go.’ So he said he was very pleased about that and he said that and after a little while we were called. And then of course we were taken back to [pause] where did we go? Let’s see. We had to, mind you we had to leave Lincolnshire then. Do you want to go on because it’s not Lincolnshire?
AS: It’s great. Carry on.
SK: Anyway, we had to go to [pause] I think it come under Northampton. Let me see. What’s the name of the place? Turweston. Now was it Turweston? Wait a minute. No. No. No. No. No. Wait a minute. No. That’s where we were. Turweston. Then we had to, when we got the posting we had to go to Little Staughton in Bedfordshire. Little Staughton was 8 Group, Pathfinder Group. So there again when I joined 467 it was a new squadron and we found out that Pathfinders were forming a new squadron and of course as most of us had been off for over a year now from a squadron we had to do refresher courses. So we were sent to different places all around to do refresher courses. We went to Binbrook, up there and did a gunnery and the bomb aimers had to do a bombing course up there. And so we did various other stations around. And then we finished up at Little Staughton and that’s where we operated from.
AS: Which squadron were you?
SK: 582 Squadron. A new squadron. It was formed on April Fool’s Day 1944. And we operated from there, right. I did twenty nine trips on 467. But I did, and I did thirty five trips on 582. So that’s sixty four in total. And —
AS: Wow.
SK: And then of course that’s, we got through ok. You know. So that’s basically my, my flying life and then we didn’t know we was on our last trip and on our last trip was to Bremer in Northern Germany there. Bremer, Bremer. How you say it? And after I landed back somebody said, ‘This is your last trip.’ I don’t know whether perhaps our skipper knew. He hadn’t told me. So we just, you know thought — really? You know. It just came quite suddenly, you know. And that’s the last time I flew in the RAF. And then after sending on leave for a while, we were on leave for a little while, they sent us right up to Northern Scotland for, to be, for an attestation sort of course to reclassify you now to a different job. The only two jobs they we were offering at the moment was to be in the transport section or airfield controller. So I jumped for airfield controller and I did my, my course down at Watchfield in Oxford as an airfield controller. And then when I passed that course I was posted to West Raynham in Norfolk and [pause] as the airfield controller there. They were very pleased to see me because there were only two, two airfield controllers there and they were having to, it’s a twenty four hour station so — and you had to be relieved for your meals so they were never off duty. So when I got there I was welcomed. And so I was there then. That was the longest station I was on because otherwise we was, you know, we seemed to be always on the move. And that’s where I met my wife. At that station.
AS: Was she a WAAF?
SK: She was a WAAF. And then I got demobbed from that station when the war had all finished and so on. And then I went back to work, sort of thing and forgot all about the Air Force then. And I took, as I thought, having a green grocers shop I’ve always got a chance to know how to sell a cabbage. So my uncle was in wholesale greengrocery business and I fancied, I fancied to, to be more in the wholesale business than a retail business. I didn’t want to go and serve women coming in to the shop and arguing about the size of a cabbage so I went in the wholesale department, right. And we, because I was keen on getting back and playing a bit of football and we could have Saturday afternoons off then. And it was interesting, you know. When I was up West Raynham after the war finished suddenly it all came out, the orders came from the hierarchy everyone’s got to play sport. You’ve got to get playing sport again. Well I loved my football until I was called up and then, and then I found I hadn’t kicked a ball for six years. And of course I suppose I would have been in my prime then so I thought, I wonder if I can kick a football? So, anyway the sergeant’s mess got up a team and said we’ll have a try you know and we formed a sergeant’s mess team and we played different sections and goodness knows what else. And I got back playing football and then when I was started playing football that’s why I wanted my Saturday afternoons off. And then after a while it went on that I went to work in London in Spitalfields Market. And I worked as a salesman in Spitalsfield Market. That’s a wholesale fruit and vegetable market there. And I finished my working life there. It’s [pause] so you know that’s basically my life story. You know. In a nutshell [laughs] It’s quite interesting though that different things, you know little things creep up in your life doesn’t it? So if that’s any help to you there you are.
AS: That’s fabulous. Shall we pause there for a second?
SK: Yeah. Yeah.
[recording paused]
AS: Sidney, I’d like to pick up on a few questions that come to mind from, from your interview so far. Could you tell me a bit more about the air gunnery training? Did people ever hit anything firing at drogues? What was the standard like?
SK: I got a standard in my [pause] how did they put it in that? Stop the tape a minute.
[recording paused]
AS: Ok. So tell me a little bit more about the gunnery training and the assessment.
SK: Well the gunnery training was when you’re air firing at a drogue they, you had a little light aircraft come alongside you, flying with you on your beam. So you could turn your turret around onto the beam. As much as ninety degrees. And you’d fire at a drogue which was let out behind. Behind the little tug. And as we took up about four gunners, I think it was at a time we’d take one [pause] we’d take one and we’d, the first gunner would have his bullets. The rounds were dipped in a coloured paint. So the tips were red, yellow, green I think. Or whatever they were. There was about four different colours. And you had two hundred rounds each to fire. So you had little short bursts of two second bursts and then you’d undo your breach and you’d see what colour you are. Because once you lost your colour you had to stop. Right. And that’s how it was done. Right. So that when a drogue came down and it was assessed the bullet would leave a little hole in the drogue with the colour around like a little round circle. And that’s how you was assessed. Two hundred rounds — how many hits you got. And of course it was all done on a beam because that’s where deflection come in and deflection was allowing for the time for your bullet to get from the gun to the aircraft. If you fire direct at him you’ve missed him because it’s gone behind him. Although the speed of the bullet is fast it’s enough to miss the aircraft, you see. So anyway that’s how, that’s how gunnery was assessed. Right. And then also when you were doing cine camera work you had magazines. Two magazines. Each gunner was allowed two magazines. And he had these little aircraft and they did flat attacks you know. They’d be on the beam and they would come in just like this and then pass underneath you. And you had to see how good your manipulation was because gunnery training is a bit like [pause] it’s a bit like, think of yourself as a snooker player. A snooker player, if he wants to be really good like these professional snooker players they have to train for hours a day and keep training. And that’s what you had to do. For gunnery you’ve got to keep training to get your control of your turret because at the turret you’ve got to turn your turret and you’ve got to angle your guns at the same time. Right. And it’s manipulation and it’s, it’s a question of having really good manipulation. And it’s just a matter of continue working at it, you know. And, and it was a Fraser Nash 20 turret I was in with four machine guns. And I had them while I was on OTU flying the Welllingtons. And it was the same as that, exactly the same turrets when I got on the Lancasters. Later on because I’d finished flying by August. Finished operational flying by August. I don’t know what the, I haven’t got the date in my mind but I know it was August ’44 I’d finished flying. And oh where were we? I’m losing my track now.
AS: Did you have ground training turrets? Ground training aids as well or was it all airborne?
SK: Well, I’m talking, I’ve been talking about airborne. Ground training — no. We did, we did a bit of training. I mean you start off by, when you’re at even your initial training when you first join up we used to get, we was at Blackpool but we went up to Fleetwood and they had some rifle butts up there somewhere on the downs, on the seashore. Somewhere near there. And we used to, we were give five rounds to fire a rifle. Right. But then prior to that, I didn’t mention in the chat but prior to that when, when the forerunner of the Home Guard came out it was called the Local Defence Volunteers. And Anthony Eden came on the radio and said, ‘We’re calling for volunteers,’ because the invasion was imminent, ‘We’re calling for volunteers. Will you report to the police station.’ So me and my old mate said, ‘Yes. Let’s go.’ You know. So we went down and we signed on and we were, we was a Local Defence Volunteers. And of course we had nothing much to start with and gradually you got little bits and pieces and then just, it was just, renamed it after a little while because they had such wonderful support that they turned it in and renamed it the Home Guard. And then of course, as soon as it was made the Home Guard that was about the time I was called up. Right. But then we had other training firing machine guns. Not much done on the ground but when we was at, when we was at air gunnery school we used to fly at Mablethorpe, along the beach at Mablethorpe because from Manby to Mablethorpe wasn’t far. We used to fly along the beach and we’d turn the guns on to the beam and there was targets put in the water. You know, this deep of water like, you know because it’s tidal there and targets were put there for you to fire at, right. And that was just for one gunner because that’s when we had [pause] No. We weren’t crewed-up there so no we must have had several gunners then. That’s right. And we, so it was done at Mablethorpe beach. Right. And then to get your, to get your results of the targets from Mablethorpe beach there the people in charge of the sight down there used to go back out on horseback to pick up the targets, you know. I remember that. Don’t kill the horses, you know.
AS: It can’t have given you much time.
SK: Pardon?
AS: It can’t have given you much time because the target comes from the front of the aeroplane.
SK: Yeah. Yes.
AS: And you’ve got very very little time to —
SK: That’s right. Well, yeah. Yeah That’s what, that was some of the training we did. We did two or three. That was part of our air gunnery training when we was at Manby. And then, as I say OTU you did the training with the trailing of the drogue and so on. Basically that was the training, you know.
AS: How about the aeroplanes that you were flying in training?
SK: Well —
AS: Were they mechanically reliable or old and worn out? Or —
SK: Yes. Old and worn out mostly, you know. The longer the war it didn’t, if the thing was operational it wasn’t put on training exercises, you know. On the training stations. It wasn’t so bad. I didn’t notice any problems when we was at Manby when we had, we had Wellingtons there. So luckily I had a good training because I was on Wellingtons all the time and with the same turret and something but when we got to, to being screen gunners we had very poor aircraft there. They had a job to keep them, you know. They’d say, ‘Yes. Your aircraft’s ready.’ We’d go out there as a crew and you find out, oh no. You’d be sitting out there waiting for an hour and a half before it was finished. And I had a, had one crash flying at while I was a screen gunner because I was flying, flying with a sprog pilot. That is a pilot going through the course. And we burst a tyre just as we lifted off on exercise. And so I, I said, well I didn’t say nothing. I thought we’d burst a tyre there and the aircraft just screwed a little bit to the left and I thought well we might as well do the exercise whatever happens because we’d burn up a bit of fuel. So, so finished the exercise and I said to the pilot afterwards, I said, ‘I want you to throttle back a bit and when you throttle back to lower the wheels and we want to inspect the tyres,’ I said. ‘I think we burst the tyre as we lifted off.’ So he said, ‘I thought the thing screwed a bit to the left,’ you know, ‘To port.’ So we, we checked the, so he did, he lowered the aircraft — the wheels down. The undercarriage down. And the port, the port tyre was blown to smithereens. And so he put it up and I said ok. Well, he said, so he said, ‘I’ll let base know.’ So we flew back over base and then we called up and said we appeared to have burst a tyre on take-off, you know. So usual old thing come from that. Put flying control in a panic. So they said the usual thing of, ‘Stand by. Stand by.’ So we, we carried on circuit and we were watching down below and we saw, we know our flight commander in charge of the course. He was, he was a good man really but we used to think he was a hard nut. But he had a little van you know and we could see his van suddenly appeared and it was at the end of the runway, you know. And we were told to fly over. He wanted to inspect it. Yeah. So he, he flew it over and he said, ‘Yes. You have blown your tyre.’ That’s the message we got back. We knew that. We’d had a look at it. So anyway, he said, I thought perhaps he might let us land with wheels up on the grass but he didn’t. He was struggling to, he didn’t want to lose an aircraft so he said, ‘No. Land on the runway and try to keep the leg off as long as you can until last moment.’ So anyway, I went forward. I had a word with the pilot and I said, ‘I’ll assist you as I can,’ and I had to look after my gunners which I got them all sorted out in the, in the fuselage. And of course it wasn’t enough points for them to all know what was going on. So the one with the most sense, as I thought, I gave him the, so he could listen to the intercom and he was to tell the others what’s going on and we [pause] So I said, ‘I’ll come forward,’ and I remember when we were doing all our circuits and bumps when we were under instruction ourselves as a crew they always had, the instructor always called out the airspeed for him. For when he was perhaps doing his stuff and by calling out the airspeed it’s one less job he’s got to watch. So I said, ‘I’ll come forward and I’ll call out the airspeed for you and anything else I can do.’ Oh he thought that was a good idea so that’s what I went forward and sat alongside him. He brought it in but at the last minute he a bit over corrected trying to keep the leg up and instead of what you might expect you’d swing around on the broken leg he went the other way and the wing hit the ground and damaged the wing a bit but we kept upright. We didn’t tip over on our nose. We kept upright and because we were slow, we were lost enough speed to keep us flat and level and I said to the crews, ‘Don’t panic.’ I said, ‘We’ll get out nice and slowly,’ you know. I said, ‘We don’t want any broken limbs.’ There was no fire. I mean I was sitting up in the cockpit with him and I said to the skipper, checking everything’s switched off. I said, ‘All switches off.’ And he checked everything. All switches off so there’s no fuel running about and I could see there was no, it all looked, there was no imminent fire. So we got out quite slowly and by that time our officer commanding was standing outside with his, with his van you know. So I got out and got all my gunners together and with the pilot because he had, he was flying with his own crew, you see. That was their training as well. To learn how to be a captain controlling the crew because he was on the course. And he was, he was a flight lieutenant believe it or not so he must have been somewhere on a training station for years you know and then suddenly said, ‘It’s time you went on ops.’ And he, anyway I walked over to, to our commanding officer there and I said to him, no. ‘No injuries sir. We’re all ok.’ He said to me, he said, he said, ‘You took a long time to get out of that aircraft.’ I said, ‘Well, we’ve got no broken limbs. No casualties.’ So I I sort of went away with a flea in my ear sort of thing, you know. I thought I’d done quite well. So that was one I had like that. And then my other gunner that I got to know which I joined up on the second crew with, he had another trouble when we had an aircraft that caught fire after he’d been airborne a little while. And he of course, we used to control it all from the astrodome halfway down the turret. Halfway down the airframe. The fuselage. And we only just used to sit and we used to control it all by the thing and I used to control the, the screen gunner used to control the tug, the flying you know, the towing the target or if it’s a little fighter going to attack us. We did that by Aldis lamp you see. Using a green for go and red for stop. No. Red was, red was exercise complete. You know. Thank you very much. But we had the green for stand by and then flashing green for attack, you know. That sort of thing. And so there was always little accidents going on, on the OTU because the aircraft weren’t at their best. They weren’t at their best. And in fact a gunner I got very friendly with also, he was one of the three crews that were going through. He was, he was sent as a screen gunner afterwards. He come only two or three days after us. That’s why we had a good lot of gunners there. And he, his wireless op was sent on from, from Turweston. Turweston yeah. When we was doing this. They crashed on take-off and were killed instantly. And that was one. So we had casualties while we was, you know, screened so we thought well might as well go back on ops. So that’s how we volunteered for our second tour.
AS: When you passed out as an air gunner.
SK: Yeah.
AS: Did you know you were going to Bomber Command and how did you feel about it?
SK: No. No. When you passed out from where? From OTU?
AS: Yeah. Yeah.
SK: Oh from OTU we were told we were going to, as I said, up the road here.
JM: Scampton.
SK: Scampton. Yeah. Scampton. Good job I’ve got a prompter. To Scampton. And we was, we were told we were going on a conversion course. That’s what we were told. When we was on a conversion we were told we were actually posted to 467.
AS: In Bomber Command.
SK: Yeah. In Bomber Command, you see. Yeah.
AS: What was it like?
SK: Mind you the OTUs were like Bomber Command. They were OT, Bomber Command’s OTUs I believe. Yeah.
AS: So you knew fairly early on that you’d end up bombing Germany.
SK: Well yeah.
AS: Yeah.
SK: When we, when I joined the first crew, when I said they were a Blenheim crew they thought they were going to the Middle East as a Blenheim crew. Because at that time they were just phasing out the Blenheims and sending them to the Middle East. And they were so surprised when they come and they were going to be made into a Wellington crew you see. So it’s, that’s how the war, you know, evolved really, you know. You never knew.
AS: What was it like being an all English crew in an Australian squadron?
SK: Well the reason we were all English crew. One Irish.
AS: Sorry. I do apologise.
SK: British.
AS: British.
SK: We were British, weren’t we? But our crew we had one Irish. He come from Belfast. We had one from Bolton. One from [pause] where did Ted come from? Bradford.
JM: Bradford.
SK: Bradford. The pilot come from the Cotswolds. I come from Essex. Johnny Lloyd. I don’t know where Johnny Lloyd, I’m not quite sure. He was our wireless op. I’m never quite sure where he come from. So we British. A British crew there. Oh and then we had, we didn’t have the, the flight engineer we got on our, when we first crewed up on our first 467. Our flight engineer really didn’t fit in the crew. And I don’t know what happened to him afterwards. He never operated with us. We did all our training with him at Scampton but when we come to be posted to 467 he suddenly disappeared. So we had to make do with what they called odd bods. If there was an engineer that hadn’t got a crew on the squadron or whatever it was or if not they had to pinch one off another crew that wasn’t flying that night.
AS: All the way through your tour?
SK: Well we had, we didn’t have a lot. We had, I think four different engineers that I can remember. So they were split over twenty nine. Twenty nine ops. One was an Australian. He was pinched off another crew. And our crew, we never had any sickness in our crew at all apart from the engineer which I mentioned. But only once the Irish chap, coming back from Belfast. Coming back from Belfast the boat, the sea was so rough they couldn’t sail the boat and he got back twenty four hours late. Well, we was on that first night so we had to pinch, we had to be given another bomb aimer and they took one from another crew. And he was an observer with the O badge, you know. And he was a good chap. We liked him but he came, he didn’t get through his tour. He failed, failed to return on one occasion. Yeah. Does that answer that question? I don’t know.
AS: Absolutely.
SK: Yeah. Yeah.
AS: What was it like being surrounded Australians? Was it very different from — ?
SK: We weren’t surrounded by Australians. I didn’t really, I didn’t really say everything.
AS: No.
SK: A lot of our leaders when we were first formed up at Scampton we found most of our leaders were New Zealanders. Believe it or not. We had the two Flights. A and B Flight. And we was put into A Flight when we got to Bottesford. And that was Squadron Leader Pape and he was a New Zealander. And then when we formed a third Flight in March we, we had our flight commander was another new Zealander. Flight Lieutenant Field. Squadron Leader Field, sorry. And our, and our officer commander, he was actually RAF. He was, he formed, he made the squadron. There was no doubt about that. He was a wonderful leader and he joined the RAF in about 1936 if my memory’s right. But he was actually born in Brazil and, you know. I think he had, I’m not sure if he had British parents or what but he was actually in the RAF. So there was, we had quite a few new Zealanders there. Not many Canadians although there was a few odd Canadians there. And then to get the squadron going, being a new squadron how they, they sent in from different, other squadrons perhaps some experienced pilots because you can’t, you want, you want some experienced crews around you and with say six, six or eight trips to do, right. And so they were sent in to finish their tours with us. So we didn’t have a lot of Australians there. And when the Australians were coming you’d find a pilot would come with his navigator and then the rest we would make up with British. With Royal Air Force. Right. And then we had one or two gunners coming through on their own and they would join a crew. But also, we got through, we was pushed through our tour very quickly. The RAF crews were. We had no rest at all. You know. It was the hardest work I ever did. But they held back a little bit on the Australian chaps coming. Trying to build up the crew, the Australian crew. The Australian squadron. Right. But I don’t think I ever come across a whole, not in my time, a whole crew of all Australians. But they were, if an Australian pilot come through, looking through the book I can see they had a different colour uniform to us so you could always tell them that they had the darker blue one, you see, the Australians. And the New Zealanders as well. So you can see them when you look at old pictures. You could say oh look he’s got three. There’s three Aussies there. The rest were made up of RAF. That’s how it worked you see. So, but that’s why we were not, got through my first tour rather quickly, you know.
AS: Going through at such a rate.
SK: Yeah.
AS: Did, did you start to feel really worn down by it all or were you glad to be going through it so fast?
SK: You didn’t think about it. You were just, it was just what the order was. Whatever the order was you did, you know. It seemed that we was always on you know. Because I mean the weather’s, a lot of people forget what the weather was like. The weather we had in the war or the war winters were very hard. Very hard winters.
AS: That, that actually touches on something I’d like to talk about.
SK: Yeah. Yeah.
AS: Did you have any experience of FIDO or the emergency landing grounds?
SK: I didn’t have it myself. There was three places in the country wasn’t there had them? One was at Manston and another one was in Suffolk.
AS: Woodbridge.
SK: Woodbridge. Yes. The other one was further up country wasn’t it? Was it in Yorkshire? But there was three in the country there. No. I never had. Never had any experience of that. I’ve spoken to. I did speak to some chaps that landed in it, you know. It’s not — you know, a dicey thing to land in. Flames burning both sides of you, you know. Makes the runway look quite small, you know when you’re coming in, you know.
AS: On your, on your first tour as you say the weather could close in.
SK: Yeah. Yeah.
AS: Close down.
AS: What was it like coming back when the weather had closed in?
SK: Well Bottesford was in what did they called it? The Vale of Belvoir was it?
JM: Belvoir.
SK: Belvoir. In the Vale of Belvoir right. Right. And it was a frost hollow. So it wasn’t so bad. It wasn’t too bad in the middle of the winter because our take off times you had more darkness. Put it that way. We were controlled by the moon. We wanted darkness. Right. And, but sometimes the moon would be coming up before you got back or something like that you know. So we were controlled. What was the actual question you asked me?
AS: What was it like when you came back to find the fog had come in or — ?
SK: Oh yes. Well, yes. Well, it was a frost hollow there so, but most mists like we’ve had recently actually they’d come in in the late hours of the night, you know they form. And then you’ve got them at dawn break, you know. And it wasn’t until you got shorter night hours when you’re coming back at daybreak perhaps or, you know, just prior to then and then it was a bit difficult. But only once did we get diverted. And we got diverted, it’s a long story there [laughs] but we’d done a long trip. That was, I’m pretty sure that was the time we went to the Skoda works down in Czechoslovakia and we, we found that quite a hard trip. Very hard for the gunners. Because, you see, I used to, if you were in the flak belts and you got ack-ack flying around you. I used to think you were better off if you were in the pitch dark because it got so intense looking out for fighters. It was, you know. And you gained experience to know how to [pause] you could smell danger by what was going on around you, you know. And we always had a good understanding. We used to, especially in the first crew because we were all sergeants in the first group. Just sergeants. In the second crew we had four officers and three sergeants. It wasn’t quite so cosy if you know what I mean there. We couldn’t do our crew meetings sitting on our beds. We used to have crew meetings after. The next day and, and if anything we could have improved on, you know. We all had our say and all that. And you could, there was lots of little things you could do to save your skin, I suppose, you know. That sort of thing. Because, you know, you’re flying in a block. You’re not flying in formation. It’s a block. It’s, you can get statistics where you can get the actual measurements. It’s a wide block and it’s that deep and you’re flying as a gaggle anyhow, right. And the reason it was like that, deep like that was because you got at the time on that first tour the Wellingtons were still flying. They could only convert them to Lancasters as the Lancasters became available. And you had, shall we say over a target you’d have the Wellingtons at fourteen thousand feet. You’d have the Stirlings at sixteen. Halifax at eighteen. And we’d try to get to twenty if we could but we couldn’t always get there but you know it just depends on the weather. So that, that’s why you got the depths of it like that. So then they used to stagger it a bit so you weren’t dropping bombs on the ones underneath you and things like that. But when you’re flying at night and your night vision was most important to you for gunners. And there’s always a dark side to the sky. There’s always a dark side. However pitch dark it is one side is darker than the other. And it’s nearly always darker underneath for a start and then the south was nearly always the darker than the north. Right. Because if you got the stars you don’t realise how brilliant the stars can be. Right. So we always used to think if we’d got a long leg to fly on, flying in this gaggle, this stream which I’d say to the skipper, you know, we had a message to say creep over to the, if that was the stream going through there and the dark side was this side shall we say we’d creep over a little bit this way. Right. We’re still in the gaggle but we’d creep over a little bit this way. So the track would be down the middle. Right. But we’d go over to this side. Not that side. So you’ve less chance of being seen. Right. So there was all them little things you learned. You weren’t taught. You couldn’t be taught operational flying. You just had to grin and bear it and learn it yourself. And the only way you learned it was by discussions afterwards, you know and by little tiny things to say how you’d go about it.
AS: What was your attitude, or your skipper’s attitude to weaving? Did —
SK: Oh yeah. In, in those days you did weave. You weaved a lot and of course it was it was so, so a gunner couldn’t get his bearing on you. Because, you know it only takes two seconds to shoot you down. Two seconds. And you’ve got to be, if you’re on a eight or nine hour flight. Long flights in the winter. It’s a lot, a lot of time that’s going on there you know. So —
AS: Did, did you, did you ever have any exposure to wakey wakey pills?
SK: Yeah.
AS: To keep you awake.
SK: Oh yeah. I used to take them. If it was only, if it was up to the Ruhr or places like that according to your, you worked out you was given your briefing to, to know what routes because you didn’t go just straight there and back. You had different ways to, tactics to do. You had to fly on. And oh I’ve lost track now.
AS: Wakey wakey pills.
SK: Oh wakey wakey pills. Yes. So going to the Ruhr it could be four hours. It could be six hours. Right. So, and so possibly not then but if you were going further afield where you’ve got an eight hours, anything over a seven hour trip you needed something to keep awake. But you’ve got to realise you’ve been at work since 8 o’clock in the morning. Right. You’ve been up since 8 o’clock in the morning. You’ve been to a meal and from half past nine that morning you started work. You had your, you’d know by 11 o’clock whether you was on that night. Right. And then you had things to do like we always went out to the aircraft. You’d find what aircraft you’d got. We didn’t have regular aircraft. You had to fly on what was available. I think I worked it out, I think it was fourteen different aircraft we flew in in twenty nine trips. I think it was fourteen. So you didn’t have a regular aircraft so you always went out there to have a look but you got to know aircraft. You know. Perhaps you might do a training trip in one because training never stopped. So if you was on that night you’d have to go out there and you’d look at it and make sure the turret, had it been serviced? You know. Check on it. Make sure the armourers hadn’t missed anything because they were hard pressed and then also give, give, of course we had no Perspex in the front. We had a canopy over the top. Give it a clean. A bit of a sides we had so clean that up. And then you had to do a night flying test. So that had to take place between a bit before you went for briefing or then you would have your briefing. Mostly you would have a meal beforehand. You know, ,a flying meal beforehand. Then you got your briefing. Sometimes it was the other way around accordingly, you know, how it worked out. So there was no, there was never any spare time. And if you weren’t on that night you’re bound to have a flying exercise to do. We never, exercises never stopped. There was always new equipment coming out that some training had to be done on. You were, you’d be put on air firing. We used to, we used to go to, that’s Lincolnshire. Wainfleet. The Wainfleet.
AS: Wainfleet ranges. Yeah.
SK: That range there. And we used to drop our eleven pound smoke bombs from twenty thousand feet onto a target down below. You had to pre-book it, you know and arrange your time and then you were, you were given a slot to bomb at, you know. And then we had gunnery places I told you. Where did we used to go? We went, we had gunnery exercises. Perhaps we went to Mablethorpe then. I don’t think so. I don’t know where we went. I can’t think but there was always exercises right to even if you’ve only got one trip to have done you were still given exercises to do and you were kept busy because it took your mind off any casualties you’d had. That’s what it was done for.
AS: Yeah.
SK: You were never, you’d never get any time to rest at all but then occasionally a squadron would be given perhaps a forty eight hour stand down. And that’s when it was, well that’s right, you know. You got the message. It was good then. The squadron would be stood down. It gives the squadron time to recover, you know. So that’s that. So anything you want to ask me now?
AS: Yeah. On the wakey wakey pills still.
SK: Oh the wakey wakey. I didn’t say that. So I used to take them if it was a long trip but I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t take them until after we’d done the bombing. Then you’ve got to be, the way home is always worse than the way out, you know. That’s the more dangerous place, coming home. More dangerous is coming back because they could be waiting for you. Especially if it was a long trip because they’d had time to go down, refuel and come up again. So I used to take the wakey wakey pills and I found out they used to make you quite tired for a quarter of an hour after you took them. Whether it was the thought of it or not I don’t know but I thought they always made me tired first. But then they did help you to keep yourself awake because it’s no good falling asleep for a time because it was very unsociable hours we were working and we worked long hours you know. And you could only do it if you were young, you know. And of course we were all young lads, you see. So.
AS: What, what was, I knew they were all different but can you give me an idea of what the debriefing was like afterwards?
SK: Debriefing. Yeah. It varied, I think on squadrons because some said when they come back they used to have a tot of rum and things like that but I don’t think we ever had that. But a cup of tea was more, was better than anything else. Of course when you, when you’ve only done one or two trips you want to keep talking about it, you know. You think, you know, fancy I’ve done that, you know and so on, you’d talk about that. But we, certainly that was one of the first things we got out in our crew is we’ve got to get to bed and forget what’s happened because we might be on the next night. Because your entire, you’d be two nights on and one night off. That’s how it was going. You weren’t always given that. You couldn’t be. But you had to be prepared for that. So from touch down we aimed to get to bed within, into our bunks in two hours. And if we could do it in two hours we were lucky. You know, we’d done well. And the initial crews, the early crews, the ones in the earliest stages would be three or four hours getting to bed, you know. And then that affected them the next day. So you’ve got to, you’d get out your aircraft, you wait for transport. Transport was good. They were nearly always waiting for you. You’d get back to the locker room. You’ve got to stow your gear and it’s no good being excited about it. I know it did happen to some of them that they were so thankful they got back they took the gear off and just threw it in the locker. But the most important thing is, especially the gunners is you have to hang up your suit, your electric suit and see that it’s in your locker. You had long lockers. And it aired in your locker. See. Because any dampness you’d get a short in it you see.
AS: Yeah.
SK: So we always made sure that we got [pause] got into our, into the locker room and stowed all our kit away properly, you know. And then you go to debriefing and when you get to debriefing it depends who’s in front of you. You know. If you had a lot, a lot of bombers on that night there’s only perhaps two or three intelligence officers there to debrief you. Right. So you walk in and the first thing you look for — whose got the tea? You know. And then there would be some WAAFs there that would bring you a cup of tea. So you had a cup of tea and you might, I don’t know whether, there was nothing to eat. You just had this tea. Two mugs of tea would go down that quick. And then if you’re lucky you’d go straight in but if not you’ve got to wait till your, a table’s available for you to sit down. And then debriefing of course. They debrief the pilot and the navigator. The navigator’s the one they’re debriefing really, with the pilot as well because the navigator has got a complete log of everything that has gone on. What you’ve got to remember is the moment you took off every one of those aircraft flying was a separate unit. No one knew what, what he was doing or what’s happening in that aircraft until he came back over base. They didn’t know where he was or anything. So the navigator had a complete log of everything that went on in the aircraft. Right. Just like a ships log. And we were closer to the navy than we were to the army although we came out of the army originally. Right. So we used to get the debriefing done and then you go for your meal. Right. Yeah. Your meal. And you always had an egg when you came back. You always found an egg. It was wonderful just to have an egg you know and that. And then, and when we was at Bottesford after we’d come out the mess there we had at least a half mile to walk back to the billet because we were dispersed. We was right out in the sticks. It might, it seemed longer than that to me but there was only just a small road to go down. Just enough to carry a van down you know. There were no big lorries in them days much. And then that’s what we tried to do. To try to get back to our billet within two hours. So is that the answer? Is that alright?
AS: Brilliant.
SK: Ok.
AS: Wonderful.
SK: Any more questions?
AS: I have hundreds of questions, Sidney.
SK: Oh [laughs]
AS: A couple more perhaps. Did, did you, because you are a man who survived two tours of operations.
SK: Yeah.
AS: At different times of the war.
SK: Yeah.
AS: Did you notice a real difference in how you operated between the first tour and the second tour?
SK: Yeah. Oh yes. Of course. Yes, it did. That’s why we had, that’s why we had to go on to a refresher course. As I said when, we crewed up but as a crew we had to go on to a refreshing course. And we did all sorts of courses. We was, I don’t know how long they were for. I’d have to check my logbook really but I think, I think it might have been even two months before we operated you know because first, navigational aids were coming through. Different navigational aids and so on. And your, your tactics were different, you know. Your tactics were different. You had to keep altering them all the time, you know. So yes, there was a big difference. Yeah. Yeah. And of course then they made more, more officers were coming through in crews and that’s what split crews. When you was all sergeants you were one unit together but when you had officers, not that we didn’t mix together but you had to, you couldn’t, you had to live apart. You didn’t live together. You lived apart. You ate apart and so on. Whereas when we were sergeants everything was done together. You was just a little unit on your own, you know.
AS: Well it seems from, from what you’ve said about your first crew at least that you were a very tight knit, staying alive club. That’s what you wanted to do.
SK: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
AS: Put a lot of —
SK: We got good results and all. We had some very good results. I remember when we didn’t know we’d finished because you were supposed to do thirty trips. Right. But our pilot had done one second dickie trip. Right. He did it with our squadron leader and he did it to Essen. Because you know what they say? When we, when we was at OTU and people used to come, come to you and say to you at OTU and say, ‘What’s it like flying on ops?’ You haven’t got an answer. You’ve got to find out for yourself. We used to say, ‘When you’ve got Essen in your logbook you’ll know what it’s like.’ That was the answer, you know. So Essen was the most heavily defended target in the Ruhr. Where the Krupps works were. And getting in and out was, you know, it seemed almost impossible. It was amazing how you got through. So that’s what we, that was our answer when we were screen gunners to tell them. Not very helpful but you couldn’t, you can’t teach them. You can’t teach them operational flying. You can teach them everything else but, you know because it was a different feeling. It’s a fear factor comes into it you see. How do you react? You know. There’s somebody there is trying to blow you out of the sky. Another fighter coming up trying to set you alight and blow you to pieces you see. So it’s, it was a fear factor there you know and people act differently, you know. And one never knows, you know. I can tell you a little story when I was [pause] is it alright if I carry on? When I was at ITW down at St Leonards we’d finished our course. Wait a minute. Where was I going to get to, to tell you? We finished our course. Oh wait a minute. I’ve forgotten what I was going to say now. What was we talking about?
AS: We, we were talking about the fear factor. And you were going to tell me a story.
SK: Oh. A story. Yeah. Oh yes. Yes. The fear factor. Yeah. Right. Got it. Well we had to wait a long time down at ITW down at, down in Eastbourne. And they said it’s all, it’s been posted. ITV has been posted. And we was put on a train at 7 o’clock in the morning. We never knew where we were going. And we finished up in Bridlington, you see, that’s Yorkshire. And then we passed our course there and [pause] what was the question again?
AS: We were talking about the fear factor.
SK: Fear factor. Fear factor.
AS: And how people react. Yeah.
SK: Yeah. How people react. The fear factor. Yeah. And oh yes while we was there so they couldn’t, they couldn’t find anywhere to train. The air gunners couldn’t find anywhere else to go forward. We had to wait for our tour because the weather was so bad they couldn’t get through to flying. So we had several weeks there doing different things, sort of thing, you know. And so the fear factor. I keep wandering off don’t I? The fear factor is —
AS: We can come back to that if you like.
SK: No. Wait a minute. The fear factor was that I thought to myself when you, when you sign on as aircrew you haven’t got any knowledge or any idea of what it’s like to fly. None of us had ever been, had had our feet off the ground. We didn’t know what it was like to fly. So I thought to myself a lot of people coming in how are people going to cope with it? Would they be airsick? You see. Well airsickness is not like seasickness. But airsickness is only, you only get airsickness if you’re, you know, doing rough flying. But when it comes to flying over enemy territory you get this fear factor, you see. So they thought well these chaps have never been off the ground. We’d better give them a test to see how they cope with flying. So we was at Bridlington, on the seafront and they decided, ‘We’ll put them through an air sickness test.’ And they got some swings what they had in the fairgrounds right. Big swings. And they put some boards along the top of them and you had to like, you laid down on the board, on the board. And then some of the course there had to keep these thing going, you know. And you had to get the thing so it went perpendicular. Like that. And you had to, to go for twenty minutes. And I mean, a lot of boffins come down and the boffins were standing at the side of us and asking us questions. They were standing here. So as we went up and down they spoke to you as you went up past, you see, ‘How do you feel?’ ‘Do you feel ill?’ ‘Would you like fish and chips?’ ‘What did you have for lunch,’ you know. Trying to make you feel sick. Right. And so this was all done on Bridlington sea front and I often thought to myself if any of the locals had seen us, ‘With a war going on what are these chaps doing having fun down there?’ See. So that’s, they did bring out the airsickness ‘cause they couldn’t tell. Some chaps did get sick in the air and its just the fear factor, you know. The fear factor of what might be ahead of them. They didn’t know you see. So they wanted to find out if there was any way they could train them but I’m sure that the tests they put us through was far greater than they would have been in reality like, you see.
AS: It’s a marvellous, marvellous story.
SK: Yeah.
AS: The fear.
SK: I passed my test by the way on that screening.
AS: Of course. Of course. But the fears that one had on, on operations. What, what was the greatest enemy do you think? Was it the flak or the fighters or the weather?
SK: Well both. Well all. There was three things you mentioned there, they’re all. It just depends at the time doesn’t it? You know. It’s, they’re all, all. Which is the worst? Well, I always thought, as I mentioned before fighters I always thought were the worst for me as a gunner because with the shells bombing around you, you know there’s no fighters there. That’s the [laughs] that’s the way I looked at it right. And my job in the back there was to make sure a fighter didn’t creep up on us you know because the German tactics changed as well as ours. And their approach to, their approach to attacking us changed. Where in the, on the first tour they all attacked us from behind, underneath and just came up to us and fired from the back. Right. Aiming at the rear gunner and the aircraft. Right. Between my tours they did the Peenemunde raid. Right. And that’s the first time the Germans used a new system. They called it the sugar music. Sugar music. I think that’s what they called it. They, they used to have a gunner in the night fighter and he was like we were. Firing from a swivel. From a swivel or a turret, you know. At us. Then they thought, well why don’t we have a, rather like the Spitfires had, fixed guns. So they fixed a gun at a thirty degree angle. Firing at that angle upwards. Right. And the pilot could fire it. Right. That’s what they did. So they used a different tactic. They’d fly underneath you where it was always darkest and then when they got underneath they used to lift up. Lift themselves up. They were mostly JU88s they weren’t fast like Spitfires or anything like that but they were just a bit faster than the Lancaster so they could keep up with you, overtake you, but they used to the throttle back and then when they got their gun right they’re aiming for your petrol tanks between the two engines. Right. And that’s how we lost so many through firing. And that started between our tours so tactics had to alter. But Air Ministry never told us about that. We never knew that. Except that we were getting, we were seeing more flamers going down. Set alight by flame. Been set alight. When there’s no ack-ack around about it must be a fighter you see. So you sort of realise something was going on but they never told us and I never knew about these guns until after the war finished. Amazing really. What I, they had the idea what you don’t know about you don’t worry about I suppose. You see.
AS: [unclear ] what, as for both of your crews really was your tactic to just not open fire if you saw somebody?
SK: I I I believed in that. I felt, you see, according to how light it was how far could you see? Right. Guns were harmonised. The four guns. Usually about two hundred and fifty yards right. So they were all supposed to hit on another at two hundred and fifty yards. Right. But sometimes you wouldn’t see an aircraft at that, not [pause] because he’s what, three times smaller than you are. He’s flying in the dark. You’re flying, so he can see you and he can see you and he can see your exhaust pipes just glowing red, you know. If he got in a certain position he could see them. So, you know, it’s — yeah where was I again?
AS: Whether or not you opened fire if you saw one.
SK: Oh yes. Whether I opened fire. Yeah. So I would think, it might have been, you don’t want to make a fight with him. You want to keep away from him. And my idea was if you, you could sense something and if you had any, you’d say to the pilot something like, are we, ‘Get to the darkest side you can,’ you know in as few words as we can. It don’t, ‘It don’t look right.’ ‘Things don’t look right,’ you know. So that, and then if they were like that, they were looking for simple targets. If they could find a crew that didn’t respond to anything you know that’s the one they’d go for, you see. So it was just, just a knowledge at the time really. I suppose. You know.
AS: When you’re flying backwards over a target that’s, that’s been bombed could you, did you look away? Could you preserve your night vision?
SK: I tried, the most important, the thing you were trying to do is don’t look at the target. Because that’s the only time it’s lighter underneath. Right. But avoid looking at the target. Don’t spoil your night vision. We had night vision training and it takes full twenty minutes to get your full night vision, you know. Twenty minutes. I know you can improve it in ten or something like that but, but it’s a full, full twenty minutes to get your full night vision and one flash of light can spoil it you see. And that’s another thing you didn’t want to do. So it’s very tempting to look to see where your bombs are falling, you know but I used to look away. And that’s the only time you looked upwards instead of downwards you know. Or sideways, you know. But that’s something you had to learn to do.
AS: Did you test fire your guns?
SK: In, in the very early stages we were allowed to do it when you were over, over the sea. Right. And then it got stopped doing it because they said there was a danger that you might give your position away and there was a danger that other aircraft might be not too far away from you. And so on. And they said, ‘No. You’re not to do it anymore.’ But we used to do. Test them. Just a short burst and so on but that got stopped. That was an order that came through to stop. So —
AS: Could you, I mean it’s a bit of a silly question because it depends to a great extent on how dark the sky was. But could you often see many other aircraft?
SK: Yes. Oh yes.
AS: Over the target? Or —
SK: Oh over the target you wonder where they all come from. You thought you was all alone. But when you were over the target aircraft were everywhere, you know. Above you. Below you. A pilot was always looking. You don’t want to see somebody with the bomb doors open just above you, you know. But yes its — yes it’s [pause] Ok?
AS: Yeah. As a crew did you ever talk about what you were doing? About the fact that you were bombing the enemy or did you just treat it as a job and just get on with it.
SK: Well it was a job of work. A job you were trained to do. It’s [pause] it’s something that we were right to do. And we had, we had targets to, we had targets to officially aim for, you know. But when you’re fighting an enemy things can go wrong, you know. I mean they had the problem of creep back. Creep back was where you, if you had a target area there and it was marked by the Pathfinders and then the bombers coming in and then they’re getting knocked about a bit. They let the bombs go a bit quicker you know. That sort of thing you know. So they used to put tactics. You’d put your, go forward, mark the forward there to allow for the creep back. You see. There was all things like that. But we were given a job to do and we thought it was the right job to do, you see. Yeah.
AS: And you said towards the end of the first part of the interview that you were demobbed and didn’t really think about it.
SK: We switched off.
AS: Yeah.
SK: It’s what happened. It’s what happened with the government and everything. They wanted everybody to forget everything. It’s like they destroyed all the aircraft. You know. All these aircraft we had. They were just got rid of them and so on and made you forget. That’s why they said on the stations what I said, got to bring sport back. They had sport everything. You’ve got to do. Play cricket. You’ve got to play football. There’s badminton, you know. And there was running races. Everybody had to be in to sport you see because that’s what the, that’s what the Services were before the war you see. So that’s you had a, you forgot all about. In fact my daughters, I’ve got three daughters, I don’t think they know much about what I did until they read the book. So there we are.
AS: Well, hopefully we’ve got a tape as well. One, one final question if I may and it’s not about your aircrew duties. It’s when you did aerodrome control. And I have a reason for this because my mum used to do it as well.
SK: Oh yes.
AS: What was your —
SK: She’d be in flying control.
AS: She was in flying control.
SK: Yes. Yes. I was in the caravan at the end of the runway.
AS: Oh Ok.
SK: Yeah.
AS: So, what did your duties entail?
SK: Right. As flying control. First of all you logged every aircraft as they took off and when they landed and you brought them on to the runway with an Aldis lamp and gave them permission to take off and then when they were landing, with your binoculars you’ve checked that their wheels are down properly. That their tyres looked in good nick and so on and also to recognise the aircraft as its coming to land and so on, you know. So that’s what your duties were. Yeah.
AS: Brilliant. Thank you.
SK: I’ve got a little bit about [pause] I’ll show you this then because I suppose you’ll want to finish then I’ll have said enough. I’ll show you one other thing. I think you’ll be able to keep it if I can show you something. Are you alright for time?
AS: I I have years for this, Sidney.
SK: Oh alright. Now where is it?
[Pause. Shuffling papers]
SK: Now where is it? No. That’s not it [pause] This was a battle order when we went to the Skoda works. Right.
AS: At Pilsen, yeah.
SK: At Pilsen. And that’s when we got diverted to Boscombe Down. I told you the one occasion.
AS: Yeah.
SK: We got diverted to Boscombe Down and our squadron, which is 5 Group, right. And a squadron should only be two Flights. And a squadron should be six aircraft to a Flight. So you should have twelve aircraft. But you had extra aircraft so you got six serviceable. Right. Well, when the war was going on and Bomber Command was building they formed, our squadron formed a third flight. Right. C Flight.
AS: Yeah.
SK: And we was in A flight when we were at the start. And then when it got to [pause] when it got to, they wanted to start a third Flight it was C Flight and the idea of that was how you build a new squadron is you build it up to three Flights and then when you’re going and alright and you’ve got, that’s eighteen aircraft and you’ve got two or three spares. Then you can take that flight away and it starts a new squadron.
AS: Yeah.
SK: But then you go back to your two flights. Well this time we was up to three Flights because we found out the first, it was the 1st of March, I think, we started our C Flight on our squadron there. And this was the 16th 17th of April right. And this is when we, it’s —these are all the pilots. There’s us up there. The other two pilots with us — one was on leave and Bally was the other that came, just followed us off here. That’s our wing commander. He was on that night. Going down, Mackenzie [pause] No. Stuart was RAAF. You asked about that.
AS: Yeah.
SK: Tillerson. Desmond. All RAF. Wilson. All RAAF I should say.
AS: Yeah.
SK: Sinclair. Wilson again. There was two Wilsons on our squadron. And Parsons. And Manifold. So by that time the captains were getting more, more Australians but we were — but they had RAF in their crews. Right. And this is the number of ops that crew had done. There. That’s the time they took off. The time they bombed. The height they bombed at.
AS: Six thousand feet.
SK: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was, that was our height to bomb at because there was nobody there. We came down to that height to bomb because there were no defences there and yet we had the hardest trip coming back then ever. That’s the time we landed. We diverted, we got the diversion call come when we was crossing the sea. I know we were just crossing the French coast on our way back. I could go on forever. Because when we was at Bottesford you have to put me back on track in a minute, when we was at Bottesford we were, the station was confined to barracks because we had a Diphtheria scare on, on the squadron and they confined everyone to barracks. No one to leave. But we were able to fly on ops. And when we when we, when we landed at Boscombe Down they knew all about it so the MO had phoned through and said, ‘They’re aliens,' you know. That sort of thing. ‘You’ve got to be careful with them.’ So we were sent up to they wouldn’t allow us in the mess. They found us empty huts and we had to lay down and they found us some, what we called biscuits you know to lay on. Mattresses. And we laid down on them and they rustled up some — because Boscombe down was an experimental station for the RAF. Right. And it was only a grass airfield but that was in Hampshire. And they had to get — we lost two aircraft that night. Stuart. And where’s the other one? Failed to return. One there. Oh up here. “And diverted to Boscombe Down in Wiltshire on return as Bottesford was fog bound.” What I mentioned before. We lost thirty five aircraft. Bomber Command lost thirty eight aircraft from this raid and yet there was no defences at the target. A hundred and ninety nine were killed in action. Fifty two prisoners of war and thirteen, there were thirteen evaders. Right. How they — they must have come down in France somewhere and managed to get back through Spain I should think.
AS: So you could have dropped some aircrew with Diphtheria into the prisoner of war camp.
SK: Yes. We were, we were all the what, you know — what do you call it? They hadn’t got enough of the, would it be serum or something?
JM: Oh No. No. Inoculations.
SK: Inoculations. They hadn’t got enough of them, you see. But when you get a big outbreak like that and so they, they was able to test you to see whether you were positive or negative or something. Do they scratch you or something? I don’t know how they do it, put it like that. But our crew was alright but then we were poorly we were still allowed to fly. And the MO at briefing said to us that night, he said, ‘If any of you unfortunately crash and come down in German you must tell them that you are Diphtheria carriers.’ We said, ‘Blimey we wouldn’t tell them that,’ [laughs] You’re asking for a bullet in your head straight away, aren’t you? You know [laughs] So we didn’t agree with the MO one bit. I remember that. So you can keep this bit if you like.
AS: Thank you.
JM: Well, that’s not in the book is it? It’s not subject to copyright?
SK: I don’t know. Maybe. Yeah but —
JM: Oh.
SK: Yeah.
JM: In which case you can’t digitise that I’m afraid.
AS: Ok. We can —
SK: Well you can have a look at it anyway.
AS: We can sort that out.
SK: You must sort it out. I don’t know.
AS: What interests me on there as well.
SK: Yeah.
AS: Is two things. One — did you climb back to height after you’d bombed?
SK: What? In this? On this one. Yeah.
AS: On that one. Yeah.
SK: You would have done. Yes.
AS: And the “Froth Blower” on there. The code name. Is that the squadron or the target code name?
SK: That. No. That would be the target code name you see. “Froth Blower.” Yeah. Yes.
AS: Ok.
SK: I think that would be in the book there. But you see how many aircraft we put up there? And look. They can’t beat that now. We took off at minute intervals.
AS: Yeah.
SK: Minute intervals. And we got fourteen up there till this last one. And I remember Manifold. He was an Aussie but he went on and he did fifty trips. He finished his tour on fifty and he went on to Pathfinders afterwards and he [pause] he, when he went to start his aircraft one engine wouldn’t start. And they had to rush around and take the spare one standing by. So he lost fifteen minutes or whatever it was. But that’s, that was, that’s good flying control. That was a good bloke at the end of the runway did that one.
AS: Fast on the finger.
SK: Yeah. Yeah. Getting them all on there. To get heavy aircraft down at the end of the runway like that, you know.
AS: So at least on that squadron if you had one you’d have a standby aircraft fully fuelled and fully bombed.
SK: You would try to. It didn’t always happen. But there was at that time. At that time there was. Yeah. Yeah. I did a little thing here I wrote down. I think I’ve got it here somewhere. I’m sure I’ve got it here. Printed out. Perhaps I haven’t got it.
[Pause. Shuffling papers]
AS: Do you know how long we’ve been talking for?
SK: No.
JM: Two hours.
AS: Nearly two hours.
SK: Oh I’m sorry.
AS: No. Not at all. Don’t apologise. It’s wonderful.
SK: [unclear ]
AS: I was just saying shall we, shall we draw stumps there. At least for the tape.
SK: Yeah. Yeah.
AS: And maybe we can do another.
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 Sidney Knott
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Adam Sutch
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-10-01
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AKnottS151001
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
01:51:57 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
Sidney Knott was from Leigh on Sea and recalls the day, with invasion apparently imminent, that signs were put up on the local shops advising people that they had to be ready to move within an hour and taking only one suitcase with them. Sidney’s father had been injured several times during the First World War and advised his son to join the RAF rather than the army. Sidney had had an interrupted education so was advised he would be accepted for general duties. He was posted to Blickling Hall where he was on crash duty but later remustered as an air gunner. Initially he was posted with 467 Squadron based at RAF Bottesford. His was the first crew to complete a full tour on the squadron. After his tour he was posted to RAF Silverstone. He was then approached to join a new squadron and do a further tour of operations. His crew joined 582 Squadron, Pathfinders based at RAF Little Staughton. He completed sixty four operations in both tours. He talks about the fear factor of operations, the instinct over the target looking out for threats and coping with the tiredness.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Great Britain
England--Bedfordshire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Norfolk
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940
1941
1944
17 OTU
467 Squadron
582 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
animal
bombing
fear
ground personnel
Lancaster
Manchester
military service conditions
Operational Training Unit
Pathfinders
RAF Bottesford
RAF Finningley
RAF Little Staughton
RAF Manby
RAF Scampton
RAF Silverstone
RAF Turweston
RAF Wainfleet
RAF Woodhall Spa
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/719/10114/ABorthwickS180306.2.mp3
2ff5ec8d7ba556eaacdc93f61495839b
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
Borthwick, Sidney
S Borthwick
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Sidney Borthwick (b. 1925). He flew operations as an air gunner with 101 Squadon.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-03-06
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Borthwick, S
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
AS: Ok. So, there we are. So, this is Andrew Sadler interviewing Sidney Borthwick at his home in Staines on Tuesday the 5th of March 2018. Sidney, can you, you were telling me about how you signed up in to the Air Force. Can you tell me about that?
[pause]
SB: It’s a bit indistinct now but there were recruitment areas in every town weren’t they? Staines. No. Where was it?
Other: West Hartlepool?
SB: But I’ve always had something wrong with my left arm. A tumour on the bone shaft of my left arm or something. The kind of thing that when you were in the playground at school. They’d just maybe let you out of lessons and you were all mad and you were chasing each other and they used to grab me and it was right where this tumour was on my, on my left arm. And it was like something on the bone that when they did things like that it wobbled about. I’ve still got it [laughs] It’ll only be, it’s long forgotten now you know but I was in the playground. I had to be very careful in the rough and tumble of [pause] what was that famous thing we used to play? Tig or something like that.
Other: Tag.
SB: Tag, and —
Other: And did this affect you for going in to the —
SB: Well, they used to grab my left, my arm you see and under there somewhere there was like a nodule or something. A tumour on the bone shaft of my left arm.
Other: But did that affect you joining the Air Force?
SB: Well, yeah. Oh, yeah. You had to keep your mouth closed about that, you know. So I think I probably went somewhere in this area to volunteer and they thought [pause] So I thought, well I’ll go to another place. There was another place. I forget the name of it now. I’ll go up there. I went in. Wanted to volunteer, you know. Here I am. ‘Yeah. Yeah. Fine. You’re in.’ [laughs] So a lesson in life that sometimes you’ve got to [unclear] [laughs] Yeah. So, yeah.
AS: And how old were you then? Was this before the war or after it had started?
SB: Doesn’t say anything in here, does it?
Other: You’ve always said that you lied about you age.
SB: I haven’t seen this in ages.
Other: You always said, dad that you lied about your age. If you had to be eighteen you were only seventeen but you put your age forward to the point that I always remember mum always said she never really knew what you were at a birthday because you kept it up.
[pause]
SB: Sergeant Brooking. I wonder how he is nowadays.
[pause]
AS: Can you tell me anything about the training that you did? How did you come to become a gunner?
SB: How come?
AS: How did you come to become a gunner?
SB: Well —
[door chimes interrupt recording]
SB: If you volunteered. A lot of people said, you know. ‘I want to be up there.’ You see. But I wasn’t like that. I knew I had limitations so I thought well there’s plenty of appendages on there, you know. You can be a bomb aimer, a mid-upper gunner and all the rest of it. So I didn’t cast my line and I always lived with the thought that one day they were going to walk up to me and say, ‘Are you Sid Borthwick?’ And I’d say, ‘Yes.’ And he’d say, ‘Yeah. Well, we know all about you. Bugger off.’[laughs] So, yeah I think I went [pause] [unclear] place. What’s it called? I forget now.
[pause]
SB: So, I learned pretty quickly when to keep my mouth shut and things like that. You, you lived in fear when your turn would come. They had a thing that spun around. I forget what it was but it was part, part of your volunteering. You passed these things and I thought I don’t think I’ll ever get through that but yeah. Be like mum. Or be like dad, keep mum. So, the less you say that can [pause] they could put up against you afterwards the better.
AS: Can you tell me about the training you had?
SB: Training?
AS: Yes.
SB: Well, yes. It’s all written down in the book.
[pause]
SB: Units at which served. ACRC. Aircrew Recruitment. St Johns Wood. In brackets I’ve put Lord’s. So, is there a big err St Johns Wood? What is the name of that?
AS: The Cricket Ground. Lord’s Cricket Ground.
SB: 4th of January 1944. And then I went to Bridlington, Bridgnorth. Stormy Down. And then Ludford Magna. Christ almighty. Catterick. Christ, I was up in Blackpool. I remember that. I had a good time up there.
AS: Can you tell me where you were posted?
[pause]
SB: I was at ACRC. At obviously, Air Crew Recruitment, St Johns Wood and I’ve got here Lord’s. 4th of January ’44. So there must have been a place up there where you went. [unclear] Upper Heyford. Scampton. Bottesford. Ludford Magna. Catterick. Kirkham. Blackpool. West Kirby. Demob. Off.
AS: Can you remember how you came to be a gunner?
SB: Capabilities. You know in your own mind. You know what you could take on without [pause] Although I always remember at school I was always in the back row. Of course, it gives you good pretensions that, you know. I don’t know what your school was like. Your headmaster sat down there and in the front row you had all the dummies as we used to call them, you know. People as thick as two planks. They were, you can imagine him standing there thinking how am I going to drum anything in to this lot? And I knew from that, the seating in the classroom how I was doing, you know. If you got yourself in the back row away from, the master used to sit in the front with the big cane didn’t he to see if you were awake. And I knew from that what I was capable of or what I thought I was capable of. So I might have diminished myself in certain respects but it gave me a line that I wanted to be above possibly. And without any, what did you call it educationally? You got secondary education, was it? The first. Secondary.
[pause]
SB: Yeah. I wasn’t going to set the world on fire.
AS: Can you tell me anything about the training you did to become a gunner?
[pause]
SB: It’s not very clear to me actually.
AS: Can you remember where you were? Where you were stationed? You said, you said something. You read from your logbook you were in Scampton. Can you tell us something about that?
[pause]
SB: Yes. This this is the book they give you when you join. You join up. Certificates of qualification etcetera. [pause] And then it goes all the way with you through. Red ink for night flying. Blue ink for daytime. Stormy Down. Yeah. Old Anson. I remember that.
AS: Could you tell us about that?
[pause]
SB: I couldn’t get on quick enough. It was, it was like taking a lad from the streets and I’m talking now a long time ago.
[telephone ringing]
[pause]
AS: Did you go on many missions? Can you tell us about some of those?
[pause]
SB: What? In the real war you mean?
[pause]
SB: Do you remember Concorde?
AS: Yes.
SB: Concorde BOAE. Passenger proving flight. Two hours up the Bay of Biscay. That was Concorde. A brand new aeroplane. [pause] ACRC. That was the old Bridlington. Then to Bridgnorth. Then to Stormy Down. Upper Heyford. Scampton. Bottesford. Ludford Magna. Catterick. Kirkham. Blackpool. Training. I was shoved off to India when they’d finished with me.
AS: Can you tell me about that?
[pause]
AS: What did you do after the war? Did you manage to settle back in to civilian life?
SB: Yeah.
AS: Was it difficult or easy?
SB: I’ve got in here Blackpool. Retraining [pause] as an equipment assistant. So it sounds like my flying days are over. Remustering training because when, when the war ended they wanted, well the lads who had been up where ever fighting the war. Serving. They all wanted to come back to England. Be in Blighty again. So lots of people like me, probably midway let him go on. So, the next thing I know I’m up in Ceylon. I’m posted overseas. Mind you it was wonderful. You’d never see [laughs] Never see them in your lifetime. Sitting here kind of thing. It’s the place to be. You see the ladies picking [pause] oh what the hell do they call them? Actually, you know the things are actually growing up there. You go from the, one day dropping bloody bombs all over the place. A couple of weeks later you’re in a foreign country. Why? Well, those lads had been up there so they’re due to come home and we need to replace them, don’t we? Yes. Off you go then. Next. [unclear] you’re sitting ladies in the, where was it? Ceylon? [pause] And they’re picking, yeah what the hell was it? What is tea like? The plant. A shrub isn’t it? [pause] Mind you, for a single bloke it was a good life.
AS: What were you doing in Ceylon? Why did you go to Ceylon?
SB: Because the government sent me there, I suppose. I didn’t volunteer for it. I just, as I say it was the time of life like that. The next thing I know I’m sitting on a bloody great liner with my feet over the edge. ‘What rank are you?’ ‘Flight sergeant.’ ‘Right. Well, you see all these squaddies sitting on this liner with you? Right. Tell them to get their feet back in. Inboard. They must not sit on the edge with their feet dangling over.’ [laughs] I thought, well I’ll tell you it was the way of it was a weird old thing, yeah. A couple of days later you land somewhere and the ladies are picking tea and things like that.
AS: Can you tell me anything about the Lancaster because you were on Lancasters, weren’t you?
SB: I was on Lancasters. Yes. A rear gunner on a Lancaster.
[pause]
Other: Can I do you another coffee?
AS: No. I’m fine thank you very much.
Other: Yeah? Can I switch this off, dad? It’s quite warm. Can I take your tea?
AS: Can you tell me anything about your squadron reunions that you, can you tell me anything about your squadron reunions?
[pause]
SB: I don’t think there are squadron reunions.
[pause]
AS: Can you remember being at Scampton, because I think you were at Scampton, weren’t you? In Lincolnshire.
SB: What?
AS: Scampton. Were you in Scampton?
[pause]
SB: It’s funny when you look at these things. Things you, because the Dutch refused to cooperate with the Germans. They were starved.
AS: And you went and dropped some food for them, didn’t you?
SB: Yeah.
AS: Can you tell me about that?
SB: Well, as I remember it we just went on to the runway, opened the bomb doors, right and rammed in as much stuff as you could. Not giving a lot of thought to what it is and we just kept doing that and then said to the skipper, ‘Pile on a bit more. Not a lot but a little bit more.’ And these because the bomb doors came down like that kept closing them down. Closing them down. Closing them down. Closing and they kept ramming stuff in to give to these people who were starving because the Germans, the Germans wouldn’t give them any food, would they? Because, because the Dutch refused to cooperate with the Germans they were starved themselves. Yeah.
[pause]
SB: I often wonder because we never kept, I mean if you flew all this time with all these people when you were demobbed that was it. Well, really —
[pause]
AS: Good.
[pause]
AS: You’ve got a good number of videos about the war, I think.
SB: “Imperial War Museum. The Official Collection. Royal Air Force at War.” Mind you, you’ve got to have plenty to, I used to have these. Yeah. There’s the lads bombing up. The front turret of a Lancaster. Crew positions of a Lancaster. [pause] I’m not quite sure if that’s my position there. Rear turret in a Lancaster. Yeah. [pause] “The story of the Lancaster bomber.”
AS: 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
A name given to the resource
Interview with Sidney Borthwick
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Andrew Sadler
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-03-06
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ABorthwickS180306
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:40:45 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Yorkshire
Sri Lanka
England--London
England--Blackpool
England--Lancashire
England--Cheshire
Netherlands
Description
An account of the resource
Sidney enlisted on 4th January 1944 at the Air Crew Reception Centre, Lord’s cricket ground. He was accepted despite a tumour on his left arm. Sidney was a rear gunner on Lancasters. After trained at Blackpool, he served at RAF Bottesford, RAF Bridgnorth, RAF Bridlington, RAF Catterick, RAF Kirkham, RAF Ludford Magna, RAF Scampton, RAF Stormy Down and RAF West Kirby. He recalls operation Manna. When the war ended, Sidney had an overseas posting to Ceylon.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
1945
1946
1944-01-04
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Sally Coulter
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending revision of OH transcription
101 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
RAF Bottesford
RAF Bridgnorth
RAF Catterick
RAF Kirkham
RAF Ludford Magna
RAF Scampton
RAF Stormy Down
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1263/17136/AWilmetS190504.2.mp3
78852fd08bde8706c1253068111d0a6b
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
Wilmet, Sheila
S Wilmet
Description
An account of the resource
One item. An oral history interview with Corporal Sheila Wilmet (b. 1924, 2090150 Royal Air Force). She served as a meteorologist at RAF Bottesford, RAF Coningsby, RAF Cottesmore, RAF Langar and RAF Spilsby.
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
2019-05-04
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
Wilmet, S
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
JM: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Julian Maslin. The interviewee is Mrs Sheila Wilmet. The interview is taking place at the home of Mrs Wilmet’s daughter Mrs Alison Belcher [buzz] on Saturday May the 4th 2019. Sheila, if I may, can I ask you to start us off by telling us a little bit about your family background?
SW: Well, I was born and brought up in Liverpool. On the outskirts. It was a really a little village which was later incorporated in to the city boundary. My mother and father had both been born in Ireland but at that time of course it was part of the British Isles and was governed from England. They had come over after the end of the First World War when my father as a returning soldier was not particularly welcome. He had served in the RAMC and found no difficulty in getting a job in a military hospital which was later taken over by the Ministry of Pensions. So I had a very conventional 1930s upbringing. Went to the primary school. Went to church on Sunday. Played out in the fields and woods which were around the house. Went to secondary school. Failed the eleven plus but they had a system in Liverpool where those who had just missed were accommodated in Central Schools. And when I was fifteen war was declared. It wasn’t a surprise I don’t think, to anybody but my father had been predicting it for years. And I took an exam for a private college and I went for the year there and passed my school certificate. That was 1940 and I remember somebody saying as we went in to the exam, ‘What does it matter what we get because the Germans will be here?’ But the Germans weren’t, fortunately and I got a job as a probationer teacher in a nursery school. This was the first nursery school as opposed to a nursery. It was an experiment and very interesting. And then in May of that year, 1941. It gets a bit hazy. We had a week of bombing and the devastation and the fires and I mean Liverpool was very, very badly bombed because of course they were after the docks and the river gave the game away. And then the bombing went on intermittently. We spent the night in an Andersons shelter at the bottom of the garden. And eventually we had the Christmas week where the bombing started as soon as it got dark and finished just as daylight was coming, and it was very hard to make one’s way home because there were unexploded bombs here and unexploded bombs there. But we just took it as part of life and carried on as best we could. When it came to the spring of 1942 it was my time to decide would I go to college, be coming up to eighteen and the war was going very badly and I think I thought they needed help [laughs] My father was very much against me just going down and joining up. He insisted that I would only join when there was something definite, and there was an ad in the Liverpool Post and Echo which said, “Red sky at night sailor’s delight. But this isn’t good enough for the Air Force.” So they were looking for women with some science in their background to train as meteorologists, and I thought that’s just the job for me. And down I went and signed up and about six weeks later I found myself on a train going to Gloucester for initial training etcetera.
JM: Thank you. Thank you. When you went and you asked to sign up did you actually specify that you wanted to be in the Meteorology department?
SW: Oh, I did. I did. I told them that’s why I had come. And of course we were all volunteers then so there was this feeling that if things went awry you could just say, ‘Well thank you but I’m going home.’
JM: Yes. Yes. Right. So, tell us a little more will you please about your service in Gloucester where you were training?
SW: In Gloucester we were billeted in an enormous hut. There were about thirty women and the beds were arranged. Some had their heads in the middle of the hut and some had their beds so it was alternate. Of course we’d never seen any of the others in our lives before and the only thing was we were all anxious. Anxious to do the right thing. Anxious about what might happen to us. Anxious about everything. And we got kitted out, and the worst thing I found was the great coat. Now this was March and it was very cold and because it rubbed the back of the neck. Otherwise, I managed quite well with everything else. And then we went out and we did square bashing on the square and after we’d done that for a week or so we were supposed to be in command, and we had to take it in turns to give the orders for right turn etcetera as we went. It was very difficult to choose the right moment and I remember the warrant officer shouting out, ‘Say something, if it’s only goodbye.’ So we had two weeks there. And then we went up to Morecambe and were billeted in boarding houses. And there we went to lectures about gas, and health and safety etcetera and who, whom to salute and when and how. And we also had all sorts of injections. I hadn’t been inoculated, no vaccinated against smallpox as a baby so I had to have that as well, which was fairly unpleasant. But I suppose we were there for perhaps three weeks and then we were divided up depending on what we were aiming to do, and I found myself in London billeted on Buckingham Palace Road in beautiful apartments and travelling to Lincoln’s Inn Fields each morning for lectures on the science of meteorology and, which was fairly difficult because my science was not really up to standard. Now. I wasn’t the only one. They were really looking for people with degrees, but of course they were very thin on the ground. We had a test every Friday, and if you couldn’t pass this you would be re-mustered. But however, we did pass and then with another girl we were sent up to a big house. Not a mansion but a big house in New York which is on the outskirts, a crossroads really on the outskirts of Coningsby Airfield.
JM: Yes.
SW: And we would travel up to the, in to the [pause] oh what do I want? Into the airfield on sort of lorry transport. Anyway, this wasn’t feasible if we were doing shifts, so we were put in then in barrack blocks on the airfield and introduced. There were just the two of us, introduced to the Met office and a very, very kind, very clever, very kind man who took us under his wing and helped us through the first few weeks until we got confidence enough. And because he was a civilian it was a little more informal than it would have been had he been in uniform. And one of our fairly regular visitors was Group Captain Gibson, and he would come in and ask the officer to explain the charts and what they meant, and what it would mean and how weather would travel etcetera etcetera. He was the only one that did that. The, the others would take whatever they were told at the briefing but he liked to know the ins and outs of it. The down side of this visit was that he would quite often say as he looked down at his big black Labrador, ‘Oh,’ he’d say, ‘N***** would like some cocoa.’ I thought, oh dear. So away I’d have to go to the, I wouldn’t call it a kitchen. There was a kettle [laughs] and I would do my best to make the cocoa. Make sure it wasn’t too hot, come out and present it to N***** while others were talking weather wise. And then he would say, ‘Thank you. Come on N*****. You’ve had your treat.’
JM: Could I just interrupt you for a moment?
SW: Yes.
JM: We are talking about Guy Gibson here, aren’t we?
SW: Oh, we are.
JM: Yes.
SW: Talking about Guy Gibson. Yes.
JM: I think I’m right in saying at that point he was the commanding officer of number 106 Squadron. Does that ring a bell with you?
SW: Yes. Yes.
JM: Were you aware that at that stage he was leading 106 to become one of the most successful squadrons in Bomber Command at that stage?
SW: No. We [pause] we felt he was special and Mr Finch, the mess officer would say, ‘He’s a little man but very big ideas.’ And that’s how I remember him.
JM: Yes. Yes.
SW: Yes.
JM: Yes, because of course history shows us that he had some, some people were rather negative about him, weren’t they? They said he wasn’t always a pleasant officer to work for.
SW: No.
JM: Did you find anything of that?
SW: No. No. No. And I think partly because Mr Finch was so, so pleasant and kind, and yes and he would, when he was explaining things to the wingco, he would do it in a very [pause] well, sort of sympathetic way, ‘I know why you’re asking the questions and this is the answer and this is why.’
JM: Yes. Yes.
SW: Yes.
JM: And these questions would be needed so that Gibson and the others could plan the night’s bombing raid for instance.
SW: Yes. They prob, yes the details of it [pause] a lot of the other officers would and later on would, would take what they were told but he was very keen to know why.
JM: Right.
SW: Why was the cloud going to be such and such or why was visibility or —
JM: Yes.
SW: Yes.
JM: I think that is a very interesting observation you make because in some sources Gibson is not always described as being very interested in science and bits and pieces. Others say that he was and you confirm that.
SW: Yes. Yes, yes. He was very keen to know everything that would have any impact.
JM: Yes.
SW: On his operation.
JM: Thank you. That’s what I hoped you would say.
SW: Yes.
JM: That fits in perfectly with the image of Guy Gibson as he was leading 106 Squadron.
SW: Yes.
JM: Before he was posted to the Dambusters, which is another story.
SW: Yes. Yes.
JM: That’s fascinating. Did, could you just tell us a little bit more about your actual duties? Were you a corporal at this stage?
SW: Yes. Well, there was what was called Stevenson Screens.
JM: I know it.
SW: Well away from buildings and it was our duty to go out every hour on the hour and read what instruments were in it, pressure mostly, and there was a sun recorder but, and then we would do observations by observing cloud type and amount, wind strength and direction err paper [laughs] [sound of newspaper sheets turning] Oh, precipitation. Yes. Temperature. We had a anemometer for wind, we had a nephoscope for clouds.
JM: Right.
SW: Speed I suppose. Yes. If we couldn’t estimate the height of the clouds just by eye we would have to send up a balloon. We had a little cubby hole beside the office and we would go and that’s where the cylinders of hydrogen were kept and we would fill a balloon red, white or blue according to the cloud not according to our fancy [laughs] And we would follow it with the theodolite for, again speed and, but mostly for cloud height. We would also estimate visibility. And then would come in and on a big like an architect’s big desk we would have a map of the British Isles on which were little circles for every Met station and they were numbered interestingly starting in Ireland and, and then on the teleprinter, a sheet would come through with the reports from all the other Met stations in quite a simple code and we would transfer the figures to symbols surrounding these little circles. We used a red and a blue pen fixed together. You just twiddled it to get which one you needed. Mostly blue but red was too much in the pressure. If it was falling you’d put it in in red and together with the other, if they were worse than the last report. And we would fill those in for all the hundred and forty eight or so stations on the map. Now, we did that every hour and every third hour, three, six, nine we did it on a bigger scale. And the Met officer then would interpret all those figures and draw his lines, and from that do his estimation of what conditions would be like 10 o’clock at night or whatever and then of course for the morning and would dew fall? Would fog form? And so on. And while he was doing that of course we’d be working away and keeping up our observations and sending through our little line of figures. It was quite intense while we were there. We were working away and another WAAF came and we just did eight hour shifts then really and kept going.
JM: I, I can imagine that you must have been curious having taken all these observations to find out more about meteorology yourself. Did you find yourself getting involved with the recognition of fronts and associated weather?
SW: Yes. Yes. Yes. Once you spend four hours, four years doing that you can’t get away from it. You can look out of the window now and I’ve brought my children up knowing this is a clearing shower and [laughs] ‘Don’t worry. Yes, it is heavy but it’s a clearing shower.’
JM: And I would also, for the record could you, I know what a Stevenson Screen is, could you describe a Stevenson Screen for people?
SW: A Stevenson Screen was a louvered rectangular box fitted on legs, about four feet high. It was louvered so that the wind could get in but not, but modified and yes the same with, as another said it was well away from buildings.
JM: Yes.
SW: Which you would notice if you were going out at two and three and four in the morning on a winter’s night. We just did it. It was part of, yes part of the job.
JM: Yes. Yes.
SW: So yes.
JM: Thank you. We’re still with you at Coningsby. Were you aware of the losses that the squadrons were taking? Were you involved in any way with that aspect of their work?
SW: No. We were for a while. The navigators used to come in after they’d been to the briefing and we would give them a card with the predictions for cloud, wind etcetera, visibility and ask them if they’d be kind enough on the way home to write in what was actually there. Now, we said it very apologetically because we knew that it was asking a bit much. If they were coming home they wouldn’t be safe until they crossed the coast and the last thing on their minds would be filling in a card. So we, we almost never got one back. And I think it was just something extra for them to think about. And that idea was dropped fairly quickly.
JM: Yes.
SW: So we didn’t actually see the aircrew at that stage, and of course being in the watchtower we were isolated from what was going on in the rest of the airfield.
JM: Yes. Yes.
SW: I mean we just had the hierarchy.
JM: Yes.
SW: Above us and [pause] yes.
JM: Yes. Yes. Thank you. So there came a point when you were posted to Langar.
SW: Yes.
JM: Could you tell us a little about that experience? Was it very similar to Coningsby or did it have its own distinguishing experiences for you?
SW: It was different. I suppose it was a newer airfield. We travelled in, in RAF wagons, and I remember seeing the sign for Langar at the side of the road. It was a lovely rural spot and the first glimpse I suppose I got of it was of a field of [pause] not buttercups [pause] not primulas. Oh.
AB: Cowslips.
SW: Hmmn?
AB: Cowslips.
SW: Cowslips. A field of cowslips. Absolutely golden in the sunshine. I thought oh this is going to be a lovely place. And then we were allocated a bed in the Nissen hut, which was very hot in the hot weather. Difficult if you’ve been on night duty and very cold in the cold weather. There were louvers on the rounded ends but the snow would come in and you’d wake up with it on the bed. That would give a warning what we were in for. We were quite a way from the airfield though. We all had bikes. Yes. I saw the Met office. It was in the watchtower but it was a different, a different set up. The airfield was much more linear [pause] And I suppose my main memory there was that there were three of us. We were covering the twenty four hours. Twenty four hours, and one of the girls got ill and for a while myself and my partner we did twenty four hours on and twenty four hours off. Somebody said, ‘What do you do in your spare time?’ [laughs] Very little. And we went there, I suppose it was May and, and then in the August I think it was there was this rumour that somebody from the BBC was coming. And well, coming but talk to us or what? Anyway, then it was he’s going on a flight and where’s he got? I think it might be a long one. Oh, poor man. Does he know what he’s letting himself in for because the losses? Anyway, if he was determined to do it, so he did come in to the office, spoke to the [pause] and didn’t speak to us. Well, there would only be one on at a time anyway. But we certainly worried about him.
JM: And this was Wynford Vaughan-Thomas?
SW: Yes, it was. Yes.
JM: Were you aware that he was a famous broadcaster even then?
SW: Yes. Yes. We’d heard him. But we did have radios. We had a radio in the office and we had a radio in the Nissen hut, and, and yes we kept well abroad of what was happening and we would also be very thankful for the music that came on. American Forces Network started at 5 o’clock. They were an hour in front of the Home Service or the Forces Network. So yes, we did know his name and his reputation and we were all very proud that it was too us he would come but we were very worried about him and of course his recording man.
JM: So he had somebody with him. A sound recordist, did he?
SW: Yes. He had a recording man. Yes.
JM: Yeah. Did you see the equipment they were going to record on to?
SW: No. No.
JM: Right.
SW: No. That would be like the aircraft.
JM: Yes. I see, yes.
SW: It would be away from us. In that sense we were kind of isolated.
JM: Yes.
SW: Yes.
JM: Yes. I wonder if you remember anything about him as a man in terms of his build or his voice? He had a very characteristic voice as I recall.
SW: A very distinctive voice.
JM: Very.
SW: Yes. Well, I would say he wasn’t past remarkable. I mean, he wasn’t exceptionally tall or anything like that. He was very pleasant and I think, yes, I can’t remember how he was outfitted but obviously for the trip he was well outfitted. Yes. And then we worried about him. We took it in turns to worry because of course if you’d been on all day or you were going on you would go and we would go to bed and you would definitely go to sleep. But the first question you know, any news? And if you were actually in the office you’d be listening. Listening. If they were due back at 4 o’clock and then it gets to ten past and where are they? And so it would go on and then, how many? It wasn’t an exact science because sometimes one of the planes, the flight would be aborted off the, off the runway. They wouldn’t have, they didn’t actually go so it was no good counting. Occasionally somebody would be fairly shot up and they would land, you know perhaps in Norfolk or something like that. So it was no good writing people off straightaway. You had to wait and find out. But yes we did know Wynford Vaughan-Thomas had got back. Yes.
JM: Do you remember whether he was showing signs of nerves before his, his trip? Do you think he knew what he was letting himself in for?
SW: Well, if he was he didn’t show it. I would say he was a professional man and people like that do what they have to do no matter what they feel inside.
JM: Yes. I think that’s a very good answer but as you pointed out there was, there were in fact two of them and we forget the nerves and the human characteristics of his, his technician don’t we?
SW: Yes. Yes. Yes.
JM: He must have been just as tense.
SW: I think it’s very true when something starts that’s what you’re concentrating on and he wanted to get there, and he wanted to get back and he wanted it to be right and I think that’s what took his attention.
JM: Yes. Yes. Did you ever get to hear the broadcast that they made?
SW: Yes. Yes. Oh, we did. Yes. Which I believe there is a production with visual and so forth?
JM: I imagine so. Yes.
SW: Yes.
JM: Yes. And whilst we’re talking about news that came through to you you’ve mentioned that you met Wing Commander Gibson. Were you aware of the Dambusters raid? You would have been at Langar then. Not at Coningsby.
SW: Yes. But they —
JM: Were you aware of it?
SW: They were only, yes but of course we knew the area.
JM: Yes.
SW: And, oh yes, I mean it was when I say common knowledge it was knowledge between people who were affected and of course we felt with our observations we were showing what, what the weather was. Our Met officer was having his input into the Lincolnshire, you know. We weren’t directly involved but we were involved on the periphery I suppose.
JM: Yes. Yes.
SW: It was all, and you know how it comes through the air sometimes.
JM: Yes. Yes. There must have been a sense of pride of being a part of that team though.
SW: Oh yes. Yes. Yes.
JM: Brilliant.
SW: Oh yes. And we would have known some of the other parties that went.
JM: Yes. Some of the boys that didn’t come back.
SW: Yes.
JM: Yes.
SW: Yes. We did.
JM: So you were, you were at Langar and then you were posted to Spilsby. Is that correct?
SW: Yes. Yes.
JM: Tell us a little bit about that will you, please.
SW: Yes. We’d rumbled off to Spilsby and it was a very deserted sort of establishment. The Americans had been there and they had left us without light bulbs. They seem to have, wherever they were going they seemed to think it would be short of everything. It was very, very basic when we got there. The only thing was they had left a couple of tubs of peanut butter and peanut butter sandwiches were the order of the day for a while. But I mean we got it up and running obviously and planes came in, and that was a very busy time. We had Windows by then.
JM: Windows.
SW: Windows were aluminium strips.
JM: Yes. Window. Yes.
SW: That were thrown out. Yes. To deflect the [pause] Yes. And of course things like radar were all getting much more sophisticated. It was, you can describe it like a step up instrument wise. And we tried out FIDO.
JM: Yes.
SW: The fog dispersal unit. Not always successfully because in, although it would be foggy it would be windy as well and it was distracting. I think it was the worst place for fog and poor visibility and the decision had to be made in conjunction with other obviously as to whether the planes could return. It wasn’t difficult to get them off but it was very difficult sometimes to get them to return. Nobody wanted them diverted. They didn’t want to be diverted. The minimum height for the cloud if I remember rightly was three hundred feet and it was very difficult in the dark to estimate it. And I don’t know about the others, but I know I’d send up a prayer, please don’t let me make a mistake. And they didn’t often have to be diverted but sometimes it was very dicey and cloud was the worst. If the cloud was nearly on the deck it was very difficult. I mean they didn’t have the instruments that they have today of course or anything like that and if a decision was made that they had to be diverted you felt as though you should run away somewhere and hide until they, in case you’d be blamed [laughs] But, yes there were. There were some, yes difficult decisions shall we say.
JM: Where the weather was marginal.
SW: Pardon?
JM: Where the visibility or the weather was in some way marginal.
SW: Yes. Yes.
JM: Yes. Yeah. Now, I understand that you are aware of the fact that there was quite a nasty accident at Spilsby.
SW: There was. Yes.
JM: Can you tell us a little about that please?
SW: I don’t really know much about it. All this talk of bombs in the bomb dump. Now, as we looked out from the watchtower, the perimeter tracks would go around and the dispersals were right, left and as far as you could see was where the bomb dump was. And I remember the talk about bombs in the bomb dump but to be perfectly honest I can’t remember in detail like as to how much damage was done or anything like that. Which seems strange but —
JM: But they were —
SW: But we just got on our bikes and cycled to work, and —
JM: But there was an explosion.
SW: Oh, there was an explosion.
JM: Yes.
SW: Yes.
JM: And people were killed or injured as a result of that.
SW: Well, yes. People out on the, yes the dispersal units. Yes.
JM: Yes.
SW: Where they would be loading. I mean, I remember them with these bombs on the trolleys going to and fro.
JM: Yes.
SW: Especially when they had an enormous one. And the thing to do for the ground crew was to write on it. You know, like people write on a cast on a broken leg or something like that. They would send messages on the side of this bomb. I never did. No. I didn’t think that was [laughs] but I do remember all the traffic with the, with the bombs. Yes.
JM: Yes.
SW: And there was always this talk about, ‘He’s reckless,’ You know, ‘The driver’s reckless. Hold on to your hat.’ The one thing there were any explosions in that. I remember a plane crashing with, on the, on take-off.
JM: With bombs on board.
SW: With bombs on board. Fortunately, no big ones on that. Yes, and I remember going to the funeral. Now, why? I can’t imagine. But we were supposed to so some representative had to go. Yes. I don’t know.
JM: And that was in Spilsby locally was it?
SW: That was at Coningsby.
JM: Oh. Coningsby.
[pause]
SW: I don’t know whether they had, you know the fire bombs.
JM: The incendiaries.
SW: Incendiaries. Yes. Fortunately, it didn’t seem to do, it didn’t do any damage in the village. Yes.
JM: So, was, was Spilsby your last posting during the war?
SW: No. From Spilsby we were sent to Bottesford.
JM: Yes.
SW: In Nottingham.
JM: Yes.
SW: Shire. And another busy station. The most remarkable thing there was the fact that we were there for the 8th of May, for the wonderful, wonderful news that the war was over. And, and we had, I think like we knew that the day before, on May the 8th was to be the day. VE Day. And anybody who wasn’t actually needed at work went on the church parade. We had it out in a hangar and we were celebrating yes, but we also knew there were so many that weren’t there to celebrate. It was a very sobering service. And then the NCOs, because I was a corporal there was no establishment for a sergeant and of course I never rose up the ranks we were invited to the sergeant’s mess for a celebratory drink. So away we went and tried to give the impression we were quite sophisticated which of course we weren’t and the gin that we were offered nearly knocked us off our feet. But, however, we thanked them and yes, all very nice and then we cycled off to the WAAF site, and made our way to Nottingham and I remember dancing in the street in the main area in front of the official buildings there and thinking how wonderful it was. And wonderful it was. Yes.
JM: Wonderful. I know that some personnel were given the opportunity to fly over Germany.
SW: They were. Yes.
JM: In things called Cooks Tours. Was that something that ever came your way?
SW: I didn’t fly over Germany but I did fly and I can remember going out to the, to the aircraft and saying something about a parachute. He said, ‘Oh, you won’t have a parachute. We’re not going that high. We’re not going high enough.’ I think we had to sign and say if things went amiss nobody would claim. But the inside of the Lancasters [pause] how they survived, those aircrew I’ll never know. It was cold. It was draughty. It was cramped. It was horrible. I never went as far as the poor old tail gunner, but even to get in to the cockpit you had to climb over obstructions and noise was incredible. The whole thing rattled and shook. And that was still while you were still on the ground. And taking off, I mean you wondered was this it? Was this the end of the world? Then it was interesting when we were in the air but it was still so, so uncomfortable and so, such hardship. I don’t know how long we were up. Less than an hour probably but to think of flying all the way to Berlin, to Italy. They went to North Africa. They needed, they needed awards for going never mind anything else. For surviving in that aircraft. Yes. It was, oh quite an experience. It really was. Yes.
JM: And when peace returned were you anxious to get demobbed and return to civilian life or were you tempted to stay with the RAF?
SW: No. There was no, there was no establishment. There was no we would have to re-muster into something else.
JM: Right.
SW: Yes. I think they had far too many personnel, women personnel. They were really looking to get rid of you in turn. Now, from, from Bottesford we went to Cottesmore.
JM: Yes.
SW: And there things were gradually sort of running down. But that was when we were flying to Holland and they were bringing people back from faraway places and things like that. And we went on a course about flying over the hump between Burma and India because of course the war in the east was still going on and, but then of course we weren’t needed but it was interesting. Yes. So, it was July 1946 when my turn came around to be demobbed and we went to a centre in Birmingham and handed in, you kept your best uniform. You could keep your underwear, which was not what most ladies were wearing and we had, well to start with we had these equestrian type knickers. The dark ones were called blackouts and the grey blue ones were called twilights. I have to say they were very good at keeping you warm if you were out on the airfield in the middle of the night but glamorous they weren’t. They did modernise them later. And the men got a suit, but the ladies got some money. And before we left we had these interviews as to what we were going to do, and, and they were quite clever because of course they were looking for certain groups of people. I knew which occupations were in need and so they were quite good at like saying, ‘Oh, you’ve done very well at these tests so you could, have you thought of being —’ this that or whatever was needed. And one of the things was teachers. Now, of course, I’d been a probationer teacher, a grade which never existed after the war so obviously teachers were needed so that’s where they encouraged you. They felt that your qualifications were such that you would be admirable for this. And jobs for, for women were very scarce on the ground in those days. You were a teacher, a nurse, a secretary, or in a shop or [pause] yes. Anyway, I went for the teaching and they had this scheme, emergency teacher training and instead of the two years because that’s what it was at that time it was thirteen months. But we got very short holidays. A week here and two weeks there and eventually passed out. And then we had to do two years’ probation at, well whatever they called the first. Yes. Instead of the year. So yes. So that’s what I became.
JM: Very good. Did, did, may I ask you did you make any friendships amongst your WAAF colleagues which endured after the, after your service?
SW: Yes. But not many because of course we were constantly split up. We didn’t, we started off, like two came up from London but it wasn’t very long before Barbara was posted somewhere else and you couldn’t keep track. There were no phones and things like that. But I did keep in touch with one girl. I went to her wedding, and but she lived in London which was a long way from Liverpool so we only saw each other occasionally. We wrote, and I went to stay with her for the Coronation and that sort of thing but of course over time.
JM: Yes.
SW: She had four children and, yes.
JM: Yes.
SW: Yes.
JM: I think the last thing I would like to ask you is when you reflect back on your, on your RAF service would you say that it changed you as a woman? Did it give you anything that would otherwise not have been open to you?
SW: Well, it gave me a lot more self-confidence, because I would not [pause] I would say I was very good. I was good at school. Not clever but good. I did what was expected of me. I was probably horribly boring, and yes it gave me self-confidence. I had to make decisions. It gave me an interest in other parts of the country, and with a broader outlook I would say. Not that I was confined at home because mum and dad were very good, but it was just different. And I suppose it did affect my teaching. Definitely. Yes.
JM: And you’ve been a lifelong supporter of Bomber Command.
SW: Oh, I have. Yes. Yes. Contributed money. Not much but some. But I’ve always stood up for them and been disgusted at it all being swept under the carpet and made to look nice. It wasn’t. It was the war. I mean I’d been in Liverpool. I knew what bombing was. Yes. But what else were we going to do? The war was, I mean I’m sure outside people I mean outside the country thought that we were finished. There was no way we were going to come back from this. Fortunately, we felt otherwise.
JM: Thank you so much. That’s an excellent note on which to finish. Thank you for a remarkable interview. Thank you very much indeed.
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 Sheila Wilmet
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Julian Maslin
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2019-05-04
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AWilmetS190504
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:59:53 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
Sheila Wilmet grew up in Liverpool and was fifteen when war was declared. She describes the devastation of bombing in 1941, spending nights in an Anderson shelter, and navigating unexploded bombs during her commute. She volunteered after viewing a meteorologist advertisement, and upon receiving initial training in Gloucester and Morecombe, she completed an education in meteorology at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London. Firstly, Wilmet was stationed at RAF Coningsby where she met Guy Gibson. She also describes her duties which consisted of regularly observing, interpreting, and collating weather data using specialist equipment including a Stevenson screen, nephoscope, hydrogen balloons, theodolite and, anemometer. Secondly, Wilmet was posted to RAF Langar. She describes the Nissen hut living conditions, and the visit of BBC broadcaster, Wynford Vaughan-Thomas. Wilmet was then posted to RAF Spilsby. She talks about American peanut butter, making difficult decisions during bad weather, and the bomb dump explosion. She also recollects the developments in equipment including radar, Windows, and FIDO. Next, Wilmet was posted to RAF Bottesford. She describes both her somber emotions and the celebratory events of VE Day. Finally, she was posted to RAF Cottesmore and demobilised in July 1946 when she retrained as a teacher. Wilmet talks about her lifelong support of Bomber Command and distaste at the way they were remembered.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Tilly Foster
Julie Williams
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
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941
1945-05-08
1946
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Merseyside
England--Liverpool
England--London
England--Leicestershire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Rutland
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Lancashire
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending revision of OH transcription
bomb dump
bombing
FIDO
Gibson, Guy Penrose (1918-1944)
ground personnel
home front
meteorological officer
military living conditions
Nissen hut
perception of bombing war
radar
RAF Bottesford
RAF Coningsby
RAF Cottesmore
RAF Langar
RAF Spilsby
shelter
Window
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/195/3328/AAllenRM160809.2.mp3
0e0b76b16f6cef1602bcaf97be83a19b
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
Allen, Richard Murray
Richard Allen
Richard Murray Allen
R Allen
Richard M Allen
Description
An account of the resource
One oral history interview with Richard Murray Allen (b. 1925, 435362 Royal Australian Air Force).
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-08-09
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
Allen, RM
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
DG: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre; my name is Donald Gould, and I'm interviewing Richard Allen at his home in Pymble, a suburb of Sydney in New Souith Wales, Australia. How old are you, Richard?
RA: Ninety one.
DG: And where were you born?
RA: In Brisbane in Queensland (pause).
DG: Where did you go to school?
RA: Well, actually I went to primary school in Mount Iza because my father went there during the depression, he was an engineer in the power house there. We spent eight years there. I did my primary schooling there, and I did my secondary schooling, two years of it in those days, which would be the equivelent of about year ten now, I did that at the State Commercial High School in Brisbane.
DG: And er, Mount Isa's a mining town, isn't it?
RA: That's correct.
DG: What was your father doing there?
RA: He was an engineer in the power house.
DG: Oh, I'm sorry, yeah (chuckles). When war broke out can you remember where you were, what you were doing, how old you were?
RA: Yes, I was fourteen. Nineteen thirty nine it was, and I was still at school.
DG: And when you were at, when you were at school did you have any thought that you might end up in the war?
RA: Yes. I joined the Air Training Corps as soon as it was formed. From memory that would have been about nineteen forty one, and I joined the Air Training Corps, and we were given, apart from marching and drilling, and all that sort of thing, we were given certain instructions in morse code, sending and receiving of course, and meteor-, meteorological education, and other things relative to the Air Force. And I was in the Air Training Corps until April nineteen forty three, and on the tenth of April, which is my birthday, I er was actually accepted by the Air Force and ten days later I was in camp at the initial training school.
DG: Now you left, you finished school in forty three?
RA: No, I finished school actually in nineteen thirty nine.
DG: Oh, I beg your pardon. Oh you, oh you had finished then?
RA: Oh yes.
DG: Oh I see. Right, right. Okay then.
RA: I finished school at fourteen, which was a bit young in those days. Most kids would have finished high school at fifteen or sixteen, but I'd had primary school, because it was a small country town I'd done two years in one, which meant I could finish school a bit younger than most people. So, I joined the Air Training Corps which was formed during the war, about nineteen forty one. Because I always wanted to get into the Air Force rather than the Army, and I knew that when I turned eighteen I would be put into either the Air Force or the Army because there was conscription for home service, but I thought I might as well volunteer and go wherever they told me to go.
DG: Why the Air Force and not the Army?
RA: Oh, I suppose because (chuckles) it appealed to me more. I can't think of any other reason.
DG: No? And did you erm, when you, when you then, when you then joined the er, the Air Force did you have any, any idea as to what you, what you wanted to do?
RA: Oh yes. Everybody wanted to be a pilot (both laugh). But on initial training course there were about a hundred and eighty on the course. Courses were going in about once a month in those days, and there were about a hunudred and eighty of us. I think there were about ten pilots and about, picked from the course, and about er perhaps ten or fifteen navigators, and the rest, the rest were, were appointed as wireless air gunners for further training. Well wireless was easy to me because I could send and receive, er twenty five, thirty words a minute because of my training in the Air Training Corps. Ah. So the wireless course, which was six months, was pretty easy, actually. The gunnery course only lasted a month, then our training was completed in Victoria, and within a month we were on a troop ship to England.
DG: So what place you, you, was all your training in Victoria?
RA: No. The initial training and the wireless training, which was a total of, initial training was one month, wireless course about six months, that was all done in Queensland. The wireless course, the initial training course, my pardon, was at Kingeroy, a country town in Queensland, and Merriburra in Queensland was the wireless course, and then in Victoria was the gunnery course, which was at West Sale. There was an Air Force station at East Sale, that's why I distinguish one from the other.
DG: So, you were then in the Air Force and receiving this training. Did you have any idea where you might end up? Did you know you might go to Europe, or-
RA: Oh yes, almost certainly, almost certainly. Actually, I was selected as a navigator on the initial training course, and then the next day they sent for me and said, 'look, I'm sorry, you were selected as a navigator but we find that you can't go overseas until you're nineteen. That's against the law. So you're going to have to be a wireless operator.' So, I was a bit peeved by that, but, you know, you have to accept your fate from these people.
DG: Yes. And so, when, when did you-
RA: Actually, I got to England before I was nineteen. I reached England in April, I beg your pardon, in March nineteen forty four, before I was nineteen. It didn't seem to matter then.
DG: No. So, you went from Victoria. Where did you go from -
RA: I went on leave for a few weeks, and then got on the troop ship. I came on leave back to Bradfield Park, Sydney, which you'd know well, and we were there for about three days.
DG: Right.
RA: And then on to the troop ship.
DG: And where did you, where did you, where did you disembark?
RA: In England?
DG: Are you- You didn't go, you didn't have training in Canada?
RA: No.
DG: No?
RA: No navigators -
DG: Ah, of course yes, yes. That's right. Yes. (DG talking across RA throughout this exchange)
RA: Navigators went there, and I think the odd pilot, but mostly the navigators. I guess because it was pretty flat.
DG: And what, and what places did you do further training in the UK?
RA: Well, when I got to UK I was given a staff job, at a Pilot's Advanced Flying Unit, up in the Cotswolds, a place called erm, Windrush, and our job up there was to fly at night time with pilots who were converting from single engined to multi engined aircraft. They were actually converting on Oxfords, which weren't a very pleasant aircraft, but we used to fly with the trainee pilots at night time, so if they got lost we could get them a bearing on the wireless to get them back to, to Windrush. I was there for a couple of months and back to Brighton, which was the RAAF holding unit, and then I was posted to operational training at a place called Kinloss in Scotland, and er, just near Fin- which was the aeordrome, just near Findhorne Bay, I believe there's a permanent base there now, and from there we went to Bottesford for operational training, and converting from, from Wellingtons which we'd flown in at operational training, and er (pause) we then went to heavy conversion unit at Bottesford. Perhaps that's not what I said originally, but it was a heavy conversion unit where we converted onto Lancasters, and then we went to, we were there I guess for about a month, maybe a bit more, then over to 101 Squadron, Ludford Magna.
DG: When you arrived -, and what er, you were a wireless operator, what rank were you at that stage?
RA: I landed in England as a Sergeant, and I, after six months you were automatically promoted to Flight Sergeant, and after tweve months automatically promoted to Warrant Officer, unless you'd kicked a Squadron Commander in the shins, or something. (pause)
DG: And er, 101, and that was at Ludford Magna?
RA: That's correct.
DG: And what type of aircraft were you flying there?
RA: Lancasters
DG: Can you tell me just a little bit about your dialy life at the base? What, what did you do?
RA: Not a lot. I'm blowed if I know. I often think about that. (DG laughs) I don't think we did much at all. Unless the, the, the unit was shut down because there was going to be an operation on, and the mess was closed twelve hours before that, I believe it was twelve hours, I think we used to hang about the hut, or talk, or play cards. Occassionally, if we weren't wanted, we'd go into Louth, er, for a few drinks. But, I can't remember what we did normally, other than that.
DG: The rest of your crew, were they, er what nationalities were they?
RA: An English captain, English engineer, I had an Australian navigator, me wireless operator, a Canadian bomb aimer, and two Scottish gunners, mid upper and rear.
DG: I believe that Ludford Magna wasn't, the airfield, wasn't very well drained.
RA: I don't remember, the strip itself was bitumen, I know that, but off the- I think it was commonly called Mudford Magna. Mudford Magna, because it was pretty sloppy, I clearly remember that.
DG: What sort of problems did that cause?
RA: The same problems as slopping about in muddy circumstances normally.
DG: And I understand that there was a fog dispersal system that was initiated there, or trialed.
RA: Yeah. They were still testing it. After May the eighth when the war was finished in Europe, I recall that aircrew was called upon, I think more than one day, to do circuits and bumps and testing this FIDO thing, Fog Intesnsive Dispersal Of, um FIDO, and it was a system where there were two pipelines, one on each side of the runway, and at intervals, at least, the pipelines had oil in them, I presume, wouldn't have been petrol, would have been oil, and they were lit, and the idea was so that if there was a fog the heat would disperse the fog. But I remember that on a couple of foggy days we were given the task of trying this thing, or testing it, or anyway, it hasn't, it couldn't have been a great success because I don't remember ever hearing of it being used anywhere else.
DG: So how, there were lines along the side of the airfield.
RA: Two pipes along the strip.
DG: And, obviously outlets for the oil. How did, how was that lit?
RA: No idea. No idea, I was concerned with, you know, getting set up to do my part on the aircraft while somebody else did that. Some of the ground staff, no doubt, were handling that while we did what we had to do.
DG: If it was a day where you were going to fly a mission, presumably that night, what was that day like, what, what was your routine then?
RA: Well, I can't clearly remember then because, you know, I only did, according to the log book, which is long since list because I, we've moved, according to my log book I only officially did one operation.
DG: Ah, right.
RA: And, er although there was some discussion about that, they wouldn't let us count a couple which we did (pause) which the Flight Commander or Squadron Leader said, no, they didn't count, but anyway. So I have very little memory of what we did, what the day was like. I remember that we had to be at the briefing at a certain time, I remember that we had to pick up our parachutes, I remember being driven out to the aircraft, I remember that we would have been er, you know, I remember putting on my harness, the parachute harness, I can remember putting on my Mae West, and I can remember standing up when the officer came in to brief us, and lots of funny little things, but er, what I clearly remember though on coming back, that was the important, well perhaps before, the important part for me was that we got a little, a ration to take with us on the aircraft for when we were flying, so we had something to nibble, you know, something to eat, whether it was a sandwich, or also Mars bar, and of course I'd never seen a Mars bar, because we didn't have Mars bars in Australia pre-war, that I ever saw, and as a kid I knew a lot about lollies, and so the Mars bar became very important, and that was where I was introduced to them.
DG: Can you remember what the target was?
RA: Yeah, Rotterdam. We were dropping food at Rotterdam.
DG: Ah, right. At what, well what, what, do you remember the date? Or month, year, whatever?
RA: Yeah, it was May the seventh, nineteen forty five.
DG: Ah right. So yes, that would have been very near-
RA: I can clearly remember part of the briefing was that if you fired, er if you were fired on you're not to return the fire, the gunners were not to return the fire, because we were only at five hundred feet, or thereabout, five hundred seems to stick in my mind, which seems pretty low. But I clearly remember as we crossed the Dutch coast, I was standing in the astrodome and shortly after that, and I could see the German light arm placements along the top of a dyke. They were looking at us, and we were looking back at them, sort of thing, but we'd been instructed that we wouldn't be fired on, but in the event that we were the gunners were not to return fire, which er, you know, I didn't approve of much, and nor did the gunners, but nobody fired on us anyway.
DG: Oh that was just as well, it would have made things a bit difficult under those circumstances. There were some, some people who, who had bad nerves, did you ever, and they, they were, they might have said they couldn't, didn't want to fly a mission, or something, and they were accused of having a lack of moral fibre. Did you come across any of that?
RA: When we, when we were at operational training in Scotland we had initially an Irish bomb aimer, and suddenly he seemed to disappear and he was replaced by a Canadian, a Canadian bloke, and it was always a mystery to me because it all, all happened so quickly, and I have since reflected on it and thought well, maybe he did turn it in then because we were constantly asked, or told, that if we didn't want to go on, now was the time to stop. 'Cause later on, you know, would be no good. You'd be letting the other fellows down.
DG: Yes. Yes. Did you, did you? So you didn't have any real first hand knowledge of that?
RA: No.
DG: No. Did you hear about, hear any stories about -?
RA: Ah, we heard stories about it, yes.
DG: How were they treated?
RA: Oh, pretty badly, you know, they weren't shot, but, you know, they were, lost their rank, and were sort of drummed out of the, out of the service, well out of sight anyway. Yes it was well known that if you went LMF you were in big trouble. Yeah.
DG: So, you didn't er, your mission was (pause) pretty uneventful, nothing -
RA: Pretty uneventful except that we were dropping, amongst other things, bags of flour, which was very exciting, but no, we were pretty low, and as we, they, they weren't too sure that when the bomb aimer released flour as he would release the bombs, they didn't seem to be too sure it would release properly, and my job that day, I'd been given a sort of a toggle. I had to lie on the floor of the aircraft as we approached the field that we were dropping the stuff in, and if they thought, if it held up, I was to work this toggle somehow to make it release, and I remember lying on the floor and when the bags of flour hit the airstream the, the, the flour all, well you know what flour's like, it went everywhere and I was covered in flour from the top of my head to the tip of my toes.
DG: Presumably some of the bags got out alright.
RA: They all got out, but it was the rush of air, you know, flour goes everywhere, you can imagine dropping a bag a flour, it hitting a gale.
DG: They weren't in some sort of canisters or anything?
RA: No, just hessian.
DG: But-
RA: We were very low. We were very low, we were right down below the five hundred feet.
DG: Oh, right. Ok.
RA: We were down below the height of the spires and the buildings.
DG: Oh, I see. But still, you know, a bag of flour hitting the ground, even from that height- (unclear, talking over one another)
RA: But when it hit the flip, the slipstream, I can tell you, it went, (chuckles) didn't burst a bag but-
DG: Oh, I see, the bag, yeah, oh, right, because some gets through the hessian. Yes, of course, I see. It's not the (unclear) it's not airtight, I see. Did you drop anything else, or was it just-
RA: No. Well, there may have been, but it was the flour that got me.
DG: Did you see people out coming to-
RA: Oh the field, the edge of the field was stacked with people. Crowds, of people. So certainly saw people, yes. Apart from the Germans we'd seen, we saw.
DG: Were Germans still at their post?
RA: Yes, yes.
DG: They'd just been told to stop firing? They hadn't been-
RA: The armistice hadn't been settled, you see.
DG: Yes, so they hadn't actually been officially captured or under control of-
RA: No, they were debating, they were debating the terms, I suppose.
DG: And it was just a ceasefire.
RA: They were debating what was to happen and there was a ceasefire.
DG: Yes.
RA: Which was a good thing, I suppose, from my point of view.
DG: Oh yes, you'd have been, you'd have really been a sitting duck.
RA: Well, we probably wouldn't have been doing it, at that height, anyway.
DG: Yes, yes. So ah, did, did you, when you were, do, on that mi, on that flight, on that mission, did you know that, that would be the last one you'd fly?
RA: No, no. No.
DG: You didn't know?
RA: No, we got out of the aircraft when we got back in the afternoon, and the groundcrew said, 'the war's over'. It had by then been announced. The armistice was-
DG: You had flown some other missions? That weren't counted? What were they?
RA: Well, we don't know, we were told, we just flew down over France somewhere. I think they were diversions of some sort.
DG: Oh, I see.
RA: You know, making the Germans think there was going to be an attack there, or an attack here. But anyway, they didn't let us count those.
DG: And did anything happen on those?
RA: Ah, no, we saw other aircraft, other Lancasters, which at one stage I remember we were tri- we were having our first experience of a thing called Fishpond, which I was operating, which was a screen which, with wiping, there was sort of a wiper going round at all times. It was supposed to pick up any other aircraft, beneath you, of course, wouldn't do it above, and I remember operating that. It wasn't very efficient. I remember saying to the gunners, 'look I can see something that looks to be suspicious'. I've forgotten whether it was below us or off to one side. But they said, 'ah, yes, it's another Lancaster. We've been watching it for ten minutes', so, you know, I was pretty slow on the Fishpond (chuckles). Anyway.
DG: But of course in those days that sort of technology was all very new, and it wasn't terribly easy to operate, or accurate or, I don't suppose.
RA: No. I seemed to be seeing things all the time, you know (chuckles) I suppose being a bit nervous.
DG: So when, when you'd flown your last mission, erm, what happened to you after that?
RA: Erm, some weeks later we were, we officially came out, see we'd been testing FIDO, we'd, I think we'd ferried an aircraft up to Lossiemouth, er, for, we'd taken an aircraft up to Lossiemouth, and then we brought it back with a couple of other crews that had also taken a couple of aircraft up there. And the RAAF announced, we were told that Australian, all the Australian air force, or air crew, were to be grounded, and they were calling for volunteers to form an Australian squadron to go to Burma. And you could volunteer for that squadron, or you could wait and get the troop ship home, and then go North, because the Japanese war, the Pacific war was still on. So I though, no, I been away from home now for, you know, sort of, eighteen months, more or less, I thought well I'll go home first and then let them do what they want to do with me.
DG: One fellow told me that some people in Bomber Command had received white feathers from the people in Australia. Did you ever hear about that?
RA: No.
DG: No. When you, when did you come back to Australia?
RA: October nineteen forty five.
DG: And what, what happened to you then?
RA: I was sent, I was given leave, told to report after about two or three weeks to Sandgate, RAAF Sandgate holding unit, and I was discharged. December nineteen forty five.
DG: And what did you do then? What did you do for work?
RA: I went back to work.
DG: Right.
RA: We were offered a rehab course, I took a rehab course, in accounting, so, and that was by correspondence so that took me, that was forty five, that took me another five years to complete that, night time, part time, an so on.
DG: Right. And where did you meet your wife?
RA: At work.
DG: Ah, right. What, what, so you, you an accountant or?
RA:Well, I was doing my accountancy, but I was working for a company that sold machines that did accounting, you know, they were accounting machines. Machinery that could handle ledgers, and most accounting is a ledger, so I was working for them, and she was working for them, and there we are (chuckles).
DG: And do you keep in touch with any people from Bomber Command?
RA: They're all gone, they're all gone, as far as I can see. The only had one, the only one in Australia was the navigator, he did, I probably shouln't mention his name, he did law, he'd been a policeman, he did law, and I picked up the paper one day, The Australian, and here his name was, he'd, he'd tickled the trust fund, I believe, so I think he finished in gaol.
DG: Oh dear. How did you, how were you treated after the war? As being with Bomber Command
RA: Alright. No problems.
DG: Yeah, yeah, right. Well thank you very much. That's much appreciated.
RA: Oh, pretty easy, pretty painless.
DG: Thank you.
RA: Not very interesting.
DG: Always interesting. Finish.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AAllenRM160809
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Richard Murray Allen
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
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:28:57 audio recording
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Donald Gould
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-08-09
Description
An account of the resource
Richard Murray Allen was born in Queensland, Australia. He joined the Air Training Corps and later volunteered for the Royal Australian Air Force on his eighteenth birthday. He trained as a wireless operator in Australia, before being posted to England, where after further training, he flew one operation with 101 Squadron from RAF Ludford Magna. He went home to Australia in October 1945, before being discharged in the December that year.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Australia
Great Britain
Netherlands
England--Lincolnshire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1945-04
1945-05
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Peter Adams
101 Squadron
aircrew
FIDO
lack of moral fibre
Lancaster
Morse-keyed wireless telegraphy
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
Oxford
promotion
RAF Bottesford
RAF Kinloss
RAF Ludford Magna
RAF Windrush
training
Wellington
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/828/10814/PFreemanR1801.2.jpg
bee4e64fb2e686498699c522ead3d620
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/828/10814/AFreemanR180312.1.mp3
dfcfd17e510a1bd603ffdddd8c3cb840
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
Freeman, Ralph
R Freeman
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Sergeant Ralph Reginald Freeman (1923 - 2019, 1523700 Royal Air Force), his log book, photographs and documents. He trained as a pilot and later flew as a flight engineer.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Susan Abbott and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-03-12
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Freeman, R
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
DK: Let’s try that again. David Kavanagh for the International Bomber Command Centre, interviewing Ralph Freeman at his home on the 12th of March 2018. So, if I just put that there.
RF: Yeah.
DK: So, first of all then, if I was to- What were you doing immediately before the war?
RF: Before the war?
DK: Before the war.
RF: I was working for the BBC on the transmitters, and I was away from home because I was- I had to go into [unclear] which is too far to go to travel, and I was held back for about six months because it was in a so-called reserved occupation, and I often wonder what would have happened if I'd have got in when I volunteered. But as I say they held me back for about six months.
DK: So, can you remember which year this would of been?
RF: Yes, it, it was 19-
DK: Do you want to have a look at that?
RF: I’ve got my [paper rustles] 1942.
DK: 1942. So, what made you then, want to join the air force? Was there any particular reason?
RF: Well, I was- I hadn’t done any flying but I was in the ATC, very keen to fly, and as a- As I was in the ATC for some time and then, I volunteered for air crew. But as I say I was held back about six months before they let me go.
DK: So, what did you want to do as air crew then, were you hoping to be a pilot?
RF: I wanted to be a pilot [laughs] which I did achieve actually.
DK: Right, so can you remember going to the recruitment office?
RF: Yes, I can, I’ve got all the dates here.
DK: Oh yeah, if you want to go through those?
RF: All those, yes. I went to London ACRC on the 1st of March 1943, and I was there just over a fortnight. Then I went to Brighton, and I was in Brighton about three weeks.
DK: What were you doing in Brighton?
RF: Square bashing mostly [chuckles].
DK: What did you think of the square bashing then? Was that-
RF: I didn’t mind it, because we used to do what they called a continuity drill, where you count in numbers all the time and- Making various rules, I thought that was quite good. But, most- Funny really because there’s always somebody who took their own direction [chuckles] but, we finished up quite well on that sort of thing. So that’s what we were doing mainly in Brighton. But then, we were billeted in The Grand Hotel, which was bombed.
DK: Ah ok, yes, yes, remember that.
RF: Yeah, I can remember that very plainly, and then from there I was right to ITW at Newquay and I was there for just over three months.
DK: So, what were you doing there? Can you remember what you were doing at Newquay?
RF: Oh, at Newquay, ITW, Initial Training Wing, mostly classroom lessons. Theory of flight and controls and all that sort of thing.
DK: So, at this point you were still hoping to be a pilot then?
RF: Oh yes, oh yes, I was still hoping to be a pilot, and we finished that and from there I went to Cambridge, just for a fortnight where we had some training on Tiger Moths.
DK: Right.
RF: I wasn’t there very long.
DK: So, would that of been the first time you flew then?
RF: Yes, on the Tiger Moths, yeah.
DK: And what did you think of that then?
RF: I thought it was marvellous [chuckles] yeah.
DK: So, you only sat in the back as a passenger then?
RF: Yes, I didn’t solo then until much later on when I was on a sort of, in-between thing. Of course, I got to solo on a Tiger Moth then, yeah, and then from there- Try to see what I'm doing. Yes, went to Heaton Park as a holding- That was a holding centre for- Before we went abroad for training. I was there about three of four weeks, and then we went to Canada, in October ‘43.
DK: Can you remember much about the trip to Canada?
RF: Oh yes, yeah. It was a troop ship, it was the Mauretania, we went on the Mauretania and came back on the Queen Elizabeth I.
DK: Oh right.
RF: And, it was unescorted because the speed and the zig-zag [unclear] them, there was no startling[?] of runts[?] on that.
DK: So, was there many on board the Mauretania?
RF: Yes, it was quite a lot.
DK: What were conditions like on the ship then?
RF: Not too bad, not too bad. I think I had a lower bunk. I think there was about four bunks and I had a lower one but, the main thing I remember was the fact that you could go and buy sweets and things because they were all rationed at home and we thought that was- You could get chocolate and- Thought marvellous [chuckles] and- So it was quite a pleasant trip that really, but we didn’t do very much in the way of any lessons or training or anything, it was just the journey. Then, we got to- Went to Moncton which was a holding centre in New Brunswick, and from there I went to Manitoba for my EFTS flying, that was the first flying course I was put on, and at the end- That was about three or four months and eventually went to a service flying training school in Manitoba, service, was there about seven months.
DK: And this would’ve all been practical flying experience then?
RF: That’s right, yes, yes, a lot of flying and I got my wings then, at the end of that course.
DK: Can you remember what it was like then, when you first went solo?
RF: Yes, I can, I can. We were doing circuits and bumps and eventually the instructor- We pulled up outside the flight control and he jumped out and said, ‘Right, go and do one by yourself,’ and I just- I’d done plenty of it and I said- I thought it was marvellous by myself and I did these circuits and bumps no bother [chuckles]. So that was- I’ve got a record of it in here.
DK: Can you remember what type of aircraft you were flying?
RF: Yes, it was a Cornell.
DK: Right, yep.
RF: [Paper rustles] My first solo was on the 16th of November 1943, yeah, and we finished that course and then I was- Went to service flying training on Ansons because they- At the end of the EFTS they graded you as to either single engine or multi-engine, and I wanted to get on single engine but wasn’t lucky.
DK: Did you see yourself as a fighter pilot then?
RF: Yeah [laughs] everybody does.
DK: So, when they said multi-engine, was that a bit of a disappointment to you? Or you just-
RF: Not really, not really a disappointment, I didn’t fret over it at all, and then we went to- [unclear], yep. EFTS, flying Ansons, yes, and I came back to this country, I was abroad about just over a year, about thirteen months.
DK: So, what was Canada like then because obviously there was the blackouts and rationing in England, what was it like when you got to Canada?
RF: Oh, marvellous, absolutely marvellous. The people were really- Well, they’d do anything for you. We- If we had a free weekend, or anything like that, they would give us an address to go to and a private house and you’d be looked after and fed and shown around, and they were most hospitable people, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, it was really pleasant.
DK: Was there much to do in your off times there, did you go into the towns and?
RF: Yes, yes, we used to get forty-eight hour passes and that sort of thing, and as I say, we’d be given an address or a couple of addresses to call at and they’d put you up and feed you.
DK: What about the weather though, was it cold?
RF: It was cold, but it was a sort of a dry cold, and we had to have ear protectors because of cold. But it was- As I say, it was dry, so I coped with that alright.
DK: So, you’ve come back then, on the Queen-
RF: On the Queen Elizabeth I, yes, that, that was about six days I think, and-
DK: Can you remember where you docked when you got back?
RF: Yes, when we left, we left Greenock in Scotland.
DK: Right.
RF: And when we came back, I think it was Liverpool. I'm pretty sure it was yeah, and, where are we? Yes, went to Harrogate, to Harrogate at a sort of a holding centre for a couple of weeks, and then I went to Brough in Yorkshire and that’s where they had the Tiger Moths, we had a mess around with those for a bit.
Dk: So, you were flying on the Tiger Moths there, were you?
RF: Yeah, just before- We got our wings in Canada you see.
DK: Yeah.
RF: But I got back and hoping to get onto a squadron, but instead of that they sent me to St Athan in Wales on a flight engineers’ course.
DK: Oh right, so did- Was there a reason why you didn’t end up as a pilot rather, as a flight engineer?
RF: Well, they said that there was a glut of pilots at that time
DK: There was too many?
RF: Too many of them, and we were sent on this- Oh we had a choice, you could either go as glider pilots or we could go to St Athan and train as flight engineers, which is what I did.
DK: Presumably if it was the gliders, it meant you’d be transferred to the army?
RF: Yes, more or less, yes.
DK: Yes, so you wouldn’t of- You didn’t want that then?
RF: I didn’t, I didn’t fancy that, no. Some of our flight went and I never heard what happened to them, but there we are.
DK: So, you got to St Athan then-
RF: Got to St Athan and it was about a three-month course.
DK: And what were you doing there then?
RF: We were training to be flight engineers on Lancasters, and from there were went to conversion units, to be crewed up.
DK: Right, so can you remember which conversion unit you were at?
RF: Yes. Bottesford.
DK: Bottesford.
RF: Nottinghamshire, yeah.
DK: So that’s where would’ve first met your crew then?
RF: That’s right, yes. Apparently, I was crewed up twice, and I can’t quite remember the reason. So, I was there longer than usual.
DK: So, what was the crewing up process, how did you meet your crew?
RF: Well, as far as I remember, it was meeting in a large hall with various flying types you know, like pilots, bomb aimers, and navigators, wireless operators and gunners we, we just sort of got round talking to each other and if we liked him, what they looked like and if they liked us, we said, ‘Well, what about crewing up together,’ you know, so it was quite a short process really.
DK: So, it’s quite hap-hazard then?
RF: Hap-hazard, yeah.
DK: No formality to it?
RF: No, no.
DK: Which is quite unusual for the military, did you think that worked well?
RF: Well, it- Yes, I was quite happy with my crew yes, and I think- Yes, you all fitted together quite well.
DK: And can you remember the name of your pilot then?
RF: Yes, Reynolds- He finished us as a flight lieutenant, but he was a flying officer when I first got to know him.
DK: So, you all got on very well together then as a crew?
RF: Mm-hm.
DK: So, is that when you're training on the Lancasters started then?
RF: That’s right, yes.
DK: So that would’ve been your first time on the Lancasters?
RF: Yes.
DK: So what did you thing of the Lancaster as an aircraft?
RF: Very good, very good, we didn’t have any trouble with it at all.
DK: No vices?
RF: No, not really, no.
DK: So, could you just say a little bit about what the role of a flight engineer was, just for somebody who doesn’t-
RF: Yes, well, mainly to do with the fuel and the various tanks, booster pumps, that sort of thing, making sure that we changed over at the right times, because we used different fuel tanks on the Lancaster, about four or five I think, and looking after hydraulics, that sort of thing, checking. But, the main, main job I think was looking after the fuel, and checking the pumps and-
DK: So, where abouts were you positioned in the aircraft?
RF: On the right-hand side, next to the pilot.
DK: Right.
RF: And had a blank row, which was on my right for the fuel. We used to keep checks on the fuel and if the tanks, the tank you were using was getting low, you used to start the booster pumps on the other, next tank and swap over.
DK: Did you help with the take off at all, or was that down to the pilot?
RF: Yes, in as much as the throttle, the throttles and looked after the undercarriage and that sort of thing
DK: Right.
RF: And then, [unclear]. Then, controlling the throttles all the time, synchronising the engines, and maintaining the shooting speed or climbing, whatever was needed.
DK: So, so you had to work very closely with the pilot?
RF: Oh yes, very closely.
DK: Did you have to kind of second guess once you got to know each other?
RF: Oh yes, yes, we were very- Quite close, yeah, got on very well with each other.
DK: So after the heavy conversion unit then, you’re now fully trained crew-
RF: That’s right.
DK: Where did you go then?
RF: We went to 101 Squadron, although it was at Bottesford, that’s right. Yes, went to 101 Squadron at Ludford Magna, they called it Mudford Lagna because it was all muddy.
DK: So I've heard [chuckles].
RF: And we were there for about three months or so and then they moved to Binbrook which was more or less a permanent base which was much better.
DK: With the same squadron?
RF: With the same squadron, yes, and I went there on the 10th of August ‘45. I didn’t actually do any service- Any operational flying because I was bit too late coming in you see. By the time I was- Got onto the squadron it was the 6th of July 1945, just after the end of the war.
DK: Right.
RF: So, I was very lucky I suppose in that respect.
DK: So, your crew never did any operations then?
RF: No, no.
DK: What was Ludford Magna like then, ‘cause it’s in the middle of nowhere isn’t it?
RF: More or less, yeah. Yes, it was, it was muddy there’s no doubt about it [chuckles].
DK: Did that affect flying at all as you landed?
RF: Not- No, not really, no, it- I, I had purchased a motorcycle in those days and I stored it in a farmer’s barn nearby and this allowed me to get home if we had any weekends and that sort of thing.
DK: So, did you and your crew socialise together then?
RF: We did yes, quite a bit.
DK: So what did you used to do?
RF: Go down the pub and drink [laughs]. The skipper, he had a motorbike at that time before I got mine, and believe it or not, it will take seven people [chuckles] on the way back [emphasis] from the pub [laughs].
DK: Probably wouldn’t want to do that now?
Other: No [laughs].
RF: Yes.
DK: Was there anything- Were you ever told anything about 101 Squadron, because they were doing some special duties there? Were you ever-
RF: Yes, we- Well as I say, by the time we got there, the war had finished. We did a lot of cross-country flights and we did trips to Italy and fetch back some Middle East people who had been in the army there.
DK: Yeah, Operation Dodge.
RF: Is that what they called it?
DK: Yeah.
RF: Yeah, I don’t-
DK: 101 Squadron though, they had some special equipment on-
RF: They did, yes that’s right.
DK: Did you ever see any of that at all, or was it quite sort of secret?
RF: Well, I, I did yes but it was mainly operated by the wireless operator so I didn’t have much to do with it so I didn’t know very much about it really.
DK: So, you weren’t really told then about the specialty [unclear]
RF: No, as I say, the war was over and, I suppose there wasn’t any need for us to know about it.
DK: So, you’ve done the operation- Not the operation, you’ve done the flights to Italy to pick-
RF: Yes, we did, quite a few flights to Italy and one to Berlin.
DK: Oh right.
RF: And brought back- I think we used to fetch back about nineteen soldiers at a time, sitting on the floor.
DK: What sort of condition were they in, presumably they hadn’t been home for a few years?
RF: Oh, they were over the moon, you know, they didn’t care about where they sat, and they all wanted to see the white cliffs, so we let them come up-
DK: Up to the cockpit?
RF: Yeah.
DK: You say you did one trip to Berlin-
RF: One trip to Berlin.
DK: You actually landed in Berlin then?
RF: Yes.
DK: Did you get a chance to look round Berlin at all?
RF: Yes, we did, yes. We were there a day or a couple of days, and I went to Berlin and saw the wall, and-
DK: Presumably it was all ruined, the city then?
RF: I don’t actually remember seeing much of ruins at all. It looked to be a thriving city and, I didn’t see much in the way of damage at all.
DK: So, was there suggestions then that you might be going out to the Far East?
RF: Yes, there was, yes but the atomic bomb kettled all that you see.
DK: Right was that kind of a blessing in disguise then?
RF: Well, depends what side you’re on doesn’t it? [chuckles]
DK: So, had you had any training to go out in the Far East at all?
RF: No, we hadn’t had any, any training but I’m sure that was where we would’ve finished up, if it hadn’t been for that, and I-
DK: So, you finished the war at Binbrook then?
RF: That’s right, yes, and after that they sent me to a maintenance unit at Stoke Heath, 24 MU, and put me in charge of a gang of about five AC2’s and our job was to break up aircraft. The aircraft was supplied in very large pieces, and we- It was our job to get them broken down so they would fit on garbage trucks to be taken for scrap, which was- I didn’t like that job at all.
DK: Do you know what sort of aircrafts were being scrapped?
RF: They were American aircraft, that’s about all I can tell you.
Other: That’s alright then.
RF: But what sort of aircraft they were I don’t know, and I finished my service there and I came out on the 6th of December 1946.
DK: So, what was your career post war then?
RF: Oh, as I say, I was working for the BBC before I went in, on transmitters, and when I came back, I applied again for my job which I got, but they sent my onto a small transmitter in Wrexham, a local transmitter just for the area, in a couple of sheds it was [chuckles] and I didn’t enjoy that very much, and I wanted to get back home into the North East, but I couldn’t get back to the North East but they transferred me to a shortwave station in Skelton in Cumbria and that’s the nearest I got to home.
DK: So, this is still with the BBC then is it?
RF: Still with the BBC yes, but I could see no chance of getting back home so I chucked that job, and I went into radio servicing with a local TV, radio and TV shop.
DK: So maybe they should’ve had you as a wireless operator then?
RF: Well, that’s what I was frightened of [chuckles].
DK: Oh, you didn’t want to do that? So, all these years later, how do you look back on your time in the RAF?
RF: I, I look back on it as a very good time, I thoroughly enjoyed it, mainly because of the flying I suppose.
DK: And did you stay in touch with your crew at all?
RF: Pardon?
DK: Did you stay in touch with-
RF: I stayed in touch with the skipper, yeah, Bob Reynolds.
DK: Bob, Bob Reynolds?
RF: Mm, until about a year or so ago and then we- I don’t know what happened but we just sort of let it tail off, so I don’t really know if he’s still alive or what.
DK: Ok, well that’s, that’s marvellous, I think we better have a break there, but I think if you’re happy with that I’ll turn the recorder off
RF: Oh good.
DK: But, thanks very much for that.
RF: At- I remember telling- Came in and pulled up over the cliffs, and shot straight up passed this, while we were doing-
DK: Oh right, so you were parading on a promenade?
RF: In front, yes on the prom, on the road in front of The Grand Hotel, and he was flying so low that he had to climb very steeply to get some altitude, so he wasn’t able to fire us or anything because guns were pointing the wrong way you see[chuckles].
DK: So, it was German Focke-Wulf?
RF: It was a, yeah, 190.
DK: Right, so how did- What did- Did you all scatter or were you all-
RF: Well, it was over so quicky, we didn’t do anything [chuckles]. Because the [unclear] down Binbrook and we went and they had the FIDO petrol things.
DK: At Woodbridge?
RF: Yes.
DK: What was it like [unclear] at Woodbridge with the FIDO?
RF: They had petrol pipes each side of the runway which they lighted, and it cleared the fog and when you came in for the landing, you felt the lifts straight away from the heat from the petrol.
DK: Oh right, was that quite frightening, cause you’re landing in flames in effect?
RF: Yeah, yes, bit dodgy.
DK: Bit dodgy.
RF: [Laughs]
DK: So you were actually still flying Lancasters into 1946 then?
RF: Yes.
DK: And it’s got here some SABS bombing, S-A-B-S?
RF: Oh yes, that was-
DK: Can you recall what SABS bombing was?
RF: Oh, S-A-B-S, um.
DK: I think it was a specific type of bomb site wasn’t it?
RF: I’m not sure, I can’t really remember. I know it was a special range we flew to, to drop these bombs but they were only little things. I forget what the S-A-B-S stands for [unclear] that’s right.
DK: Right, the bombing range?
RF: Yeah [pause] 1946.
DK: So, the last flight was, April the 7th 1946?
RF: Yes.
DK: Ok then, we’ll put that-
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Ralph Freeman
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
David Kavanagh
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-03-12
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AFreemanR180312, PFreemanR1801
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:33:05 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Canada
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
Manitoba--Winnipeg
Wales--Glamorgan
Manitoba
Description
An account of the resource
Ralph Freeman volunteered for the RAF in 1942. He began initial training in March 1943 and was posted to Manitoba in October, where he qualified as a pilot after training on Cornells and Ansons. Upon returning to Great Britain, Freeman was remustered and completed flight engineer training on Lancasters at RAF St Athan, before forming a crew at RAF Bottesford. The crew joined 101 Squadron at RAF Ludford Magna on the 6th July 1945, but moved to RAF Binbrook in August, where they undertook flights to Italy under Operation Dodge. For his final posting, he completed maintenance at RAF Stoke Heath and left the RAF in December 1946.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Tilly Foster
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1943
1945
1946
101 Squadron
aircrew
Anson
Cornell
FIDO
flight engineer
Lancaster
Operation Dodge (1945)
pilot
RAF Binbrook
RAF Bottesford
RAF Ludford Magna
RAF St Athan
Tiger Moth
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/645/8915/PStevensonPD1601.1.jpg
6af72eacae79a4d18db921853d4c668d
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/645/8915/AStevensonP160817.2.mp3
6327e4703cdd17ca26c2141fdf7b1415
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
Stevenson, Peter
Peter Desmond Stevenson
P D Stevenson
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Stevenson, PD
Description
An account of the resource
Two items. An oral history interview with Peter Stevenson (b. 1923) and his memoir. He grew up in Lincolnshire and while he was working towards an engineering apprenticeship he rose through the ranks to become a Warrant Officer in the Air Training Corps.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Peter Stevenson and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-08-17
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
HD: This is Helen Durham on the 17th of August 2016. Here for the International Bomber Command Centre and I’m interviewing Mr Peter Stevenson who was part of ground crew during the years of Bomber Command. Peter -
PDS: Ok.
HD: Thank you ever so much for allowing us to come and interview. I wonder could you just start off by telling me what sort of thing you did before the war? How you started?
PDS: Well the thing I want to stress right from the very beginning is that I was among the people who say, people say, they also served who only stood and waited. I grew up in Grantham at a time when Grantham was very much an RAF town. There were, in addition to the 21 Training Group based on RAF Spitalgate there was also, later on, number 5 Group headquarters down at St Vincent’s and the majority of my school friends were sons of serving officers. The Grantham School collected a fair number of people including, rather surprisingly people whose fathers were serving at Cranwell as well as Grantham. Now, Grantham was one of the three stations that survived the downsizing after the First World War. You’ve got Cranwell of course as the, as the RAF college but in addition to that there were two squad, two stations RAF Digby and RAF Spitalgate. There are various ways of spelling that. It’s either Spittle or alternatively S P I T A L when people were feeling a bit more respectable towards it. Now, the three stations were of course very much in competition with each other and we got to know quite a lot of the people there. As I say my two friends were always up there and we learned an awful lot about the, what was going on at that time. This was of course a time when the youth of Britain was very, very much encouraged to become air minded and one of the things that emerged just after the First World War was an organisation called The Air League of the British Empire. Now, this not only promoted air mindedness in youth and the general population but it also sponsored things like RAF open days at the various stations and they also did a lot to sponsor the prestige activities which were going on at that time. These were either the height records, the speed records or the distance records or whatever. Now, in Lincolnshire of course we went very much in the distance records and I can remember quite a lot of the activities where aircraft were produced specifically for gaining the world distance records and the RAF were justifying, if you like, the tax payers money by spending a lot of time making Britain first in whichever activity it happened to be. Now, the Air League of the British Empire around about 1935 was when they began to realise that war was more or less inevitable. They started a junior section which I joined and received all the information what was going on. Then, which was rather significant, my King’s School at Grantham, it had an OTC. Now in those days OTC was a little bit elite. It meant officer’s training school er Officer’s Training School and so the OTC, it tended to produce or promote leadership and right from the very beginning even when you were twelve years old whenever you learned anything the first thing you had to do was to learn how to teach that. So inevitably by the time you were about fifteen or sixteen you became fairly confident at facing up to all sorts of people. This helped very much because my father, who was sales director of the big Ford dealers in the, in the Lincolnshire area had a lot of contacts. One of the most significant was Sir Arthur Longmore. Now, Sir Arthur Longmore, a bit of a controversial figure because he was number three commandant at Cranwell around about 1923/24 time. He went to become the AOC of the Middle East and when it was a case of finding a scapegoat for the loss of Greece and the Balkans during the, the Nazi invasion down there in the early years of the war when a head had to fall they decided that Sir Arthur had to be the person who got the chop. He came back to Grantham but took a significant part in the formation of the Grantham squadron of the Air Defence Cadet Corps so we got to know him pretty well and through him we gained entry or entrée if you like in to places like the 5 Group headquarters and Spitalgate and so on. Now, one of the other things about this OTC, Officer’s Training Corps was the fact they trained you up to what was called the Certificate A Standard which was the first, if you like it was the 11+ for getting in to Sandhurst. Now, around about 1935 time the RAF rather objected to the war department in general that here were the, here was the army making sure that the majority of the likely lads who were coming up were well injected with khaki in to their blood and they wanted a slice. So what happened was formed an organisation which you can still find on the internet, if you look it up, which was called the Public Schools Air Cadet Wing. Now, this was a fairly, again a fairly elite organisation. There were only about two hundred and fifty of us and they were composed of people who were in the university air squadrons and also a certain number of selected grammar schools across the country. We were allocated eight places on this and of course there was the inevitable selection board to which one appeared in your best and you were interviewed. The other seven went in, all very fit and looking air crew right away and you could tell by the look on their face they were accepted. Then I walked in complete with glasses so there was dead silence, and they said, ‘This is for air crew.’ So I said, ‘Excuse me gentleman but,’ I said, ‘We are now entering a very technical stage of the war. You have accepted seven air crew. You need somebody to keep them in the air.’ I think the sheer effrontery of this caused them to stop dead. They sort of looked at each other, as a grin all over their faces. ‘Alright you’re in.’ Well it was absolutely marvellous because the RAF wherever there was a local, you know they were near to Oundle and some of these other places, there were certainly RAF stations nearby but of course at Grantham we were lucky because we’d got Spitalgate at the top of the hill. What they spent on us I do not know but it must have been by today’s standards millions. They took us everywhere. They opened the stations, we went in, we flew with them, we went with exercises. Although we were khaki clad we were treated as being part of the RAF right from the beginning even though we were only fifteen, sixteen and the net result was of course that the majority of us were absolutely dead set for going into the RAF and one thing that I have to mention about the, the Public Schools Air Cadet Wing was the wonderful camp that they had in July 1939 just before the thing started where we went down to this Selsey Bill which was next door to RAF Tangmere and they took us everywhere. They showed us everything from Bomber Command to Fighter Command to Coastal Command to the Fleet Air Arm and so on and this really was an absolutely marvellous occasion and I can still remember now the final dinner in this huge mess tent that we went in to. We were told to appear in best uniforms and so on. When we were, we moved in our jaws dropped because this thing, this, after being in our mess tent for the week this thing had been converted into an officer’s mess and it was white linen and RAF personnel doing the serving and we stood and then the top brass came in and it really was. There was the head of Bomber Command, there was the head of Fighter Command, there was the head of Coastal Command, Fleet Air Arm and the top table was resplendent including one civilian who we knew by sight and as soon as we took one look at him we sort of looked at each other, ‘Hello. What’s all this about?’ and this was a bloke called Duff Cooper. Now Duff Cooper was one of Churchill’s war mongers, if you like and he was, he had for years been absolutely dead set against the disarmament and so on and he was very largely responsible for the political drive behind making sure that the RAF was equipped as far as possible with new breeds of fighters and so on and of course at that time with, shall we say, the Chamberlain mentality about there was this hope that if we only ignored him far enough, long enough he would probably go away which of course he didn’t and Duff Cooper stood up and said, ‘Right gentleman,’ he said, ‘Within one month we shall be at war.’ There was a sort of, ‘Ahhh,’ like that but he was dead right and so what happened was that I was in this Public Schools Air Cadet Wing. Now, in the meantime sir Arthur Longmore with his friends up in the league of the Air League of the British Empire had caused the formation of the Grantham squadron of the air training er the Air Defence Cadet Corps. When they were looking round for a commanding officer, let me go back a fraction. I said I wanted to go there. My father put his foot down. He said, ‘Look. You’re coming up for your matric examinations, you’re already in the OTC. You’re already in the Public Schools Air Cadet Wing you have not any time for any further organisation.’ So I said, ‘I still want to go.’ He said, ‘Alright, you can go under one condition. That I come with you just to make sure you don’t commit yourself.’ ‘Ok.’ So we turn up and we were addressed by Chamier who was the head of the Air Defence Cadet Corps at that time and all the various people including Sir Arthur Longmore and it came a question. Yes, the mayor of Grantham agreed that the council would, would submit a budget for the, because it was all privately run at that time, the RAF hadn’t actually taken it over and so yes it was agreed that we would form a squadron of the Air Defence Cadet Corps. Then the next question was who was the, to be the commanding officer. Now, my father, in the First World War, he got a blighty one in 1915. When he came back he spent most of the war up at the Ripon Reserve Training Centre which was one of the biggest training organisations for people for the First World War and he eventually ended up as aide de camp to the commanding officer up there so he had quite a lot of administrative experience if you like and so what happened was when it came to the question of the, of the commanding officer Sir Arthur Longmore just pointed straight at my father and said, ‘There is your commanding officer,’ you see. My father’s jaw dropped and there was a certain amount of hear hearing going on and of course we walked out with my father as the new commanding officer of the Grantham squadron of the of the Air Defence Cadet Corps and me not allowed to join. Now, of course when war was declared I was sixteen. There was a possibility that I might go onto the sixth form but things were so unstable at that time that in the majority of cases unless you were, what shall we say, top flight 1-1 students obviously destined for university the general tendency was look we’re in it we might just as well sort of adopt a career strategy and so what happened was I left school, started an engineering apprenticeship which was to last five years as it worked out but of course I never expected to finish that because at the age of eighteen I would be called up anyway to go in to it. At the same time you had to go to technical college and so on to get your, your technical qualifications behind that. By the time I was eighteen I had passed the point of no return. In other words having reached that level I went before various selection boards who said you must stay out to get the necessary Institute of Mechanical Engineers qualifications to go straight in and I was accepted provisionally for a commission in the technical branch of the RAF. So I was sort of hell bent for that particular line expecting to go into the RAF around about ‘43/44 time when I qualified but in the meantime of course we had to be in part of of pre-service organisation. In my case of course it was the Air Defence Cadet Corps and then from 1941 this became the Air Training Corps and because my father was very, very strict about these things whenever we got into uniform we were, he would not allow us to leave the house together. We always had to go separately. We went off to the headquarters and I saluted him very carefully whenever I came, came across him because of course I was saluting the King’s Commission in those days and he said straightway to all the flight commanders, he said, ‘Look. With his experience he probably knows a damned sight more about the RAF and these things than, than you do, but,’ he said, ‘I am not actually accepting any recommendations of promotion until you’re all quite satisfied that he is worthy of promotion. I am not going to have any favouritism in my squadron.’ So I ended up going into, going into the, in to the Air Defence Cadet Corps as a humble cadet and during the war, because I was, if you like, one of the few only cadets who actually stayed in the Air Training Corps for the whole of the war period I rose up from being cadet, corporal, sergeant, flight sergeant and eventually became the second warrant officer for the Grantham squadron and I have still my warrant over in a file here which could be done to prove this. Now, during this time of course we went to an awful lot of specialist courses at various places down at places like Cardington and, and so on and it was also interesting because we had the first warrant officer’s course at Cardington and there were seventeen, eighteen of us I think, all ATC warrant officers and I was in that. That was the first, the first course there. Now, during the war, of course we were essentially civilians during the daytime but in addition to that and apart from the fact that we were probably doing either a whole day’s release or three nights at night school or technical college then of course we had also to be in pre-service training which I was already in as being in the ATC. First of all we were attached to RAF, RAF Spitalgate, Grantham which of course was a training station. By that time it was 12 PAFU Pilot Advanced Flying Training Unit which were training night fighter pilots. But of course as things built up we had a separate wing down at, separate flight down at Colsterworth and it was agreed that we would leave Spitalgate as being the nearest station to the Colsterworth flight and then we would, we ourselves be attached to Bomber Command stations so our first station of contact was RAF Bottesford which was the home of 207 squadron. 207 squadron was noted as being the first squadron to receive, when it was formed or reformed ‘cause 207 that number two hundred indicates that it was originally a Royal Naval Air Service station or squadron in the First World War so 207 was reformed at Cranwell and immediately came down to Bottesford which had only just recently been commissioned as a station and they were the first squadron to receive these Avro Manchesters. Well, of course, anybody who knows anything about the Manchester, if you say, ‘I flew in a Manchester,’ they’d look at you as much as to say, ‘Oh how did you escape,’ [laughs] because of course it was a wonderful aircraft so far as an air frame was concerned but it had these two huge horrible Vulture engines which were virtually a couple of V, V12 engines, one on top of the other which was put in to service before it was properly trained, properly tested. The net result was that these engines would suddenly fail and if it failed on one engine that was it and it came, it would come in and crash and that would be the end of it. Anyway, it was interesting at Bottesford because then it was just at the point when the RAF were beginning to get some very interesting personnel there. There was a certain Joe McCarthy who was at Bottesford at the time and he was already a bit of a name for himself because if there was one thing that Joe liked was low flying and as soon as the blitzes that were being planned for the Tirpitz and the Gneisenau and the other, the other targets this was before, if you like, the RAF had settled down in to, in to an area bombing technique. This was still at the period when there were specific targets. Now, when McCarthy decided that low flying was needed he often used to go down the fens where he could fly along and go around the trees rather than over them and it was quite normal for us to be going along at something in the region of a hundred and fifty, a hundred and eighty miles an hour about fifty feet above the ground which was quite exciting and I can remember one particular time when we were buzzing across and I was, as navigation instructor for the squadron had got a group of ATC cadets in various places and I was talking to them through the intercom. I’d got a couple of them with me up in the top turret of this, of this Lancaster and there was a couple down at the back end and others sort of in various disposal because they never worried about, I mean we never bothered about parachutes because, you know, we never got high enough to use them [laughs] and I can remember panning along and of course the usual thing we did was we kept because we knew the countryside fairly well we would sort of be brash enough to say, ‘Upper gunner to captain.’ ‘Yeah, go ahead’ captain er ‘go ahead gunner.’ ‘HT cables five miles ahead.’ ‘Thank you.’ Not a change in height. Not a change in speed. ‘Top gunner. One mile ahead.’ ‘Thank you.’ Not a change in speed. Not a change in height. And one of the others would say, ‘HT cables in sight.’ ‘Thank you.’ Not a change. Then all of a sudden an American voice said, ‘Alright boys. Shall we go over them or shall we go under them?’ And of course there was absolute dead silence and he said, ‘I take it that means under them,’ and we did [laughs] which was rather exciting. And of course another thing he used to love to do on a Sunday morning when “Dad’s Army” was being marched along with Mainwaring in front one thing about a Lancaster which you don’t really get these days is if you could get a Lancaster down to about fifty feet no sound comes forward. The net result is that you can be going along and he suddenly would go like this and we got ourselves over a typical fenland road with ditches each side of it and there in front was “Dad’s Army” marching along, goes pfffft straight over the top of them. Of course it was very interesting because when you turned around the only person who was still on the road was Captain Mainwaring. All the rest, all the rest of them [laughs]. Oh they were great days. Anyway, the, as I say the Bottesford period was a period when the RAF was still experimenting with low level flight, low level flying, specific targets and so on. What happened was that the amount of damage that was being done because at that time Bottesford was still a grass airfield that they came to the conclusion that the airfield, as a grass airfield was just about worn out. They just couldn’t keep the grass together especially in the winter time and they were definitely getting worried that they would not get airborne with their, with their bomb loads on so they decided to close Bottesford. 207 was first of all sent off to RAF Langar and then eventually it went up to RAF Spilsby and today if you go up you will find that the 207 squadron veterans and their archive and everything are all held up at the Spilsby airfield. Well, Spilsby, but East Kirkby, in the, in the headquarters there so what happened was that we hadn’t got a, we hadn’t got a, an attachment so I think my father managed to twist some arms up at 5 Group headquarters and the next thing is we were attached to 106 squadron at Syerston. Now, Syerston was perhaps the most westerly of the 5 Group airfields and by that time the RAF, the Bomber Command 5 Group in particular had settled down to grim warfare. No more specialist targets. No more panacea targets as Harris used to call them. No. This was, this was Harris warfare in full and it was an entirely different operation. Now, we had got used to, at Bottesford we’d got used to the fact that we would be working on a planes helping to clear up, loading incendiaries and all that sort of thing and we had sort of reached the point where we were in spite of that fact that we were only teenagers basically we were accepting the fact that the bloke we were talking to yesterday afternoon was no longer there and we also, I mean I used to find for example that as a leading NCO I used to bring my, ‘cause they used to collect us from, from Grantham those of us that could get away on a Saturday morning working five day week because the employers realised that we were, that our, what we were doing was valuable they would let us go off. We would be collected, taken to an RAF station. Could be Bottesford, could be Syerston or wherever. As soon as we entered there we were immediately shunted off to the security section and the security officer would say, ‘No communication with the outside whatsoever. Big op tonight. We mustn’t let any loose talk,’ and so we would be fixed in the station or we would go and we’d load incendiaries and we would generally go, and of course the next morning when the aircraft came back then I would collect from our nissen hut, we had a specific nissen hut there, I would collect my, because we marched everywhere. Nowadays, they just walk but we marched everywhere and I would be intercepted by one of the flight sergeants, RAF flight sergeants who said, ‘Keep away from that one. We haven’t had the chance to hose it out yet.’ And, oh yes there were some because they always the tail end gunner out and some of those tail end gunners oh I tell you, it was mess, it really was. So we grew up very rapidly. When we got to Syerston we did find that the RAF frame of mind if you like had changed over from this Harris expression panacea targets to total obliteration and it was grim and as I say we grew up very quickly. So we carried on and you could more or less say that three weekends out of four we were at one station or the another whether it was Bottesford or whether it was Syerston and so on. Well, I dropped a name, Joe McCarthy and quite a lot of the people who were with him of course were head hunted by you know who. By the time we got to Syerston who was the commanding officer there? You know who. Now people are divided. There’s ten percent of the RAF thought that Guy was absolutely marvellous and the other ten percent were not at all sure because -
HD: So he was the commanding officer at -
PDS: Oh Guy Gibson. Yes.
HD: Guy Gibson.
PDS: He was, he was a bighead and he had all sorts of funny ideas because he’d been an ex between wars officer where, at a time social standing was very very important and it was only towards the end of the war would Guy Gibson allow himself to be photographed with his sergeant air crew. Oh no. No. He would separate them out.
HD: So he was quite separate.
PDS: He would only appear in a photograph. If you look at Guy -
HD: Yeah.
PDS: In some of the early periods of the war you don’t see an NCO anywhere there. All commissioned. Guy did not approve of the ATC. He thought we were just a boys club and want keeping clear of the real war so we in general kept clear of him and but for all that the Syerston period was an important period I think for the majority of the young men who went into the RAF from the Grantham squadron and a lot of them sort of ended the war feeling that there but by the grace of God so on and I think what happens is you do tend to find as happens in all branches of all services that survivors begin to get a bit of a guilt complex. Why was I allowed to survive? And the fact that when I eventually got the necessary qualifications for going into the RAF they said well to be perfectly honest we’re so near the end of the war and the vast reconstruction that we’re going to have to do not only in this country but of course particularly in Europe and elsewhere. In view of the fact that I was working on construction machinery and I was, by that time a section leader and design draughtsman and I was producing equipment which gave me no end of trouble actually because I can start looking up on the internet and there is some enthusiast in New Zealand or Australia, particularly Australia who is keeping one of my graders going as being an historical piece and I’m going, ‘No. That was mine. I designed that.’
HD: So what sort of things did you design then?
PDS: Pardon?
HD: What sort of things did you design?
PDS: Well it started off on big dump trucks. You know -
HD: Right.
PDS: That would receive over cast material in coal mines and also in the big quarries and specific mines for specific materials, iron ore and that sort of thing but in addition to that because the the government over here was concerned at the amount of dollars that we were having to spend in buying equipment from the United States which they felt quite rightly that we could produce over here we were, the whole industry was asked to team up with American companies to produce American equipment under licence in this country and by that time I was, as I say a design section leader and I was immediately sent off with a colleague from the welding shops and a colleague from machine shops over to the States to get all the necessary information for getting these graders into production in Grantham which brought me again into contact with airfield construction equipment but coming back quite a bit because I’d already been in that when they said eventually, ‘Well sorry but we’ve ceased recruitment into the technical branch of the RAF but what we can offer you is a commission in the airfield construction service,’ so I thought well I suppose that’s as good as anything you see but even that folded up. They said, ‘Oh no we’ve got enough,’ so eventually about 1945 or the spring of 1945 before either VE or VJ I was more or less sort of hived off to win the peace and so my contact with the RAF more or less ceased at that point. Well, I wasn’t all that pleased. I thought well having spent the whole war doing everything I possibly could to train people up for the RAF through the Air Training Corps and so on and doing so much in contact with the RAF that suddenly to find that here were mere civilian bureaucrats turning around and saying well yeah ok sorry and all that but – so to be perfectly honest around about the spring of 1945 I made rude gestures towards the RAF. I thought right, blow them. And so for fifteen, for a period of about fifteen years I more or less ignored the RAF. I said more or less because by that time my wife and I had got, I’d met up with my wife and we’d got married. We were living on the far side of Grantham and every day when I came into the Aveling Barford company that I worked for I had to go through what was left of RAF Spitalgate and it rather peeved me because that became the headquarters of the RAF, of the ATC gliding set up and you could see all this activity going on and oh blow this for a game and I rather ignored it. But around about, I think it was about 1975 I suddenly got the urge again because during the war, long before you could get plastic kits of aircraft I always used to get the air crew members of the, of the Grantham squadron. I would give them a drawing and some photographs of a specific aircraft and say, ‘Right. Now here’s some bits of balsa. Try and make a model as closely as you could. Here we are. Here are some craft knives and so on and do this,’ because the great thing about it was by the time you’d converted this into a model however rough and inaccurate it would be the fact was that the bloke had reached the point when he could recognise that particular aircraft from any angle and it proved it because eventually we had a wonderful game that we used to do. We got one of these Aldis projector that projected slides and we fitted it up with a camera lens.
HD: Yes.
PDS: Not the lens. The shutter at the front so that we could put a picture in the thing, just click it and it would be on the screen for five seconds.
HD: Right. Yes.
PDS: Right. What was that? Oh that was an ME109. No it isn’t. It’s a Hurricane. Why isn’t it a Hurricane? Because so and so radiators and so on and so forth you see. Then we got it down to one second.
HD: Goodness me.
PDS: And eventually we got it down to the point when these could be recognised at two hundred and fiftieth of a second. It just went like that.
HD: Yes.
PDS: But the mere stick of the aircraft ‘cause I said straight away. That may be the saving of your life. If you can recognise that aircraft as being friend or foe. Your life might still be on. So it was interesting to make aircraft models long before there were kits and everything so that everybody knew the shape of these things and I remember I got, I got into a row up at Spitalgate because one of the instructors up there was doing a lecture and he’d got a whole lot of these slides and he put a slide in, released it, shut it immediately, he said, ‘You’re not supposed to see that.’ So I said, ‘I know you’re not.’ He said, ‘What is it?’ He said. This is the latest, they called it the Typhoon at the time.
HD: It is.
PDS: Well, he said, ‘You’re not supposed to know about that.’ Well [laughs]
HD: So what -
PDS: So the week after I gave him a model of it just from that -
HD: Oh really.
PDS: On that twenty fifth of a second. He took one look at this, he said , ‘Right. I’m confiscating that.’
HD: So what aircraft did you work on during your time?
PDS: Well these were mainly, it started off at, it started off at Grantham.
HD: Yes.
PDS: Now Grantham initially started with biplanes. Hawker Hinds and that sort of thing because at that time during the war the RAF was still mainly army cooperation. We worked on Avro Ansons which of course was notable because the Avro Anson was the first twin engine monoplane that the RAF had. The first one with a, with an enclosed gun turret, retractable undercarriage and so on. Also there were the RAF’s other trainer which was the Airspeed Oxford always known as the Ox Box because it was completely wooden apart from the engines and the other metal bits around it and then as we came over to, to Bottesford of course it was Manchesters and then Lancasters so we got to know those pretty well and I could still go inside the, I could go over to East Kirkby and they could put me blindfolded into the back of a Lancaster and I could walk down, down the Lancaster purely by feel and say right this is a giro compass just as you’re getting through the door. Yes. Now careful this is the point when you’ve got to get over, and so on and we got to know those pretty well. This was another thing of course that they used to do and even as cadets we would go on to a Lancaster which wasn’t doing anything in particular, you would be blindfold and that cadet had to spend ten minutes or a quarter of an hour completely blindfolded inside the Lancaster until he knew exactly where everything was because of course in the pitch dark when the aircraft was at all sorts of different angles you had to recognise where the, what the aircraft was by, by shape or smell because the Lancaster always had a distinctive smell.
HD: Did it?
PDS: When you poke your nose in to the back of the Just Jane or the one at, at oh Coningsby.
HD: Coningsby, yes.
PDS: There’s this distinctive smell. What it is missing of course was the smell which immediately hits you in an old well-worn Lancaster as you came through the door at the back was the fact during certain hair raising manoeuvres the elsan just in front of the spar of the tail plane would inevitably come adrift and it was always an ATC’s job to go and clean out the back of the - [laughs] So we got to know the smell of the Lancaster as well as the feel of it.
HD: The Lancaster. Yes. Yes
PDS: And then of course the blow fell because although we were being taken to Syerston eventually there was a complete reshuffle. They decided that A 5 Group should move further north and so the headquarters of the 5 Group moved up from Grantham up to Bawtrey, the various 5 Group squadrons moved further north so there was not only number 3 Group which was partly Lincolnshire, partly South Yorkshire but also 5 Group up there. Then of course in came in the magic air force. Have you ever, have you ever seen that film “The Magic Army,”?
HD: No. I haven’t.
PDS: This was Leslie Thomas’ skit of the arrival of the first American troops over in to this country and it’s an absolute howler. If you ever get a chance of seeing it you must see it.
HD: Yes.
PDS: It was the impact of what happened when -
HD: The Americans -
PDS: A complete American air force unit which was, because of course they were very heavily segregated in those days and here was this sleepy little south of England town which was suddenly invaded by a whole lot of gum chewing, be-bopping, American negro servicemen who took the local people by surprise.
HD: So what time of, during the war did they come? When was this?
PDS: Oh in ‘43. It was about -
HD: 1943. Yes.
PDS: 1943 when they came.
HD: Yes.
PDS: I mean they had been operating in East Anglia from, sort of ‘42 onwards because we moved out so that the main RAF bomber concentration was definitely Lincolnshire and Yorkshire and so the Americans they came in to the south of that. Then of course it was a question of the invasion and the net result was that Grantham 5 Group headquarters which as I said moved forward, moved up to Bawtry became, became the headquarters of the US Army Air Force 9th Troop Carrying Command and so in to all the stations the ex-bomber stations to the north of Grantham, or to the north east of Grantham became American. The previous one at Syerston became an Operational Training Unit. It was felt that they needed to have Operational Training Units a bit nearer to the, to the action. At the same time they wanted to move the RAF in to the new stations which were being formed in the east of Lincolnshire. Then of course in came the Americans and they had their headquarters in, at Fulbeck, at Fulbeck Hall. It became the headquarters of the American 9th Troop Carrying Command and Fulbeck airfield became the headquarter airfield to which we were attached. Now, that of course was a complete culture change because having been used to the RAF where everything was strictly security and so on to sort of to wander on to one of these airfields. We were collected in the morning, when we got on we were dumped outside. They said, ‘Alright boys, you know where the headquarters are. Make your way there.’ And so we would wander off and oh and, ‘It’s coffee break boys. Go down and, go down to the break,’ so we would go down and enjoy, I mean, after years of the old Camp chicory coffee suddenly being confronted because the Americans brought everything in. Do you know they even brought dustbins in from the States? Oh no they brought everything from toilet rolls to dustbins. I mean can you imagine it during the war when all the pressure on the, on the convoys in the Atlantic that they were bringing in toilet papers and dustbins over. Anyway, of course it was a cultural shock and I’ve written quite a bit about it. Now, what I think I would like to do if, I want to do another copy of this sometime. If you look at this you will see that this is what I call Cadet 1935 to 1945. Now, this starts off with me. I catch the air bug in the 1920s which was, if you like, the first chapter. Then here’s me in the King’s School defence sorry King’s School Grantham Officer’s Training Corps. Then a bit about the Public School’s Air Cadet Wing and particularly the camp at Selsey Bill there. Then there was the formation of the Grantham Air Defence Cadet Corps squadron in 1935. Just for a brief period I became an ARP messenger while I was still at school because my father would not allow me to join the Air Defence Cadet Corps until I was officially left school but in view of the fact the school wasn’t open that was my first job as ARP messenger. Then I joined the Air Defence Cadet Corps which went ‘39 to ‘40. Then this was attachments to RAF Bottesford. The attachment to RAF Syerston. I usually do this because I’ve done a lot of talking to Women’s Institutes and so on and of course until well after the war the ATC was strictly boys only but what many people don’t realise was that the, the women’s services were getting fed up with the fact that all the government assistance seemed to be going into the boys unit and so what was formed was called the Girls Training Corps and of course as soon as they started in Grantham we shared headquarters, much to the delight of all concerned and we trained up their NCOs until they were in a positon to operate separately. So that is a definite chapter, if you like, in my life.
HD: Is that where you met your future wife?
PDS: No. It wasn’t. No. I’ll tell you about that in a few minutes. Anyway, then with the magic air force, the 9 Troop Carrying Command at RAF Fulbeck and then I said anti-climax, and finale and then a little epilogue. Now –
HD: Very good.
PDS: If you would like to take that and dip into it.
HD: That would be lovely. Thank you very much. Thank you.
PDS: Yes.
HD: We’ll sort that out after the interview. Yes.
PDS: Yes.
HD: So tell me then, you’d obviously done all this training and then it got to 1945 and they didn’t need so many engineers.
PDS: That’s it.
HD: To go in to Bomber Command so –
PDS: It was goodbye and thank you.
HD: Yeah. So where did your life take you then?
PDS: Well as I say I was into design engineering but because the Institute of Mechanical Engineers were very strict on getting a broad, as broad as possible experience, I mean, nowadays you can get a qualification by purely being in, in, at university because during the war there was no university. You couldn’t, you couldn’t get that route through to technical qualification and nowadays of course provided you’ve done a certain amount of, if you like between term experience, work experience in engineering companies you would then be accepted as a graduate and then eventually when you got a position of some responsibility and some organisation that they can feel satisfied that you have got the broad spectrum of an engineering in general rather than something of a specific nature so what happened was at the end of the war I came to the conclusion that if I was going to become a qualified engineer I had to get more experience so I packed up this job in Grantham much to their annoyance and when I went I got a handshake from all my colleagues and I got less than a, than a friendly handshake from the firm because they didn’t want me to leave because I’d got quite a few jobs on hand but unfortunately due to the fact that my design experience lacked a certain amount of experience in the design and development of gear boxes and axles and that sort of thing. I was alright on structures but when it came to that it did mean that I was short of experience in the company and what happened was that they recruited what eventually turned out for me to be a cuckoo in the nest. As soon as he got here it was quite obvious he just took one look which said, you are out and so he did everything he could to get rid of me. What happened was that I’d already come to the conclusion that if I was to become generally qualified I’d got to get more general experience so pulled out and for two years I worked with a firm of contractors in Birmingham in their plant depot and eventually family problems meant that I had to come home due to the wife going down with TB and other problems. I had to come back and I joined the firm of Ruston Bucyrus. Now, I didn’t want to go back into production. I’d had enough to know that I was not happy in the works environment. Also the company at Lincoln which seemed to be the best place was not engaged in original design. They took basically stuff that had been designed by their parent company over in Milwaukee which they converted into British practice and so there was not a lot of original design work so I went to them and I said, ‘Well, I’d like to work for you.’ And it was just at the time when they were recruiting. They said, ‘Well, look we’re just in the process of a huge expansion. What we’re interested in is recruiting, if you like, a group of young Turks if you like, who could be the drive behind the new,’ And this was a time when computers were first coming in and so on.
HD: So what year was this?
PDS: This was in 1956. 1956.
HD: Yes.
PDS: So I joined this company Ruston Bucyrus but when I put my CV they said, ‘Well you know, ok we’ll introduce you to all the various directors of the different functions in the company and you choose. If you like a particular aspect. We’ll find a job for you.’ Which I thought was rather surprising and very nice. So, I went ‘Well, don’t hurry. Just think about it.’ Anyway I’d only been home about a week. ‘Would you come up to Lincoln again?’ ‘Yes.’ You know obviously query in my voice. ‘There’s been a development.’ ‘Oh yes’ ‘Yes. Well we’ll tell you about it when you come.’ So surreptitiously I came up to Lincoln. When I get there they said, ‘Well look. We have come to the conclusion that our distributors,’ how are you doing, alright? ‘We we’re finding that the, our distributors who we have been insisting sent their sales representatives to Lincoln to the firm of Ruston Bucyrus for a year’s training and when they get there what happens they are put with the apprentice department and the apprentice department just puts them into the shop.’ What we used to call shop soaking. They were just there. Which of course is not the way that one trains people, you see. Way back in the, way back in the old OTC days it was a case of whenever you had something to talk about you told them what you were going to tell them, then you told them, then you asked them what they’d been told. So I applied that same sort of technique up there and I was able to reduce this, this year-long programme down to something in the region of ten to twelve weeks which of course made a terrific difference and this company gradually developed to the point where I had a whole, I had a new building specifically designed for my use. I had a team of eight. There were five people working on visual aids so I got experience on producing film strips and films and slides and training material and so and then in addition to that I had a sales instructor and a service instructor with me, sort of heading it up and I also spent an awful lot of time round about in the 1960s travelling around Europe and most of the eastern world if you like because the, the North and South America was mainly handled from our Milwaukee head office and we did Europe, Africa, Australia, Australasia and so on. So I headed up this department until unfortunately because we had been making a very acceptable between five and ten percent profit during the years when the British were in command of the company when eventually the Americans got rid of their old guard and brought in a new bloke he said, ‘This is ridiculous. A company like you should be making thirty percent profit.’ So it was a case of downsizing and they literally took the guts out of it so that this company which used to be one of the principal, we employed six thousand people in Lincoln in those days just gradually went out. So eventually I was, I was made redundant from that. After a couple of years of being a gentleman of enforced leisure if you like, which is another story altogether I eventually was headhunted for teaching technical English at a, at a, an ex-teacher training college in Nottinghamshire. These were training overseas people in technical English before they went over to people like British Oxygen and the big fertiliser companies and so on. So it was teaching technical English. Oh we even, we even had people, which was always a very popular job teaching young Omani air force personnel who were on their way to Cranwell, to the college there and we had a whale of a time but it was interesting because I would be teaching probably seven hours a day.
HD: So what year was this?
PDS: This was 1950 sorry 1982 to ‘87. ‘82 to ‘87.
HD: Ok.
PDS: Now, that was very interesting because as I say, I would be teaching probably seven lessons a day and everyone was completely different. One would be the chemistry of combustion for fire service people, the next lesson would be aero dynamics for the people who were going to Cranwell and so on and so forth. An interesting period. Now -
HD: Can you, can we just go back to the war and your family? So were you always with your family? You never had to leave them behind.
PDS: No. That was it. Yes. What happened was that because we were in Grantham, in the middle of Grantham my mother was terribly claustrophobic. Where we lived in Grantham we were surrounded by tall buildings and we were on the direct bombing run for the cannon factory. The twenty five millimetre, twenty millimetre cannon factory British Marcos and time and again the streets just behind us had been caught by short fall bombs. My mother was dead scared she was going to be buried alive and we moved out into a deserted farmhouse in the area between Denton and Moorsalt by Belvoir which was a wonderful period. I must say that. That I have to admit that some of those wartime years for somebody who had been a townie was, some of the most wonderful things because of course in those days with the blackout there was none of this, this light pollution that you’ve got these days. I mean how many people today have seen the Milky Way?
HD: Very few I would imagine.
PDS: Yeah. Very few of them. I mean you have to be out at Kielder Forest or something.
HD: That’s right.
PDS: Where there’s absolutely no light.
HD: Yes.
PDS: Before you could see it.
HD: We had wonderful times up there and we saw an awful lot of the war going on from that area. We certainly enjoyed ourselves when we were living out there but most of the time I’m afraid my mother was by herself because my father as the commanding officer, he had a job in Lincoln and he was with the ATC during the evenings and I was there or I was over at the Newark Technical College and so on and eventually of course when it was obvious that I was not going to go into the RAF then we just settled down to a peacetime existence.
PDS: So where did you meet your wife and how did you meet your wife? Tell me.
HD: Well, this is, this is rather interesting actually because after the war of course there were no cars, no petrol, rationing. Everybody cycled everywhere. Well during the war I’d cycled to and from work. I mean by the time you’d done seven miles each way in the mornings and evenings, you know, you were pretty fit. The end of the war I decided I’d go down to visit my father’s relations down at Southampton which we’d been unable to really visit them due to the, all the, all the closure during the build up for the invasion and so on so I cycled down to Southampton. Then I spent a few days going around in that area. During that time I joined the Youth Hostels organisation like so many of us did at that time. I was coming back, I decided that I would just for the sake of it go over in to South Wales just to see what it looked like because I thought I’d have a holiday down there some time. Went in to the youth hostel at Mitcheldean in the Forest of Dean and couldn’t help noticing across, you know, one enchanted evening and all that sort of business, across the room were a couple of girls who were obviously the centre of attention. There was one particular good looking girl and the other one who was the taller, more gangly one who, I must admit she wasn’t initially as attractive but anyway I thought nothing of it because you see, you start off next morning. They go seventy five miles in that direction, I go seventy miles and that would be the end of it but lo and behold we turn up in Stratford Youth Hostel both booked in for the theatre there. There they were. So we sort of looked at each other. ‘Weren’t you at Mitcheldean? Yes. Knowing perfectly well we were at Mitcheldean because apparently Jean had spotted me as well. So anyway -
HD: Which one was Jean?
PDS: Jean was the older, taller, gangly one. It was only many years later that she admitted that her sister wasn’t going to get a word in [laughs]. Oh it’s so funny because I mean wwe were just kids let’s face it because after the war you see so many people who were twenty two or twenty three they suddenly discovered that they’d not really had a teenage and so many of them sort of turned back the clock and went through the motion of being teenagers again and they sort of did the daft things like cycling all over the place and joining the Youth Hostels Organisation and so on and though they might be departmental managers in the daytime they were kids at weekends.
HD: So how old were you when you met Jean then?
PDS: Well I was twenty three and she was twenty two.
HD: Yeah.
PDS: So what happened was that when we got back yes we went to the theatre together. Unfortunately we had booked in separate seats but that didn’t stop us joining up again for the, for the coffee break during which time we discovered I came from the Grantham area and she came from Spilsby. She and her sister. They were on a tandem. So anyway we got around to how we were going to get back up to, up to Lincolnshire again. They said, oh they were going through Tamworth and Rugby and Leicester and so on. I said, ‘Well that’s not a very nice interesting route.’ I said, ‘I’ll tell you what I’m doing.’ I said are you aware of the fact that there is a position where the Old Ermine Street crosses the old Fosseway and at that point the Fosseway continues up into the Lincoln area and it’s almost a dead straight route like most Roman roads, avoids habitation wherever possible but it was a dead straight road and at times it even went through farmer’s yards but we came all the way up until we met up until we finally decided that they were going on to Spilsby and their father was going to collect her and, and, and just a minute.
[pause]
HD: Mr Stevenson has just gone to find some photographs.
[long pause]
PDS: Being a great one for visual aids.
HD: Yes.
PDS: I did this when we were having a bit of a get together, the family and all the rest of it to sort of celebrate Jean’s death about a fortnight ago.
HD: Yes.
PDS: And if you like there is the significant part. This was Jean. Here we are when we first met.
HD: Yes.
PDS: That was that special day in 1946 when we first met up and this was many years later at the same place at Croxton Kerrial which is rather a special place for us. As you can see we were great, we used that tandem for nearly fifty years.
HD: My goodness. Mr Stevenson is showing me some photographs of Jean and their life and they were obviously keen cyclists.
PDS: And hill walkers.
HD: And hill walkers, yes.
PDS: And anyway we obviously, it clicked and from then onwards it was just a love story that went on for the next seventy years.
HD: Wonderful.
PDS: So -
HD: Well thank you very much and thank you very much for giving all your experiences to us and the interview will now finish and the time is nineteen minutes past eleven. Thank you very much Mr Stevenson.
PDS: Would you like a cup of coffee?
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Peter Stevenson
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Helen Durham
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
2016-08-17
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AStevensonP160817
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Pending OH transcription
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
Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Grantham
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
1945
Description
An account of the resource
Peter Stevenson was born in Grantham and joined the Air League of the British Empire as well as the Air Defence Cadet Corps, The Officer’s Training Corps and the Public School’s Air Cadet Wing. He rose through the cadet ranks and embarked on training and other airfield duties and witnessed life on Bomber Command stations.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Civilian
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
01:10:25 audio recording
106 Squadron
207 Squadron
Gibson, Guy Penrose (1918-1944)
ground personnel
home front
Manchester
RAF Bottesford
RAF Grantham
RAF Syerston
sanitation
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/568/8836/AFittP150519.2.mp3
81db65d296c732124d3b40d329ce903a
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
Fitt, Peter
P Fitt
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Fitt, P
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Flight Lieutenant Peter Fitt (Royal Air Force) and two photographs. He flew operations as a wireless operator with 467 Squadron.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Peter Fitt and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-05-19
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
AS: So that is now recording –
PF: Right.
AS: Right, as I’ve explained, this is an interview with Peter Fitt, Flight Lieutenant Signaller, from the Royal Air Force Bomber Command during the war. The interview’s carried out by Adam Sutch at Cromer, on the 19th of May 2015. The interview is also for the International Bomber Command Centre digital archive, and also present is Peter’s daughter, Jane.
PF: Yep, right.
AS: Peter, thanks ever so much for agreeing to be interviewed, I’d like to set the scene by asking you to describe your life before joining the Air Force. A little bit about your home, your parents, brothers and whatnot?
PF: Well, well that’s very quick. I was in horticulture so, and my father was a head gardener, and he was keen – I wasn’t – he was keen on me going into horticulture. I wanted to go into the Air Force, ‘cause I was still at the grammar school and there was opportunities to, to join the Air Force, but I – it didn’t materialise, and I was a bit angry at the time, but it didn’t matter, when your children, you get on with these sort of things, and the war came along [chuckles]. Course I went into the Air Force, and that was that, I’d, I became aircrew and I flew on operations during the war, against Germany, and in Lancasters like the one up there, and that’s [laughing] about all I can say apart from describing every trip which is – I don’t want to do that.
AS: No, no of course. When you were growing up, whereabouts was this? Where did you grow up? In Norwich?
PF: Where did I grow up? Oh yeah well, I went to Thetford Grammar School, and I left –
Jane: Where were you born?
PF: Oh, where was I born? Yes, well I was born at Earlham Hall here in, in Norwich where my father was head gardener, and erm, see the connection to horticulture [chuckles], and then I – where was I until you, I –
Jane: Then you went to Breccles Hall.
PF: Ah yes, then I –
Jane: But your father moved –
PF: My father, my father moved as head gardener at Breccles Hall and I was four I think when we moved, I went the local council school, and then I went to Thetford Grammar School when I was eleven, and that’s where I was until I, until I left. Got the usual thing one gets from grammar schools, a school certificate and things like that, and [pause] then it was – a war was declared and I always wanted to go into the Air Force, and my father wouldn’t let me go, and, ‘cause when I was at Thetford Grammar School, there was chances every year, the Air Ministry used to come send people round and, canvassing for chaps to go into the Air Force, but he wouldn’t let me, so when the time came along when he didn’t have anything to do with it, and of course I went into the Air Force [chuckles].
AS: What, what year would that be? What, what month and year?
PF: This would be at the outbreak of war, round about ’39 time.
AS: Okay, so what, what did you want to do in the Air Force? What was your plan when you joined?
PF: Well, my plan was, when, when I joined was to be a pilot and, let me think, I gotta get some things straight. I was at Uxbridge, and oh, there wasn’t a vacancy at the next pilot school, he gave, they gave me an excuse anyhow, perhaps they didn’t want me or what, however I didn’t get, I didn’t get my course, and I carried on and I wanted to be aircrew, so I became a wireless operator [chuckles], a diddy dit dah dit man.
Jane: Was it Bicester?
PF: Pardon?
Jane: You went to Blackpool to learn Morse code.
PF: Yes, that’s where I started – yes well – yes at Blackpool and Yatesbury for wireless operating.
AS: Could we go back a bit? What did you do, what, to join the Air Force? Did you –
PF: What was I before the war?
AS: Sorry?
PF: What was I before the war?
AS: No, what did you do to join the Air Force? Did you go to a recruiting office or, or, or what?
PF: Well, I, I just went to the St Martineau Hall in Norwich here, and I joined the Air Force from there, ‘cause I was working at Crown Point, during [unclear] horticulture actually, and I was at Crown Point, I lived in the boffy there, and, so I naturally went to the recruiting station in Norwich and joined the Air Force.
AS: And that was it, you just –
PF: That was it. And I was in, I think I was in the Air Force for a fortnight and I was flying in a fortnight or so.
AS: Good lord. When, where, after the recruiting office, can you describe to me a little bit about the process of joining the Air Force? So, what they did to you, where you went, how you were messed about, that sort of stuff?
PF: Well, I was messed about quite a bit, by waiting to go – be – [pause] to, to sign on as it were, and I had to go to a place called St Martineau Hall, is that right?
Jane: No that’s County Hall. Martineau Lane is where County Hall building is now.
PF: Where who is?
Lucy: Norfolk County Council building is actually on Martineau Lane.
PF: Oh, are they? Oh yeah, oh of course –
Lucy: That’s where the archive centre is actually –
PF: Well that’s why I joined the Air Force there, and signed on, because I, I was determined to go into the Air Force, my father – I was at the grammar school, I had a chance to go in the Air Force when I was fifteen, course they use to take boys from grammar schools, and I, he wouldn’t let me do it, so the time came, when I was all on my own, so I did it, and I went into the Air Force and that was it. I was, I was a wireless operator – trained as a wireless operator. I did my first tour of ops as a sergeant, a flight sergeant, and then I was, I was commissioned, and then I got a permanent commission and I was a flight lieutenant, and so that was my life in the Air Force. I was a signals, I was a signals leader in the in, and so that was my lot – my life was spelt and spent in the signals actually.
AS: Great. Let’s just wind back – we’ll get onto operational flying for sure – let’s wind back to how they got you into the Air Force. So where did they, where did they send you for kitting out, and what was the process of actually becoming an airman?
PF: Oh, what was the process?
AS: Yeah.
PF: Well, I, I of course volunteered here in Norwich, forgotten the name of the street now, and I just went and signed on there, and within a few days I’d been called up, and I was at Uxbridge [chuckles] in a uniform, much to my parents’ horror. You can imagine my mother [chuckles].
AS: Absolutely. And this, this was as selected for aircrew already, or was this basic training to start with? Basic recruit training?
PF: Yes, that’s right, yeah. It was recruit training and as I was going in for the signals, I was naturally pushed to places where you could – you got used to the life, and the Morse code and all that sort of thing. However, that’s roughly how it worked, is it – was that all you wanted to know? I can’t give you a lot of detail.
AS: No, no, we’re fine –
PF: My logbook is up there somewhere –
AS: We’re doing well. Perhaps we could do it from your logbook to an extent. So, when you’d done your recruit training, and you were selected for aircrew, what happened then, for your signals training? Were you selected for signals straight away, or given some sort of tests?
PF: Well, I wanted to be a pilot, and I tried to be a pilot – I went through numerous selection things, and every time they said, ‘well Mr Fitt, we recommend you to go to Yatesbury’, I think it was to Number Two Radio School, and go in for, and go in for signals. Become a radio operator aircrew, which I did of course, and I was a signals leader and I went right up the ladder in the signals side, but – there we are. But I was a flight lieutenant, signals leader. What is it, Jane?
Jane: [Unclear]
AS: Thank you. Yes, so Yatesbury was your initial contact with signal, was it?
PF: Yes, well no, it wasn’t really. Blackpool was, Blackpool not only was a recruiting centre where I had to go when I first joined in 1940, but it was done by One Radio School or something, so I had a little bit of wireless training there, but my main wireless training was done at, in Number Two Radio School in Yatesbury in Wiltshire. That’s where I started – I did all my training right the way through to OTU crewing up, and or not – I was on operations in early ’43, 1943, and I had a Norfolk pilot which was rather good [chuckles] from Ormesby [chuckles] –
AS: So, can you tell us – the period – you joined up sort of ’39, ’40, and the period between then and going on operations, were you being trained all that time?
PF: All that time yes, on radio, yes. But that, not – to answer your question correctly – not all that time. There was three or four months where I found myself at Royal Air Force Watton, two miles from where my parents lived, so that was very, that was very handy, and I was there as a radio – as a wireless operator. Well it wasn’t bad because I was, I was in keeping with the Morse code and all that sort of thing, and then from there, that’s where the whole career started, and I was flying and I crewed up and I did my tour of ops in 1943, I made thirty trips and went back again in – oh God I can’t remember, 1945, in between time I was at, back to Yatesbury as, ‘cause I was commissioned, so I went back as officer in charge of the wireless flights, so I [unclear, chuckles].
AS: When you went to Watton, early on –
PF: Ah yes, I was – that was before I was commissioned. I was there as a ground operator actually, as a wireless operator, and Watton near – my parents lived three miles down the road [chuckles].
AS: As a, as a ground wireless operator, were you involved with DF-ing aircraft? What were your duties?
PF: No, I could have been, but it was purely SHQ, station headquarters, radio operating, which was station to station. It wasn’t for very long, and I was back in aircrew training again.
AS: Okay. Did you do very much flying whilst you were training?
PF: Yes, I did, I did a tour of ops in 1943, doing my thirty trips, and I went back again, on my second tour – I can’t remember the date – what was the – have you got my logbook there, Jane?
Jane: Yep, yeah it was –
AS: When you were training as a wireless operator, did you do much flying or was it mostly on the ground?
PF: Oh yes I did, we flew in Proctors and Dominis at Yatesbury funnily enough –
AS: Really?
PF: And, yeah that’s all it amounted to and that wasn’t – these aeroplanes were fixed up with four-five sets, and you just went up there with an instructor and that was that.
AS: Mhm. And you learnt Morse code obviously, what –
PF: Yes, I had to do eighteen words a minute, for a start before you ever did anything, and then I became a signals leader, and I had to do twenty-one words a minute for that. But I never – you never use twenty-one words a minute. Twenty-one words a minute is very, is very fast Morse and it’s usually about eighteen is the comfortable Morse speed.
AS: Aside from the Morse, what else did your training consist of? Processes and procedures?
PF: Well, I [pause] fault detection, fault finding, if anything went, if anything went wrong with the transmitter or receiver, you were taught to look for different things to, try and trace it through. Didn’t always work, however, but you had to do it. FF - fault finding.
AS: Mhm. How about wireless bearings and things like that?
PF: Oh yes well that was all part and parcel of your work, and I had to take bearings knowing where and how to call up, using the, you know the Morse code getting a bearing, and that was your job really. That was – and getting, what was it [pause], oh God, I’ve forgotten the name of them now, getting QDMs [chuckles], you’re nodding your head as if you know what I’m talking –
AS: I know some of them, I know the important ones. I know QDM and QFE and one or two other things. Did you get involved with these flimsies at all? Little papers with secret information about station call signs and things like that. Was that part of the stuff you went flying with?
PF: Well, we always had, we always had a, carried a – what did we call them – a flimsy, which was, could be eaten if you were [pause] caught by the enemy, that contained all the wireless information, station frequencies and call signs that you required, so that was what happened. And most of us, you – you’re doing it yourself. [Pause] there was a picture somewhere – where is it? Oh there it is, of me sitting at my 11-54-55 there.
AS: That’s in a Lancaster, isn’t it?
PF: Yeah it –
AS: Yeah.
PF: You know the sets, did you? The 54-55 –
AS: Not a lot no –
PF: No, I didn’t know whether you were a wireless man.
AS: I – my father was a wireless man, not me. [Pause] was it all work? Did you get quite a lot of leave when you were training?
PF: Well, no – we got, at the end of each course we got leave, but there was no fixed leave like when, what we got on the squadron, and we were operating, you used to get seven days leave every six weeks, and that was, that was very useful, ‘cause I was married then, and yes and [pause] what else was there? Yes, that was about all, we were just lucky, only because I was aircrew.
AS: Before you got to aircrew, still on the training, apart from Morse speed examinations, did you have to take any other sort of technical examinations? Written –
PF: We had, had examinations on fault finding and [pause] repair work and, you know – what’s the word for, you know, there is a word that one uses, not second-hand, [pause] when you have a breakdown on a car, you –
Jane: Maintenance journal?
AS: No, no it doesn’t matter, I know what he means –
PF: You know what I’m trying to say.
AS: Yeah. Repair’s a good, repair’s a good word, yeah, it is. Okay. The chaps you trained with, did you form close bonds with them during training, as a unit?
PF: When, what? I’m not with you –
AS: When you were training as a wireless operator –
PF: Yeah –
AS: Did you form close friendships with others on the course? Other trainees?
PF: Well, no, we didn’t, well yeah, I think we got – one or two of us found ourselves on a squadron, but some weren’t fortunate, I think it just depends on your ability and how good you were at Morse and things like that [chuckles].
AS: Yeah. Again, during training, did you ever fly out over the Irish Sea on training flights?
PF: No, honestly, I never flew over the Irish Sea period.
AS: Okay. Now I have a special interest in asking, because of an organisation called The Training Flying Control Centre, but if you didn’t fly over there, we’ll pass that one.
PF: No, no I can’t get into that, because I wouldn’t know anything about it.
AS: When you’d finished your training, you’re entitled to your aircrew badge. Did you have a big parade with dignitaries, or did they send you to the stores to get it? What happened?
PF: No, no we had a – I was at Yatesbury and we had a proper passing out parade, which was purposely laid on for the benefit of the, what’s the word, esprit de corps, and that was it. A parade and an inspection by the CO, who would pin your brevet on [chuckles].
AS: And at that point, were you promoted?
PF: Well, immediately I became aircrew, I became a sergeant, then I was a flight sergeant, and then I applied for a commission and I was commissioned [pause] in the September, I think it was, and I became a signals leader, and I became a flight lieutenant, and I became a signals leader on a squadron, and so that was my history in, where signals are concerned.
AS: When you passed out and got your flying brevet, did you choose to go to Bomber Command or were you just sent?
PF: I was posted to Bomber Command. I was quite happy about it, because I didn’t fancy going into Fighter Command or, or into these fighter bombers, like Blenheims and Bostons, that wasn’t my cup of tea. I imagined myself like that sitting in the cabin [chuckles] and with, a large, with seven other members of the crew, and I was quite happy about that. That’s how I continued, I became a signals leader and a, what else, all sorts of things, a leading, you know how it goes, and the pay was good, leave was good, I was at Mildenhall only about twenty minutes away from my home[chuckles].
AS: So did, once you’d passed out, did you go straight to a squadron or, what happened then?
PF: Oh, we’re back in training? Well, I did operational training on a Wellington, on Wimpies –
AS: Whereabouts?
PF: Finningley, and Doncaster. Then I went to the squadron, via a, oh God, I can’t think of words, a conversion –
AS: Heavy conversion unit.
PF: Heavy conversion unit. At, can’t think, Winthorpe I think it was. Gosh, this is going back a bit, but it’s in my logbook, doesn’t matter, I don’t want to look it up, and that was the, my history in the Air Force. So, I was connected with signals all the time, even when I’d finished operational flying, I went as a signals leader somewhere. I was mainly at Mildenhall which was a bit of luck.
Jane: Can I just ask you, what about RAF Cranwell? When were you there then?
PF: Yeah, I was, I went to a course at Cranwell while I was at Mildenhall, Jane. Yes, Jane’s reminding me I had to go to Cranwell, mainly because I was commissioned, and they were feeding a, pilot officers into Cranwell to give you a taste of bullshit you know [chuckles], how it is and that’s how I, that’s how I got to Cranwell.
AS: Okay. What did you think of the Wellingtons that you were training on at the OTU?
PF: Well, the Wellington was, it was a wonderful aeroplane, it was so reliable and erm – I did all my training on Wellingtons until we were told we were going onto Lancasters, and that we would be going onto Manchesters to convert, and that was my routine, and on Manchesters and on Lancs and that was that.
AS: And at the OTU – was it the OTU you met your crew?
PF: Yes, I was crewed up at the OTU. We were still on Wellingtons then, and that was at Finningley.
AS: Can you tell me a little bit about the crewing up process? What you were looking for in a crew?
PF: Oh yes well, that, it was left to you, the courses arrived at the OTU, the operational training unit, and we were all called to a meeting [pause], the whole caboodle, and then we were told by the CO that we were all going to be put in so and so and so and so, some large room or dining room or something like that, and then we gotta leave it and you must crew up. So that’s the way we crewed up, we just, how did I crew up? Well Dennis was in – I recognised Dennis as a Norfolk accent, so that’s how I got my pilot, and the rest came from there, the others were just dillying around and that was that, we crewed up. We stayed together all those years, all those months rather, because we did a tour in about nine months. So that’s history.
AS: How long was the OTU process, and what time of year was it? Was it swift, or did you get weather problems or –
PF: Oh yes, we did have weather problems, particularly when we were having to do forced cross countries, and the weather was pretty lousy, and that was in sort of November, December time. And this was at, this was at Bircotes which was a satellite at Finningley in Yorkshire, and that was that. I did my OTU, went to, we crewed up at OTU, crewed up with five and we all went on Wellingtons, and we were then posted to [pause] an HCU, a heavy conversion unit where we converted, and this was at Swinderby, and we converted onto Lancasters, and that’s the history of the thing. I never flew on anything else, only on Lancs with the same crew.
AS: Can you remember what sort of training exercises you would do at the OTU? Things like nav-exes or bulls-eyes?
PF: Oh yes, going back to the OTU, that was before the conversion courses, well it was, mainly cross countries at night to get you used to the navigator and the navigator getting used to you and your wireless operating [pause] speciality, if that’s the right word, expertise is the word really, and that was that. That’s what I did, we crewed up and five of us were sent to – we crewed up in five, in Wellingtons and then we were posted to RAF Swinderby where we converted onto Lancasters, with, had to have two more crew, that was an engineer and another gunner added to the five, so that made seven, and then we trained there and we went to the squadron and we were on operations, just like that.
AS: How did you interact with the navigator?
PF: At, at the what, process?
AS: When you were airborne, how did you interact with the navigator? Providing him information, or -
PF: Well, Bert and I, Bert Tischington was the navigator, we got on very well together. We trained on Wimpies as a crew of five, Wellingtons that is, and so we got to know each other very well and we, so we never looked back. We did a tour of ops, complete tour on Lancs [coughs] ‘scuse me [coughs] good God. And that was that [chuckles]. Oh dear, excuse me.
AS: Yeah of course [pause]. Did you have to learn other things that you hadn’t learned in training when you were actually preparing for operations? Things like Z-procedure, using the wireless for landing? Did you get involved with that at all?
PF: I wasn’t involved with that at all. [Pause] my main job was with the navigator really, ‘cause we were training for long distance stuff with Lancs, ‘cause that’s where we were destined to get onto Lancaster squadron where we, which we were, we went to I should say, so henceforth, I was on Lancs until the end of the war I suppose, [pause] but it was just like that up there [chuckles].
AS: Right, we’ll pause the tape for a little while if that’s okay –
PF: I’m sorry, you’ll what?
[Tape paused and restarted]
PF: [Unclear] – with my logbook –
AS: Peter, I’d like to go back to the OTU a bit –
PF: Yeah, that’s fine, I’m going back to [unclear] if I can find it, Bottesford, so back still further [long pause, chuckles]. Oh dear, there’s a note I’ve written here, the mess and the modern, and the modern obliterations in this logbook, are necessary because my son Tim, when he was a little boy, pretended he was like his father and started filling my, filling all the bits and pieces in the logbook [laugh] ‘cause there’s a mess. So, I, I had to put a note in there about that. So, what are we, am I –
AS: We’re looking up OTU on the Wellingtons.
PF: Oh right, oh gosh –
AS: You alright?
PF: Yeah, in a minute. I’ve just got, my back was killing me. Ah, oh. So, OTU, that would be 1942, oh gosh this is going back a bit [turning pages], October ’42, yeah, I’m getting near [long pause]. Here we are, 25 OTU Finningley, 16th of September 1942.
AS: That’s your first flight at the OUT, is it?
PF: Yep –
AS: As a crew?
PF: As a crew, yeah.
AS: Yeah. And did your captain immediately take you off as a crew, or did he do some flying with somebody else first?
PF: Oh no, we all met as sprogs, nobody, no crews – we were assem – we were all, we were all assembling in a very big hall, and we got given four, five hours to crew up, and how did I crew up? Only because of being a Norfolk man, because Dennis Claxton was a baker at Ormesby, came along in his old broad Norfolk accent and said, ‘hello Peter, will you fly with me?’ I thought, oh my God, and I said, ‘yes of course I will’, and as I said, cause that’s how we crewed up, and I flew with him right through the war really. He was a good pilot. Claxton, his father was a baker at Ormesby.
AS: Were you all sergeants to start with?
PF: Yes, then I became a flight sergeant, and among the very few members of aircrew as a wireless operator, I had to take examinations would you believe, to get any, any promotion, in the wireless world of course, and until I became a grade one, I couldn’t get any promotion, so I was, I was messed about a bit. However, I got, I did it and I got my promotions and I became a flight sergeant, and then I was commissioned, and so I, and a signals leader, so I never looked back really. I had a good life, I enjoyed, particularly while I was at Mildenhall, this is after the war, this was in between tours, it wasn’t after the war. I finished my first tour and I was about to go back on my second tour at Mildenhall. I was near to home, I was near my wife, who lived just outside in a place called Ownedge, just outside Bedford, and so I was quite happy there really.
AS: You’ve still got your logbook open at the OTU, how much, how much flying did you do? Can you track that back?
PF: Yeah, well, I’ll tell you in a minute, I did [long pause], oh that’s the [unclear] synopsis, Finningley. Was that, Jane?
AS: Yes.
Jane: Sorry –
PF: At 25 OTU Finningley, I did [pause], there’s loads of it, oh dear, all at sea, yeah, one hour and half hours [long pause] I did twenty, in this instance, it was twenty-nine daylight and six at night. So this has, this has got to be more. [Pause] oh here we are, Bircotes now, so that was the next station, still on OTU, so that puts me up to ninety-five, nearly one hundred hours at OTU.
AS: Wow.
PF: And so it goes on. Oh, this was on the conversion, and then I went – a hundred and fifteen hours, including the OTU on Wellingtons and conversion on Manchesters to Lancasters, ‘cause it was only fourteen hours [chuckles], oh God.
AS: Were you a –
PF: What we, what we looking for do you know?
AS: Well, we’ve answered it actually, the hours, yeah –
PF: Oh, have we? Oh, fair enough. It was a bit complicated, looking up logbooks.
AS: Yeah. Were you straight wireless or did you do air gunner training as well?
PF: I did very little air – I didn’t want anything to do with air gunnering. I was quite happy with signals and I was, I was, would be a signals leader and things like that, so I, quite honestly, I had nothing to do with gunnering. I perhaps should have been a gunnery leader but I didn’t want to know [chuckles].
AS: That’s fair. Did you do any bulls-eye exercises?
PF: Oh yes, lots of bulls-eyes.
AS: What did they involve?
PF: Pardon?
AS: What did they involve?
PF: Long night cross country runs, let’s just look back. OTU Finningley that would be [pause], just give you an idea how long they were, ooh er [long pause], look I’ve got notes everywhere [long pause]. Why are logbooks so complicated when you look back through? Bottesford, that’s all good, I want training [long pause].
AS: No, so the bulls-eyes were at Bottesford were they?
PF: What, just a minute, I’ll just try and get back to Bottesford, I should be there in a sec, because I remember writing – oh that’s 1660 Conversion Unit, that was after that, so it’s got to be here. Bulls-eye here we are. I did a bulls-eye [pause] with Warrant Officer Buzz [unclear] as pilot [pause], five and a half hours from RAF Bircotes which is a satellite at Finningley. Oh you know it, don’t you?
AS: Yeah.
PF: Yeah, so that’s it. Well, that was when I was first flying with Dennis Claxton, who was my pilot during the, during the Lancs time, who lives out here at, he was a baker at Hemsby.
AS: Was, this was winter time, wasn’t it? OTU and HCU?
PF: Yeah, it was 15th of November, yeah.
AS: Yeah. Did the weather cause many problems, many interruptions, or many losses? Did you lose many aircraft in training?
PF: We, yes, we did, because of bad navigation. We didn’t have the things like Gee and that then, and navigation was pretty [pause], what’s the word –
AS: Haphazard?
PF: Basic, yeah. The, you hadn’t got the, what you had later, the radar bit, the Gee box, to get your fixers. No, I was there as a radio operator and I had to get my navigator fixers on numerous occasions, you know. Get a WT fix.
AS: And what speed did you get down to? How quickly could you do that?
PF: Well that took an age, it used to take them an age to wind my training aerial out for a start, and then there was the getting through, well it would take me about half an hour to get a fix I should think. Main time spent cranking the bloody lot of, the aerial in because it was airmen dear, and that means I had to have a training aerial. You’re nodding your head as if you understood [chuckles]. Oh dear, that’s history, that’s the first time anybody’s asked me that question, you know, but –
AS: It must have been hard work in flying kit and on your knees, was it? Winding down?
PF: Yeah, that wasn’t, in the cockpit you had to – it was usually in the, the winding gear was in the panelling of the aeroplane, and that was pretty knuckling, what’s the word [pause], knocking the skin off your knuckles –
AS: Grazing your knuckles, yeah. Did you ever lose one? Forget to wind it up?
PF: No, I didn’t. I must admit, I never, I always – because we had to write it in on the log, and we got seriously chastised, if we hadn’t done it and so we were always very careful, ‘cause they said they were gonna start charging us for any aerials that we lose, and there were not a lot of chaps lost them. What’s that, dear?
Jane: Actually that’s, I haven’t seen that before. I can’t remember the actual picture; I don’t know where the original is –
PF: Oh my God, this is ancient. That was one of the first pictures taken, when, oh God, what was it? When we first joined the Old Ed fifty, 541, my wife’s name was Edna, she was called Ed, and of course up there, it was ED541, so that was Ed-541, that one [chuckles]. So, four-six-seven Wimpies away –
AS: So that on the wall, I understand now, that on the wall is a painting of your aircraft, A-Able isn’t it?
PF: That’s right, yeah.
AS: Now I understand.
PF: Yeah, that was my, that was my first aeroplane that we were allocated for, on operations, here we are, ED541 July 1943, now that’s, that must have been that picture then, yeah, ‘cause I started operating in nine, nine, July, August, yeah that’s right. Oh dear, I get confused about these dates –
AS: We can go through your logbook later for the, for the operations if you like. When you were training, perhaps moving from the OTU to the HCU, did you start meeting equipment in operational aeroplanes that you hadn’t seen before?
PF: Oh yes.
AS: Can you tell me about that?
PF: We had, well not so much from the HFDF from the normal 11-54-55 Marconi stuff that I was using for Morse and communication generally, that was the same, that never altered, the things that were altering were the Gees and H2S, and all the up-to-date radar equipment, that was always changing, but that had nothing to do with me, I was quite happy with my, my Morse code [chuckles].
AS: Did you have things like Fishpond to look after?
PF: Yes, we did, but I didn’t have to look after it, the navigator looked after that. It was, he, we didn’t have it at – we were training on, with it, we never used it on operations or anything like that, but we did, we did have it, that was H2S two-three-one, I can’t remember the damn things now. [Pause] I would have remembered had I had to operate it, but I didn’t have to operate it. I had enough work to do of my own.
AS: It’s quite busy, was it? You didn’t just take off and fly round and come back again?
PF: Oh no, no, I mean, you had to take your broadcast every half hour, and that was numbered so you had to make sure you got that down in your logbook, erm, oh yes there was, there was never a dull moment, not where a wireless operator was concerned, because you were busy nearly all the time, from the time you took off to the time you landed.
AS: So, what sort of things would you be, would be coming in and going out? Position reports or-
PF: For start, things coming in would be your half hourly broadcast, which you had to rec – you had to log, and that was usually [unclear] text, it was numbered, and then after that, it was mainly work. We were always given exercises to do and, with ground stations, with, in particular DF stations, getting QDFs, QDMs, all that sort of thing, and, so there was never a dull moment where I was concerned. As a matter of fact, I suppose I was pleased in a way, because I had plenty to do, I didn’t have a chance to think about anything else. The navigator always kept me busy.
AS: When you knew you were posted to Bomber Command, how did you feel?
PF: Well, I was pleased in a way because we were told we were going onto Lancs, and the Lancaster had just been introduced, so everybody was keen to get onto a Lanc squadron, and as it happened, I was lucky and we got on one, and that was, that was quite good. So that was, that answers your question doesn’t it really?
AS: Yeah. When you were crewed up, formed as a crew, you were all sergeants, were you living together in a mess, or in huts or –
PF: Oh yes, we all lived in – there was, there was an aircrew sergeants mess, because all aircrew were sergeants then, not when I first joined up and flew, there was an LAC erm, yes there was a special mess for the aircrew sergeants.
AS: And did you live as a crew?
PF: Pardon?
AS: Did you live all together as a crew, or –
PF: Oh yes. When we first crewed up, we were always messed together in the same, and always, always in the same hut, and that went on for, through the OTU, through the conversion units when we went from Wellingtons to Lancasters [pause], to when we arrived at the squadron and converted onto Lancasters.
AS: Did it get [pause] –
PF: Sorry?
AS: Did it get too much sometimes, being with the same people all the time, in the air and on the –
PF: No, we were very pleased in a way that we had our own crew, we were like a family really, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way really. Dennis, my pilot, was, lived at, he had a, he was a baker at Ormesby, Hemsby and his wife and my wife were very good friends, and we were all very close knit, we were close knit as a crew. Yes, that was all, that was all good fun really, if you could call it fun.
AS: What were the losses like during training? Were there many aircraft lost?
PF: Oh no, there wasn’t. We were, touching wood, no, there were very few losses while we were training. There were losses when, for example, on OTU, on operational training units where crews got lost and went down in the mountains somewhere you know, if we, if we were doing foreign cross countries and things like that where we did for training. So yes, that used, that used to happen, but not, not very often fortunately.
AS: Mhm. Did you form close links with your ground crew as well as your aircrew mates?
PF: Oh yes, oh yes, we did. We have a very – while we were on operations, I, we, we flew on ops from Bottesford near Nottingham, and we got very close to our ground crews. We used to entertain them a lot, and we used to go out, always meet in the pubs and things like that, and yes, that was, yes, we were, answering your question, yes, we were quite close.
AS: Whose aeroplane was it? Was it your aeroplane or their aeroplane?
PF: Well, that depends, it was theirs in their camp and then ours in our camp.
AS: How did they maintain it? Was it mostly working outside?
PF: Oh yes, it was all outside. They did the daily inspections, the special inspections, and that was all done on the, what do you call it, the dispersal on the airfield.
AS: So, what, what was the daily routine before, before flight? What would you do before flight with your equipment?
PF: Well, I had, I had to check the, all the radio equipment, intercom, anything which was radio or radar, I had to check it worked alright. And the radio, the RT, the radio telephone part.
AS: So, I think we’ve done quite a bit about OTU and HCU. Did you say your HCU, you were actually on Manchesters?
PF: Well, I flew on Manchesters – when I finished on, let me give you the story, when we finished operational training on Wellingtons, we knew we were going to be posted to a conversion unit because we were going to go onto heavy bombers, and we knew that before we got onto them we would have to fly Manchesters, that was the Lanc with two engines if you can perhaps remember, and, so we went onto Lancs – onto Manchesters and then Lancs in that, in that order and that all went quite smoothly. I must say, it was, it was exciting going onto a Lancaster after a bloody old, twopy, old Wimpy, [pause] it was like getting into a – well as Dennis our pilot said, it was like getting into a Spitfire, though he’d never flown a Spitfire [chuckles]. He guessed as much because the Lanc was so much faster than the Wimpy, and more manoeuvrable of course.
AS: When you were learning to fly the Lancaster, before you go to the squadron, was the, was the aeroplane to an operational standard, with all the equipment that was in it?
PF: Oh yes.
AS: Okay. Did you have to learn different operational techniques as well as this equipment when you were at the HCU, or had your training taken care of the –
PF: Oh yes, yes it did –
AS: It did. So, you were –
PF: Pretty well [unclear] up, yeah.
AS: Gemmed up with the operational techniques –
PF: Yep, yeah indeed.
AS: Okay. So, did you pass out of the HCU? Was there a parade?
PF: Er, no, there wasn’t. We were – it was just very ordinary; we were only five or six weeks from OTU to HCU. I was at Swinderby – God, we were there and we were gone and we were on the squadron. As a matter of fact, we were nearly operating, it was that quick. Much to our horror, but there –
AS: Shall we pause it there for a moment?
PF: Okay.
[Tape paused and restarted]
AS: This is a taped interview with Flight Lieutenant Peter Fitt, carried out by Adam Sutch, on the 19th of May 2015 for the International Bomber Command Centre. Peter Fitt was on 467 Squadron for his first tour of operations, and perhaps Peter, I could, I could start by asking what happened when you came to the squadron before you went on ops, when you arrived as a crew?
PF: Right, well, first of all, I want to go back a bit to OTU, Operational Training Unit, where we crewed up. We all arrived there as individual pilots, navigators and wireless operators, air gunners, and – [interrupted] – is somebody coming?
Other: Sorry, would either of you like a hot drink?
[Tape paused and restarted]
AS: Right, let’s start again Peter shall we, now the tea lady’s gone –
PF: Yeah, yeah, you carry on –
AS: You were going back to the OTU when you crewed up, just before you got on the squadron.
PF: Yeah, yeah, yes, and that was 1942 I believe, would that be right?
AS: ’42, ’43, yeah, I think, we did before, so you left, left –
PF: Yes, yes it would be ’42, because I started off – I did my ops in ’43, and this is OTU we’re talking about, yes ’42, August ’42.
AS: Yeah, okay. And what can you remember about your OTU time?
PF: My OTU time was a bit strange, we all arrived at the sta – were posted to this RAF Finningley actually, in Yorkshire, and we all mingled in the, hmm, whatever it was, an old hangar or something, and one officer came along and he spoke to us and said, ‘well I’ve got you all gathered here because we want you – this is the OTU and we want you to crew up, and that’s, it’s got to be up to you. You can mingle with each other and find a pilot and a pilot will find a wireless operator and the wireless operator will find an air gunner’ sort of thing, you just sort it out yourselves’, they don’t print one up to say you’ll fly with so and so, you just sort it all out, and you’re given two or three days to do that, which we did, and I, I crewed up quite easily because it was a Norfolk man, a Norfolk baker from Ormesby, he came over and said, ‘you’re Norfolk, aren’t you?’ I said – he’s real, broad Norfolk – I said ‘yes’ and ‘I am’, and he – I can tell you because he had a real broad Norfolk accent, and he said, ‘why, I’m a pilot’, and he said, ‘I was wondering whether you would, you would, as we’re Norfolkites, you can come be my wireless operator’, ‘yes’, I said, ‘I’d love to’, and in the meantime, he’d sorted out the rest of the crew, so there was five of us. We were crewing up for Wellingtons actually, at OTU, on which we – the aeroplane we did our OTUs on, and so that’s how I crewed up. And then we, we did three months there I suppose – this is RAF Finningley in Yorkshire, and then we were posted to – oh God, I can’t remember the name of the bloody place now, not Finningley, Swinderby, where we went, transferred to four engined aeroplanes, so that was the beginning on the, on the Lancaster episodes, the aeroplanes we flew in for the rest of the war. Now that was, that was, that was rather all good fun, well wasn’t good fun it was bloody dangerous but, but, erm, it was all part of the adventure, wasn’t it?
AS: Exciting, exciting.
PF: So there, that was, so we crewed up and we, we stayed together all those years – we did a mini two tours of ops – this is late ’42 I’m talking about – and we were still flying in ’44, ’45 together, and, and the war came to an end and we kept meeting you know, ‘cause of, Den was a, he was a baker from Ormesby actually, and we used to – we all got, you all get very, very friendly, you know, and the whole families become friendly, and so that was, that was quite a nice episode in my life. It was a bit dangerous for me, during ops but I, Dennis was a good pilot and the rest of the crew were good, and we were, yeah, that was, that was quite an exciting time. I often think back on it, and we, we have our crew reunions still, and that’s jolly nice to get together again.
AS: What sort of skipper was Sergeant Claxton, Dennis Claxton?
PF: What sort –
AS: Yeah, was he a disciplinarian, or relaxed, or?
PF: No, no, he was a typical, what did we say, ordinary bloke who liked driving, a chauffeur if you like, he was conscientious, he always knew what he wanted, he always knew what to ask the navigator, he always knew what to ask us all actually, if he wanted to know anything, and, and yeah, he was quite knowledgeable, and a good pilot. That’s what we were after, we wanted someone who really knew the aeroplane and could throw out a boat when, if we were attacked or anything like that, and he was that good, so we were happy. As a matter of fact, I was a – no, poor Dennis died five or six years ago, his wife is still alive, and she comes and sees me here sometimes which is, which is rather nice.
AS: Absolutely, continuity.
PF: And, and of course – my wife, well she’s dead now, but my wife used to like Iris, which was Dennis’, the pilot’s wife, and they became very friendly – well, we all became friends actually.
AS: So, you finished HCU on Manchesters and Lancasters, and –
PF: I, I finished what?
AS: HCU. Heavy Conversion Unit.
PF: Yeah.
AS: On Manchesters and Lancasters was it?
PF: Yeah, Manchesters and Lancs, yeah.
AS: Yeah. And then you were posted to F –
PF: This, this was at Swinderby where we, we, we er went onto four engines, in the Lanc, and from Swinderby. And from Swinderby we, we – now what, I’m just trying to think of what that was called, when you converted to four engines, not a confighter, it was, it had a, it had a special name –
AS: HCU was it? Heavy Conversion Unit?
PF: Heavy Conversion, well done, you, you’re a gen-king you know.
AS: [Laughing] just, just lucky.
PF: Yeah, yeah on HCU –
AS: HCU, yeah.
PF: And, and Dennis converted to – and he took to the Lancs, he thought it was a great aeroplane, and he was a good pilot, and erm, so that, and we were together all that time. On two tours.
AS: On the aeroplane, did you feel a very great difference when it was loaded and not?
PF: No, no. It was a bit – Dennis used to say it’s a bit, you know, he had to be a bit more careful on takeoff because there was a lot more power, and they used to have to – he said, ‘I’m not supposed put, to go into S-gear’, but he said, ‘I bloody will go into S-gear’, ‘cause he said, ‘I wanna get off safely’, and so he did, that – that S-gear was. It’s called S-gear was a special gear that you, you put the throttles in and that connects to the engine [chuckles], and as the throttles are connected there it does something, it gives you that extra power –
AS: More power, yeah. So, you were posted to 467 Squadron I think?
PF: Yes. We went to – we were posted to – we finished Swinderby, that’s Conversion Unit, and we were posted to [slight pause] Bottesford and, near Nottingham, where we were – joined an Australian squadron, 467 Squadron, and I was with them for a complete – I did my first tour there with them.
AS: Did it feel like an Australian squadron? Were many of the aircrew Australian?
PF: They were nearly, they were nearly all Australian, yes it did feel like, you know – that’s a nice way of putting it, they were real Aussies and that was, that made it rather nice. And erm, so I was very pleased I served on an Aussie squadron and [pause] it was, it was nice, and – what is the word when you’re a mixture, I can’t think of a name but it was, it was very good. And I, I enjoyed myself there, as one can enjoy yourself while you’re risking your bloody neck at night, but it was, that was – I had a very good crew, Dennis Claxton, my baker from Ormesby, he was good, he was a good pilot [pauses] and I hoped I was an average radio operator for, get my navigator some good bearings.
AS: You brought them back.
PF: Brought them back? Oh yeah.
AS: When you were on the squadron, did you do a lot of training flying still?
PF: Did I what?
AS: Do a lot of training flying still, while on the squadron?
PF: No, no, no. The only training you did on the squadron – well it was training I suppose, ‘cause they were called training flights, and that was, you would do cross countries, mainly for navigation, for the navigator and the wireless operator and, for the pilot of course, so that was what we did, yes. Cross countries. We used to call them – they were called bulls-eyes and you used to do a lot of bulls-eyes. Well, they were good really because they make you accurate at, and careful what you’re doing.
AS: Were the skies full of aeroplanes doing the same thing, over England?
PF: Over where, not –
AS: Over England, while you were training. Did you find it really crowded skies, or?
PF: No, no, ‘cause I was trained at night. I was, I was, we were trained for night flying, and we did our training at night, so we didn’t really see a lot of other aeroplanes anyhow. The only time you saw them was when you were taking off and when you joined the circuit to land, when you got back. But that was, that was good training, and well I, I mustn’t say I enjoyed it – that’s not quite the right word, but it was interesting, and I was quite happy [chuckles], I had a good crew, our Dennis was a good pilot, and [pause] we, we survived.
AS: Did you encounter night fighters at all?
PF: Yes, yes, we were, we were attacked several times, mainly by Junkers 88s actually. I thought they [unclear], we thought they’d been Messerschmitt 109 Es and Fs but it wasn’t, it was, we were always attacked by Junkers 88s, which is quite a heavy aircraft is a – it’s nearly as a big as a Wellington, and we just couldn’t imagine them using them as night fighters but they were.
AS: But obviously not brought down, your pilot’s skills and your gunner’s skills –
PF: No, no we evaded all attacks, and the gunners and that, we didn’t – the gunners didn’t shoot any down, any attackers down but I think they were sufficiently awake enough and aware to let the German know that we were around, we knew he was there, sort of thing.
AS: How about the – I know it wasn’t your trade, but how about the navigation equipment when you were doing your first tour? Did you have Gee and H2S by then?
PF: Ooh yes, we had Gee, ooh yes, I had – well I know I was a wireless op, but I had to know all, how to use the Gee and the H2S and all those sorts of things, which were very good, I mean we’d all, could literally be lost without, without them, and they were inc, incredibly good. H2S in particular.
AS: Mhm, did –
PF: Now don’t ask me what H2S stands for, because I don’t know, I never knew, I never did ask. I bet you’ve got to tell me actually –
AS: Not at all, now I don’t, I don’t know, I don’t know. In your logbook here, you’ve got a, an Astra recall, or Astro recall, as a, do you know what that’s all about?
PF: Ah yes, that was [interrupted]. Is somebody [unclear].
Other: Hiya, [unclear], I’ve come to change your water jug.
PF: Okay, alright.
Other: Thank you.
PF: Thank you. Erm, what were we talking about, Astra recall? The, they, they’re two separate words actually. Astra meaning we were doing navigation by stars, by, and what was the other word?
AS: Recall.
PF: Recall, recall was to do with diversions and things like that, but that, that’s what that was. Astra navigation, the navigator didn’t like it and I had to help him and I wasn’t keen on it either. The, the, when you’re in cramped conditions and, you’ve got to keep referring to tables and cross referencing all the time makes – it’s hard work.
AS: Hmm. From your station in the aeroplane, could you see very much? Could you see out? Did you want to see out?
PF: Well, yes, I did want to – I liked to see out, there’s something – it’s nice to know that the world is passing by and if you were being attacked, you see it coming. Well, you know, I sat just behind the [pause] wireless operator, well, well you can’t quite see, there was a, there was an astrodome just behind the main cockpit coppola, well that’s what, that’s where I sat under that. That’s why there’s – there was always good light there. That’s where the warmth was, and it was, that was a good position, next to the navigator and course we used to work together.
AS: What were your fears on, on ops really at night?
PF: What was what?
AS: Your fears on ops?
PF: Well, well my fears were pretty awful really, I dreaded it. Well I think we all did, that was, it was alright, go to briefing and you, you were told the target and what to do and what not to do, and that’s frightening when you know the target, ‘cause it was usually a hotspot, and warned about night – it’s all very alarming, but once you get airborne, you’re, thing’s aren’t quite so bad until you get attacked [chuckles], but on the whole I, we were, we were very fortunate, we were, I mean we were only attacked once by night fighters. Used to get, we used to get anti-aircraft [unclear] of course, but the dread of course were night fighters ‘cause the Germans had a very good set-up.
AS: Could you sense or see other aeroplanes in the bomber stream around you?
PF: No, but you knew they were there because of the, of the turbulence you know, and the, and the airmen being in, being in people’s prop turbulence that used to, used to shake you about a bit. That’s the only indication you, you, you had. We were attacked two or three times but we – the gunners were alert enough to shoot away as it were.
AS: I see your first operation was to the Gironde in France –
PF: That’s right, yeah.
AS: What were you doing there?
PF: Laying mines. That, that – all freshmen aircrew, their first, their first raid over enemy territory was a gardening trip, and gardening was laying mines [chuckles], and the Gironde was one that, that was my first, that was my first trip, and that was, that was laying mines in the Gironde River, just off Bordeaux actually.
AS: So, these would be solo trips, would they? Just send one aircraft to, to lay mines, or?
PF: Well, well no, there would be, there would be squadrons doing it, and, and, but it wasn’t mass [pause], wasn’t mass operations, but there were several aircraft doing it, to keep their, their [pause] fighters, things, alive.
AS: Hmm, yeah. Another thing you’ve got here is SBA, local flying, is that standard beam approach?
PF: Yeah, yeah.
AS: Did that involve you at all, or, as the wireless man, or?
PF: No, it didn’t involve me in any shape or form, even though I was the wireless operator. It was, it was only the bomb aimer and the pilot’s concern because the bomb aimer was the first, virtually the second pilot because we didn’t carry a second pilot on Lancs, but we, but the bomb aimer took the part of the second pilot [chuckles].
AS: Okay. And did, he knew enough to fly the aeroplane?
PF: He knew enough to fly the aircraft. Whether he would have had enough – I don’t think Taffey would have been able to land, land it, but he would get you back, and you could do a ditch in the sea if you wanted – if you couldn’t land.
AS: Could I talk about some of the aids? Did you have any contact with Darky?
PF: Well, that, that rings a bell, Darky – now that was to do with RT, wasn’t it?
AS: Yeah, yeah.
PF: Now, now what was Darky? Oh gosh that’s right, on the [pause] forefront of my mind [pause] –
AS: Darky was local transmitters at, at observical posts and aerodromes, and if you were lost you could call up –
PF: Yes, yes oh God, yeah, I remember. I remember, yes, Darky very well.
AS: And did you use it?
PF: No, no, fortunately we never had to [pause]. We had a good navigator and we had Gee which we used to use a lot, and we erm, we didn’t have to use anything else. And none, none of us did courses on that while we got through.
AS: What – sounds like a silly question really, but what was the tension like as you approached the target?
PF: What was the what?
AS: The tension like in the crew as you approached the target?
PF: Well, as a matter of fact – it’s funny you should ask that question because that does cross my mind many times, ‘cause nearly everybody asks you that question. The funny part about it is, that when you’re approaching the target, all fear seems to have gone and dissipated, and you, you, everybody was looking out to find, to look at, to find the target and see what the defences were like and what attack we were going to do, and, and bearing in mind. what you’d been told to do, so yes, yes, that was, that was – rephrase your question because I was getting a bit out of touch with it.
AS: No, no I just – I wondered whether the tension really grew as you were approaching the target, but you’ve told me that the fear left you.
PF: Oh, I see, you mean as you approached the target, did the tension increase? No it didn’t, funnily enough, it rather dissipated, mainly I suppose because you, you were there, you’d seen what you were going to do. The defences hadn’t erupted and all you got was a target which was coloured red, which had obviously been bombed earlier, and that was, that was it, it never crossed our, never crossed our minds. Well, it never crossed my mind because I was a wireless operator and I was busy, and I never, I never even looked out. I was, I had, I was busy on the – ‘cause we had all sorts of messages coming in and that, so I had to listen all the time.
AS: Yes, so you listened on the main sets. Did you also control the RT, or, the radio telephone? You were on the radio telephone as well.
PF: Yes, yes, we were but the pilot used the RT, radio tele, used that for landing and takeoff purposes –
AS: Okay.
PF: But apart from that, there were, there were, the RT was never used.
AS: Hmm. How about the master bomber?
PF: Oh, the master bomber? Yeah well, we, that [pause] he was, it was all done by, by voice actually, and – to be quite honest, we were never impressed with it. It was a bit of a, of guidance you know, but sometimes he was a bit out, and sometimes he couldn’t find the place, but, on the whole, I suppose it worked because the, with their know-how and, and our own know-how.
AS: And you could hear it? You could hear what the master bomber was saying?
PF: Oh yes, it was very clear. Clear as crystal.
AS: Hm. So you were, you were on 467, that’s 5 Group, isn’t it?
PF: That was in 5 Group, yeah.
AS: 5 Group were a bit special, weren’t they?
PF: They were the, THE group, yeah. If you hadn’t have said that, I was going to say that.
AS: [Laughing] Sorry.
PF: But I’m glad you said it, so, you knew about it.
AS: Yeah.
PF: Yes, we used to get all the posh jobs as we’d call them, the posh and dangerous ones.
AS: And one of those that you got was Peenemunde.
PF: Peenemunde, yes, I was on that raid.
AS: Could, could you tell us a little bit about that?
PF: [Pause] yeah, yeah, I’ll tell you [long pause]. Oh, you’ve got my logbook there.
AS: Yeah, yeah, I got –
PF: I just gotta think of the date, what was it, was it August something, wasn’t it?
AS: I’m just looking actually –
PF: It’s ‘40, ’43 [pause.
AS: Do you know, I can’t find it. You’ll probably quicker than I would. Berlin, Berlin [long pause]. There we go, August, spot on, 12th of August.
PF: Yeah, I remember that very well. That was the [unclear], that was the most effective raid of the war, you know, everybody was so accurate, and trained to be accurate, and it was a very efficient raid result.
AS: How much did they tell you at briefing about Peenemunde and why you were going there? What did they tell you?
PF: Well, I’m just trying to think [pause]. We were told of course that, that, that they were specialising in speciality model aircraft to bomb London, and well, we knew that and that did make us more attentive to detail and sorted out, which we did.
AS: Is it true that the, the aircrew were told that if they didn’t do it the first time, they’d have to go back the next night, or is that just a story?
PF: Oh yeah that happened to me several times. Air-chief Marshal, our boss man in 5 Group was, erm, oh God, why has his name escaped me –
AS: Ralph Cochrane?
PF: Pardon?
AS: Was it Cochrane?
PF: Was it who?
AS: Cochrane. Ralph Cochrane.
PF: Oh yeah Ralph Cochrane, that’s the chap, well done, you know more about what I did –
AS: I wouldn’t say that sir, I wouldn’t say that at all.
PF: I just forgot, I just forgot his name, and, and, he was, he wanted you to do everything right, and he was like that and, ‘if you don’t bloody well get it tonight, you’ll go tomorrow night and you’ll go the next night’, and so on, he talked just like that. It was if he was talking to a class of kids, you know, and, yes, he was a very efficient man, and we had – we didn’t applaud him, we appreciated him, his air [unclear] and things like that. Yeah, I remember the briefing for the Peenemunde raid.
AS: Is it like we see on the films, where everyone sits down and the station commander comes in and they pull back the curtain – was it like that?
PF: It was like that, yeah, yeah, but it wasn’t quite so, not quite so dramatic as that [laughs] you know.
AS: How many briefings were there?
PF: Well, that was just – there was only one main briefing, but the navigators, the pilots and the navigators always had to go half an hour early to have their separate briefing, which was – I don’t know why, and the rest of the crews went afterwards to the main briefing. But we all had – as I was signals and we all had our separate briefings by our own leaders.
AS: So, what was the procedure then? The aeroplanes would be test flown, flying test –
PF: Would be –
AS: You’d have a flying test, a night flying test with the aeroplane –
PF: Oh yes, and then an active course, yes, yeah.
AS: Yeah, and then you’d have your briefing, and –
PF: Yes well, the, the, it wasn’t quite as close as we are saying it. For example, if, if the operations were on the Friday night, or any particular night, you would do your flying – we had a special word for them and it escapes, it escapes me, not NFT, something like that – you’d go and do that in the morning somewhere and check everything was alright, and that would be your, your [unclear] practical briefing. And then we’d go to the main briefing and having done all that we, you knew exactly where you were.
AS: And then you’d have, have a meal, or -
PF: We’d have a meal, our eggs and bacon, twice. Eggs and bacon before and eggs and bacon afterwards [laugh], and, yes so that was, that was a very exciting life but it was bloody dangerous, and you got, you get a bit worried about it, particularly if you’re married and that, but there.
AS: How did you get out to the aeroplane?
PF: We were taken out by, by bus, ministry, you know, Air Force busses. They were specially, they were specially made for that purpose. They used to take the crews. They, you had enough space for all the parachutes and the stuff to go inside your – me and my pigeons, I had to carry, we had to carry pigeons, that sounds good doesn’t it [chuckles], and, that, that was it. We would then be taken out to our aircraft, ground crew would be waiting for us, we would be ushered into our seats, and they would carry the stuff in for us, and that was that, and the pilot would get the engines started and run up and we’d all, we’d all do our bits and pieces. I’d do mine and away we go.
AS: Tell me about the pigeons. I mean, they weren’t to eat, were they?
PF: Pardon?
AS: They weren’t there to be eaten, were they? Tell me about the pigeons.
PF: [Pause] it was quite a joke really. They, it used to be one to tell your children. We had to carry pigeons and they’d say, ‘what, you had pigeons, did they tell you where to go Dad’ [chuckles]. I’d say, ‘yeah, we’d let them out and then we’d say Berlin and we’ll follow you’ [laughs]. What was I saying? Yes, we had, we had pigeons.
AS: Whereabouts did you keep them?
PF: What, my – I was responsible for them as the wireless operator, and right behind me were the armour-plated doors, which was ideal for me really, but behind the armour-plated door was a rest couch – oh I thought I saw them earlier – and erm, that’s where we used to place them on that, just right, they all fitted there nicely.
AS: So by the time you’d got to the aeroplane, was it all bombed up and fuelled up?
PF: Oh yes, it was, they were all done up in the morning, if you were taking off in the evening. All the bombing up – everything would have been ready in the morning. That was, that was very, very efficient, and then we would go to the briefing in the afternoon and then take off in the evening.
AS: Hm. Did you feel that you had enough fuel all the time, for the distances and trips that you –
PF: Oh yeah well, we had a, our engine – we all had, every crew had an engineer, and that was his responsibility to make sure that the bowsers had put the right amount of petrol in, and they got the [pause], they got it all laid on so that if the, if the pilot wanted to change engines or something, they did sometimes, that could all be done by stopping an engine and starting another up sort of thing.
AS: Okay.
PF: That was all very complicated but all was very well organised. Everybody knew what they had to do.
AS: Yeah. So, you, you’d done your Gironde mine laying trip, and then you went to Saint Nazaire. Was that the same sort of thing?
PF: Yes, same thing, yeah.
AS: Dropping –
PF: Yeah, well I’m just trying to – why was that? It was because that was the – of course, Saint Nazaire is on the Gironde River, so that was, it was something to do with that trip.
AS: And then the big one, the Big B, operation to Berlin.
PF: Yeah. That was the Big B yeah, they were big trips. Dangerous ones, the losses were always heavy. Well, they were mainly night fighters – Hitler made sure that his beloved Berlin and all that area round there was well guarded by night fighters, which were the Junkers 88, which was a very efficient aeroplane, and they caused us proper problem.
AS: Hm. Did you lose a lot on the squadron to –
PF: Pardon?
AS: Did you lose a lot on the squadron to night fighters?
PF: No we didn’t, funnily enough. We used to have losses to ack-ack and the odd fighter, but that was, there was nothing catastrophic from fighters.
AS: But over the period you were on ops from March 1943, were the losses heavy? Severe?
PF: They were. I wouldn’t say they were severe, they were heavy. I didn’t know what the statistics are on this, I can’t remember them, but – oh you could, people used to hear it on the radio and they would say something about aircraft missing; that used to be an indication of what the night was like. Some nights were pretty awful, mainly due to night fighters.
AS: And could you get a sense of this at the squadron as well? People just disappearing?
PF: Yeah.
AS: Hm. And then, then two days later, you went to Berlin again, and it says ‘bombs dropped on Flensburg’. What was that all about?
PF: Oh yeah, that was a, that was a – that wasn’t a catastrophe, but it was an embarrassment. Let me think now. Oh yes, we were set off and we were briefed to bomb Berlin, and crossing over, oh gosh, what’s the name of, Jutland area, you know –
AS: Oh I – Denmark there.
PF: Denmark?
AS: Yeah.
PF: Yeah. The, there, to the right of Denmark is Flensburg, which is German obviously, and if you drifted off course, you got it in the neck from Flensburg. Well, that was what was happening. And yeah, that was a dicey old area, and we never, I never liked the Berlin trips, ‘cause that was, it was a long way there and you had to go through, like Flensburg, and so many other hazards, there was no sort of sitting back and relaxing and saying ‘oh well, let’s go’ [chuckles].
AS: Did you always feel yourselves well informed about where the German hazards were? Where the flack was –
PF: Oh yes we were. The briefing was very accurate and – no we never had anything, no faults to find with that.
AS: And how about –
PF: And our intelligence was very good too.
AS: How about the debrief when you got back? Was that – what happened in the debrief? Was that a long time or just very cursory or?
PF: No, no that was, it was done quite quickly. We, we just, we landed dead on time as always, found your way back to the debriefing room and sat yourself down at a table, and the debriefing officer would come along and start asking us the routine questions, and that was that, you know. Nothing in particular about it, we just wanted to get back to the mess and have a meal.
AS: Can you remember what –
PF: Our eggs and bacon [chuckles].
AS: Okay. Can you remember what some of the questions were? I know it’s a long time ago, but what were they interested in?
PF: They were interested in the concentration of anti-aircraft from the guns, and particularly the fighters. That’s what they were interested in, because they were becoming a menace, and to trace what airfield they were coming from so they could take care of them with a separate force. But that was the, that was the main thing was night fighters, and he had a very good, he was, Hitler had a very good night fighter force, or Goering I should say.
AS: A moment ago, you talked about getting back and landing dead on time. What was the procedure as you approached the English coast to return?
PF: What, what was the procedure? Well, well actually, we were on tracks that the briefing officer had given you and, so they always knew exactly where you were going to do. If you were off track as it were, you, I, we would just let them know that we were off track.
AS: And then you’d spot, what, you’d spot the pundit light for –
PF: Yeah, yeah, a pundit or a something, a light, strip of light and that would, you’d pick it up and that would give an indication. Everything was so well organised.
AS: You, when you got back to base, what happened then? When you were in the circuit, did they stack you up or, or?
PF: No, no they didn’t stack us up at all, they would get us down as soon as possible, which was right, and we would land and the transport would be there, the aircrew bus would be there to pick you up. We used to have a bus would you believe? And take us back to the debriefing. They’d sow us with coffee [unclear] and that was that. Everybody thankful to be back, having looked round the room to see who was missing [chuckles]. I’m laughing about it, I shouldn’t –
AS: Yeah, but as you said before, you lived in your self-contained crew world.
PF: Yeah.
AS: Yeah. This – you’ve got quite a lot of trips to, to Italy, and I noticed you –
PF: Yes, yeah. I did eight Italian trips.
AS: You got the Italian Star for that.
PF: What’s that?
AS: Was that what you got the Italian Star for?
PF: Oh yes.
AS: So, what were the Italian trips like? Did you go over the Alps?
PF: It was – mostly yes, mostly. Not all trips took us over the Alps but the majority did, and they were quite – we used to like the Italy trips, ‘cause they were quite uneventful. You had all that track across France and there were very few night fighters, which was, which was the problem, attacking Germany or France, and there were very little problems then. It wasn’t until we got nearer to the industrial areas that the night fighters, night fighter problem increased. [Knocking] come in.
Other: Peter, returning back with the water.
PF: Alright, yes, thank you.
Other: Here we are.
PF: Yes, thank you.
Other: You’re welcome.
AS: Yeah, so Italy was a long time but a comparatively easy trip, was it?
PF: Oh yes, the Italian trips, we [chuckles] used to like – when we’d arrive into the briefing room and you looked up on the wall and there’d be the big map up, and you’d see the, that Italy was the target, were the targets and sigh of relief because the, you know, going all the way across France, there were very few night fighters and, not until you got to the Italian area that they become concentrated. But Italy trips were always good. We always looked forward to those.
AS: Did you end up coming back in daylight from them, or was there enough time to –
PF: Mostly we got back in daylight, no in, at night time I should say, but we used to do – oh God, what were they [pause], we used to do trips and there was a name for them and that, that’s slipped my mind [pause]. They were virtually daylight raids, but we were given courses across Germany and France which, which weren’t defended heavily, but, yes, we used to, but that, on the whole we used to like these light trips as we called them [chuckles].
AS: And there were some others, some really difficult trips, some really difficult trips like the Ruhr trips, like Essen and –
PF: Oh yeah, the Ruhr trips were, Happy Valley as we called them, were very severe and strong. We used to hate Happy Valley, because the, the ack-ack concentration – Hitler had done it to please his own people actually, that all, the whole Ruhr Valley was saturated with anti-aircraft guns [pause]. But we did most, that was most of the operation with the, on the Ruhr Valley you know, Happy Valley – you see that? Oh God, handkerchief, oh there it is [long pause].
AS: Are there any particular moments that really stick in your mind of, of carrying out this campaign? Airborne moments?
PF: Well, I, I’m just trying to think. I had an idea you were going to ask me a question like that [long pause].
AS: Were any of you wounded at all?
PF: I was never, fortunately I was never wounded, I was never, we were never hit. We were knocked about a bit by German night fighters, but they weren’t very heavy attack, heavily, they weren’t heavy attacks because our gunners were good enough to keep them at bay. So no, to answer your question, no we, we, it wasn’t a problem. Thank God, because that could – he had an extremely good night fighter force.
AS: And you, you flew the same aircraft, A-Able?.
PF: On A-Able, yeah. There’s a painting of her up there. Er yes, we, we were fortunate enough to have our own aeroplane right through the, my tour.
AS: And did she always start on four engines and come back on four engines?
PF: Yeah –
AS: Mechanically very reliable, yeah?
PF: Yeah, but sometimes the pilot had to give an engine a rest, and we’d come back, perhaps come back on three, but on the whole we managed. Well, it’s nice to know we had – the old Lanc would fly well on two engines.
AS: And on, on takeoff, was that a particularly worrying time with –
PF: Was what?
AS: On takeoff, with, full of full and bombs and –
PF: Well, what, well yes it was, but it was a touch and go sort of thing. The, the tanks, the petrol tanks would be full up and the bomb racks would be full, so you had a, what did we used to call it, a maximum load, or it was called something else, a maximum effort I think it was called, and, and we managed to get through okay.
AS: Were you, had you got married by the time you were on operations?
PF: Pardon?
AS: Had you got married by the time you were on operations, on 467?
PF: I was, I was on operations in ’43, and no, I got married in ’44.
AS: Okay, so when you’d finished ops.
PF: No, and I – when I went back on my second tour, when the second, after the second front had started, that was in ’45, then, yeah I did my second tour, which was in ’45, yeah. I don’t know what when I was leading to, I’m sorry.
AS: No, no, we were talking about when you got married. Did you feel differently on your second tour, when you were married on ops?
PF: No, no I didn’t. We, you treated – it was a job, you know, and that’s how you looked at it, and kept your fingers crossed. I was very fortunate but I, when I, ‘cause I did, my first tour was pretty grim, but I wasn’t, but I wasn’t married then, but apart from that we had a reasonably efficient –
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Peter Fitt
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Adam Sutch
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-05-19
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AFittP150519
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.
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
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
01:49:04 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
Peter was born in Norwich. His father was a head gardener and wanted him to follow that occupation and so refused to let him join the RAF. With the advent of war the situation changed and Peter volunteered at a recruiting station and after selection tests was accepted as a wireless operator. Peter completed his ground training at No. 2 radio school At RAF Yatesbury and air training at RAF Watton which ended with a passing out parade.
Sent to an operational training unit to fly Wellingtons, he remembers the high rate of losses due to accidents, particularly of flying into high ground. Crewed up at RAF Finningly in September 1942, he was converted onto Manchesters and then Lancasters at the heavy conversion unit at RAF Swinderby. He describes in detail the equipment available to him, which made for a very busy job, and remembers that all the codes were written on 'flimsies' which could be swallowed in an emergency.
Sent to 467 Squadron which, as a special unit, Peter felt were given the "posh and dangerous" jobs. He completed a full tour including minelaying to the Gironde and St. Nazaire, Berlin and also eight trips to Italy, which he considers were easy compared to 'happy valley', as the Ruhr valley was known . One special trip was to Peenemunde and the crews were warned that if they didn't do the job properly, then they would be sent back every night until it was completed. He recalls being attacked by night fighters but the gunners kept them at bay and so completed his full tour in the same aircraft, A-Able.
On completion of his tour Peter was commissioned and put in charge of the wireless flight until 1945 when he commenced his second tour which was terminated with the cessation of hostilities.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Norfolk
England--Wiltshire
England--Yorkshire
France
France--Gironde Estuary
France--Saint-Nazaire
Germany
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Peenemünde
Italy
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Terry Holmes
Vivienne Tincombe
467 Squadron
aircrew
animal
Bombing of Peenemünde (17/18 August 1943)
briefing
crewing up
fear
Gee
H2S
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Manchester
mine laying
Morse-keyed wireless telegraphy
Operational Training Unit
RAF Bottesford
RAF Finningley
RAF Swinderby
RAF Yatesbury
training
Wellington
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/297/3452/PMcBeanLW1602.1.jpg
8c7fbfb2845990a68d2b4ba40cd383c3
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/297/3452/AMcBeanLW161022.2.mp3
c1d0e5a458132c81e8eb1429d0346aaa
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
McBean, Lachie
Lachlan William McBean
Lachlan W McBean
Lachlan McBean
L W McBean
L McBean
Description
An account of the resource
117 Items. Collection concerns Lachlan William "Lachie" McBean (1924 - 2019, 430629 Royal Australian Air Force). He was a pilot whose crew had just finished their course at a Heavy Conversion Unit when the European war ended. Collection consist of an oral history interview and photographs of people, places and aircraft.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Lachlan McBean 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
2016-10-22
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
McBean, LW
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
AP: This interview for the International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archive is with Lachie McBean who was a pilot at the tail end of World War Two. The interview is taking place at Lachie’s home in Ballarat in Victoria. It’s the 22nd of October 2016 and my name is Adam Purcell. Lachie, start from the beginning. Can you tell me something about your early life? Where and how you grew up and what you were doing before you enlisted?
LM: Yes, Adam. I was a country boy. I, we came from a place, a town called Seymour in Victoria. My people originally came from Moulamein in New South Wales but I was still, I was going to school in Geelong when I turned eighteen and on turning eighteen a friend of mine and myself both joined the air force. And we were told that we had to finish our school year out before we would be called up. So we did finish our school year out and then in January the following year we were called up then. So, I didn’t have any work experience or anything like that before I went into the air force.
AP: What, what were your thoughts and how old were you when you heard that war had been declared?
LM: Oh I think I would have been about fourteen or so and I remember, I remember the occasion very well when Mr Menzies announced that Australia had declared war. It’s quite vivid in my mind. I guess in those days being a school boy it didn’t, it didn’t have a great Effect on us but we were aware of people joining the services and going away. It was a little bit ahead for us being only about fourteen or so at the time.
AP: Did you have any thoughts about whether or how you might have been involved yourself eventually?
LM: Not initially. Not initially, Adam but as the time goes on when we were getting towards the age of eighteen it wasn’t discussed amongst school, school mates at all but we all, I think we all just automatically understood that we would be joining the services. There was no thought of, not in my mind, of doing anything else. I think everybody, almost everybody, just assumed they would be in the services.
AP: What — did you sort of see any effects of the war as like in those few years before you enlisted yourself. So home front type things.
LM: Sorry I didn’t —
AP: Sorry. Did you see any effects of the war? Like in, on the home front in the first sort of few years before you enlisted yourself? So as a, as a civilian essentially did the war have any effect on your life in Australia?
LM: Oh yes, certainly. Certainly by the, being aware of the people who were joining and going away and yes we were certainly as school kids aware of the effects of the war, but we certainly were pretty sheltered by it. Looking back on it I think we should have been more aware. But we still remember all of the, all of the more important things that were happening through newspaper reports of course and radio.
AP: Why did you pick the air force?
LM: It seemed to be an automatic choice. I just, I wouldn’t know when we picked the air force. I think I must have been always a little interested in the air force because I did know a little bit about some of the aeroplanes that were used prior to that. I remember, for instance, the Hawker Demon, the Bristol Bulldog. There was another one that I [pause] won’t come to mind at the moment. I remember when the Avro Anson first, first came out to Australia, well, pre-war. So I must have had a leaning. Leaning that way. I certainly didn’t give it a lot of thought.
AP: It was always, always going to be the air force. Alright. What about the enlistment process? So, once you were, once you were called up what happened next. How did you enlist? Where did you have to go and what did you have to do?
LM: Well, we, I went, I went to Melbourne. I can’t think exactly of where it was. We, in civilian clothing of course. We were put on to a troop train to go to Sydney that night. There was a troop train ran every night from Melbourne to Sydney. I well recall going for the troop train because there were all army, mostly army personnel on there and we were dressed in civilian clothing, young people. They knew we were in the air force. We got, we got a lot of cheek from the army blokes. And I do remember we were very pleased to get shut into the carriages that were there. Away from the [pause] what were they calling us? Blue orchids or something to that effect. But I know that we were quite pleased to get away from the army thing and I can even remember an incident on that troop train going. We were stopped outside, outside Wagga. I think it was just the southern side of Wagga. There was a big army camp there and a lot of the army people used to come from the camp, hop through and the train would stop and they would get a ride into Wagga on the troop train. And one of the, one of the army fellas was trying to get through the fence and he got his pants caught on one of the wires. And a train stopped there with hundreds of people hanging out the windows barracking at him [laughs]
AP: Can you remember much of the interview or medical process that you had to go through before you were accepted?
LM: No. I remember very little. Very little about it. We did a medical. We did a medical I’m not sure if it was on that day. Certainly we had to do a medical, a medical. But, no, I don’t remember any details about that.
AP: Were you on the reserve for any length of time or did you just go straight in?
LM: No. I went straight in.
AP: Straight in. Scratch that question off the list. Alright, so you were on a troop train up to Sydney. Presumably your Initial Training School was at Bradfield Park.
LM: It was at Bradfield Park, yes.
AP: Tell me something of that. What happened there? What was the place like?
LM: Well, it, it was a surprising place because it was the nearest railway station I believe was Lindfield and quite a built up area and the Bradfield Park camp was not very far from the station. Probably about a mile. But when at, at the camp you wouldn’t know you were in a built up area. There was a very steep bank at the back of the camp going down to the Lane Cove River. It seemed although, although in a, virtually in a built up area it wasn’t noticeable at all there.
AP: What sort of things happened there? What can you remember of what you did? What you learned.
LM: Well, certainly the thing that I most remember there was the drill instructor that we had. He was, he was a corporal, Corporal Sheriff. And Corporal Sheriff had more power than any officer that I’ve ever came across I think. He used to be a professional boxer and showed all the signs of it. He had a flattened nose. I had heard of cauliflower ears before I went into the air force but once I saw Corporal Sheriff I knew exactly what cauliflower ears means. His grammar was out of this world really. He, he would say to you things like, ‘What was the first thing I learned yous was when I seen yous?’ And you had to answer to him, ‘Corporal that yousil tell us nothing wrong.’ He wouldn’t, he wouldn’t stand you saying, saying, ‘You wouldn’t tell us anything wrong corporal.’ You had to say that, ‘Yous’il tell us nothing wrong.’ And I have great memories of Corporal Sheriff. And although he was rough and tough I now regard him as one of the people who had a lot of influence on my life. He was a strict disciplinarian. Disciplinarian. And he wouldn’t stand for anything but your best effort. And I think I learned a lot from Corporal Sheriff.
AP: What was the accommodation like at Bradfield Park?
LM: Oh well, I thought it was excellent. We were in a Nissen hut, about thirty people I think. And very good, and very good meals. Yes. It was, it was, naturally from a kid coming straight from school it was an experience. I hadn’t had any experience of the outside world and that was all new to me but I coped pretty well.
AP: Some of the, can you tell me some of the, well about some of the other people who were in your course? In your intake. Like — did you make any mates in particular?
LM: Well yes. I actually did go, one of my friends, the friend who we joined up together did go in with me so that was a help. And also another. I had another friend who unexpectedly was called up in the same draft. He was in a different flight from me but I knew him very well. But there were a few characters in amongst them. I had been used to, because I’d been at boarding school, I’d been used to living with other people. But there was certainly a few characters. One — Kevin Brennan, I remember was a great character. Another one — Lou Murray who was older than most of us. He was twenty five or six and had been in the army and Lou was a great character. That, we all got on pretty well together.
AP: There was a lot of helping each other out with the lessons and the study and all that sort of thing as well.
LM: I don’t know so much about helping each other out. Yes. I suppose we did. We all, we all [pause] well, we all coped. We all seemed to cope and we had, I can’t remember a lot about it but it was almost in a way like going back to school again because we, we had, most of the day was occupied with lectures of some sort or other.
AP: That was going to lead me to the next question. Was there any sort of time off or time spare at ITS and what did you do with it if there was? Was it go, go, go the whole time?
LM: We, we did have leave in the [pause] I’m not sure if it wasn’t every second weekend. No. It might have been every weekend we had leave and could go in to Sydney and do. Do little things. There wasn’t much in the way of sports from what I, what I remember. Quite a bit of work in the gym. But no, I don’t remember. I think we were kept pretty well, pretty occupied. I don’t know what we did in the evenings but we, we coped. I just don’t remember what we did in the evenings.
AP: That’s alright.
LM: We were not allowed out. We were not off away from camp in the evenings.
AP: So, I think it was at ITS that you did a selection board or something where they chose where you were going next.
LM: Yes. We had a Category Selection Board that we had to front up and I well remember that because I was the last one interviewed on, on the particular day. It was considered to be a pretty big ordeal for, for trainees to front the Category Selection Board. And when I was called, called into it there were three officers on the board and I certainly remember it well because Corporal Sheriff marched me in. He, he gave me, you know, ‘Right turn. Halt,’ in front of the, of the officers, ‘Left turn.’ And then said, ‘Sir,’ which meant that he handed me over to the officers. And at the time I thought I didn’t think. I thought there was something wrong with the interview. It didn’t seem to be going smoothly. And then I realised that I was, had put so much attention in trying to do everything correctly that I had forgotten to salute. We were supposed to give them a smart salute. And I waited until there seemed to be an appropriate answer and I threw a salute to the three officers. And something strange happened then because the one who was in the centre had a lot of papers in his hand and he picked these papers up and put them up in front of his face and he seemed to be shaking a bit. But the officer on each side of him both dropped their pencils on the floor and they took a fair while to get their pencils back again. I wondered. And when they did one of the officers made some sort of a comment which I thought was a bit like a school-girlish comment and they all burst into laughter. And of course, you know having this this recruit forgetting to salute them was a great joke to them. And after that the interview went, went pretty well. I know that they kept talking about my navigation. They asked what category I’d like to be and I said, ‘A pilot,’ and they kept talking about and saying my navigation was pretty good, ‘What would you I think if we made you a navigator?’ And I said, ‘Oh well if I’m made a navigator I guess that’s right.’ Anyhow, it turned out at the finish that they did select me for my first choice so that was lucky. But actually when I forgot to salute I was more worried about Corporal Sherriff standing behind me than I was about the officers. And in fact now that I remember it that Corporal Sherriff took me to task. He said, ‘You’s has disgraced me.’ [laughs] and he sent me down to his hut. He said, ‘At the double.’ He said, ‘There’ll be, there’s a couple of pairs of boxing gloves behind the door. Go and get those and meet me in the gym.’ Which I did. I was terrified about that and when I got there Corporal Sherriff was working on a punching bag and he was a lather of sweat and anyhow I thought this looks pretty bad but he said to me, ‘Put them down there and get out of me way. Clear off.’ [laughs] Which I did pretty smartly.
AP: Excellent.
LM: He was a great character, Corporal Sherriff.
AP: Obviously had you well, he had you well figured out. Or he had trainees well figured out.
LM: My word he did.
AP: Yeah [laughs] very good. Alright, so you’ve just found out you're a pilot. You then get shuffled off to EFTS.
LM: Yes. I went.
AP: Where was that?
LM: I went off to EFTS on Tiger Moths at Narrandera in New South Wales. Southern New South Wales. Yes. Can’t remember. I think there were two or three of us there but I don’t remember the other people who went there. So —
AP: What, what happened at Narrandera? Tell me about the learning there.
LM: Narrandera. Well it was, it was pretty interesting. The, it was in the wintertime and I’ve always thought since that you didn’t know what a frost was like until you’ve experienced one at Narrandera. You’d sometimes be flying at 7:30 in the morning and you could see the whole countryside absolutely white below as if it were covered with snow. It was very, and of course an open cockpit. When we got down you would probably not be able to feel your legs ‘til probably 10 or 11 o’clock in the morning. But Narrandera was good. Yes, we enjoyed that. And that’s about it, I think, for Narrandera.
AP: A question I have to answer every pilot — tell me about your first solo.
LM: Yeah, my first solo was interesting in that I was having a bit of trouble landing and I thought that I was probably going to get scrubbed because I could do, handle everything else but I was having a bit of trouble landing. And when it came to the critical time they gave me another instructor and he straight away, he straight away identified the problem that I was having with it. I was able to correct that to land it perfectly well. I had about two flights with him and then he, he hopped out and said, ‘You’re on your own,’ and so that was, I had no trouble afterwards landing. I think I was, I didn’t realise that, I think I was trying to sort of to wheel them on and didn’t realise, and hadn’t been really instructed by my original instructor about three pointing them. But it was just a matter of just one, you know, one comment, or one from the new instructor that fixed it.
AP: I can, yeah, I have a story that’s almost exactly the same. I was flying at Bankstown in a Cherokee and I’d completely forgotten how to land.
LM: Yeah.
AP: This was shortly after I’d got my licence. I just couldn’t land it. New aeroplane, new instructor ‘cause I was getting checked out there.
LM: Yeah.
AP: And I did about two hours with him and then, or two or three hours with him and I just couldn’t figure it out. And then I went with another instructor who had something like thirty thousand instructional hours.
LM: Yes.
AP: And he went, ‘You’re looking at the wrong place on the runway.’ It was as simple as that.
LM: Yeah.
AP: Fixed it. Never had a problem since.
LM: Well, I was trying to bring them in on a, I think, touch the wheels down instead of just holding it off. Stalling it on to the ground.
AP: Very good.
LM: Yeah. Very, very simple and very effective from the new instructor.
AP: How — did you spend any time there as one pilot’s called it, tarmac terrier? Starting engines up and things like that before you started.
LM: No. No I didn’t do any of that. No. No.
AP: Just straight into it. After EFTS you went to a Service Flying Training School.
LM: I went to, on twin engines on Avro Ansons at a place called Mallala in South Australia. Just north of, north of Adelaide. And I really, I really enjoyed being at Mallala. And —
AP: What happened there? Why did you really enjoy it?
LM: For some reason we, we used to have, I think, three days off every second weekend at Mallala and we could go into Adelaide. I’m not a city person at all but I really liked Adelaide. I felt at home over in South Australia and have ever since actually. But it was, it was a cropping area around Mallala and we used to do a lot of cross country flights to interesting places. Up to the Flinders Ranges and Port Lincoln over to the, to the west. They were, used to fly those with, with two trainee pilots. One would be navigator on the way out and swap over. Swap over with the other pilot and the course was very interesting. But for some reason I seemed to feel at home over in Mallala and I didn’t, I didn’t realise until later in life that my forebears first came to Adelaide in South Australia. And an old forebear arrived in Adelaide in 1838 and became an overlander. And I just seemed to feel at home there. So yes I enjoyed Mallala. Yeah.
AP: There was Ansons you said. What did you think of the Anson?
LM: The Anson. Oh I really liked the old Anson. They seemed reliable and not complicated. And I think a lot of people were not very impressed with them but yes I’ve still got a soft spot for the old Anson. Yeah. But they, they seemed to me to be simple and safe, yeah I enjoyed them.
AP: Where did you go from Mallala? What was next?
LM: I think, Mallala — after Mallala was to [pause] must have been to the Melbourne Cricket Ground as embarkation depot I think.
AP: Tell me about the MCG.
LM: Well, the Melbourne Cricket Club, the Melbourne Cricket Ground, yes. It was an interesting place to be. I lived there for three weeks. Under no circumstance were we allowed to set foot on the ground itself but we had parade grounds on the tarmac in front of the, I think it was in front of the old, the original old members stand. Yes, three weeks there for — I actually was, I was meant to go overseas a little earlier than I did because I’d been given pre-embarkation leave. My mother had gone to live in Canberra at that time and I had only a few days. I think about four or five days embarkation leave and the train, I was late back because of a train not connecting and when I got back the rest of the boys were all ready to go overseas and I remained there another couple of weeks. And, and by doing so the ones that I had been with had gone on a ship via the Cape of Good Hope. And the ship that I travelled on went via New Zealand and the United States. So I probably would have selected that way of going.
AP: Right. Tell me about that boat then. Tell me about that trip to the UK.
LM: To the — well we were taken to Brisbane. We were in camp at a place just north of Brisbane for two or three nights and embarked on a, on an American troop carrier called the Matsonia. The Matsonia was almost empty because they had taken troops to New Guinea and we, we travelled from Brisbane quite close to Lord Howe Island. I would think probably only a mile off Lord Howe Island. They’d got these remarkable high cliffs that I’ve always remembered there. From there to Auckland. Not allowed off the ship at Auckland and then from there to San Francisco, and we had about a week or so in San Francisco which was pretty interesting to young blokes like we all were. Not long left school. About a four day trip across the United States by train through — I remember going through a tunnel called the Moffat Tunnel which was, I think was something like seven and three quarter miles long. The longest tunnel in the world. I remember seeing the first snow I had ever seen. The place might have been called [unclear]. Salt Lake City. Places like that. Passing through. Detroit. Passing through them and then we had a week or so in New York. The American people were absolutely great to us. I know that on at least two occasions some others and myself had had meals in a restaurant and had gone up to pay for it and been told it’s already been paid for. And people had already paid for them and not even come up and told you they were doing so. That happened at least on two occasions. So, yes the American people were great.
AP: Can you tell me some more about New York?
LM: More about New York.
AP: Yeah. And your — well you spent a week there. What sort of things did you do?
LM: I think —
AP: What did you think?
LM: Well, first of all at San Francisco when we had a week or so there we were, we were camped on an island in the San Francisco harbour which was quite close to the famous prison island which is [pause] won’t come to mind now but there is a famous prison island in San Francisco and we were quite close to that. But in New York we, I know that we were billeted for a few days with a doctor who took us to an opera. It was, the opera was called, I believe, “Carmen Jones,” and it was all black, all black cast. He took us to his country, his residence in the country further to the north. I can’t remember just where but I do remember it was very cold at the time and I was with a friend of mine called Doc Davies from , who came from Perth. And there was a pond. He had a country property. There was a pond on this property that he had which was covered in ice. It was a beaver pond. The pond had been made by beavers and I remember Doc being, I suppose silly enough but walking out on the ice there and went through the ice and into the freezing water. But he was able to get out easily enough but, it — we looked of course at all the buildings. The famous buildings in New York. I think most of us went to visit Jack Dempsey’s bar. He was, I think, had been World Heavyweight Boxing Champion prior to that. That was a famous place. And anyhow it was a great experience for young people. From young people from the country in Victoria.
AP: You’re not the first person to tell me about Jack Dempsey’s bar, so —
LM: Is that so?
AP: Yes. A lot of people have mentioned it.
LM: Yeah.
AP: Yeah very good. Alright. Then you go across to England.
LM: Yes. We, we went to, if I remember correctly there were only seventeen in our party and yes, we, I was put in charge of the baggage of this lot and I was taken down to the wharf with all the baggage. The day prior to our sailing I think it was. But however we travelled on the Queen Mary and in New York harbour tied up along, beside the Queen Mary was the Queen Elizabeth. So the two biggest ocean liners in the world were tied up together. We were fortunate to travel up together in the Queen Mary which was a great experience. There were lots of rumours. The Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth carried lots and lots of troops to, to England. And there were lots of stories about u-boats looking for them. Hunting them. However, we had a, we had a — our trip was ok. I believe that the trip that I did was to that time had the record number of troops on it than it had so far. And I understand that there were twenty two thousand troops on because there were a lot of American troops being taken to England prior to D-day. And I understand they had one soldier sleeping in a bunk in the daytime and a different one sleeping in the same bunk at night. And I can remember them having the canteens on the decks and the American troops had to line up. To line up at these and they’d have to, they’d get their rations slapped on to plates and then they had to run for about a hundred yards away. They had American service police who were belting them on the backside with a baton and saying, ‘Get moving buddy.’ And they’d belt them on the backside with batons to make them run so they would clear the area out and not be hanging around there. And I might add they’re talking about the meals on troop ships the meals we had on the American troop ship, the Matsonia were absolutely magnificent because the ship was almost empty and probably four or five course meals, unbelievable for troops. Yeah.
AP: Lovely. This is the first time obviously that you’ve been overseas isn’t it?
LM: Oh yeah.
AP: Yeah.
LM: Yes. Yes.
AP: It would have made a fairly big impact I imagine.
LM: A fair?
AP: A fairly big impact.
LM: Oh yes. Oh well, but I guess, I guess we took it all in our stride. It surprises me now that they didn’t seem to be big deals. All the young people just seemed to take it in their stride.
AP: So you, you then land in the UK.
LM: Yes, at Greenock.
AP: In Greenock. And presumably you then, you probably caught a train down to Brighton or something similar.
LM: Yes we would have caught a train to Brighton. That was, that was our first posting in England, to Brighton.
AP: What did you think of England? Seeing it for the first time as a young Australian.
LM: I guess again, I guess again we just took it in our stride. We just accepted what we, what we saw. I don’t remember having any particular thoughts about it. No. I can’t think of any immediate. Any impressions that I had.
AP: Did you, when was the first time that you realised you were now in a war zone?
LM: Oh well it didn’t take long to realise that because of course there were — beaches were, were fenced off with barbed wire along there. There were anti–aircraft guns on the beach front. More or less in front of our billets. We were billeted in a couple of the big hotels. There was the Royal and the Metro. I can’t remember which one I was in but I know there were plenty of signs of wartime then. You often used to see in the evenings the, off the coast you would see what certainly appeared to be gunfire. I understand the little motor torpedo boats used to get involved in little actions off the shore. You saw plenty of signs of that at night. Occasionally at Brighton, even at Brighton occasionally sirens going, air raid sirens going off. Oh no, it was soon very very obvious that [pause] I think we could get down to the beach. The beaches were not sand. They were, they were pebble beaches and absolutely marvellous for throwing stones. Skipping stones across the water. And I had one friend Henty Wilson and I — there was one place you could get down to the water and throw stones and we regularly went down throwing stones in the water there.
AP: Where did you go next, after Brighton?
LM: I can’t quite remember. I was at Brighton for, for a while. I don’t remember quite where I went but probably there was a, we went to a camp which was an interesting posting. We went to one called Credenhill near Hereford and it was not to do with flying. I can’t remember the purpose of the camp. We did a lot of exercises. Climbing over walls with nets on them and through big pipes and all that sort of thing. We did a lot of, did a lot of, a lot of exercises but it was interesting in that camp because after we’d been there for a few days all of the pilots on the course were called in to be given a talk by an RAF officer. And I don’t think we, I don’t think we understood what the talk was about really. But when he’d finished his talk he, he said, he asked us if any of us would volunteer to retrain as glider pilots. And we could hardly believe this. Nobody was remotely interested in it. He not only asked, he not only asked if anyone would volunteer. He more or less pleaded. He seemed to be quite insistent and, but still nobody even remotely thought of doing. We thought it was a backward step. And I don’t think, I don’t think we thought any more about it after that but about a month later after breakfast one morning I can recall.
[phone ringing, recording paused]
AP: Now you were saying about a month later, a month after —
LM: About a month later, near at the end of the course we were out after breakfast doing some exercises and we could hear the drone of aircraft, and suddenly aircraft appeared towing gliders. Going straight over our heads. Not at great height. Probably fifteen hundred feet or thereabouts and the sky became full of aircraft towing gliders and if you looked to the north as far as you could see and looked to the south as far as you could see they were gliders everywhere there. Strangely, at the time we didn’t immediately realise what was happening. It was later in the day that it was announced that the D-day landing had occurred and then of course we came to understand why we were asked if we would consider remustering as glider pilots.
AP: Wow. That’s great.
LM: So that was a, that was a pretty interesting posting to that place.
AP: Wow. That’s a good story. I like that one.
LM: Strangely I, I can’t I can still see them going over today but I can’t remember. I think they were mostly DC3s towing the very big gliders. Mostly DC3s and I can’t, I can’t even remember anyone commenting on what the aircraft were that were towing them. But the sky was full of aircraft as far as you could see. North and South and even from where they were coming they took quite some time to go over us.
AP: Suddenly we understood. I like it. Alright, were there any other training, well there were some more training units. After that did you do AFU or something like that? An Advanced Flying Unit.
LM: Oh yes. We did, we did a refresher course on Tiger Moths and I think we did a beam approach course on [pause] I can’t remember what they were but we did, did an AFU or whatever on Oxfords. Airspeed Oxfords, which were a bit of a step up from the Ansons I suppose they were but I would still prefer the Ansons myself. And yeah, that was I can’t think where we were doing that but it was quite a comprehensive course on Oxfords. There was, there was another interesting posting. I think it was actually where we were doing the Oxfords. Yes. I think it was. It was at a place, at a small village called Badminton which I understand is pretty well known because of horse trials they have there. But it was, it was interesting in that in doing this course and yes I’m pretty sure it was with, with the Oxford — on one of the runways the one that was mostly used on taking off it went directly over the top of a very, very large mansion. It was, I think about three storeys high this mansion, and stone. Had a magnificent looking garden and driveways around it and had a big area of park like grounds surrounding it with scattered trees and a herd of deer in the, this surrounding land. And the deer didn’t seem to be worried in any way by the aircraft going over but, but the home belonged to the Duke and Duchess of Beaufort if I remember correctly. But we, and when it took off and going up straight over the top of the building we’d only be probably two or three hundred feet over it, night flying as well. And we couldn’t understand why that would be allowed because, especially because it was the wartime residence of Queen Mary. Queen Mary being the wife of the late George the Vth. I think he died in [pause] probably seven or eight years prior to the war. Anyhow, that was Queen Mary’s wartime residence and here are these aircraft flying directly over the top of the thing. Could not, and once we were very fortunate that we were invited. The dominion blokes who were on the course. Probably about a dozen Aussies and three or four Kiwis. Might have been a Canadian, I think. A couple of South Africans probably. We were invited to go to this. It was called Badminton House I think. We were invited to go and watch a film being shown. The film was, “Pygmalion.” And we were taken over in a bus, shown into this very large room barely furnished that had a screen for showing the film on. It had a row of about oh probably seven or eight more or less comfortable chairs and then probably about three or four rows of wooden benches. And also had a table with cups and saucers and things on it. Very big room. Very high ceiling. I reckon probably about twenty foot ceiling or something. So we were shown into that room and after a while a door opened and two very good looking girls walked in there and that caused a fair bit of excitement amongst all of our blokes. And soon after that they were followed by a couple of fairly foppish looking young blokes about the same age. That caused a bit of comment too I can say. And then two or three other people came into the room and then Queen Mary herself came in and she stood at the doorway and she looked at all the troops and beamed at everyone, looking around. Then she took up her seat and we all sat down. The lights went out. They showed this film, “Pygmalion.” I think later called, “My Fair Lady.” A couple of, I know a few of us were a bit worried about that because we knew the word, ‘bloody,’ was used a couple of times [laughs] in this film. Anyhow, we watched the film and enjoyed that and when it was finished the lights went on and Queen Mary stood up. And we would only be sitting, you know, probably three rows, three to four rows behind her. Probably ten or fifteen feet or something behind her. And she stood up and she beamed at everybody again and walked out followed by the others. Not a word was spoken in the entire time from when the time the girls came in ‘til everyone went out. Not one word was spoken. We were then given our cups of tea and some sandwiches and off home. So we were pretty fortunate to have that opportunity. Yeah.
AP: Yeah. Presumably Church Broughton happened fairly soon thereafter.
LM: Went to Church Broughton.
AP: Yeah. You mentioned Church Broughton.
LM: Well we would have gone soon after Church Broughton was OTU. Where we crewed up. Crewed up at OTU. Yeah.
AP: Tell me about that process. How you crewed up.
LM: I don’t remember much about it. I mean, I think the process was that we were, a whole lot of us were let loose in a room and we had to make up our own crews I think. And I don’t really remember much about that process but we came out of it with a crew. We had, two of us were Aussies, a couple of Scotsmen and a couple of Englishmen. Six in the crew at that time. But, yeah. I just can’t remember much about the process. I think, I think most people are you know, sort of understood pretty well what happened but, you know I just don’t remember much about it.
AP: What sort of flying did you do at Operational Training Unit?
LM: Well it was on Wellingtons there and first of all it was mostly daytime. It was getting familiar because it was the biggest step of all, I think of, of going from an Oxford on to a Wellington. It was , yeah it was a bigger step than [pause] certainly bigger than previously and then of course there was a crew there to be thought of us as well. And yeah, quite, quite a big step and did, did mostly daylight until I guess we became familiar and competent with it. And mostly night flying after that. And it was, it was good joining with a crew. We seemed to get on pretty well I think and I think most crews got on. Most people on crews got on well. I really can’t think of any times when there was problems amongst the crews. I guess there were at times but I’m not aware of them and, you know, our crews certainly got on well.
AP: What was I going to ask you next? [pause] So you’ve now been in England for a little while. What sort of things did you get up to on leave and when you were off duty?
LM: Well when I happened to have a few relatives that I was able to visit. I certainly didn’t do enough visiting them but I had an aunt, a sister of my father who actually lived at Hove which was within walking distance of where I was at Brighton. And I’m really sorry to say that I can only remember going up a couple of times while I was there to visit them. I had two half-sisters who lived in, were living in England then. One that was more convenient to go. I used to go there on leave to stay with them. She lived in Stockbridge in Wiltshire, I think. Might have been Hampshire. Later on I had a motorbike and I did a little. We had a lot of leave later. In the latter part and I was able to get petrol for my motorbike. I’m not going to go into too much detail how some of that petrol was got [laughs] but we seemed to manage that and sometimes on a few occasions the whole of the crew went. I remember going, all going to London once because one of the English boys lived in London and I used to like trying to do sightseeing and visiting, looking at famous buildings like Winchester Cathedral and Salisbury Cathedral and those sort of places. I can’t think too much more of leave but certainly at the, mostly at the latter time, of course, when the war had finished when we did have quite a bit of leave and that’s when I did the motorbike work.
AP: Can you tell me something more about that motorbike? What sort was it and where did you get it from?
LM: Well it was a Norton 500 and it was said to be the fastest bike on the station and the way I got it was that the flight engineer that joined our crew after we’d finished OTU, when we went on to Heavy Conversion Unit the flight engineer that we picked up had been a, been a racing rider, motorbike racing rider. And he organised this Norton 500 for me and he taught me how to ride it and that’s probably the most terrifying time that I had when I was, entire time when I was in England because he used to go — belt down these narrow country lane. We’d do a left turn for instance and he’d yell out, ‘Go over.’ I didn’t know much about going over as you turned a corner and then he’d yell out, ‘Come back.’ And we’d have to do but had traffic been coming the other way there was no way we could not have collided. He absolutely terrified the living daylights out of me. I don’t know if he was putting on a special show or for me or not, just to show me how good he was but anyhow I was pleased when my lessons were finished on that. It was years and years afterwards that I, it occurred to me that I don’t know whether the bike was registered or not. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have been insured and I certainly didn’t have a licence, and I didn’t think a thing about this. And I can’t remember what happened. When I finished either. I think I just left it on the station.
AP: What a shame [laughs] Very nice. Did you see or hear about any accidents while you were training?
LM: Any accidents?
AP: Accidents. Like flying accidents.
LM: Oh yes. Oh well, yes, there were. There were some. There was. On EFTS originally at Narrandera one of the chaps who was quite a good friend of mine he baled out. Had to bale out of his Tiger Moth. But unfortunately he hit the release button instead of pulling the rip cord and that’s the first. That was the first accident, but oh yes, there were. There were accidents throughout the training and it I remember, I remember when we went to Bottesford on the Lancasters when we were taken on to the station. The first thing I saw was that, well we all noted it, was a graveyard of two or three wrecked aircraft, which struck a bit of a cord. Yeah. But yeah, there were often accidents with undercarriage, through landing and that sort of thing. Taxiing accidents too. Fortunately, I wasn’t involved in any accidents at all.
AP: So after your OTU, you’re on a Heavy Conversion Unit. That was, you said was at Bottesford.
LM: That was at Bottesford. Yes. Yes.
AP: Ok. Can you tell me something about Bottesford.
LM: We picked up, picked up the seventh member of the crew.
AP: What, what did you do there? Actually tell me of your first impression of a Lancaster.
LM: Well, I guess they were, they were big and, was the first impression. Big and powerful. But seemed to be, seemed to be, you know perhaps easier certainly than the Wellington. The Wellington was pretty heavy on the, on the controls. And the Lancaster just seemed to be easier to come to convert on to. And they were, they were a marvellous aircraft yes. But that’s about it I think. I can’t —
AP: What did your position, your pilot’s position in the Lancaster? What’s around you? What does it look like? What do you feel?
LM: What was the —
AP: Well the pilot’s position. What does it look like and what does it feel like when you’re sitting in a Lancaster?
LM: Well, the viewing was very good. Seeing out of the, seeing out of the aircraft which was important. There was no obstructed viewing. They looked pretty high when you were sitting. Sitting in them when you first got in to them. Pretty high off the ground. They just, they appeared, they seemed to me to be fairly easy after the Wellington. And I suppose it seems strange with young people who are not even twenty one and that having, and not perhaps being mechanically minded or anything like that, but everybody coped perfectly well. I don’t think I can add much to that.
AP: That’s alright. Some, a place where many things happened was the mess at various airfields. What was the atmosphere like in a wartime mess?
LM: In the wartime, in the mess?
AP: Yeah.
LM: Well it was usually fairly lively most nights [laughs] and I think there was some who used to hang on there longer than others. But I think they were yeah, I just remember enjoyable experiences of the mess as far as I’m concerned. There were occasionally, there was a lot of line shooting went on there I think. You’d see people standing at the bar waving their arms and manoeuvring with their arms and I think that’s where there were a few tall stories there. But I used to, I used to enjoy going into the mess and everybody got there. We used to play darts and all that sort of thing in there and that was a great little hobby, like going down to the local village pubs at night. That was a great little thing and we used to do that a lot. Most of our crew would go down there. And we’d get home alright at night usually [laughs] without too much trouble. But I used to even have my own set of darts that I used to take down to play. And I can imagine the, all the locals how much it would have upset them with all these kids practically coming in and pinching their dartboard and making nuisances of themselves in the local quiet little pubs. They were a great atmosphere in those little country pubs, yeah.
AP: What, you’ve just gone on to the front door of whatever your favourite pub was, you open the door, you step in. What do you see?
LM: What do you see? Well you usually see a fairly good crowd of people in there. And you’d see the blokes, you’d see the local blokes sitting down and playing draughts. A few of the others playing, playing darts. You’d probably notice the great big pots they had instead of a, instead of what we would normally have. They’d have a pint pot and a pint was a pretty big, pretty big volume of liquid. But that’s what they mostly did have there. Oh yeah, well I just think often the pubs that we used to go into were little, little country pubs because you know having an airfield near them you’re not near built up areas. And they were a great atmosphere.
AP: What was the English beer like?
LM: Well, I think you were almost duty bound to criticise it [laughs] but, you know, for all that everybody drank plenty of it. I think it was thought to be warm and this and that and the other but everybody — it didn’t put people off drinking, drinking it. But I think for most Aussies I think it was part of your duty to be critical of it.
AP: Still is. Do any of your flights, all throughout your, your flying career with the air force do any of your flights stick out in your memory in particular?
LM: Do any particular ones?
AP: Flights, yeah, any of your flying. For whatever reason.
LM: I don’t, I don’t see, I don’t think of any being any being particularly remarkable for any reason because we finished our training. It coincided with the end of the war. Pretty neatly I think. We, ours were all routine, routine training flights. There were always times that everybody would have experienced, you know, some drama or other. That happened, you know all the time I guess. There were little things of drama. But I don’t remember any being of any particular significance.
AP: So the end of your, you came to the end of your training and it happened to be the end of the war. How did you find out? Did you know that the end of the war was coming? Did it, you know was there we’re just waiting for it to happen now or, how did it actually happen?
LM: No. It’s such a long time ago now. I think, I suppose my thought is that probably it was only in the last week or so that from from my point of view that I, it seemed it was going to. There was talk of it earlier but to my way of thinking it was only in the last when it was actually coming up to the last week or so that I realised that it was going to. You seemed to be involved in what you were doing and you know I really haven’t got, you know good memories of that time.
AP: What were your feelings when the war did end? You found out. It’s over. Now what?
LM: I I suppose, I think I just thought, well that’s it. That’s it, you know, what happens now? I can’t remember having thought about any great sighs of relief or anything. I think it was, in those days you seemed to, you seemed to live day to day. You did what you had to do and didn’t sort of speculate much on other things and, yeah. I just feel that you went on with life. What was happening, you just went on with it you know. One thing finishes, something else starts.
AP: What did happened next?
LM: What did happen? Well we were sent, from my memory then, when we finished the course, from my memory I think we were sent up by train up to 467 Squadron and we were not taken on strength by them. There’s nothing in my records about it but I think we were sent up to 467 and then, and then without being taken on to the station I think we were issued with new rail passes and sent back again to Bottesford. But that’s getting a long, long time ago and from what I understood was that the crews on our Heavy Conversion Course, the ones that were all English crews, as I understand it, they were, they were sent on to a tour of duty flying prisoners of war back from Italy. I think minus the gunners of course, but the pilot, flight engineer, radio operator and navigator. I think that they were sort of retained. That was my understanding that the English crews did that. And we were sent on leave virtually I think at that stage. We used to get leave extended by a couple of weeks all the time.
AP: And that’s when you were hurtling around on your motorbike most of the time.
LM: Yeah. Yeah.
AP: Great. I’ve seen some photos of Scotland in your photo album there. Tell me something of that little trip.
LM: Oh well I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to go to Scotland. And my forebears came from the Scottish Highlands so that was all very interesting, and that’s the, that’s sort of the destination that I eventually headed to. I did a lot around the Scottish Highlands, Isle of Skye, that sort of thing. And, you know, I was extremely lucky to have the opportunity of doing that. The motorbike seemed to go pretty well and I don’t think I ever had troubles with it. I can’t say what else but yeah, I got, I saw a lot of the Highlands and you know the, the lands that your forebears came from. So I was very lucky there. I wouldn’t have been able to do so otherwise. And I was able of course, with the motorbike, to get down to where my half-sister was living in the south of England. So I don’t know that I can enlarge on that.
AP: That’s alright. So travelled all over England after the war ended essentially is a summary of it.
LM: Well yeah. Well I travelled more, you know, more Scotland and — yeah. More Scotland rather than over the rest of England. Yeah.
AP: So how did you get home?
LM: I came home on a ship called the Athlone Castle. It came from Southampton and I don’t remember it but I noticed in one of the photographs I’ve got there is a photograph of the Queen Elizabeth at Southampton. So therefore I’ve seen the Queen Elizabeth on two different occasions. We came home through the Suez Canal. I think we arrived in Fremantle just before Christmas and if I remember we had Christmas Day between Fremantle and Melbourne.
AP: Christmas Day 1945.
LM: Yeah, ‘45 that would have been. Christmas Day 1945. And one thing I do remember about it. It would be about Christmas Day coming across The Bight between Fremantle and Melbourne. I remember seeing quite a number of whales that were spouting or blowing I think they call it. Yes. Which was quite interesting.
AP: So how long before you were demobbed?
LM: Not long at all. I was demobbed, I think, within a couple of weeks of getting home. As I mentioned my mother had moved, moved to Canberra and I think I had a, just had a short bit of leave, about five or six days or something and was demobbed soon afterwards.
AP: What happened then? How did you find re-adjusting to civilian life? Getting a job. A real job for once.
LM: It was quite unsettling really and I had, we were given, we were on the ship coming home we were given a few lectures on the future thing. We were, we were given the opportunity to go to, to apply for the university if we wanted to. And quite a few of my friends did take that opportunity of doing a university course. I think quite a few of them went. They had a campus at Mildura at the time. Straight after the war. And I actually think I filled in papers to do engineering at the university but I scrapped that. Soon after we got back I wanted to go on, decided I wanted to go on the land and do something because my people had always been on the land in the past. That didn’t, I don’t think that that fact that families had been on the land would influence me but I seemed to come to that decision that I wanted to do that. So I scrapped my, any thought of going to the university, to do engineering. But yeah it took a while to settle down.
AP: So you were a farmer for your working life. Is that what happened?
LM: Yes. Yes. I actually qualified to get a soldier’s settlement block under the Victorian scheme and I think I was very fortunate for that to happen. And it happened in a great area as far as I was concerned. So yes, I was very, very lucky. And until eighteen months ago I’ve lived on that. We lived on that property until eighteen months ago. We were over sixty years there. So that you know that was a really good opportunity.
AP: That was, that’s Lismore I think you said, wasn’t it?
LM: Sorry?
AP: That was Lismore area.
LM: At Lismore area. Yes. Yes
AP: Tell me about the book you wrote.
LM: Well I knew that I didn’t know much about family history but I knew that I had an old forebear who’d come out in the very early days to Adelaide in 1838. I didn’t know much about him really, really at all, and I think the first real interest that was sparked when I was training at Mallala. I had to do a cross country from Mallala across the, across the Mallee country to a place called Pinnaroo, somewhere. And where we crossed the Murray River, I noticed on the chart, just near the place we crossed the river on that flight there’s a place called McBeans’ Pound, and that made me wonder why that would be. I didn’t know anything about it but I knew there was a branch of the family living near the Barossa valley in South Australia and had been there for a long time. I did actually ring them up and speak to one of them while I was at Mallala and I was invited to call out. We used to do a lot of flights around. I remember [unclear] Kapunda, and things flying over, over there. They lived, their property was near Truro which I don’t think I ever flew over, but I did ring one of them. I was invited to go. To go out and visit them. I didn’t get the opportunity to, but that’s, that’s all that I knew and later on I got to, got to hear a few. There were always stories told about this old fella. He settled up in the Moulamein area mainly in New South, New South Wales, but there were lots of stories that were told about him. In fact, when I was boy of ten or twelve or something like that people used to visit my grandmother. And that’s all they seemed to do was tell stories about old Lachie and, but though they were mostly stories about his closeness with money or his eccentric ways or less eccentric ways. When I was a little boy, about ten or twelve or something like that I used to get really annoyed at these people telling these stories and I used to think, you know that story’s not true, and this sort of thing. And eventually, that must have been the first time really thought of the old fella and added to that scene this place called McBean pound on the Murray River caused me to look into it quite a lot. And so eventually I did research and as much as I could and put together this little book that I wrote about him. And I think it’s probably, probably one of the most important things that I have done because all of this history about the old bloke would have disappeared if I hadn’t written it down. Heaps of people in the past have had the opportunity and no one’s done it. And it would have all disappeared so I am pleased that I did write that.
AP: Lovely. Alright. Final question. What, to you is the legacy of Bomber Command and of your time in Bomber Command and how do you want to see it remembered?
LM: To see Bomber Command remembered. Well I suppose [pause] I suppose one thing it certainly taught discipline and that’s anyone who served learned plenty of that. There were certainly huge sacrifices made by, by young people with everything before them and you know as long as that’s remembered and known by people then it can only be a good thing. It would be, you know very sad if a lot of this stuff was lost, and there are not very many of them left these days. But [pause] well, all I can say is that I hope every, you know, every move that made us successful in remembering the efforts of Bomber Command and I don’t think I can add any more.
AP: Before we turn off the tape any final thoughts, stories.
LM: It would be a great weight off my mind if you turned off the tape [laughs]
AP: Alright [laughs] thank you Lachie.
LM: Alright. You know to think of you coming all this way just to do that.
AP: Not a problem at all. It’s been great.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AMcBeanLW161022
PMcBeanLW1602
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Lachie McBean
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
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
01:22:58 audio recording
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Pending OH summary
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Adam Purcell
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-10-22
Description
An account of the resource
Lachie McBean grew up in Australia and joined the Royal Australian Air Force when he was 18. He was a pilot at a Heavy Conversion Unit when the war in Europe ended. After the war he returned to Australia and became a farmer. He also took the opportunity to research his family history and wrote a book about one of his ancestors.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Australia
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1945
aircrew
entertainment
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
mess
military living conditions
military service conditions
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
Oxford
pilot
RAF Bottesford
RAF Church Broughton
RAF Credenhill
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/515/8747/AGreenKS150713.1.mp3
c8ff4633227b104e9027ea6a3b4661cb
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
Green, Kenneth Shelton
K S Green
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Green, KS
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Leading Aircraftsman Kenneth Green.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
MC: This interview is being conducted for, on behalf of the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Mike Connock, the interviewee is Kenneth Shelton Green and the interview is taking place at Skellingthorpe Community Centre on the 13th of July 2015.
KG: As I say -
MC: OK, Kenneth, what we’ll do is, I’ll just ask you to tell me a bit about when and where you were born.
KG: Yes
MC: and err, your early days, school and the, the area you lived in
KG: Yes, right. I was born at Pleasley near Mansfield, on the 17th of January 1922, I lived variously, as a small person with my parents and partially with my grandparents, at a place called Pleasley, and it doesn’t matter what the name of the street is, it was Burghley House, B-U-R-G-H-L-E-Y House, Pleasley, near Mansfield, that’s where my parents lived and my [pause] lived with my mother’s parents when they were first married and where I was born. That’s [unclear], then moved to a small agricultural setup, called Dales Torth D-A-L-E-S T-O-R-T-H, two separate words, Danish background origin, and then we moved to a place called Skegby, S-K-E-G-B-Y, where I started school as a five year old, [pause] err, [pause]. We later moved to Nottingham where my father took up a post with the Nottinghamshire County Council in 1920, [pause] something, six, eight, thereabouts
MC: When were, when were you born?
KG: Oh, I was born 17th January 1922
MC: ‘22
KG: Err, I ‘ve gotten down out as 17, [unclear] move into Nottingham, where we had a house whilst a new house was built for my parents where we occup, which we entered into occupation in 1930 I think, at Mapperley, Gedling, Nottingham, Westdale Lane, that’s it, err, [pause]. I was then transferred to a school at Mapperley, Nottingham and was there until I, from there obtained a scholarship at Nottingham High school where I went in 1933, I think, yeh, [pause]. I had a scholarship for the same year also to Henry Mellish modern school, which I didn’t take up because I went to the high school, err, we lived at Nottingham, well Gedling it was called the address, until I was err, err, I went into business and then into the RAF, and then the Navy, and then came out.
MC: How old were you when you left school?
KG: I left school at the age of 18, 17, 17.
MC: So, did you have any employment from then?
KG: Yes, I worked for a, an insurance company at the office in Nottingham until, I went in the Air Force and I came out of the Navy, er, out of the Air Force
MC: Before you joined the Air Force, did you do anything else?
KG: I was in, oh yes, I was in the, air, auxiliary fire service, the local Carlton AFS where I was part of the team, and ultimately was an engineer with the fire engines and so forth, that’s where I first drove a Rolls Royce, which had a fire pump trailer behind it. That would be 1930, correction, 1941, two.
MC: So, what age were you when you joined the Air Force?
KG: I went into the Air Force, er, in 1942, at the age of - [pause]
MC: Yes, you would be about 19, 20 if you were born in ’22.
KG: I wouldn’t, yes, I get, I’m sorry about this.
MC: That’s ok
KG: I’m so, er, [pause] 1939 was the beginning of the war, 1940, ‘41, ah ‘42 [emphasis], I joined the Air Force, that’s it.
MC: What made you choose the Air Force?
KG: Because I wanted to fly, er, I became an engineer in the Air Force
MC: So, what was the reaction when you asked to fly, what was the action, reaction, from the Air Force when you asked to fly, said you wanted to fly?
KG: Well, I wanted to fly but unknown to me, I had astigmatism, an eye condition which prevented me being accepted for aircrew, yes,
MC: So -
KG: So, I joined the Air Force and then went to my first technical school in South Wales.
MC: Did you do any basic training?
KG: Oh, oh yes, I did my paddy, Padgate, Blackpool, square bashing, then I went into the technical college, technical, er, section of the Air Force in South Wales, erm, name. St Athan
MC: RAF St Athans
KG: Yes, I went and did my first technical course there, and became I, I, merged head of course as a flight mechanic and joined, 61 Squadron RAF, Bomber Command, 5 Group, Lancasters, as an erk, SAC, as LAC, give or take, yes LAC, 1942, yes that’s it, ’42. I stayed with squadron, until, moved to, oh, oh, wait a minute, I didn’t, I went off on a conversion course to, number 1 school of technical training, Halton, RAF, in 1943.
MC: That was conversion too?
KG: I was, I was, then became a fitter to E, engines, LAC, I joined the servicing flight of 61 Squadron, which was a new type of arrangement for dealing with [pause] periodic inspections, a separate team
MC: [unclear]
KG: A separate team, a separate team, we were an upstage from the, from the squadron, but we were still on the squadron, but we were the servicing flight, er
MC: Where was that, that was at?
KG: That was at RAF Syerston, first of all, 61 Squadron,
MC: Not far from here
KG: The squadron then moved to Skellingthorpe
MC: So, what was the -
KG: And then from Skellingthorpe to [pause] bom, bom, bom, [pause] er, Coningsby, then back to Skellingthorpe, where they have been doing some runway work in the meantime, still on 61 Squadron, er, I was then posted to a new par unit, production unit, at RAF Bottesford
MC: Can I go back to Syerston, when you -
KG: Yes
MC: First went back to Syerston, what, err, you worked, what mark of Lancaster did you work on?
KG: I worked on both Mk 2’s and Mk 1’s and Mk 3’s, the Mk 2’s then left the squadron, down to, went down to Cambridge where they shifted the whole lot, but we were the, we were a rare beast there were very few Mk 2’s made, they were, [pause] Bristol Hercules engines in a Lancaster, so I am one of the relatively small number of people who worked on those.
MC: That was all part of your training?
KG: Well no, it was part of service, I was at the squadron with them
MC: Yes, but I mean you, your training on the engines
KG: Oh well, you did, you did all engines
MC: Oh, you did?
KG: And expected, I, I took a, a works course at Rolls Royce, Derby on Rolls Royce engines in 1943 [pause], yes
MC: So, then you went on to Skellingthorpe from Syerston?
KG: But, but well I, no, whilst I was at Skellingthorpe, I went off to Derby and did a course then came back, then, I left Skellingthorpe to this, to Bottesford
MC: Can I ask you what’s, what were your reactions to the accommodation and stuff at Skellingthorpe, what was it like?
KG: At Skellingthorpe you were, you were, a Nissan hut in a field [pause] oh, over the hedge and so forth, away from the main er, sites at er, Skellingthorpe. We had a proper civilised brick establishment at er, Syerston of course, [laugh] it was not, it was not highly regarded the basic sort of Nissan huts that we ended up with at Skellingthorpe [laugh] but anyway, I use, I used not to go preferably to, well the guard room was too far away, I lived over fields so it was nearer to go over the next field over across the farm and down to erm, the station at Hykeham, where it was very convenient to catch a train to Nottingham where I lived and I er, it saved time and other things. Not to go as far as Nottingham but to get off at Carlton, which is the station before Nottingham so you didn’t meet people like SP’s who wanted to know how, why, when and where.
MC: I’d like to cover some of the experiences at Skellingthorpe if I can, erm, you know
KG: Yeah
MC: Mishaps or whatever
KG: Well, life was what it was, one worked hard, I was proud to be there, we, we went off to do all sorts of things occasionally. I went down to, I went down to [unclear] erm, Silverstone [emphasis] I went down to Peterborough, servicing was to pick up a Lancaster, it had landed down there after ops and it wasn’t working properly but in actual fact, it was that the pilot was friendly with a WAAF in the stores there [laughs]. When he was doing his OTU training [laughs], however, Chiefy and I went down by Hillman Minx sort of garry, and, er, sorted the aeroplane out which was not in dire straits, there were a few sparks out of the exhaust pipe that was it, that was the argument, err, yes
MC: So, you, you say you went down to Peterborough and it was er, -
KG: Well, yeah, I went to Peterborough to swap an engine on Mickey the Moocher as it was at er, later, 61 Squadron’s M, Mike, and the flight mechanic who was on the flights with it, he painted the first Mickey the Moocher and the Mickey, and then the trolley and the bomb and all the rest of it er, yeah and I spoke to him after the war, he lived in South Wales then er, [pause]
MC: So, you got quite friendly with the crew of Mickey the Moocher then?
KG: Oh, oh we went down to her because the third crew on Mickey the Moocher, yes, I think they were the third crew, they’d had an engine blow, starboard outer, blew up on an op and they landed at Peterborough, so, er, a colleague of mine from the squadron went down with an engine and swapped it and managed to get it all put together and back again the next day
MC: How long would it take you to change an engine?
KG: Well, it, [laughs] not long because we wanted to catch the train from Nottingham [laughs], at five thirty [laughs] from Hykeham, so we flew back by Lancaster [laughs] yeah, up to the Nissan hut in the field and then out of the back door to the Hykeham station [laughs]
MC: I gather you experienced quite a bit of an explosion at Skellingthorpe?
KG: Oh, Skellingthorpe, yes in the course of ordinary work, we did our periodic, periodic inspections which were a stage up from what, what the squadron could do and I, I was stuck on a B flight aircraft, I can’t remember which one it was now, erm, with err, another chap. I’d finished my port outer, I’d done no snags and engine ready, and it was four o’clock thereabouts and my colleague John, was in the record for the getting killed, he was doing the port inner
MC: Who with?
KG: He said, ‘look, I’ll do the run up with Chiefy, you, you scarper,’ he knew where I was going, so off I went with my bike, he stayed and shortly after I left, before I got, be, beyond sort of two hundred yards from the back over the fence on my bike going down to the station, there was a hell of a bang, and err, something had gone up. I didn’t know what it was, but of course couldn’t do anything about it, preceded on my way, get back at midnight at Hykeham and people said, ‘Oh we’ve been sweeping the deck looking for your fingernails,’ and so forth and it was er, my friend who’d kindly stayed to do the run up and this whole tractor and trailer, train of thousand pound, yellows, yankee, DA, delayed actions for daylight were tur, turning round to bomb up and servicing aircraft when you are doing bombing up was not [emphasis] a good thing to do. Anyway, my friend was blown, blown apart because the back spring on the trailer, row of trailers which was being driven by a chap, I think he was an electrician, anyway he’d broken his collar bone and he was fed up with doing nothing and he accepted the job as driving the tractor for armourers with a whole string of bombs and he was with his arm in, in plaster, he was driving one handed and the, the back spring on the back trailer which you can, you know was far off and you couldn’t see it and it broke and the back bomb [three loud taps] kept hitting the ground and it pulled the safety pin out and so forth, and, er, as he got to the aircraft where my friend was still doing his port inner engine, it went bang and the lot went from here to there and back again, so he’s, he was killed and is in the er, killed list that would be I think, October, September, October ’40, ’44.
MC: Squadron [unclear]
KG: Hmm
MC: Any other, any other -
KG: It was, it was a B Flight aircraft
MC: Any other issues like that?
KG: Well, no, I mean, whilst going, whilst, for, for a time we were going all the way down at Bottesford, a mate and I we used to go by train, from erm, from Carlton to Newark, in the mornings, and cycle, down the A1 to Bottesford, over the, over the hedge and so forth, because we had got a permanent living out chit, both of us, and both of us came from Nottingham, and we cycled, used to cycle down. I can remember this Sunday morning, winter, it would be ‘44, seeing these, these, contrails going vertically up from the ground down to the south east, and they were the German V2’s being fired from Holland into England, we didn’t know at the time but er, that’s exactly what it was, that was an interesting, you know when, when you it was sort of 5am, 6am, that sort of thing but in the early light of dawn, to see these things going up and not knowing what they were
MC: So, when did you leave 61 Squadron?
KG: Came then, on, and er, I left 61 to go down to Bottesford, for doing, doing these, we used to make, make up brand new engines for
MC: Oh, engine assembly
KG: Into power plants, we were, we were instead of a factory somewhere doing it, we were RAF people doing it, we could do it alright, we knew what we were about, we were all qualified people and, er, yes, it, it was interesting
MC: Had you got any promotions from then?
KG: No, no, it was no such thing then, out of the blue, we were slung in the, slung in the Navy
MC: So, there’s no [unclear]
KG: Which was not, [emphasis] not to our liking
MC: So, you finished up in the [unclear]
KG: So, I went off back to Padgate, Warrington, to go into the Navy, from the Air Force and there we were issued with all our naval gear. I was dressed as a taxi driver, because I was a fitter, other people were dressed as sailors, of course that suited them with the young ladies around, that suited them very much for a time, but they soon got fed up with it, all the year, and, err, we were not best pleased, we were definitely dis-chuffed, and the excuse, and they put us under armed guard, with the old barbed wire, and so forth, and that, that, really did knock people who were, you know, we didn’t like that and the politicians from London running around like scared rabbits, didn’t know what, what they were doing and they didn’t [laughs] but then they claimed they, they were propaganda game was who. The Army guard were pleased because we had got cheap cigarettes [laughs] anyways, it, it was a, talk about a hairs breath from really blowing up out there and really, we were dis-chuffed, we were very fed up indeed, [laughs]
KG: Yes, that was a, a not a very unhappy experience, then in the Navy. I was sent off to a squadron in Northern Ireland, with a, oh, [laughs] a, a low grade of training aircraft and we, one didn’t have, and I had very little regard for them and then
MC: [unclear] Can you remember what aircraft it was?
KG: Err, [pause] I could have done when I walked in [laughs], what was it
MC: [unclear]
KG: It was a single engined, target towing aircraft, and they used to tow a glider, tin, little tin gliders, fifteen-foot span, for, to be shot at by, RAF fighters in training, or Navy fighters in training. Then we left, they were building a ship at Belfast, which was, instead, they said you are going to be on our ship, for going out to Russia or Timbukthree, oh yes, before, by then, we had got Tiger force, who were going to have Lancasters to Siberia, would bomb, outbound, bomb Japan, land in the islands, re bomb and back into Russia. We were, we were quite, we could put up with that, we were, we thought that was quite interesting, and that’s where we were going to go you see, in the RAF, and then they bunged us in the Navy [laughs], all part of the story.
MC: What about flying yourself when you was, when you was
KG: I, I,
MC: When you was doing the servicing
KG: Right
MC: Did you do any test flights?
KG: In flying, I once went to the trouble, first time, a new boy, to get a parachute from stores, to go on a test flight, after doing an ordinary inspection, that’s an L plate, number one, new boy. By the time I got back, they were nearly fed up with waiting for me ‘cos I’d taken so long, to cycle across the airfield, find the stores, argue the toss with the store masters. Anyway, got back, and that’s the only time I ever got a parachute [laughs] and flew, from that time onwards, if I, if I mended it, I’ll fly it, I don’t want to know about parachutes [laughs], never again did I wear a parachute, [laughs] flying in the Air Force, that’s, that’s true [laughs]
MC: So, what was your role on the test flight, what did you do?
KG: Well I, sat on the, I looked around, sat in, lay on the rash bed or [laughs] what have you, err, you just hung around, just another, just another jolly [laughs]. I remember, from, Skellingthorpe, a young chap was a pilot, we’d done all the inspections and I, I as usual, I would always grab a flight if I could, after we’d done the inspection, and we, I can remember, I was standing in the astrodome, which was near the mid upper, and we were doing fighter affiliation as a, argy bargy with a Spitfire or Hurricane, or something and I remember looking up in the astrodome, and there was Newark [laughs] church spire looking up at me [laughs], I thought how come that, I’m upside down in a Lancaster [laughs] looking down [laughs] at the church tower [laughs]. Interesting experience
MC: How did that happen?
KG: Well, it was, we were [laughs] doing aerobatics in a Lancaster to avoid the fighter, and, and they went on ops that night, this would be late afternoon, they went on ops, that night and got the chop, never came back [laughs] probably the wings fell off [laughs] overstrained or something. Oh dear.
MC: What about socialising within the Air Force when you was off duty and -
KG: Well, we, we never had much socialising, curiously enough, as least I, I would nip off home if I could, you see, it was, that was the easiest way, and I could er, use my time personally, privately, rather better than, and RAF events, we had all the usual, booze up sort of parties and so on, but I, I didn’t drink then, [laughs] when you are younger you don’t, anyway, I used to go off home when I could, and, err, that was a case of bike, Skellingthorpe, took it in and away, err
MC: So, you had experience of the Packard Merlin?
KG: Oh yes, yes, yes, yes, I -
MC: Was there much difference?
KG: Packard, oh, very different, but Stromberg carburettors, are, a, a, it’s a whole chapter on its own, SU’s, yes, I know, I know about SU’s, but Stromberg’s, they were a challenge, they were a very involved pieces of machinery, but jolly good, first class, Merlin 24’s, they were fitted to, yeh, anyway, I went into the Navy, after all, all that
MC: So, what aircraft did you work on in the Navy?
KG: Oh, these useless single engine, target towing things, and, er, and that [unclear] in Northern Ireland, oh dear, Northern Ireland, far side, you were there -
Other: Dublin?
KG: No, far side
Other: Far side of Ireland?
KG: Northern Ireland
Other: Northern Ireland? Why you come to er-
MC: Ballykelly
Other: Strabane
KG: No, no, bigger city
Other: A city?
KG: Yes, ah, [emphasis] the capital of Northern Ireland
Other: Belfast?
KG: No, opposite side, opposite side, far, far side
Other: Well, the capital is at this side
KG: Yes, yes, I know
Other: Belfast
KG: It’s the next, er, no, it’s, er, big city, beyond side of Ireland
Other: Well, there’s Limavady
KG: Northern Ireland, no, next to Limavady, and it’s quite a small place, next door to Limavady, further over, the big city, where all the, the, erm -
Other: Cork?
KG: No, no, north
Other: Yeah
MC: So, you were at Derry
KG: Yeah
MC: With the Navy?
KG: Yes, yeah
MC: So, what, where did you go from there?
KG: Then we were moved to, Cornwall, which was er, [laughs] not the brightest idea, especially as they got off the train somewhere at Crewe, then the train went, and then we found that we shouldn’t have got off, that was a genius [emphasis] naval officer, [laughs]
MC: Oh, was that still with the Navy to Cornwall?
KG: Yes, [laughs] and then I was at there, down there at Cornwall, Padstow was the end of the line, the buffers, and you couldn’t go any further, and that was then, you got off there, and you got on a garry and went to the airfield, an RAF airfield, modern built, big runways, and they served us in the Fleet Air Arm, not just in the Navy, but what was it called, north shore of Cornwall [pause] oh, dear oh dear, big airfield
MC: St Mawgan
KG: No, it’s next to there,
Other: You’ve got Wellington down there haven’t you
KG: No but, we had, in fact, they, 61 Squadron put some Lancasters to fly down to Spain from there, we lost them, Mk 2’s, from 61 Squadron, you know where I mean, I, I, it just goes blank on me, you haven’t got an atlas with you? No, [pause]
MC: So, this was a holiday estate on the north shore of Cornwall, was it?
KG: Yeh, and that was where, where, near Padstow, and then you go inland and there was the airfield, but, and on the coast, going the opposite way, there was this er, holiday resort
MC: So, were you there until you finished in the Air, in the Navy, or finished it during the end of the war
KG: No, no, they, they explained that I wouldn’t usually get out, and I would say when, when do I get my ticket, oh no you can’t, with the Navy you have to wait until your replacements come, it’ll take two or three years, and so I said words to the effect of stuff that, and so I had a word with higher up, I didn’t tell my theoretical seniors, I went over their head and said there’s a way of me getting a broken educational continuity course, civilianisation, and so forth, where, where, do I get the course for that, and suddenly out of the blue, I was posted to this naval college, which was, oh yeah, Salisbury part of the world, I mean, it’s just gone blank on me
MC: When was that?
KG:’45, I, I went then and my lot who were saying you can’t go, they couldn’t do anything about it, I said, ‘you can’t argue with head office, I’ve gone,’ so off I went, and I spent, er, er, five or six weeks becoming a civilian, we were all ranks, commissioned and non-commissioned, it was very, [laughs] and we went round visiting companies to see how companies run in civvy street, and so forth, [laughs] it was a good five or six weeks, and then when I got back, they’d, they’d found a replacement for me, and I, very shortly, I went down to Plymouth, and, and got my civilian establishment, papers, and so forth, and left them.
MC: So, post war what was your reaction to the job you did and the work you did?
KG: Well, I went back into the office and then, picked up where I’d been
MC: I’m thinking about your thoughts, on, you know, on the war itself
KG: Well
MC: And what you did and -
KG: I just worked in an office, that’s all I could -
MC: As a flight engineer
KG: No, as a clerk
MC: No, I meant during the war, what did you think of the work you’d done during the war
KG: Well, I thought I was not doing a bad job, I’d, I’d done technically, I’d learnt everything I could, I was interested, [emphasis] I learnt everything I could about Rolls Royce, I considered myself a cut, er, you know, I knew what I was doing, the other lot, not necessarily, and when we were building up power plants, you felt that you were part of the, it is, it’s a strange thing because to find yourself in effect being rather like Rolls Royce works and building their power plants which is what we were doing and we were turning out a lot of power plants, and er, they were going out on ops and being broken [laughs] etc. and we were turning out
MC: So, obviously post war then, you said you went in an office
KG: I went back into the office, and er, ultimately, I became an outside rep, and then I came up to Scunthorpe and opened a new office, the first, first North Lincolnshire office, I was running the whole caboodle
MC: I gather you ultimately achieved your ambition to fly
KG: Well, no, that went on, I then left the insurance company and went as, I joined the chairman of my commercial group, as his PA, and, and, ultimately, became the director of all the companies at Scunthorpe, and we, and anyway, there was a lot of business things I was running new lines in business in Cornwall, and Chester etc. etc., we were, we were, tied up with the sewer works, I went to, I did a tour of America and so forth, with the, with the, tying up with business people as, as I say I became a director of eight or nine companies and in the meantime -
MC: So, where did the flying come in?
KG: Oh, oh, then, but I started, I stayed in [unclear] in motor sport, car rallying, and so forth, navigating and so forth, I was in things like, all the Daily Express rallies. I was driving and co-driving and navigating on those etc. it was a pretty busy sort of existence er, I forget, one forgets about and then I, heard about flying and I thought oh I’ll try this, and started with the local Lincoln flying club, and went on and on and on ultimately flying, involved with more exotic sort of flying, and through twin engines, and night flying and airways and all sorts of things, and, er, in business I was using it of course as well because it was convenient sometimes to fly here, there and everywhere and I was a qualified, qualified pilot in night airways etc. and radio etc. etc. etc., oh well, and so it went on
MC: Er, do you, do you keep in touch with many of your colleagues from the RAF days?
KG: Er, I’m afraid there aren’t many of us left [laughs]. I’ve gone to the squadron association, and that’s, I’ve regarded that as my main link and people who I used to know have passed away or gone on, I, don’t know, these links decay and fall but Skellingthorpes the only one really that is, is my active one
MC: Well, thank you very much Kenneth
KG: Not very natural, but, er, I’m sorry, I’m, iffing and butting, but
MC: No
KG: Er, one forgets and time goes on you see, and then I retired in my sixties, but, er, I, I, then, I was the founder, and Chairman of the Chamber of Commerce, new Chamber of Commerce, North Lincolnshire and so forth, North Lindsey as we call it, erm, etc., it, it just happens, and suddenly you realise, you’re eighty not sixty, [laughs]
MC: And how old are you now?
KG: Ninety-three
MC: But, it’s been lovely talking to you Kenneth
KG: Anyway, I’m sorry I’m, I’ve, been -
MC: No, it’s
KG: Wandering and I can’t remember, and anyway, you’ve helped to remind me of -
MC: Thank you
KG: And names and -
MC: Tell me about this trip up to er, Yorkshire then, what, what -
KG: What was the name of the airfield inland from -
Other: From where?
KG: From Bridlington
Other: From Bridlington, it would be Driffield
KG: Driffield
MC: Yes, so you finished
KG: I had this aircraft, 61 Squadron aircraft, and landed at Driffield, been shot up, MU crowd had rebuilt it there, we went up to spent 2 or 3 days sorting it out, weather went clampers, so we were stuck with no gear, no nothing [laughs] I know we went down to, Bridlington, and, and, shall I say extracted some free money out of the penny in the slot machines, by devious means [laughs] oh dear, anyway, then the weather improved, and that’s when we separated, everybody went off but I was left with the aircraft and the incoming CO from 61 Squadron, and the signals leader, so it was a three man crew for a Lancaster [laughs]
MC: You flew as flight engineer, did you?
KG: I flew as flight engineer, I was, I was the crew [emphasis] flight engineer, everything [laughs] you don’t argue with a CO, I mean, I had probably been in as many Lancasters as him, running up and one thing and another, but it was all part of fun and games, that would be ‘44, can’t remember when, it was before, oh, before I went to Bottesford, so it would be ‘44, summer, yeah, [laughs] you forget these things, I do.
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 Kenneth Shelton Green
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Mike Connock
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-07-13
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AGreenKS150713
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
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.
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:41:21 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
Kenneth Green was born on the 17th January 1922 at Pleasley, near Mansfield and worked with the Carlton Auxillary Fire Service before joining the Royal Air Force at the age of 20.
He trained as an engineer after he was unable to fly due to eye problems, and worked on a variety of engines, including the Bristol Hercules, Packard Merlin and the Rolls Royce Merlin engines.
He tells of his time on base, the explosion that took the life of his friend, and the work he completed on the Avro Lancasters and worked on the Mark 1, 2 and 3’s.
Kenneth joined 61 Squadron, and served at Skellingthorpe and Bottesford, before working with the Royal Navy where he worked on single engine aircraft.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Vivienne Tincombe
61 Squadron
bombing up
fitter engine
ground crew
Lancaster
Lancaster Mk 1
Lancaster Mk 2
Lancaster Mk 3
military living conditions
Nissen hut
RAF Bottesford
RAF Skellingthorpe
RAF St Athan
RAF Syerston
service vehicle
tractor
V-2
V-weapon
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1137/11681/ASquiresJW180407.1.mp3
bbfec58bd33828f0572f97565c980163
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
Squires, John William
J W Squires
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with John William Squires (b.1936). He grew up in Nottinghamshire and witnessed a crash.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-04-07
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.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Squires, JW
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
DK: I’ll just introduce myself then. It’s David Kavanagh for the International Bomber Command Centre interviewing Mr Squires at his home on the 7th of April 2018. With his son Roger, Roger Squires. So if I just put that down there. Can I just ask first of all how long have you lived, lived here?
RS: You was born here weren’t you?
DK: Born here.
JS: Yeah. I was born here. Born just down here.
DK: Right.
JS: And then we moved up the road. Mum and dad did.
DK: So what year would that have been?
JS: ’57.
RS: ’37.
DK: 1937
JS: ’57. No. When they moved
DK: Oh right. Ok. You moved in ’57.
JS: Yeah.
DK: Yeah.
RS: So you —
DK: So what, what year were you born?
JS: ’36.
DK: 1936. Ok.
JS: Eighty two, nearly.
DK: So, you’ve, you’ve been here more or less all your life then.
JS: Yes.
DK: Yeah. So has it been sort of farming here then?
JS: Pardon?
DK: Have you been farming?
JS: Well, we’ve done a bit of all sorts here.
DK: Right. What, what do you do on the fields then? What do you grow there?
JS: We’ve got four beasts.
DK: Right.
JS: And the horse. And they keep it down.
DK: Yeah.
RS: You’ve had pigs and cattle most of your life though. Haven’t you, dad?
DK: Yeah.
JS: Yeah.
DK: Right. So pigs. Cattle.
RS: Yeah.
DK: So, when, so in going back to the 1930 1940s what was it like around here? Presumably there’s all new houses gone up.
JS: Oh yeah.
DK: Was it more fields?
JS: Yes.
DK: Yeah.
JS: Across here. That were milk. The one down. Next one. The next one wasn’t built.
DK: Right.
JS: And they were just paddocks.
DK: Right. So you’ve seen a few changes then.
JS: A tremendous amount of changes and not for the better.
DK: Not for the best. Did you prefer the old days then?
JS: Yes.
DK: Yeah. So, have you enjoyed working on the farm around here then? With the —
JS: Yes. I worked on a farm when I left school.
DK: Right.
JS: I never went to school in my last year.
DK: Right. So what, how old were you when you left school?
JS: Officially fifteen but I was fourteen.
DK: Right.
JS: And where I worked I used to go like part time and weekends, Tom Arnolds. Then the cowman got killed.
DK: Oh.
JS: In about, I think it was about October. And he come down one night and said Billy had been killed.
DK: Right.
JS: On the A1. And could I go in the morning? I never went to school no more.
DK: Oh. Oh.
JS: I did all the corn. Ploughed all the land.
DK: Yeah. So, can you remember much then about the war time years around here?
JS: Yes.
DK: Yeah. So what can you remember about those? Those years?
JS: The pub around here was called the Blue Greyhound.
DK: Right.
JS: The pub. And it was full of airmen, soldiers mainly.
DK: Where, where had they come from? The airmen and soldiers.
JS: Oh, Bottesford and Balderton.
DK: Right. So were they, were they mostly British or —
JS: All sorts.
DK: Americans?
JS: Yeah. Mostly British.
DK: Mostly British. Yeah.
JS: They were mostly British but there were all sorts of in them.
DK: Yeah.
JS: Amongst them. And mum and dad, it was only a two bedroom cottage where we lived and there was me, my brother.
DK: Right.
JS: My sister. Mum and dad. And it was never empty.
DK: Right.
JS: Never. We’d always got either airmen here. Army. Land Army.
DK: So the, the airmen then used to stay in your house did they?
JS: Well, they used to come and then go home the next day.
DK: Oh right. Ok. So what did they do when they were in your house? Can you remember? Did they give you treats?
JS: Well. Yeah.
DK: What did you get?
JS: We got, we got sweets and got gum. And I think that was about it.
DK: So you remember them fondly do you? Giving you, giving you things.
JS: Yes.
DK: Yeah.
JS: I was only very small in them days.
DK: So how old would you have been about?
JS: Five or six. Seven maybe.
DK: And, and you can remember those changes in the wartime then?
JS: Oh yes.
DK: Yeah.
JS: I can remember a lot about them. And then went on to [pause] from, from all the airmen and Army and Land Army and everybody it was like.
DK: Yeah.
JS: All come to our house. We had a very great big table in the kitchen. As big as what this space is.
DK: Yeah.
JS: Proper farmhouse table in the a kitchen. It were only a two bedroom. A [pig] hanging on the wall.
DK: Did, did any of the Land Army people actually work here with, with your parents?
JS: No.
DK: On the farm. No.
JS: No. Any Land Army we had she were up at [Lind’s]
DK: Right.
JS: That was up at where the NT junction goes on to the main street. The farm just on the left there.
DK: And they were Land Army girls were they?
JS: Yeah.
DK: Mostly? Yeah. Right.
JS: Yeah.
DK: So just coming to the incident then of the plane crash that you saw. Could you tell us a little bit about what you saw?
JS: Well, we’d just finished killing the pig. Just finished cutting it up.
DK: Right.
JS: And Fred Potts, he was the pig killer and my dad and a sudden, we just heard this very big bump. And then the noise like and then of course everything just lit up. Sort of orange. Because it lit up the room above our lighting. And then everything. We wanted to know what had happened.
DK: Can you remember what time of day it was? Was it in the morning? Evening?
JS: No. It was the evening.
DK: Right. Can you remember roughly what sort of time? Early evening?
JS: Nay. But I would reckon about 8.45.
DK: Right. Ok. Ok.
JS: We’d just finished cutting the pig up. Fred Potts lived down at the Grange.
DK: Yeah. So you didn’t actually see the aircraft come down.
JS: No.
DK: You just heard the noise. So did you go over to the crash itself.
JS: No.
DK: And did, did your father go over and have a look? Or —
JS: My dad worked at the farm just across the road here. They owned these two fields. Well, they owned the land like.
DK: Yeah.
JS: He’d got beasts and him and Fred Potts went on their hands and knees because there were bullets flying everywhere. Went on their hands and knees over a plank, over the dyke here, up the edge and then the field was along an the end a big dip in it.
DK: Right.
JS: And they crawled across there and they went to there to see if everything was alright there. And it didn’t, didn’t get as far as there.
DK: So sadly then most of the crew were, were killed as far as you know.
JS: Yes. They was all killed sadly.
DK: So can you remember the recovery? Did the Air Force turn up?
JS: Yes.
DK: To put the fire out or —
JS: I can’t remember much about the fire because I didn’t go out that night.
DK: Yeah.
JS: I weren’t allowed out. I mean, I was only about, I think — what would I be? Ten, six, five?
RS: Jenny put you under the table didn’t she?
JS: Eh?
RS: Put you under the table.
JS: Yeah.
DK: Why were you put under the table?
JS: Because they thought the house was going to go up.
DK: Oh right. So —
JS: We were put in the glory hole for a start and that was like the cupboard in, like a lean to cupboard in it.
DK: Right. So —
JS: Under the stairs.
DK: Was your family worried that there could be bombs on board presumably.
JS: Yes. Yes.
DK: That might have gone up again.
JS: My brother had got double pneumonia and mother wrapped him in a blanket and said she was going out. Take us all out of it. And my Granny Horton was here. Mother’s mother. Helping to get the pig out of the way. And she said, ‘We’re not. We’re stopping here, Aggie. If we go we’ll all go together.’ And we stayed in there and we were shoved under the stairs in the glory hole. And they had the notion that if, if it did blow up then the big main beam of the house would drop on us.
DK: Yeah.
JS: So we were taken out of there and put in [laughs] put under the table. And my sister had got her head in the stays of the chair like. She didn’t get in properly. She was struggling and she was trying to get under. But we was under the table.
DK: And in in the days afterwards can you remember anything about the crash itself? Were they taking the wreckage away? Or —
JS: Yes. I can remember that.
DK: Yeah. How did they take the wreckage away? Did you see any of that?
JS: Yes. They reckon they went, come down this Green Lane and pick it up and they couldn’t get down.
DK: Right.
JS: So they were going to come in from across there [unclear] But then there was this big dip in the field and the things bellied when they went over it. So they organised that. I can’t remember them organising it but they did do, and they dragged the big, the top of the hill down to the bottom and made it just a ramp.
DK: Right.
JS: Then they came over with Queen Mary’s.
DK: Yeah.
JS: And a mobile crane arm. I don’t know whether the was an arm on them or what. But they came in a mobile crane and picked bits up by bit and took it.
DK: Yeah. And you can actually remember the Queen Marys and, and the mobile crane.
JS: Yeah.
DK: Yeah.
JS: I can remember seeing that.
DK: So how long was if before all the wreckage had gone? Was it quite quickly? Or. —
JS: I think it was pretty quick because it snowed like hell that night.
DK: Yeah.
JS: And you didn’t see much in the morning like because it was all snow. But it did as the snow disappeared. And you know where it came over the river don’t you?
DK: Could you tell me? Is it —
JS: Yeah. It came, it came down in those fields out the back there.
DK: Right. Ok. Ok.
JS: Not my land. Foston Fields. It hit the riverbank and jumped up and crossed the river.
DK: Right.
JS: That was when the rear gunner fell off. And then it carried on going across the field, scoping it out with the propellers still going.
DK: Right.
JS: It hit the tree in the lane down here.
DK: Right.
JS: Grubbed the first tree up by the roots. The second tree it snapped off at about twelve foot. And the third tree it took off at about twelve foot. And then it crossed the lane and there was a big elm on this side. On the right hand side.
DK: Yeah.
JS: And it hit that and it catapulted it around and all the rubbish was in this hedge. All the wreckage.
DK: Right.
JS: And in this hedge.
RS: The wheel come down the lane and stopped up there where that black car is.
DK: Oh right.
JS: One of the wheels did. It hit a tree just here. Right here in front of those conifers.
DK: So you’re quite lucky then it didn’t come into the house.
JS: Oh Christ, we were exceptionally lucky.
DK: Yeah.
RS: The tree up there you can still see the split in it where it split in half. Can’t you?
JS: Yeah. It hit that tree there.
DK: Let’s all go and have a look later.
JS: Yeah. It hit that tree there and then carried on. It carried on going up the lane which is only thirty yards I think from here.
DK: Yeah.
JS: And we were sitting there. It hit the tree up there and knocked the top out of it and then it was dead then. It knocked the top out of this tree.
DK: And presumably were you finding bits of wreckage in the years afterwards?
JS: Yes.
DK: Yeah.
JS: Only bits of rubbish. Tin and that.
DK: Yeah.
JS: You know. Alloy and things.
DK: Right.
JS: And dad found, for years dad was finding it and he had a tin, a box up there. And someone, I was going to give them it and they came down. I went to the box and it was empty.
DK: Oh.
JS: But there was nothing of any value.
DK: No.
JS: It was just a bit of alloy and a bit of metal like.
DK: Yeah. So how long was it before you kind of were conscious of, of the crew being killed? I mean did you know that as a child?
JS: More or less instant.
DK: Yeah. But you were aware that one of the crew did survive.
JS: Yes. Tom Arnold at the top of the village. I don’t know what he was. Air raid warden. Possible.
DK: Yeah.
JS: He came down and said, ‘You’re alright, missus. There’s no bombs on it.’ And he came down across these fields. ‘There’s no bombs on it so you’re alright.’ So everybody was relieved then like.
DK: Ok. What I’ll do just for the recording then I’ll say here that we now know that it was Lancaster, the serial number LM619 and it came from 1668 Heavy Conversion Unit and it crashed on the 15th of January 1945.
JS: Yeah. I think it was.
DK: Does that sound right?
JS: I think it was that date but I’m not sure.
DK: Yeah. Yeah. We’ve checked on that and six of the crew were killed but the rear gunner survived.
JS: Yeah.
RS: He later took his own life.
DK: And I understand —
RS: Yeah.
DK: He subsequently committed suicide. [The rear gunner, Sergeant G F Ashby died of natural causes in 1958]
JS: Did he?
DK: Which, that was tragic.
JS: I didn’t know that but it left him a bit, it sent him doolally like.
DK: Yeah.
JS: He was found wandering at Bennington.
DK: Really?
JS: He’d walked up the river.
DK: Yeah.
JS: And he was found at Bennington.
DK: Presumably he was suffering concussion or something or —
JS: Yeah.
RS: Yeah. You said you can remember the smell can’t you?
DK: Yeah.
[pause]
DK: Can, can you sort of remember the smell then of the —
JS: Yes.
DK: What did it smell like? What’s it —
JS: I can’t remember what it was there but it, yes there was a smell with it. And there was a fire. A big fire. A hell of a big fire. And it all petered out and bullets sort of seized up. Shooting around.
DK: Yeah.
JS: And we went up to the bedroom window then to look at it. The bedroom window was just out, just out here like.
DK: Yeah. Yeah.
JS: Straight down onto the site.
DK: So you were looking down on the crash site then.
JS: Yes, almost.
DK: Yeah.
JS: And then we were allowed to go out then when it, after we’d been told there was no bombs on it and the bullets had died.
DK: And when you first saw the wreckage can you remember sort of what you saw?
JS: I can’t remember what it was but it was a tangled up mess.
DK: Right.
JS: I can visualise what it was. It was a tangled up mess and there were bits everywhere.
DK: Yeah.
JS: Engines. One engine had carried on going when it come off.
DK: It implies it was coming out as some speed isn’t it?
JS: Pardon?
DK: It implies it was coming up at some speed doesn’t it?
JS: Yeah. It was landing.
DK: Yeah. So do you know where he was trying to land then? Or —
JS: Yeah. He was trying to land at Bottesford.
DK: Right. Because that’s that way.
RS: Yeah. Three fields.
DK: That doesn’t help the recording me saying that way, does it?
RS: No. But its three fields. If you look on the thing its three fields further on.
DK: Oh ok. Right. So he, he nearly made it.
RS: Well, there was Nissen huts and things in this farm. Farm building. Weren’t there, dad?
JS: Hmmn?
RS: There was huts in this building. In this farm, wasn’t it? There were huts in it weren’t there?
JS: Yes.
RS: So whether he took it that that was landing.
DK: Yeah.
RS: I don’t know.
JS: Yeah. It was all like cat gut.
DK: And —
JS: Twelve foot up.
DK: And as far as we know, this is just for the recording here the pilot we know was a Pilot Officer Thompson.
JS: I don’t know who he was.
DK: No.
JS: They’d got permission to land at Bennington err —
DK: Bottesford.
JS: At Bottesford.
DK: Yeah
JS: And they’d got permission but they’d got to go around again.
DK: Right.
JS: And then go down and they thought he was in there because there was a tin sheds in this field. And they put it down there and of course the river. They give the job up.
DK: Yeah. Can, can you remember the Lancasters then? And various other aircraft all flying around here?
JS: Yeah.
DK: So was that, was that quite a common occurrence then?
JS: No. We’ve had hours and hours on a Sunday evening. Especially Sunday. Stood on our front yard. The front, the front of our cottage watching them fight. Dogfighting.
DK: Oh right.
JS: Just up here like. And you see him and then you, you either hear it [humming noise] that was a goner or, or they, or they cleared off.
DK: Yeah.
JS: Times and times and times we used to stand in the yard watching them. All in the dark we was.
RS: There were searchlights here, weren’t there, dad? Searchlights on Bennington Road.
JS: Eh?
RS: Searchlights on Bennington Road weren’t there?
JS: Yes.
DK: Searchlights. Yeah. Any anti-aircraft guns or —
JS: I can’t remember them.
DK: No.
JS: I can remember the searchlights.
DK: Yeah.
JS: I can remember the searchlights operating by being two men.
DK: Yeah.
JS: One of them was sat there tending the wheel. Well they both got a wheel and one was a gun aimer.
DK: Right.
JS: And when they were fighting, you know like this scrap were going on up there. But it was regular to see them. The searchlights on the farm.
DK: Right.
JS: Yeah. And all around here there was barbed wire. And probably about four posts on the roadside and a hole dug.
DK: Yeah.
RS: That’s Bottesford airfield.
DK: Oh right. Closer than I thought.
RS: That’s us.
DK: Right.
RS: Landed. So it dropped there.
DK: Yeah.
RS: There was only them two.
DK: So that’s where he was trying to make for, wasn’t it?
RS: And there’s a couple beside the A1.
DK: This is another memorial. The other side of Bottesford then.
RS: That’s right. Yeah.
DK: Yeah. Another crashed Lancaster.
JS: Yeah. There was one or two around here.
DK: Yeah.
JS: Different ones.
DK: So that was, that was the only accident you saw then was it, the — or you were aware of around here?
JS: Yes. Yes.
DK: So, so once the war’s finished was it a big change here then?
JS: I can’t remember. I can’t remember. I can remember my dad because he worked over there.
DK: Yeah.
JS: He got a big mark on, every, every door around here. VE. VE. I can remember. I can remember him walking around doing it.
DK: Yeah. So everyone was quite pleased and celebrating were they?
JS: Yeah.
DK: Right.
JS: Yeah. And I mean all that’s gone now. The buildings and everything’s gone.
DK: Yeah.
JS: All gone in to development. But if you found them doors you’d find this VE.
DK: Right. Ok. That’s marvellous. I think we’ve sort of covered it, haven’t we? We can, we can come back again if you want to. if I, I’m going to turn this off now so, but thanks very much for that.
[recording paused]
DK: Sorry. Go on. You were going to say.
JS: We heard this droning noise and everybody looked at everybody and said nothing. And then it was just bang. Crashed and everything just sort of shattering and then the sky lit up orange.
DK: So you could feel the ground shake could you?
JS: Yeah.
DK: Yeah.
JS: You could feel feel the whole house shake. I thought it was going to fall down.
DK: Yeah. I guess when you’re that age you’re not too frightened of things but can you recall if you were a bit scared of that or —
JS: No. I wasn’t scared. I don’t know about the rest of the family but I weren’t scared.
DK: Yeah.
JS: It was excitement to me.
DK: Yes. I can imagine.
JS: But then Tom Arnold came down and he came across the fields to the back door there and said, ‘Are you alright, missus?’
DK: Yeah.
JS: Because my dad had gone across to the rectory. There were no bombs on it. So I don’t know how he knew. Whether they’d informed him.
DK: Yeah.
JS: I think he was air raid warden.
DK: Yes. I guess they would have known quite early if it was on a training flight that there was no bombs. So —
RS: They put guards on it didn’t they?
JS: Yeah.
DK: But what were the guards? Were they the Home Guard or were they soldiers? Can you remember?
JS: Weren’t Home Guard. They were MPs.
DK: Oh ok.
JS: Put on it to guard it.
DK: Yeah.
JS: As I say it snowed and they commandeered the Village Hall. They had that. And my dad was milking the cow across here like he always had done. And the bloke, one of the guards came across with him. And then when he saw where the milk come from he was sick.
DK: He didn’t know.
JS: No. He didn’t know. He just thought it came out a bottle.
DK: I think there’s a lot of people today don’t know where milk came from.
JS: Yeah.
DK: Right. Ok. That’s, that’s marvellous I’ll stop this again now but thanks very much for that.
[recording paused]
DK: You mentioned, you mentioned about the boot. You were saying that there was a boot out there after the accident.
JS: Yes.
DK: Can you remember what you saw there?
JS: A flying boot. And then you looked in it and it was like a half foot. Half a leg.
DK: And that was in what is now your back garden.
JS: Yeah.
DK: Yeah. And how long was it there for?
JS: I can’t remember how long it was there for. I would imagine it wouldn’t be very long but I can’t remember.
DK: No.
JS: It happened in the night. I think it was a Saturday night. I think it would be about 8 o’clock. And of course, it was all found in daylight the next day.
DK: Not a, not a nice thing to see was it?
JS: No.
DK: No. Oh dear.
JS: I should think it was probably picked up the next day. I don’t know what happened to it.
DK: Yeah.
JS: It was reported that there was a boot there.
DK: Not good. Not a good thing to see.
JS: And on those trees what I showed you the first one was grubbed out completely.
DK: Yeah.
JS: The second one had got a load of gut hanging.
DK: A load of — ?
JS: Like cat gut.
DK: Oh.
JS: Where it had been got up there about twelve foot.
DK: Yeah.
JS: And dripped like.
DK: Oh dear. Not a very pleasant sight.
JS: No.
DK: Well, I hope we can get the Memorial sorted out to them. That would be very good wouldn’t it?
JS: Yes.
DK: Yeah. I like the idea of the bench. Sounds a good idea that.
JS: I don’t know what. I haven’t got nothing to do with that. Sorting the Memorial or doing anything with the Memorial.
DK: Well, your son is trying to sort something out, isn’t he?
JS: Yeah.
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
A name given to the resource
Interview with John William Squires
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
David Kavanagh
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
2018-04-07
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.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ASquiresJW180407
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:25:12 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Description
An account of the resource
John was living on a farm and working there when he left school at fourteen. The family of five lived in a two-bedroom cottage and John remembered hearing a plane crashing near Westborough one evening, all but one of the crew being killed. The children were put under the table for protection against a bomb exploding. The aircraft, which crashed on the 15 January 1945, was Lancaster LM619 from a RAF Bottesford Heavy Conversion Unit. The rear gunner, Sergeant G F Ashby survived. A memorial bench had been planned for the village.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Sue Smith
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Nottinghamshire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1945-01-15
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending revision of OH transcription
air gunner
aircrew
crash
Lancaster
memorial
RAF Bottesford
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1224/3356/PBrownJ1721.2.jpg
841499b815a584b52bc4b555540f5b4f
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1224/3356/ABrownJ170118.2.mp3
a8113fdf85b50ce4324c3cbdb34aa73f
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, Jeff
Jeffrey Brown
J Brown
Description
An account of the resource
35 items. One oral history interview with Flying Officer Jeff Brown (b. 1925, 2205595, Royal Air Force), his log book, service material and photographs including 16 pictures of B-29s. He flew operations as a Flight Sergeant air gunner with 576 Squadron from RAF Fiskerton towards the end of the war and took part in Operation Manna.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Jeff Brown and catalogued by Peter Adams.
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
2017-01-18
2017-01-31
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. 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
Brown, J-3
Access Rights
Information about who can access the resource or an indication of its security status. Access Rights may include information regarding access or restrictions based on privacy, security, or other policies.
Permission granted for commercial projects
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
SP: So this is Susanne Pescott I am interviewing Jeffrey Brown today for the International Bomber Command Centres Digital Archive, we are at Jeff’s home and it’s 18th January 2017, so first of all Jeff thank you for allowing us to talk to you today and also present is Yvonne O’Rourke Jeff’s daughter. So Jeff do you want to tell me about your early life before you joined the RAF.
JB: Well after school when I was fifteen I became an apprentice electrician in the local bus depot working on buses and trolley buses and then when the, I was always interested in aircraft model aircraft my neighbour friend and I used to make and fly model aircraft er we had a good place to fly them because across the way from where we lived was the Ashton Golf Course so when nobody was playing golf it was our flying area [laughs], so when the Air Training Corps started I think it was 1941 I joined that and er got interested and of course the war was on then and er there was the possibility of later after a year or two I might be called up to go in the services so er at that time if you waited until you were called up at eighteen every tenth conscriptee was sent to work down the coal mines, it was a scheme developed by a Government Minister called Ernest Bevan because they were short of miners, and if you were unlucky enough to be caught in that you had to go and work in the coal industry now I didn’t want that I wanted to join the air force so to be sure of going in the air force at seventeen and a half you could volunteer for the air force and you went and had a medical and aptitude test and if you were accepted for training as air crew you were given an air force number, you were paid for the days you were at this centre which was at Warrington, and you were in the air force but you were then sent home on what was called deferred service until you were eighteen and at eighteen you could be called at any time to start serving properly and this ensured that when you registered at eighteen they couldn’t send you down the coal mines because you were already in the air force that was one way of avoiding coal mining [laughs]. So I was accepted initially to train as a wireless operator air gunner and at about eighteen two three months I was finally called up to serve and er in those days air crew trainees the first place you reported to was Lords Cricket Ground in London which was rather [laughs] an unusual place to start service and er there you were kitted all your equipment had medicals and so on and then after a few weeks you were sent out to start your training properly, after about three months of this er which was largely basic air force training and learning to receive and send Morse Code er we were called to a meeting by a group captain and he said ‘I’m sorry to inform you that we have so many wireless operators under training we cannot cope with the numbers so we are going to have to suspend your training may be for six months possibly indefinitely’ but he said ‘we are at the moment of short of trainee air gunners anyone wishing to change can do so by leaving a name now’ so most of us being young and daft said ‘oh yes we want to be air gunners’ so we started training again as air gunners, er the basic training was done at Bridgnorth in Shropshire er after that we were sent to an Air Gunners School at RAF Dalcross near Inverness, we trained there for about three or four months and then we qualified as air gunners er the training was done in Ansom aircraft er we flew with another aircraft pulling a target which was a long canvas sleeve and you fired ammunition which had been dipped in paint, the nose of the bullets were dipped in paint, so if you hit this white canvas sleeve besides making a hole in it it left a little colour smear this way the scores could be counted afterwards and er we did this all types of different exercises out over the sea the Moray Firth er following that I was sent on leave and then posted to Operational Training Unit which was at um a place called Westcott and there you were crewed up in a crew, um it was a rather haphazard method all the different air crew categories were put into one large hall and told ‘find yourself a crew’ and I wandered round a bit lost and I was approached a a little chap an air gunner he said ‘have you got a crew yet?’ I said ‘no’ ‘well would you like to join ours?’ and I said ‘yes I would’ and that was how I was crewed up, er my pilot was a New Zealand lad flight sergeant and the rest of the crew were all English boys, so [coughs] we were flying in Wellington aircraft we did various exercises all kinds of things for the different trades, navigation training, bombing training, gunnery training and so on and um after this we were sent to er what was it called Heavy Conversion Unit this was at RAF Bottesford in Nottinghamshire where we were introduced to the Lancaster bomber and also another member joined the crew this was the flight engineer, er in our case our flight engineer was also a pilot this had happened because they had a large surplus of pilots and to give them something to do they trained some of them er as engineers so we had two pilots in the crew which was handy, er we did this training again doing all kinds of exercises including the dreaded corkscrew evasive manoeuvre which was quite horrendous, and from there we were posted to RAF Fiskerton to join 576 Squadron this was in April 1945 towards the end of the war, we did further er what you might call squadron training for a week or two before we were considered qualified to go on operations and the big thing at that moment was called Operation Manna this was dropping food supplies in Holland because it was an area which had been cut off by the advance of the armies and in the last six months or so of the war there had been dreadful food shortages and people were dying of starvation thousands and thousands of Dutchmen died through lack of food so we and the American Air Force were tasked to drop food supplies for them and the area was still under German occupation er a rather dodgy truce was organised with the Germans a kind of er ‘don’t shoot at us we won’t shoot at you’ but it was a little bit of a flimsy thing and several aircraft were shot at ours luckily wasn’t but one American aircraft was shot down and the crew killed by the German Occupation Forces, so I did five of these trips er mainly to Rotterdam and we dropped these food supplies er they were simply bundled into the bomb bay of the aircraft and they weren’t dropped on parachutes they just opened the bomb bay doors and everything fell out in a huge cloud tins and boxes and sacks and all kinds of food which were collected by the Dutch authorities and then distributed to the people who needed it, er we did the last flight on 8th May 1945 which was VE Day, the war ended on that day. After the war we continued flying doing various exercises er one thing we did was to fly to Brussels and bring home Army personnel who had been prisoners of war, another thing we did was to fly to Naples in Italy and bring home again Army personnel who were due for early release from the forces er we continued to do this for about I think four or five months and then the big run down of Bomber Command started the squadrons were disbanded and we were all thrown on the scrap heap not really knowing what would happen to us, but um eventually much against my wishes I was sent on a course to be an equipper demanding and issuing supplies and in this role I was finally posted to a small radar unit in Germany er initially in the British zone of Germany and then er eventually in the American zone and finally in the French occupation zone and er I was there for two and a half years something like that, during that time we had on this little unit when I say little there were a total of about thirty five personnel you could tell how small it was we required an interpreter somebody who spoke German and French because we had the contact with the French Occupation Forces and a young lady called Dorothy Bush who lived nearby she was the daughter of the local school teacher became our interpreter and er many well not many years several years later Dorothy and I were married [very emotional].
SP: Do you want to stop?
JB: Right after some time on this small radar station in Germany I found that you could er re-engage you could sign up for regular service and that would be as air crew to be flying again so I applied for this er I was sent to London to have a medical examinations and so on and I was accepted to fly again as an air gunner but before you could start the flying training er as gunners we had to be trained with er er sort of auxiliary trade and we did this at RAF Kirkham near Preston it was a school of armament trades we learned about all the armament equipment in use at that time in the RAF guns and mines and all the er ancillary equipment, and then we had to do a course at a place called Wellesbourne Mountford on aerial photography that took another couple of months or so so we were quite highly qualified in the trades by that time and then we were posted to RAF Marham in 1950 to join 149 Squadron which was reforming it was the first squadron in the RAF to be equipped with American B29 Super Fortress Bombers the type of bombers that the Americans had used in the Pacific to bomb Japan and drop the atom bomb with so we did this course at RAF Marham and then we had to move out and make room for the next squadron to come in and do the course and we were sent to RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire which at that time was shut down and we arrived there but we didn’t have any aircraft because in the meantime the war in Korea had started and the Americans stopped the supply of B29’s to the RAF because they wanted them for themselves [laughs] so we sat at Coningsby fully trained squadron, air crew and ground crew, for six weeks and the only aircraft we had was an Oxford and a Tiger Moth [laughs] had the Russians known they could have walked in [laughs]. So finally one B29 arrived and our crew had the honour of making the first B29 flight from RAF Coningsby er in I think it was November 1950 er so eventually more aircraft came and the squadron got rolling and operating as it should do and er we were there for a couple of years doing all kinds of exercises, some very very long range flights lasting fifteen sometimes as long as eighteen, nineteen hours without landing or refuelling and then of course jet aircraft began to enter service and on these aircraft no requirement for air gunners so once again facing redundancy, several of the chaps applied to retrain and were accepted as navigators, pilots, so I thought I’m going to have a go at this so I applied and after the interviews and medicals I was accepted for pilot training but by this time the RAF had decided that if you were pilot or navigator you had to be commissioned not like in the old war time days where you could have sergeant pilots etcetera so we had do to a commissioning course which lasted about five months at Jurby in the Isle of Man, having qualified for that and gained a commission I was fortunate to be chosen with a small group of chaps to go and do our flying training in Canada under a NATO training scheme so we flew to Canada in er civilian aircraft and after some time in kind of transit units we eventually landed up in Alberta a place called Claresholm which was about sixty miles south of Calgary, this was a flying training school and unlike the British trainees who started their pilot training on a light aircraft like a Tiger Moth we went on day one on Harvard aircraft which for a trainee were quite a handful they were a sturdy little aircraft with a big five hundred and fifty horsepower engine and they took a bit of handling when you were a novice but er we coped with it and we did the all the necessary exercises day and night flying and er finally after I think it would be nine or ten months er we qualified but we were caught in a rather unusual situation previously at the end of flying school training they had a big parade and celebration and you were presented with your wings the Canadian authorities had decided they were not doing this any longer they were giving our chaps their wings when they’d done a further advanced flying training so what was going to happen to us we were due to come home then and nobody could really tell us what was going to happen when are we going to get our wings, so we flew home in a civilian aircraft we arrived in London airport and were taken in buses to the Air Ministry this was about half past six seven o’clock in the evening by then going dark and we were ushered into a dismal basement room where we met by a civilian clerk, who from the smell of his breath had been out and had a few pints whilst he was waiting for us so, he then issued er instructions of where we were to be posted to and in those days we were still on rations so he issued ration cards and as we were due to leave he said ‘before you go any questions?’ and one chap piped up he said ‘when do we get our wings?’ and this half drunken clerk said ‘oh it’s okay you can put them up now if you want to’ that’s was how we were awarded our wings I thought it was the most miserable bit of service time the whole of my air force career. So we were then posted to RAF Turnhill to do a course on instrument flying to get a qualification called the white card er instrument flying this and they wanted you to fly under various weather conditions, er the grades were white, green, and master green, if you were so experienced and qualified if you got a master green you could fly in any weather conditions whatsoever so we got the white card which had limitations and when we had arrived there some of the chaps not believing what this clerk at the Air Ministry had said arrived not wearing wings odd chaps who had previously been other air crew like a engineer or air gunners were still wearing their old air force air gunner engineer wings and the first day we were introduced er by a squadron leader to tell us what the course was all about and he started his speech and then after a moment he stopped and he pointed at the lad in the front row who was wearing the single wing of a flight engineer and he said ‘who are you what are you doing here?’ so the lad said ‘well I understand sir I’ve come to do an instrument rating course’ so he said ‘well are you a pilot?’ and the lad said ‘well I’ve done a pilot’s course’ and he said ‘why aren’t you wearing pilot’s wings?’ so the lad said truthfully ’because I’ve not been awarded them’ and the squadron leader took no notice of this at all he looked around the room and he said ‘well if you want to do this course you better get some wings up damn quick and that goes for all the rest of you not wearing them’ that was our introduction to being pilots. [Pause] So this business of the wings I thought was disgraceful and thinking about it years later I feel that about that time due to the way we had been treated I really began to lose interest it destroyed my enthusiasm for the RAF, and for flying, and for the whole bloomin thing, however, we did this um instrument training course and then we were posted on to er Meteor Jet Fighters a twin engine jet fighter of that day er and we did conversion on to those and er I did I did conversion I went on solo on them they were comparatively easy to fly engine wise because you didn’t have too many points to consider with a jet engine as you did with a piston engine aircraft and er we carried on with this course till we got to the stage where we started aerobatics and then I found that due to the violent manoeuvres with aerobatics er I started blacking out so I was removed from the course and after a while I was sent to the er er the School of Aviation Medicine School at Farnborough where they have flying doctors who took me up in a Meteor equipped with G measuring device and they flew the plane around and blacked me out all over the place and declared that I had a low G tolerance and I would be grounded so that was a big disappointment after all that I’d been through before, I I was then offered the choice of one or two ground trades which I didn’t fancy doing if I wasn’t flying I didn’t want to be in the air force so the other alternative was to leave so I was then discharged having been in the air force something like eleven years altogether, and um I came home and I started applying for jobs and I went for various interviews and er people asked me what I’d done and so on as usual the case ‘oh that’s very interesting but your no use to us’ so I got a bit despondent I was out of work for may be about six weeks and I was walking along one evening I bumped into an old school chum of mine and the conversation got around to jobs ‘what are you doing?’ I said ‘I’m looking for a job’ ‘what are you doing?’ he said ‘I’m on a management training course in Manchester for the CWS the Co-opertive Society’ er he said ‘come round to my house I’ll show you what we are doing’ so I went to his house and he showed me all these books and information and I thought oh how boring after flying [laughs] doing that didn’t appeal one one little bit, all this time his father had been sitting there quietly reading a newspaper and he chipped in he said ‘have you tried our place?’ so I said ‘well where is our place?’ he said ‘A V Roe’ and he gave me the address of the employment officer so I wrote in and er they called me in for an interview and I think they had it in mind that I would fit in to some kind of position in the works so they sent me home and said we’ll notify you and then a letter came sorry we can’t do anything for you so disappointment again and then almost immediately another letter came from them would I go for an interview with the chief draughtsman ‘cos at that time the Avro factory at Chadderton was the main design office for the company, so er I went for this interview it was a Friday afternoon and er I saw this gentleman the chief draughtsman and he asked me all about my service career and so on and then he said ‘I think we could find a place for you in here’ so he said er ‘when would you like to start Monday?’ [laughs] following just a weekend away [laughs] oh rather puzzled I said ‘oh yes that’d be fine’ so on Monday morning I turned up and I was placed in the middle of the design office and due to my armament work that I had done in the forces I was put onto what was called the armament section the design office was broken up into sections groups of about a dozen men each section did a different type of work some did air frames, some would do engines, some would be radio, and I was on the armament section and quite a lot of the work they were doing was stuff I already knew that I’d seen and worked on in the air force but of course there was a lot of new stuff because at that time they were just introducing the Vulcan Bomber so I fitted in very nicely and er got going steadily working on the Vulcan and the Shackleton and later on the Nimrod and er several aircraft we did er certain parts of those and er so I worked quite steadily and happily for several years I think about twelve years in the design office on armament equipment mainly of the different aircraft and then the company decided to have a huge reorganisation, er they moved the design office to the company airfield at Woodford and of course it was practically impossible for me to get there I didn’t have a car at the time it would have meant several bus trips a train journey and er it was just impossible so I joined a bunch of rebels who said ‘we’re not going’ [laughs] so we were kept for a while at Chadderton in the design office on a sort of queries section and I thought well this will just potter along until the company get fed up with it and then you’d be given the ultimatum either get to Woodford or get out [laughs] so I left and I got a job at a local firm building er commercial vehicles again in their design office which was quite different to what I had been doing before but it was in a way quite interesting. I did this for a year or two and eventually I bumped into a chap er who I’d worked with in the design office and er we got chatting and I said ‘I’m a little bit bored with this job I’m doing’ and he said ‘well we’re looking for people at Chadderton in the publications er department’ ‘cos each aircraft has a huge set of books for servicing and maintaining them er he gave me the address to write in to and er eventually after had an interview I was accepted there and I started back again on my beloved aircraft in the publications department and I worked in there for about twenty years [laughs] until I finally retired in 1989 [laughs] so that was the end of my life with aircraft more or less right through my whole working life [laughs] it had been aircraft one way or another.
SP: So Jeff you talked about when you first joined up you went to Lords Cricket Ground do you want to tell me a little bit more about that?
JB: Yes, oh for aircrew trainees during the war the place you reported to when you were called up was Lords Cricket Ground in London, rather unusual setting to think you are going in the air force er we were billeted in blocks of flats all around Regents Park and we were kitted out you got all your uniform and equipment and er you had your introduction to things like how to march and drill and so on, and one day we were taken back to a building on the side of er Regents Park which was a medical centre we were led into the backyard amongst piles of coke and coal [laughs] taken upstairs to about er the third floor on the way up you had to take your tunic off and roll both sleeves up when you stepped inside the door there was a duty airman on each side with a basin with some sort of disinfectant fluid in and a scrubbing brush and he scrubbed both your upper arms, you moved on into the next room and there were doctors in line and you were given various injections inoculations er oh what what was it something fever they had in those days, and then you were led out down some stairs onto a road at the side by the railings of Regents Park [laughs] it looked like a scene from a battlefield there were chaps hanging over the railings vomiting, there were others lying flat out on the pavement having fainted not being used to all this injections and inoculations [laughs], luckily it didn’t affect me although I did have a rather sore arm for a little while [laughs].
SP: So Jeff you were talking about during when you were on the plane the dreaded corkscrew.
JB: Yes
SP: Do you want to tell me a little bit about that?
JB: Yes er when we did the course er on er to train on the Lancaster er one of the exercises we had to do was to er learn er called an evasive tactic in case you were attacked by a fighter they had this manoeuvre called the corkscrew where the aircraft went into steep dives and turns and climbs in order to put the aim of the attacker off and you had certain drills to carry out er in order to aim your guns correctly and try and hit him whilst you were doing this, now the main people involved with this were the gunners and the pilot um you gave the instruction to the pilot when to start this manoeuvre and whilst he was doing it he told you what you were doing because you were thrown about so much you could hardly realise whether you were turning left, right, going up or down whatever it was very very violent and er you repeated back to the pilot so he understood that you knew and according to what he said you had to apply certain rules of sighting in order to hopefully hit the attacker, so the the manoeuvre would start like this, oh before I say anything more I should say that our first corkscrew was done by an instructor pilot an experienced fella, the manoeuvre went like this you as a gunner had a thing called a reflector sight you looked through a glass screen and it had a red ring with a dot in the middle you compared the size of this to the size of the attacking aircraft you had to learn the wing span of the groups of the attacking aircraft when he filled a certain amount of your ring and bead sight he was at six hundred yards that was the distance when you were to open fire ’cos it was the best range for the guns you were using, so you watched this attacker and make him he came in a curving dive which is called a curved pursuit and you raced him with your gun sight you warned the pilot he was coming in when he got to six hundred yards you said ‘corkscrew’ either port or starboard depending which side he was coming in from the pilot then we did the first one to port which is the left side he just simply stood the aircraft up on it’s port wing tip and we went down in a screaming dive after a few hundred feet he rolled and he went down on the other side the starboard side for a few more hundred feet and then he pulled up violently, on the way down you were virtually weightless you just floated up off your seat the only thing I was holding onto was the two control handles for the gun turret [laughs], all this time you were trying to apply these what we call sighting rules where you aimed your sight at the attacker you didn’t aim directly at him and then the pilot pulled up and he did the same manoeuvre going up and then the G Force came on you were slammed literally just slammed down into your seat became several times heavier than you normally are [laughs] and it was so severe you couldn’t raise your arms try as you may you couldn’t lift them and you had an oxygen mask on your face this pulled away on the straps and then you climbed up to your starting height and then you went down and started another corkscrew [laughs], all this time other members of the crew that weren’t involved with this as I said it was just the pilot and the gunner the other people such as the navigator and wireless operator were sitting there with their stomachs churning and quite a lot of them being airsick but due to the fact that you were so concentrating on what you were doing it didn’t make me airsick strangely enough so that was our introduction to the corkscrew [laughs].
SP: Jeff you also talked that you were at Fiskerton on VE Day do you want to talk me through what happened on VE Day what you did?
JB: Yes er VE Day 8th May 1945 we were scheduled to do the last Manna food drop in Holland [coughs] we got out of the aircraft and a photographer suddenly appeared and asked us the crew and the ground crew to pose in front of the aircraft and took our photographs which I still have, and then something happened that had never happened on any previous operation a car drew up and it was the station commander the group captain wishing us well [laughs] and hoping that we had a good trip of course we knew that it was the last day of the war [coughs], my pilot and two other pilots from our crew had made a secret arrangement that on the way back at one of the turning points on the route back was Cambridge that we were going to meet up formate and fly back from Cambridge to Fiskerton and beat up in the airfield in formation, so [laughs] we arrived at er at er Cambridge and [coughs] they’d arrange [coughs] not to use the radio so that it wouldn’t be identified [coughs] they arranged to fire off a coloured vary cartridges so these two planes were milling around at Cambridge when we arrived and they were shooting off these coloured vary cartridges I think they were green and we fired some off so we knew who we were and we all joined up together and headed off to Fiskerton, now we were flying a rather old Lancaster and we were slowly dropping behind these other two aircraft we couldn’t keep up with them ‘cos they were going flat out and our engineer told us he said they had er a sort of toggle which was called an emergency boost button to give the engines a little bit of extra power he said ‘I’ve pulled the emergency boost and we still can’t keep up with them’ and we were dropping more and more lagging behind them dropping away so eventually our pilot said ‘okay well we’ll forget it’ but because of all this extra power on this old aircraft was shuddering and shaking suddenly there was a loud bang and a whole sheet of metal fell off from underneath the starboard wing [laughs] we didn’t know what it was at the time [laughs] but I reported it to the pilot he said ‘well I don’t know what it is but we’re still flying okay so we carry on’ and we flew back to Fiskerton and of course this beat up had occurred by the time we got back and when we landed we found that this vibration had loosened some of the skin coverings on the outboard engine nacelle and it had ripped off with the airflow that’s what we saw some farmer would find a nice sheet of aluminium in one of his fields [laughs], so we then went to the debriefing and the station commander came up on the dais afterwards and he said ‘all pilots are to remain behind everyone else is dismissed’ he didn’t know he hadn’t identified who had done this beat up at the airfield so we scurried off to get our bacon and egg which was the meal you got after flying [laughs] whilst all the pilots got a tremendous bollocking from the station commander [laughs] that was VE Day [laughs].
SP: Jeff do you want to tell me about the time in the Wellington bomber that you were talking about?
JB: Yes um we were introduced to the Wellington at a unit called Operational Training Unit OTU this is where you joined a crew [coughs] and amongst various exercises you did of course there was quite a lot of practice bombing er you dropped small smoke bombs on er des designated targets where er how well or badly you had done there were staff there could record it and send the results back to your unit [coughs] now to do this exercise er we were based at this er place er Westcott near Aylesbury we had to fly er about thirty miles in a northerly direction to the area I think it was Northampton and back for the navigator to calculate the wind ‘cos this was a vital thing for the bomb aimer to know he set this into his equipment er the target we were to attack was on some moorland in the Oxford area, so we took off and we had to climb up to twelve thousand feet to fly this course to calculate the wind er on the way we flew through quite a few heaps of cloud it got a little bit bumpy and unknown to us behind all this cloud was a cumulus nimbus thunderstorm cloud and we flew straight into it and it was a fantastic all of sudden it went grey and then it went almost completely dark this is sort of ten o’clock in the morning and the turbulence we were thrown about up and down and in a flash then the the inside of the gun turret was painted matt black in a flash it just became white all over with hoarfrost and I made the aimless gesture of trying to scrape some of it off with my fingers [laughs] I don’t know why I did that [laughs] but we were thrown about we went up and down and the pilot said ‘we’re getting iced up I’m losing control’ he said ‘we’ll have to get out of this’ and he did the worst thing he could have done he tried to turn round to go back out of it, the rule was if you were in that position you flew straight through it, so he started this turn and he collected so much ice on the wings he lost control of it he called out ‘I can’t control it’ and he gave the order ‘fix parachutes and standby’ now you wore your parachute harness all the time in the aircraft but your parachute was in a pack in a stowage near to where you were sitting so we grabbed the er the parachute out of its stowage and it fell to the floor just at the moment we started to be lifted up at some tremendous speed and the G was so strong I couldn’t lift the parachute pack and I thought if this carries on I going to die pretty soon [laughs] ‘cos I’ve heard of stories of planes flying into thunderstorm clouds and coming out in bits in the bottom so we were flung up and down, up and down, and then eventually we came out of the clouds and we began to lose some of the ice that had got into all our and the pilot regained control so he said ‘stand down’ we didn’t need to put the parachute on to jump but we fell out of control iced up from twelve to four thousand feet totally out of control and the air speed indicator broke the the air speed indicator pointer the needle was just hanging down and swinging like a little pendulum so we’d no air speed however our pilot er was experienced enough to know that if he put certain power settings on the engine it would keep us flying [coughs], so we abandoned the exercise and flew back to Westcott where we were based told them what had happened they then divert, oh they asked how much fuel we still had so we had sufficient fuel, they then diverted to us to RAF Wittering which is in the Peterborough area and Peter and Wittering was a big pre-war airfield and across the fields from it was a smaller wartime airfield called Collyweston and there was a flat land flat fields between the two and they had laid what was called pierced steel planking between the two airfields to create an emergency landing strip was a bit longer than the normal landing strip so we were given instructions over the radio and we told them what had happened to us what power settings to set on the engine to make a faster than normal approach so there was no danger that we would stall and we all got down in what we call crash positions we were trained to do this and we landed on this pierced steel planking runway which made a hell of a noise [laughs] when you ran over it but we got down safely and then motored back to the Wittering side where we were interviewed as to what happened then we were taken for a meal whilst the aircraft was prepared and then later on that day we flew it back to Westcott, but that from that day on until we got on the Lancaster which was an all metal aircraft I was always a bit scared [laughs] when we flew into big heaped up clouds [laughs].
SP: So Jeff you talked about Operation Manna how did you feel about doing that?
JB: Well at times it was quite emotional because so many people had died twenty odd thousand in total I think in the last months of the war er and many people had suffered so greatly through this starvation and eating all sorts of weird food like the flower bulbs they used to fry flower bulbs and all kinds of stuff, they used to make from what we were told foraging trips the people in the big cities suffered the most because they could out may be on bicycle or walking ‘cos they’d no vehicles er into the country areas and barter for food with the farmers to get a few eggs or potatoes and give away their valuables and all kinds of thing and when you spoke with some of the people that had suffered with this er it’s quite er emotional, little old ladies would want to come and hug you [laughs] and that kind of thing, and er one boy I think about probably twelve years old came to me spoke very good English as most of them do and he said ‘I want to shake your hand and thank you’ so I said ‘well what do you want to thank me for you weren’t born at the time we did this’ he said no ‘you saved my grandparents lives’ and that was the kind of thing that er happened to you people come ‘thank you thank you’ and giving you gifts it was utterly amazing the gratitude that er they showed was just overwhelming at times.
SP: Okay thanks for that is there anything else at all that you feel you haven’t had a chance to say?
JB: Well one little amusing story er when we came back from Canada and we did this instrument flying course at Turnhill er the course included normal exercises besides instruments and navigation exercises and so on and er we were being briefed to do the first solo night cross country flight we we had a rather er broad spoken Yorkshire flight lieutenant flight commander who was giving this er briefing before the flight and er he told everything we were supposed to know the weather and everything and er at the end he said ‘just a word of advice before you go’ he said er ‘if’ in his broad Yorkshire accent he said ‘now if you get lost or owt bloody silly like that for god’s sake give us a call even if it’s only to say goodbye’ [laughs].
SP: [Laughs] That’s great Jeff so thanks for all the stories there [Laughs].
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ABrownJ170118
PBrownJ1721
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Jeff Brown
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
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
01:03:08 audio recording
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Pending OH summary. Allocated T Holmes
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Susanne Pescott
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-01-18
Description
An account of the resource
Jeff Brown worked as an electrician until he joined the Royal Air Force. He flew with 576 Squadron from RAF Fiskerton.
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
Netherlands
England--Lincolnshire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1945-04
1945-05
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Jackie Simpson
149 Squadron
576 Squadron
air gunner
Air Gunnery School
aircrew
B-29
bombing
crewing up
Harvard
Lancaster
Meteor
military service conditions
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
Operational Training Unit
pilot
RAF Bottesford
RAF Dalcross
RAF Fiskerton
RAF Marham
RAF Westcott
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1171/11740/PMortensenJC1803.2.jpg
2902abff131d5b25fa39163e7da37336
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1171/11740/AMortensenJC180917.1.mp3
54eab7ebac5dce038fc42a6a53cfc8f2
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
Mortensen, James Christian
J C Mortensen
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Warrant Officer James Mortensen (1924, 2209575 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a wireless operator with 149 Squadron.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-09-17
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Mortensen, JC
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
BW: This is Brian Wright interviewing Warrant Officer James Mortensen of 149 Squadron, at 2.30 on Monday 17th September 2018 at his home in Leyland, near Preston. First questions if you don’t mind James, if you would just confirm your service number for us and your date of birth please.
JM: Double two o nine five seven five. [Laughs]
BW: You never forget that, do you?
JM: You never forget it. [Laughs]
BW: And what was your date of birth?
JM: 27th 12th 1924.
BW: Which makes you currently 93.
JM: Correct.
BW: Where were you born and where did you grow up, you mentioned -?
JM: Liverpool.
BW: Liverpool. Whereabouts in Liverpool, actually in the centre?
JM: Aigburch, Liverpool 17.
BW: Okay, and Aigburch, that’s an unusual spelling, isn’t it. A u g -
JM: A i g b u r c h.
BW: And along with your mum and dad did you have any brothers and sisters?
JM: Yes, I had two sisters and a brother.
BW: And were you in between, or were you the older brother?
JM: Yeah, I was third, [laughs] I had two older sisters and a younger brother.
BW: And what was home life like in Aigburch, was it quite a nice area?
JM: It was very good, my father was a detective in the police.
BW: What did your mum do?
JM: She just stayed at home [laughs].
JM: Unfortunately, she died in 1937. Very, very young. [Pause]
BW: So you would have not been so old yourself, about nine.
JM: About thirteen, fourteen that’s all.
BW: Thirteen, okay. And whereabouts did you go to school?
JM: St Anne’s Church of England School.
BW: Was that the, was that your first one, was it a primary school or - ?
JM: It was a primary school, yes. And it was, it was a church school right through, from five to fourteen.
BW: And you stayed there, as you say, until you were fourteen. I saw a school report that said you had a special aptitude for Maths and English, is that right?
JM: Yeah.
BW: Were they your favourite subjects then?
JM: Yes, [laughs] maths still is.
BW: Do you think you have a technical background, or a logical sort of brain to-?
JM: I can always remember phone numbers. When I pick up the phone I can ring up anybody and I never look at the, I know the numbers. [laughs]
BW: And you came top of the class in your last examination.
JM: Yeah.
BW: So was that, I think they called it high school certificate, is that right?
JM: Yeah.
BW: So in your year, you were top of that year.
JM: Had my mother been alive, I’d have gone to university. But dad decided otherwise. He was a self made man, he was a detective sergeant and he reckoned that all his children should be the same.
BW: What would you have liked to study at university had you been able to go, did you have plans?
JM: I don’t know, I never considered, I might be, I’d have got there.
BW: I just wondered if you’d had plans –
JM: No.
BW: Or particular focus on things to study.
JM: I was always very keen on maths, probably would have been something to do with that.
BW: And when war broke out you would have been about fifteen years old then, wouldn’t you?
JM: Yeah, I was in the ATC.
BW: And that only started in 1941 didn’t it.
JM: Yeah, number 7 Squadron, 7F squadron, the Founder squadron. That was in Liverpool.
BW: Did you join in 1941, or did you -?
JM: I can’t remember when I joined.
BW: Okay.
JM: I’d got up to NCO or some sort, I remember that, but which I don’t know.
BW: Did you manage to get any flying?
JM: Oh yes, and also we did gliding. That was great [laughs].
BW: So was it –
JM: RAF Sealand we went for that.
BW: Okay.That’s in North Wales.
JM: Yeah, North Wales, Cheshire, Cheshire.
BW: Was it the flying that attracted you to join the Air Force or was there some other aspect to training?
JM: It was flying, flying.
BW: And did you have intentions to become a pilot at this stage?
JM: I went in as a PNB, you know, pilot, navigator, bomb aimer; and when we got the, we went down to Bridgenorth when we, when I was joined up. We went to London first, you know for the ordinary thing at Lords cricket ground, and then I was moved to Bridgenorth. A lot of us decided then what we were going to do. And I went as PNB, and they said well you can go as a PNB but there’s a hell of a waiting list, and you’ve got to go to America or Canada. And he said, ‘it’s a long course,’ he said, ‘of course you can go as a rear gunner right away,’ I said, ‘No thank you’. [laughs]. And he said, ‘well we’ve got a radio school going, as a wireless operator.’ He had a course. I said I fancied that, so I went on that. If I’d gone on the PNB course to America I would have had to wait about eight months, and then it’s about another eight or ten months flying, so it rewarded me well.
BW: So what year was when it you joined up then?
JM: ‘43.
BW: In June I think it was, so you’d have been eighteen.
JM: Yes.
BW: And that was, at that time the minimum age for joining wasn’t it, the earliest point at which you could join.
JM: I’m not sure.
BW: Were you, you said you left school at fourteen,
JM: Yes.
BW: Were you employed between fourteen and eighteen?
JM: Yes, I worked in an office first, as an office clerk, doing the postage stamp et cetera, and then I went into Roots aircraft, building Halifaxes.
BW: And what were, what was your trade when you were building Halifaxes?
BW: Well I got up to like a leading hand, in charge of, they were all of women then, very few men and I was in charge, I was only about eighteen, seventeen whatever it was, and I was in charge of older women, because at that time they wouldn’t let women be in charge [chuckle].
BW: And what kind of things were you instructing?
JM: I was doing the interior of the Halifax, you know the riveting all round. You’d hold the gun inside while somebody outside -
BW: So you had to be quite, exactly the right position.
JM: Yeah, well you went along in a row, and you went from one to another and if you missed it hard luck! [laughs]
BW: And did you enjoy the work?
JM: Oh yes, it were very good.
BW: Was, sometimes these shifts I understood would have been pretty long and very long working hours, did you ever get a chance for a social life in between at all, or-?
JM: Oh yes, we used to go out and enjoy ourselves, a crowd of us. [chuckle]
BW: So you, you joined up in 1943, and you decided to go to be a wireless operator.
JM: Yeah.
BW: And that was simply really because of the shorter waiting list and training time, wasn’t it?
JM: Yeah.
BW: How did you find the training for that profession?
JM: It was excellent. It was RAF Madley in Hereford.
BW: And how long were you there?
JM: About eleven months, it was a long course.
BW: Can you describe what sort of things you were doing during that time?
JM: Yes. We started off learning the morse code, and eventually you had to get up to a certain speed, I got up to thirty two words per minute sending and twenty eight receiving which was not right at the top, and then we learnt all about the TR1154 55 which was the radio transmitter receiver we used in the Lancs. And we had to strip them, well they stripped them down and we had to put them back together eventually when we’d learned all about the valves, they were valves then of course. [chuckle] We used to take the condenser out, or put a dud one in or a dud valve and you had to come in and sort it out.
BW: Presumably this was not just so that you could maintain the radio let’s say in daylight hours in the aircraft, taken out, potentially you would have had to look at a problem with the set in the aircraft at night as well.
JM: Yeah.
BW: Were you training in fairly realistic conditions, in the sense would they turn the lights off to try and recreate night conditions or anything like that?
JM: No.
BW: Just for practice -
JM: Not that I can remember.
BW: Okay. I believe you began your training from then on Wellingtons, your sort of aircrew training.
JM: Yeah.
BW: Do you recall where that was?
JM: It’s all in me log books this. I can’t remember them all.
BW: Okay.
JM: We had Blenheims as well.
BW: So you learnt on Blenheims too?
JM: But on the radio school we were in Percival Proctors.
BW: Okay.
JM: And Avro Ansons and then the flight things for the radio. We were taught it on the ground first and then we used to go two or three in, in an aircraft and take over.
BW: And what kind of exercises were you doing in the aircraft.
JM: Only air to ground communications, morse code and everything.
BW: How did you find that compared to doing it on the ground, any different?
JM: It were very good, very interesting. [Laughs]
BW: What were your assessments like on that, did you, you said you came pretty well near the top on the sending and receiving in Morse Code, was that the same in the air, did you find that, those easy?
JM: Well yeah about the same. [pause]
BW: I believe you met your pilot who would become your, let’s say your, your regular crew pilot while you were flying Wellingtons.
JM: Yeah.
BW: Was that Sergeant Heady?
JM: Addy.
BW: Addy.
JM: A d d y.
BW: And what was, what was he like?
JM: He was fine.
BW: Did you get on pretty well?
JM: Big, tall chap, he lived in Torquay actually. [pause] He was a sergeant then of course. Then eventually all Bomber Command pilots were commissioned.
BW: And so he, he obviously was potentially one of the last remaining NCO pilots, wasn’t he?
JM: Yes, he must have been because it was March when I got to the squadron, ’45 so only few months before, er after a, the war ended.
BW: And from Wellingtons you went on to Lancasters and I believe you started at 16 68 Heavy Conversion Unit.
JM: Yeah, Bottesford, yeah.
BW: Is that Norfolk?
JM: No, I don’t think it is.
BW: South Lincolnshire?
JM: South Lincolnshire I think, Bottesford.
BW: And how did you meet the rest of your crew? ‘Cause you’d meet at the Conversion Unit or thereabouts before going on to the operational squadron?
JM: Well when we met the skipper there were other people, other navigators and bomb aimers there and we all sort of got together.
BW: Did you, some crews met in a hangar, was that your experience?
JM: I can’t remember that. [Laughs]
BW: You just sort of met them -
JM: It’s seventy years ago [laughs].
BW: Do you recall once you got to Methwold in, was it Methwold?
JM: Yep.
BW: In Norfolk, and 149 Squadron, East India Squadron. Do you recall the rest of the crew?
JM: Oh, I know the crew very well, yes.
BW: Do you know what their names and roles were at all?
JM: Oh yes, I kept in touch with three of them.
BW: Who were they?
JM: I kept in touch with the pilot, we used to send Christmas cards to each other every year till about three years ago, then it stopped, I’ve heard nothing since. The navigator died of pneumonia many years ago. The rear gunner, I kept in touch with him and his wife wrote me to saying he’d died. The navigator died of pneumonia I think it was, oh many years ago. So there’s only the bomb aimer and the mid upper gunner that I didn’t know anything about, and I still don’t.
BW: Do you recall their names at all?
JM: Yeah, Bob Simpson the bomb aimer he was from North, up Northumberland, and Barney the gunner, the top, no, mid upper gunner he was from London. Whether they are still alive I don’t know, but they are the only two I don’t know about.
BW: Do you recall who the rear gunner was at all?
JM: Alf Fawcett.
BW: Alf Fawcett.
JM: F a w c e double t. I kept in touch with him and then it was his wife who rang, or phone, sent a letter to me saying he had died, many years ago.
BW: And when you joined were the rest of them all NCOs, were they all sergeant aircrew like you or were any of them -?
JM: All except for the flight engineer, he was the older one of the lot. He remustered from ground crew. So he was like the father of us all, he kept, kept an eye on us. We had a father figure amongst the crew.
BW: And who, do you recall his name, who he was?
JM: Oh gawd, it’ll come back to me, I can’t think of it all but.
BW: No worries. And you said you, said earlier, that you flew with a reduced crew and there was only two gunners.
JM: We only ever had two gunners – a mid upper and a rear gunner.
BW: Okay.
JM: We never had a front gunner, the bomb aimer used to do that. And if we had a mid under, I used to do the mid-under. [pause]
BW: What was, what were the facilities like on the base at Methwold? Do you recall? Did you all share the same accommodation or were you in the sergeants mess, or -?
JM: We had a sergeants mess, but then, it was, they had six wings, and every wing had a dance. So six nights a week we were dancing. [Laughter] and we used to bring in the civvies from Hereford, on the bus, which the WAAFs hated.
BW: So there was, there was quite a good social life through there.
JM: Oh yes. Brilliant social life. And at Methwold, they didn’t have a cinema in Methwold and we had one on the camp so we used to bring the girls in to watch any films and things. It was a very sleepy little village.
BW: Was it quite close by?
JM: Yeah, couple, two or three mile, that’s all.
BW: So you could walk in to town.
JM: Oh well, you wouldn’t walk it, but you could get there handy, you know.
BW: Okay. Did you ever socialise off, off base as well, did you go into Methwold for drinks or anything like that, or did you just stay there?
JM: Yes, they were very good actually, because. My wife has been dead over twenty years now, but when she was alive we decided we’d have a, we had a caravan, I used to tow a caravan, and we stayed in Norfolk, so we went to Methwold, and as we drove into Methwold, right opposite at the junction we came to, was a café, and I said to my wife, I said: ‘That used to be a pub.’ She said, ‘It’s a café,’ so I said anyway let’s go and have a cup of tea. So we went and had a cup of tea, and I said to the lady, this looks very, very like a pub we used to drink in, and she said come with me and she took me through a little side door, and in the back was the bar we used to drink in.
BW: Did it bring back a lot of memories?
JM: Oh yes.
BW: Did you share many of those memories with your wife at the time?
JM: Oh yes, they were very good, some of them [chuckle].
BW: So just thinking now in terms of your sort of operational duties. Can you describe a typical operation, how you prepared for it?
JM: Well the first thing we did, we used to go down to the wireless operator briefing, they’d give us the call signs and everything else we needed to know, and emergency come-backs and things, and then we all used to go to the main briefing and then we found out where we were going.
BW: And how long would the main briefing sort of take?
JM: It would be half an hour, to an hour you know, on the Berlin one, explaining everything you know. It was quite a long flight.
BW: Hmm. Berlin was a notoriously difficult target, how did you feel –
JM: That was our last one.
BW: Yeah. How did you feel when it came up on your list again?
JM: Um, I don’t know, at twenty years of age you’re not frightened, [chuckle] you should be, and I think half the time you felt it was an adventure, off we go again.
BW: So once the briefing had finished, what kinds of things would happen then? What would you be doing in order to join the aircraft?
JM: You’d get all your equipment together, the order they do things and then you needed helmets and then out to the aircraft.
BW: And would you be bused out there?
JM: Oh yeah, well either bused or in a open, or a closed in, what do you call, lorry.
BW: Yeah. A truck with a canvas back sort of thing.
JM: Yeah, yeah.
BW: And did you or any of the crew have any superstitions or particular rituals for getting on board? I mean some crews did, but it was particular to them. Did you have any?
JM: Nothing I can think of, the rear gunner used to wave to a WAAF friend he used have, as we drove down, taxied round the perimeter, she’d you know come out and wave to him and that was about it.
BW: So you would all get on the aircraft then, ready to start the operation.
JM: Yeah.
BW: What kind of checks or preparations would you make at that point?
JM: Well we’d have to set the transmitter receiver up for the frequencies we were going to use, because every hour we got a group message, any agency could come in between, but every hour they got a group message, and you had to set up for that and everything. If you went in a different aircraft, because you never always flew in the same one, somebody else would have a different call sign so you’d have to put your own in.
BW: And did it take long at all to, to get ready, were you fairly quick and efficient at doing it?
JM: Yes as soon as possible so as you could sit down. [Chuckle]
BW: And as you sort of taxied out would the pilot be calling the crew for checks or anything like that, would he - ?
JM: He would just make sure we were all in position and then he’d took over with the control tower.
BW: So right at the, I suppose, start of a, an operation then, [cough] how did it feel if you think back to your first operation, and you having done all that training in the lead up to it, do you recall how it felt to go on your first op, over Germany?
JM: I think they all felt the same, we went either to the Ruhr or Berlin, but they all felt the same. At twenty years of age you weren’t bothered.
BW: There were no butterflies in the stomach or anything like that?
JM: Well, I suppose there must have been, but it wasn’t really in fear, I always knew I was coming back. ‘Cause I always made arrangements where I was going the next night. Mind, it didn’t always work out that way.
BW: And being so close to the end of the war because this was around March.
JM: Yes, March ’45. Yeah.
BW: 1945. Did you feel at any point prior to that an eagerness to get on to operations before the war ended, or -?
JM: Oh yes, we wanted to go, I mean we did three or four, and then we had a mess up and we were sent to Feltwell on the bombing course.
BW: And was there any reason given for that, being sent on the course?
JM: Well yes, [chuckle] a difference between the pilot and the navigator, and where to bomb.
BW: And do you think that was a mis-identified target or -?
JM: Yeah.
BW: Okay.
JM: When we came back, because there was a camera on board of course. And they photographed where we bombed and we were sent from Methwold to Feltwell which only a couple of mile away, and we did a fortnight bombing practice.
BW: Were those the only repercussions from the incident?
JM: Yeah. That’s all that I knew. I don’t know what happened to the pilot, have no idea. But they still stayed with us.
BW: So they certainly weren’t separated or anything like that.
JM: No.
BW: Were there any particular incidents from other raids that you went on? You flew in total four operational sorties, two during the day and two at night. Were there any particular incidents that stood out from those?
JM: Only one, when we were attacked by a night fighter. That was fun, well it wasn’t fun then but, but the mid upper started on him and the rear gunner and then I had a mid under and I had a go but I don’t think we hit him. But it must have been about, well a month later, we got a DFM sent to the squadron, only one. I don’t know who got it, I’ve no idea, it shouldn’t have been shared between the crew. somebody got it I don’t know who, could have been anyone.
BW: So potentially that might, might have been over, over Berlin, on your last sortie.
JM: It could well have been.
BW: Were there any other, there were no other, no other incidents, you only mentioned the one.
JM: No, I saw a few Halifaxes and Lancs hit and go down, but we were never hit or anything, so, just that one, the night fighter came down, over, he never hit us, he just went just past us and went underneath and that was it.
BW: And you mention your role was dual role as a mid-under gunner as well. Can you describe what that entailed?
JM: Well, it was very, very, very few aircraft had a mid-under turret. Most of the time they didn’t. They was just all flat prone. But if we were on an aircraft that had a mid-under I used to use it, that’s all. It was very seld,I think I only used it once, I think.
BW: And what sort of –
JM: Because most of them didn’t have them.
BW: What sort of gun were you firing?
JM: The 303, four 303s or two, I can’t remember now. They were 303s I know.
BW: And how were you positioned in the aircraft, clearly you’d be sat on the floor.
JM: Yes.
BW: But were you just, was there any kind of seating for you to be in as there was for other gunners?
JM: No, not really. You sort of bent down sort of thing, you know, on the loo seat we had. But then only happened once so, all the other aircraft didn’t have mid-unders.
BW: And were you given any gunnery training?
JM: Oh I did some gunnery training, yes,
BW: And was yours –
JM: ‘Cause I went in as a WOP/AG first, then half way through they changed it to the S brevet for Signals, so WOP/AG finished and the Signallers took over.
BW: And were you, was yours the only aircraft on the squadron with the mid-under gunner or were there any, any others?
JM: We didn’t have a mid-under gunner.
BW: Or any of them –
JM: It was the wireless op that did it. [laughs]
BW: Yeah, but were, were there any other aircraft on the squadron, on your squadron, that had that facility?
JM: Some of them, I never went through them all, but some I flew had, I think there was two had it, all the rest didn’t. Cause there were very, very few of them had them.
BW: Interesting this.
JM: Because they were old ones. Because they were the early mark one Lancs that had the mid under.
BW: Okay. And were you, from your position in the aircraft, you are fairly enclosed, were you able at any stage able to see the targets you were flying over at all?
JM: I had a window alongside me.
BW: So you had a reasonable view.
JM: I had a wonderful view, [laughter]. It was only when, apart from the pilot and the bomb aimer in the front, this was the only window, it was smashing and I could look out and see what was happening.
BW: Do you recall what it was like flying over the targets during the day as opposed to during the night, was it any significant difference for you?
JM: You were more vulnerable during the day, you could be seen easier of course, but we never had any problems at all, apart from that once. Which was like a trip going out and coming back, dropping your bombs and coming back. We were very lucky.
BW: Fairly straight forward then, wasn’t it?
JM: Yeah. Fifty percent luck.
BW: And I believe you were also involved in, or your flights after the Berlin raid and after the surrender, involved POW repatriation.
JM: Yes.
BW: You had one around May.
JM: Yeah, brought Italian prisoners, our prisoners from Italy, brought them back and also dropped food supplies to the people in Holland, got a photograph there of it.
BW: Can you describe those kind of sorties? They are quite different.
JM: It was wonderful actually, because we were flying over, we had to fly pretty low to drop them, and there were thousands of people round the, wherever we were dropping them, and we were frightened of hitting them, so that’s the point, they were so, because the minute the stuff dropped they were on them, because they were short of food.
BW: And when you say it’s very low level, would you say it’s below two hundred and fifty feet, something like that?
JM: Oh no, I wouldn’t think so.
BW: Slightly above.
JM: Probably about a thousand feet.
BW: Thousand. Okay.
JM: But, we couldn’t be too high or when they dropped you didn’t want to damage anything. You didn’t drop from a big height. We’d have messed some.
BW: Did they, do you recall how they delivered the food packages? Was it a case of just opening the bomb bay doors or did they go out the side, the sort of the crew door or anything like that?
JM: We used to throw them out the doors mainly ‘cause you couldn’t put them in the bomb bay really.
BW: What sort of size packages are we talking about do you think?
JM: Oh, I can’t remember, but they ended up on a short parachute down there, but the minute they landed they were on.
BW: So I guess they were kind of um, boxes that you could lift and -.
JM: I think there’s a photograph there isn’t there, that one.
BW: Yes, so these show, this photograph happens to show a Lancaster with its bomb bay doors open.
JM: There must have been some went down from there.
BW: And that, looking at that, the people on the ground obviously seem pretty happy to see you. Was that something, does that photograph look pretty familiar to you, was that the kind of thing you would see?
JM: Yeah, they were all waiting, we had to be very careful we miss them.
BW: Did you fly many of those, or was it just the one?
JM: Must have been a couple that’s all. We also took the top brass over the bombing areas after the war. They wanted to see what damage had been done to Berlin and places like that, I forget the name now, there was a special name for it. But top brass used to come and fly with us, so that they could see what had happened and went back again.
BW: Did you have to give up your seat for any of them so they could have a look out the window?
JM: No, I had to stay there in case there was a call. [Laughs]
BW: And just thinking about the POW flights, what can you recall of those?
JM: Oh, that was unbelievable, they were really, down and out and we took cigarettes and chocolate with us and gave it them, they were pleased as anything, you know. More Brits we brought back, from Italy.
BW: How many do you think you, you managed to fit in the aircraft?
JM: I can’t remember that.
BW: Because it was quite tight those.
JM: But they, they made room for them, you know. But they were very, very, very [emphasis] grateful for being brought back.
BW: And were they all RAF POWs? The Army?
JM: No, no, the Army, Navy, not Navy, Army and RAF mainly.
BW: And did they look like they’d had a rough time at all or were they - ?
JM: They didn’t look very happy, well they did happy when we got there.
BW: You flew both Wellingtons and Lancasters. Did you have a preference having flown either, was there any – ?
JM: Oh, the Lancaster.
BW: Particular characteristics?
JM: The Lancaster definitely, much better. Also flew in a mosquito.
BW: Have you: what was that like?
JM: Well, it was queer how it happened. I was a Warrant Officer then, I believe, or a flight sergeant, one of them, and I was in the office and this bloke came, was a pilot, he came in and he said, ‘Are you busy?’ I said, ‘Not too busy why?’ He said ‘I’m going up for a flight’ he said, ‘I need someone with me.’ Okay, fair enough. Told them, say where I was going, I went out there was a Mosquito, [laugh] terrific.
BW: Do you recall where you went?
JM: No, we were just flying round generally but, terrific aircraft.
BW: It wasn’t at low level was it, was it er - ?
JM: Just bits and pieces.
BW: Really.
JM: Oh no, the only low level was in the air display down in London, that was er, murder. We all went down for Battle of Britain day and the Lancs were going to do a low level fly past and the pilot was Squadron Leader, I’ve forgotten his surname now, but he said, I was going with him, only two of us, I had to act as flight engineer as well. He said okay. We got there and it was pouring rain so we all went to the pub, then the sun came out and they decided to go ahead with the operation. Did a four engine fly over, then a three engine, then a two engine. He said, ‘do you fancy a single?’ I said ‘you can go to hell!’ [Laugh] And then on the way back he said, ‘I’m knackered’ he said, ‘you can fly it back,’ so I flew it back, only straight and level obviously, keep the height and that’s all. And then woke him up when we got near the drome.
BW: You had no issues flying it, or taking, taking control or anything?
JM: Hmm?
BW: You had no issues taking control or anything it was very easy to fly?
JM: Well we used to take turns apiece the crew, pilot used to come out and, not on ops obviously, but low, on cross country flying we used to take, he’d to say come and have a go I’m having a rest and we’d all take turns. [Laughs]
BW: How did it feel to fly?
JM: It was fine.
BW: That’s quite something, to be just given a go on a Lancaster.
JM: Mind you, don’t forget there was a flight engineer sitting alongside you and he’s a pilot as well.
BW: True. Were there any other incidents, or sorties that were particularly memorable for you?
JM: No, I don’t think so, only the low level one we did, over East Anglia, about five of us in formation. Oh god, cows and sheep running riot.
BW: So there were five –
JM: They had permission to do that of course.
BW: So there were five Lancasters, in -
JM: Formation.
BW: Were you fairly close formation?
JM: No, not too close.
BW: So fairly loose formation, and presumably shaped like an arrowhead, one lead and two either side.
JM: Yes, from what I can remember. Oh, it was great.
BW: What sort of height were you for that?
JM: I can’t remember that, it was quite low.
BW: And you were over East Anglia.
JM: Yes.
BW: At that point. Did you go over the beach?
JM: Over the sea as well.
BW: Excellent. And who was your CO? You mentioned, you mentioned him before, when you went down to display, who was your CO on that?
JM: Group Captain, I can’t remember his name now, but he was a smashing bloke. And when we went out on day trips and things, instead of him coming in the car he come in the truck with us. He was a real down to earth bloke, you know, very nice.
BW: There was a Wing Commander Cholton in charge of the squadron at the time. I don’t suppose he, his name rings any bells does it?
JM: No.
BW: No. Okay. So after the war ended and you’ve had these, er additional sort of sorties, what sort of things happened to you after that?
JM: Well I was asked to stay on, sign on and stay on. And I had, had three months of church parades, drills, no flying, and I got bored to tears and said oh gawd this isn’t for me so I came out. But I was offered a commission if I stayed on, but I didn’t, perhaps it was a mistake, I don’t know, I’d have got a lovely pension by now. [laughs]
BW: So at that stage you were a Warrant Officer.
JM: Yes.
BW: And sort of, potentially you’d been asked to consider going up to officer but declined it, and so this would be, your, your service in the RAF ended in –
JM: ’47.
BW: February 1947.
JM: It would be the end of ’46.
BW: And you asked –
JM: I wasn’t the only one, I think they asked quite a few to stay on, but I was one of them. After having, as I said, a few months of no flying, ‘cause we hardly ever went up after the war finished, apart from these special ones, and there was that and loads of church parades every Sunday, and parades during the week, no, I thought I couldn’t stick four more of this. But afterwards I thought maybe I should have done.
BW: And were you still based at Methwold during that time?
JM: No, I was up at Kings Lynn. Marham. RAF Marham.
BW: And so eventually in ’47 you asked to be demobbed, and what happened to you then, what, what course did your life take after that?
JM: Well, I was sent to Burtonwood, that’s where we got demobbed, and I got me suit [chuckle] and then I went home.
BW: So Burtonwood’s not too far from Liverpool, really.
JM: No.
BW: Near Warrington.
JM: Yeah, Warrington. That’s where we got demobbed, at Burtonwood.
BW: And did you go back to the family home in Aigburch?
JM: Oh no, my father had remarried then and moved to Hunts Cross, which was a [posh voice] superior area of Liverpool, so they say.
BW: [Cough] And was he still in the police force at that time?
JM: Yep.
BW: So presumably he had been promoted from -
JM: He’d made it to Detective Sergeant, yeah. And then he remarried of course, and we won’t go into further details, and I left home. [chuckle] He [emphasis] was all right.
BW: And where, okay, So, um –
JM: I went into digs then.
BW: And were you still in the Liverpool area, on your own?
JM: Oh yes.
BW: And what did you do for employment after that, after coming out the RAF?
JM: My uncle was in the aircraft industry and I went into Roots and they were making Lancasters, Halifaxes then. No, start again, [mutter] can’t remember, oh, um, what the heck did I do then? [Pause] I went to the British School of Motoring, as a driving instructor.
BW: And how long were you there?
JM: About fourteen months, because someone said to us there was a firm opening up at Speke, where they made Ford cars and they wanted delivery drivers. So, I had a pupil, I said ‘you’re going for a nice long ride today, we’re going out to Speke!’ And we went out to Speke, I went to see the manager and he signed me up right away, well, being an instructor. And a couple of weeks later I was delivering new cars and Fords, all over the country. Single cars. Then eventually I drove the car transporters.
BW: How long did that last?
JM: Oh gawd, twenty odd years, I was there a long time. I retired from there actually.
BW: And what –
JM: I’ve been retired since 1997.
BW: And what sort of things have occupied your time since? I mean obviously you spent time with your wife, as you say, before she died two years ago, sadly.
JM: We had, well we had a series of caravans in the Lake District. We loved the Lake District and still do, and we had a caravan near Keswick, so we used to spend nearly every weekend up at Keswick. Used to go for long walks and it was great.
BW: Very nice part of the world.
JM: Oh, I love Keswick.
BW: And, just thinking about the sort of commemoration and recognition given to Bomber Command and the veterans since, have you been to the Bomber Command Centre in Lincoln? Alright. Okay, but you’ve been to East Kirkby and to Coningsby and so on.
JM: I went to Madley once, that’s all. I’ve been to Lincoln.
BW: And did you go to the unveiling of the memorial in Green Park?
JM: No, no, I went to the Cathedral, because they’ve got all the information in the Cathedral there.
BW: And what are your thoughts about the recognition that’s been given to bomber crew since?
JM: I think it’s about time, I mean we did lose fifty percent.
BW: Yeah, the 125,000 crew that’s –
JM: Yes, that’s a lot of crew.
BW: And lost 55,000 plus.
JM: Yeah.
BW: And were there any additional or other memorable incidents that you can recall from your service at all?
JM: No, not really.
BW: Do you think we’ve covered everything?
JM: Apart from one when I could have died, [chuckle] that was our own fault. We went out to a night do, in Hereford, a dance, and the last bus was eleven something and it was about twenty to twelve, and the, what do you call it? the SPs came up to me, said, Warrant he said, ‘I am going to give you a chance, there’s twenty minutes to go till midnight, if you are still here at midnight we’re booking you.’ So, we stayed didn’t we, and we got booked. But anyway we came out, there were no buses, and it was about eight mile back to the camp, about one o’clock in the morning and we were all walking along, horrible snowing and all, it was a horrible night, and lucky a, one of the transports came along, with food things, we got a lift back in that. God knows how we’d have got back otherwise. [Laugh] Course we got seven days for that, didn’t we.
BW: Was that the only time you spent in –
JM: CB, yes. [Laugh]
BW: And when you married, what, what happened? You had, obviously a son, Dave and -
JM: Got another son in America, Andrew, and a daughter in the Wirral. My son’s coming over from America in November.
BW: So you’ve had a pretty good post war life really, haven’t you?
JM: I’ve a very enjoyable life.
BW: Yeah. You enjoyed your RAF service and you’ve enjoyed your time since.
JM: Yes.
BW: Good. Well, that’s all the questions I have for you, James, so -
JM: Good!
BW: Thank you very much for your time and the information you’ve given to the IBCC.
JM: If you want any other stuff, there’s photographs there maybe, if you want them, and the, just make sure they’re working.
BW: So would you –
JM: Short burst on each, front and rear, and you know, that was it, as I say it was only once I think, only once or twice at the most, I ever had [emphasis] a mid under, most of the time I didn’t. There were very few Lancs had them.
BW: And you, you’d never fired your guns in anger had you?
JM: Only once. That was once.
BW: Just the, when you saw that night fighter.
JM: Yeah. Whether we hit it or not I’ve no idea. But we got a DFM to the squadron afterwards. I don’t know who got it. They said we were going to draw lots to get it, never heard any more about it.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with James Christian Mortensen
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Brian Wright
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-09-17
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AMortensenJC180917, PMortensenJC1803
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:49:17 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Herefordshire
England--Leicestershire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Norfolk
Germany
Germany--Berlin
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
1944
1945
1946
1947
Description
An account of the resource
Born on 27 December 1924 in Aigburth Liverpool, James was 15 when war broke out in Europe. He intended to join as a pilot, navigator, bomber aimer in 1943 but due to shorter waiting list and training time he trained to become a wireless operator at RAF Madley. James mentions that he trained in older medium bomber such as Blenheims and Wellingtons, and mentions how he met his regular pilot, Sgt Aedy. He qualified for heavy bombers at RAF Bottesford, on Lancasters, before being assigned to 149 Squadron 'West Indies' at RAF Methwold.
James says that a separate briefing was held for wireless operators to inform them of callsigns and code words to be used before the main briefing. James was also the mid-under gun operator when the aircraft required one. James’ crew only flew four operations over Berlin being near the end of the war; he mentions a mis-identified target incident and an attack by a night fighter. James’ account also details being involved in the Operation Dodge and Operation Manna, as well as recalling a time that he was invited to fly in a Mosquito which he described as ‘a terrific aircraft’. James continue to serve until 1947 until he de-mobilised due to his ‘dislike of a lack of flying’. James retired from active service as a warrant officer. He would work as a delivery driver until retiring in 1997. James recalls that he kept in contact with three members of his crew until 2015.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Alex Joy
Anne-Marie Watson
Steph Jackson
149 Squadron
aircrew
Blenheim
bombing
Distinguished Flying Medal
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
military ethos
Morse-keyed wireless telegraphy
Mosquito
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
RAF Bottesford
RAF Feltwell
RAF Madley
RAF Methwold
training
Wellington
wireless operator
wireless operator / air gunner
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1190/11763/AWebsterJK161004.2.mp3
f9224f5c0c2f75e44c5edc90e00ebe87
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
Webster, Jack
Jack K Webster
J K Webster
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Jack Webster (Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a wireless operator with 514 and 138 Squadrons.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-10-04
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
Webster, JK
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
DK: Right. It’s David Kavanagh on the, I think it’s the 4th of October 2016, interviewing Jack Webster at his home. If I just put that there we’ll try and ignore it. If I keep looking down I’m just making sure it’s still going.
JW: That’s right.
DK: I’m not being rude. That’s looks ok. Ok. Could I just sort of ask first of all what you were doing immediately before the war?
JW: I was working in the Public Analyst’s Office.
DK: Right.
JW: Clerical more than anything. And it was a reserved, or it got known as a Reserved Occupation and did I want to join up or not and of course, I said no. Anyway, suddenly, when I was eighteen I suddenly changed my mind.
DK: So, what year would that have been? You were eighteen?
JW: ’25. ’42.
DK: 1942.
JW: December ’42.
DK: So, was it the immediate choice to join the Air Force then? Or —
JW: Oh yes. Yeah. I suddenly decided. The idea of flying suddenly appealed to me.
DK: Right. So, what, what did you, where did you start your training then at with the RAF?
JW: Well, I went to a selection board first.
DK: Right.
JW: At Cardington, and they offered me wireless operator air gunner. They said they’d got too many pilots. And, and they sent me to sort of deferred. Sent me back home and told me to hang on. And then in June ’43 I finally joined up.
DK: So that was a letter through the post was it that you got?
JW: Yes.
DK: From the joining office.
JW: And went to Viceroy Court, in St John’s Wood. Was there about three weeks I suppose and that was the start of the career so to speak. But I mean from there I went to ITW, Initial Training Wing at Bridlington and I can’t remember how long we were there but —
DK: What would you have been doing at the ITW?
JW: It was drill mostly. Drill and admin lessons. And then from there went on to Number 4 Radio School at RAF Madley in Herefordshire where it was more or less all day long Morse more than anything because they suddenly had done away with the air gunnery part because the Lancaster didn’t need the, they had the separate gunners so they just had a straight signaller or wireless op.
DK: Yeah.
JW: And any road I don’t know how long I was at the Radio School but I finally managed to pass out at eighteen words per minute Morse.
DK: Did you enjoy Morse code? Was it something you could do easily?
JW: I wouldn’t say I enjoyed it or it wasn’t easy. We got fed up with it in the end. I mean, I think some of them almost went crazy with it. I mean all day long the instructor would set up a creed machine and he’d sit back and read his paper while we sort of sent messages and things to each other. But anyway, I finally passed out there and got the brevet S and then I was sent to Dumfries Advanced Radio School, Advanced Flying Unit and we, that was on Ansons. They were just the pilot, navigator and the bomb, and the wireless op.
DK: Was that, would that have been the first time you had flown then?
JW: Oh no. I did flew, we flew at Radio School.
DK: Right. Ok.
JW: In, first of all in the old Dominie and I was sick the first time. And then after that we went on to Proctors. They were just the pilot and the wireless op and we had the pilots who were on, had sort of completed their tour. They were on rest period really but they were just flying I suppose and they were fed up with flying anyway. And of course, we had the trailing aerial which used to allow, there was a case of one of them tried to shoot up a plane in the led weights that went through the windows of the trains. They had a strict instruction. No shooting up the planes. But anyway, going back to, I went to Dumfries and, on Ansons and it was the wireless ops job there to reel the undercarriage up which —
DK: Oh right.
JW: By hand which was quite a job. And we flew up and down sort of the Irish Sea, over the Isle of Man and all this sort of thing. More or less more for the navigator than the wireless op because the wireless op was the same as what we were doing all the time really.
DK: Yeah.
JW: And, and then from the, we went to OTU at Chipping Warden.
DK: Can you remember which OTU it was? The number?
JW: I can’t. I don’t know if I’ve got it down in here.
DK: I can check later.
JW: I can’t think where I would have it. Oh, yeah. I have it.
[pause]
DK: That’s ok.
JW: Number 12 OTU.
DK: Number 12 OTU. Ok.
JW: At Chipping Warden. That’s it. And then from there —
DK: What type of aircraft were at the OTUs?
JW: Wellingtons. And that’s where we crewed up and I finished up with a, at the time all the rest of them were all Canadians.
DK: Right.
JW: Until we got to Heavy Conversion Unit when we picked up the pilot engineer.
DK: So how was the crewing done at the OTU? How did you meet your pilot?
JW: We just sort of walked around and I think somebody came up to me and said, ‘Have you got a crew?’ I said, ‘No.’ That was the pilot and he said, ‘Well, you know do, do you fancy joining me?’ So, I mean one was as good as another as far as I was concerned. That turned out he’d already had the two gunners, the navigator and bomb aimer. All Canadian. So, he said, ‘If you don’t mind Canadians.’ So, no. I didn’t. That didn’t worry me.
DK: Can you remember his name? Your pilot’s name.
JW: Yeah. Flight Lieutenant Elwood. Keith Elwood.
DK: And he was Canadian.
JW: Canadian. Yeah.
DK: So what did you think of the Canadians then? As you met them there.
JW: Oh, I got on alright with them there. Yeah. We always went around as a crew. Yeah. Yeah. We picked up the engineer at Heavy Conversion Unit.
DK: Right. Can you remember where the Heavy Conversion Unit was?
JW: 1668 at Bottesford. Between Grantham and Nottingham. Yeah. And —
DK: He was English, was he? The flight engineer.
JW: Yeah. He was English.
DK: So you were the two English and the rest —
JW: Two English.
DK: Were Canadian.
JW: Five were Canadians. Yeah. And, and then, and then from there we were posted to Feltwell. Yeah. RAF Feltwell which was the 514 Squadron at Cambridge.
DK: 514.
JW: And we were, we were only there for one operation and then we got posted to Tuddenham with 138 Squadron.
DK: So where, where was your first operation to with 514?
JW: That was to a synthetic oil works in the Ruhr at a place, I don’t know how you pronounce Hüls and I always remember that some of the plane, it was bombed up and had a four thousand pound cookie and fifteen five hundred pounders and it was a disappointment really. It was a GH bombing through cloud and where the pilot sort of, you fly in a rough formation and the pilot had the equipment or that, the leader had the equipment to determine when to drop that and when he opened his bomb doors you all opened yours. When he dropped his bombs you dropped yours. It was all very well until we nearly over the target then all the planes suddenly made contrails and it was like flying through cloud and after a touch you couldn’t see a thing. The navigator, I said, ‘I think they must have dropped them by now.’ So the pilot went up above the contrails and you could see and they were there. They’d turned off. So we circled around and the navigator, he said, ‘Well, we’re roughly over the target.’ So he just let them all go.
DK: So you never bombed with a GH leader then.
JW: No.
DK: You just —
JW: No. It was —
DK: And this was in daylight presumably.
JW: This was in daylight.
DK: Yeah.
JW: How I don’t know what. When we got back obviously they got interrogated. They didn’t interrogate the wireless op because there’s nothing we could see anyway, really. But what happened with them I don’t know what they, whether they said anything. Whether that was why we suddenly got posted I don’t know [laughs] but 138 Squadron had then converted from special duties. They were at Tempsford. They’d converted the special duties on to heavy bombing.
DK: So just going back a bit presumably it was at the Heavy Conversion Unit that you saw, first flew on the Lancaster was it?
JW: That was when we first flew it. Yes.
DK: So, what were your feelings about flying on that compared to the Wellington and —
JW: Well, that was, that was quite an upgrading so to speak. I mean that was a heavy bomber compared to the Wellington. And you know, everything. It seemed more spacious and yeah —
DK: So, then you’ve got on to 138 Squadron. That’s Lancasters again presumably.
JW: That was Lancasters again. Yes.
DK: And where were they based? 138.
JW: At Tuddenham. Just, we were settled at Mildenhall. In fact, I think we did have one pilot that came back with a bomb load and landed at Mildenhall by mistake instead of Tuddenham. In the night time I suppose that was easy because the two dromes, the drem lighting you know it sort of entwined one another.
DK: So when you were flying out on an operation then what, what’s your role as the wireless operator? What? What do you do when you’re —
JW: Well, the main thing is you just listen. The main thing was you had to listen in every half an hour to base and if they hadn’t got any message they would transmit a number and you had to record that number to prove that you’d heard the —
DK: Transmission.
JW: The transmission. But apart from that it was possibly the navigator might need a loop aerial bearing. Or the Group might transmit a wind, a different wind speed and if there was any recall or cancellation they would, that would come through them.
DK: So, once you got a message you would immediately tell both the pilot and navigator.
JW: If there was, yes.
DK: Yeah.
JW: Yeah. It, it was very rare to get a message. Obviously, there was no verbal messages. They were —
DK: What about your Morse Code training? Did that come in useful when you were once on operations?
JW: I didn’t really use it a lot. It’s funny that all these things you learn, you are taught, they don’t come in to use. I mean, I suppose had we got in to trouble Morse would have been handy then.
DK: What would have been your role as wireless operator then if the aircraft was in trouble?
JW: Well, to send any emergency position that we were at.
DK: Right.
JW: Or if we were coming down in the sea. But other than that there was not much you had to do.
DK: So how many operations did you fly?
JW: I only did five.
DK: Five. So, one with 514 and three with —
JW: Four with —
DK: Four with. So, five altogether.
JW: Yeah.
DK: Yeah.
JW: But the, I suppose the, the one I remember most is a daylight on Bremen. The allies were waiting. We were going to go in to Bremen and we were supposed to go and soften them up and they routed us over Wilhelmshaven. And the Met man said before, and when we took off, before we took off he said, ‘There will be ten tenths cloud so you should be alright.’ Of course, when we got over there it was clear. It was. And we were then sort of getting near the target and the rear gunner suddenly, the light came on on the intercom and the rear gunner came on. He said, ‘Oh skipper, the kite behind has been hit.’ So, I got a bit, in the astrodome to have a look just in time to see two of them baling out. I thought well this is, this is getting too close. And we’d hardly got clear of them and suddenly we got hit. Not a, it was just a thump more than anything and the pilot called up he said, ‘Everybody alright?’ Everyone was alright. He said, ‘Can anybody see anything?’ And nobody could see anything. No damage and it wasn’t until we landed that we saw the, there was a hole in the fuselage just near the elsan and the trimmer tab on the rear elevator had been got. It was gone. Of course, he knew there was something wrong because it didn’t fly quite right and there were holes under the, in the wings. Under the wings. But apart from that just after that the master bomber cancelled the operation anyway because the target was obscured with smoke and cloud so —
DK: So you never bombed then.
JW: We bombed.
DK: Oh, you had.
JW: We had bombed.
DK: Oh right. Right.
JW: Yeah. But they stopped it after. I got a, I got a report on the one there somewhere [pause – pages turning] Yeah. The raid [pause] Yeah, the raid was hampered by cloud and by smoke and dust from bombing as the raid progressed. The master bomber ordered the raid to stop after a hundred and ninety five Lancasters had bombed. The whole of numbers 1 and 4 Groups returned home without attacking. So, I found out. I got the result off the internet. That was the, oh we went to Kiel. That’s when we capsized the Admiral Scheer and the Admiral Hipper and the Emden were badly damaged.
DK: Did you manage to see the battleships down there? Or —
JW: No. It was dark. It was night.
DK: It was dark.
JW: Night. There was five hundred and ninety one Lancasters and eight Mosquitoes. There was only three Lancasters lost. And at Bremen there were six hundred and fifty one Lancasters, a hundred Halifaxes, seven hundred and sixty seven aircraft altogether.
DK: Have you got the dates of those? Can I —
JW: Yeah.
DK: So, it’s the 9th 10th of April 1945 was Kiel. And then 14th 15th of April Cuxhaven.
JW: No. That was —
DK: Oh, Potsdam. Sorry.
JW: Potsdam. Yeah.
DK: So, 14th 15th of April 1945 Potsdam.
JW: Yeah.
DK: And then 22nd April 1945 Bremen where your aircraft was damaged.
JW: Yeah.
DK: Do you remember the Potsdam raid at all?
JW: That was night time. That was very [pause] We expected it to be a lot worse than it was. But —
DK: Just outside Berlin isn’t it? Potsdam.
JW: That’s a, that’s the suburb of Berlin.
DK: Yeah. Yeah.
JW: That said that was, that was the first time Bomber Command four engine aircraft had entered the Berlin defence since March 1944. But there was only one Lancaster shot got down by a night fighter.
DK: Were you ever attacked by any —
JW: No.
DK: Aircraft.
JW: No.
DK: So just that one incident of damage. Yeah.
JW: One damage. That was the only time we, yeah.
DK: So, moving on then. Presumably you were then involved in Operation Manna.
JW: Manna. Yes.
DK: And how many operations?
JW: I only did, we only did one Manna drop because it was a job to get on. Everybody wanted to do it and some of them were lucky. Some did quite a few. But we only got the one.
DK: Can you remember whereabouts in the Netherlands you dropped the food?
JW: The Hague.
DK: It was at the Hague.
JW: At the Hague. But I think it was probably the race track. They had a big cross out on the ground. And I can always remember as we got there I sort of looked out and you could see a German soldier standing there with a rifle and people were waving sheets and things. The words of my navigator, ‘Gosh,’ he said, ‘Look at those poor bastards.’ Yeah.
DK: So how did that make you feel dropping the food to the —
JW: Oh, that was, that was good. And I mean after that we, I only did the one but in 1983 there was, in the little booklet we used to get every sort of I can’t think what it was called now. I’ve got loads of them. Oh, “Intercom.” That’s right.
DK: Right.
JW: That’s, we used to get that every so often and there was a piece in there about anybody who took part in Operation Manna, if they were interested in having a reunion to contact this chap. So, I thought, I said to my wife, ‘Oh I don’t know. I’m not going to bother.’ ‘Go on. She said, ‘You don’t, you never know.’ So anyway, I contacted him and we had a smashing time in Holland for the weekend. I got a huge piece. I know I typed it all out and on the way back we decided we would meet the following year at Droitwich and we had quite a good weekend there. And then we got invited back to Holland by the Dutch people and we went back there in ’85. Sorry, in ’83. ’85. ’89 and 2000 and gosh they wouldn’t let you pay for anything.
DK: They, they were pleased to see you were they?
JW: Oh, they were. And the first time when we went there we went in to the sort of hotel they’d booked for us and the room was full of sort of chocolates and sweets, drinks and a little thing you know, ‘Thank you for what you did.’ I mean we got more thanks from the Dutch people than we ever did from Bomber Command. It was, yeah and they had one, they actually had a reunion last year but unfortunately I wasn’t in, couldn’t go anyway. But I don’t think there were many of them left.
DK: So, were, were you involved in Exodus as well then?
JW: Yes.
DK: The picking up of the POWs.
JW: The POWs. Yeah.
DK: So, what, can you remember where you landed to pick them up?
JW: Yes. At Juvencourt. There was, we did six I think. Five or six. And brought them back twenty four at a time. And it was there that one of them from 514 Squadron crashed on take-off and they, they lost the whole lot.
DK: Oh dear.
JW: They never did know what happened. They wondered whether the prisoners moved about and upset the balance of the aircraft. They don’t know.
DK: Did you actually see the aircraft crash?
JW: No. No.
DK: Ok. Just —
JW: No.
DK: So, what was the, what was the prisoner’s reaction when they saw you and they were, you were flying them home?
JW: Oh, they were quite pleased to see, I mean it’s funny we, we had, we had to hand them out five cigarettes, a little packet of boiled sweets and a sick bag. And we, we didn’t have any parachutes then. They said it would look bad to have parachutes on when the prisoners didn’t have so we flew without parachutes.
DK: And were they mostly Army POWs?
JW: They were Army POWs. Yeah.
DK: Yeah.
JW: And some of the them were, I can remember one chap when, as we saw the cliffs at you know, the white cliffs come in to sight tears came in to his eyes. He was, he’d been away quite a while I think. But oh, they all had trophies. Helmets and bayonets and things. But —
DK: So, what, after the war is finished then what, what —
JW: The war was over. Yeah.
DK: So, what were you. What did you do immediately after that? Did you stay in the RAF for very long?
JW: Oh, they kept us on because they kept us on for what they called the Tiger Force for Japan. And it wasn’t until, well then after that we then did what they called Operation Review which was flying over different parts of the country, and different flying up and down taking photographs. It was as boring as anything. I mean, I think one of them was nine hours we had.
DK: What, what was the point of that then? Just —
JW: They were make, forming new maps I think.
DK: Oh, for map reading.
JW: I think it was. We never did really know why but that’s all we could assume. That they were making some new, new maps.
DK: So that was Operation Review.
JW: Review. Yeah.
DK: The only reason I asked you that is just literally yesterday somebody was asking me what Operation Revue was and nobody knew.
JW: Oh.
DK: You’ve answered the question.
JW: Yeah.
DK: Thank you. So you never really found out what it was for.
JW: Not what it was for. No. We saw a lot —
DK: Were all the squadrons doing this or just yourselves?
JW: No. I don’t, I honestly couldn’t say.
DK: Yeah. So, you were just flying up and down the country taking photos.
JW: Yeah. I mean it was hard on the navigator. He had to work out exactly when to turn and of course they all had to, the photographs all had to overlap.
DK: Right. I’d better tell. I’m going to tell them now what it is. Oh right. Thanks. So, so when did you actually leave the RAF then?
JW: 1947.
DK: Right. If I could just go back a stage you said that you were earmarked for Tiger Force.
JW: Yes.
DK: Going off to the Far East.
JW: Yeah.
DK: What was your feelings when the war, the war suddenly ended?
JW: Well, I suppose we, you know I think we knew. Or you could see it was going to end I think. But they wouldn’t let us go until I don’t know when. That must have been [pause] No. I can’t think. I mean, suddenly they just said, oh you’re redundant and they posted us. They posted. I got posted to [pause] God, I can never remember numbers. My memory for names now. It was RAF Molesworth. That’s it. And there was only, there was nobody in charge there. A, I think a flight sergeant. The bar was open all night. You know. It was, the Americans had left a radiogram there with one record and this one record was, “Off We Go in to The Bright Blue Yonder.” Gosh. And, and that record went and in the end somebody smashed it. But I was, I don’t know what. I was put in charge or asked to look after the cycle store. And that was a huge Nissen hut full of bicycles. And nobody wanted a bike anyway so I [laughs] —
DK: So really the, the war has ended and they really didn’t know what to do with you.
JW: They didn’t know what to do with us.
DK: So, after you’ve left the RAF what did you do then? What was your career?
JW: I went back to the Public Analyst for a very short time. I mean, the thing that, I think when I finished in the Air Force I was earning fifteen and thruppence a day which was pocket money because clothes and food was all found. And when I went back to the work I was earning five pound a week which was nothing really. But —
DK: Was your job left open for you then?
JW: Oh, yes.
DK: So, they —
JW: Yeah
DK: They had to take you back.
JW: They didn’t have to. No.
DK: Right.
JW: Because I left on my own.
DK: Oh ok.
JW: But I wasn’t there that long when I then got a job with the Norwich City Council as a rent collector. And from a rent collector I got to a housing inspector and that’s when I finished.
DK: So, looking back now, seventy odd years later how do you feel about your time in the RAF?
JW: Well. I must say I enjoyed it but when I, it’s funny at the time you don’t think about it but when I look back and I think of the times we took off. Look, every time we had a Cookie on board and a load of bombs and a full load of petrol and you then realise if anything had gone wrong on take-off that would have been the end anyway and —
DK: Did, did you think about those dangers at the time then?
JW: No. That’s what I’m saying. I didn’t.
DK: Yeah.
JW: At the time.
DK: It was full of petrol and high explosives.
JW: Yeah. I didn’t think about it at the time.
DK: Yeah.
JW: But it’s looking back now and —
DK: Do you think that’s because you obviously were a lot younger then? And —
JW: This is it. It was. Yes. Definitely.
DK: Don’t feel the dangers.
JW: And it’s the same I suppose over the target. You think it isn’t going to happen to us you know.
DK: It’s always going to happen to somebody else.
JW: Somebody else. Yeah.
DK: So how, did you stay in touch with your crew then afterwards?
JW: Well, it’s funny. I tried. I tried to contact them and I couldn’t and I, it all happened. I got, this is a long story really but I got an email from a girl whose father was at Waterbeach.
DK: Yeah.
JW: Oh, I said Feltwell. I meant Waterbeach.
DK: Ok.
JW: And she came over here with her mother. Her father had died. She came over here with her mother. Oh no. Her father hadn’t died then. She came over with her father and her mother to visit old places where he’d been and while they were here, her mother they were waiting for a train and her mother had a heart attack and died. And anyway, she then told me that she’d been in touch with several people at Waterbeach and as she heard that we’d been there did I remember her dad who had since died? But I said no. I pointed out that we were only there a short time. And anyway, she suddenly contacted me and said she had heard from a chap who was stationed at Waterbeach and he was trying to contact me. And she gave me his email address and I, I got in touch with him and he had moved from Canada to New Zealand. He’d married and moved over to New Zealand and he gave me an address, email address of someone. A museum in Canada where I might be able to contact the rest of the crew. So, I went on to this email and I couldn’t. There were pages and pages of people wanting to contact. And so I left a message. You know, “Anybody in Flight Lieutenant Elwood’s crew of 138 Squadron —” And I forgot all about it and suddenly I got an email, “I’m Flight Lieutenant Elwood’s son. Unfortunately, my dad has died.”
DK: Oh.
JW: And so —
DK: Do, do you know when he passed away? Your pilot.
JW: I don’t. No.
DK: No. No.
JW: No.
DK: Right.
JW: And at first, the pilot. The engineer had also died. I don’t know how I got in touch with his wife but no, I tried no end of times to try and get in. Even when I met Canadians over in Holland. So I left messages with them to, they were going to try and contact.
DK: You never got in contact with any of the crew then.
JW: No.
DK: No. That’s a shame.
JW: Only the navigator who —
DK: Oh right.
JW: He then, he couldn’t remember a thing about what we’d done.
DK: Oh right.
JW: He’d, he’d shut everything out.
DK: Can you remember the navigator’s name?
JW: Yes. Keith Evans.
DK: And was it Keith Evans who had gone to New Zealand then?
JW: Yes.
DK: Oh, right. Ok.
DK: Yes.
JW: And then he, it was Keith Evans who got you in touch with the Canadians.
JW: No, not Keith. Johnnie. John Evans.
DK: John Evans. So, it was John Evans who went to New Zealand.
JW: Yeah.
DK: He was the navigator.
JW: He was the navigator.
DK: It was he who put you in touch with the Canadian Museum.
JW: Yes.
DK: Yeah.
DK: Yeah.
JW: So, did he, is he still alive or —
JW: No. He’s dead.
DK: Right.
JW: He died of cancer.
DK: Right. And, and he totally blocked out everything.
JW: He blocked out everything.
DK: So you never actually met him then.
JW: No.
DK: Just emailed communications.
JW: Emailed. He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t even remember us getting hit. He’d shut out, he said right from the start he had, he was seeing a psychiatrist or something. He’d shut everything out. All he could think of was the people he might have killed.
DK: Right.
JW: And he shut everything. In fact, he said, ‘Can you tell me about the hit? When we got hit.’ So I tried to tell him on an email as best I could but he couldn’t remember anything.
DK: Did you hear from him again after that? Once you two had —
JW: Oh, we corresponded.
DK: Right.
JW: Backwards, and you know quite regularly.
DK: And did any of it come back to him do you know?
JW: No. No. It’s funny. Operation Manna did.
DK: Right.
JW: He remembered that.
DK: But the, but the actual operations over Germany he’d blocked out.
JW: He couldn’t. No. Or he didn’t know. Whether he didn’t want to I don’t but —
DK: But you say he’s since passed away.
JW: He’s, he’s since died. Yeah.
DK: Ok. I think that’s probably enough. If I stop this now. Well, thanks for that anyway.
JW: Yeah.
DK: That’s really interesting. Thanks for your time.
[recording paused]
DK: So, your crew then. Left to right. So that’s you.
JW: That’s me. He, we called him Sealevel he was so short. He was Clark. L Clark.
DK: Al Clark. Yeah. So what, what he was then?
JW: He was the bomb aimer.
DK: Bomb aimer, so and —
JW: Curly Watson. He was the engineer.
DK: So, he was the other English.
JW: Pilot. The other English chap. Yeah.
DK: Yeah. So you’ve got sergeant.
JW: The first names I don’t. Bulward. his name was Bulward, definitely.
DK: Bill Ward.
JW: Bul, Bulward.
DK: Bulward. Right.
JW: They called him Bull, I think.
DK: Right. Bulward.
JW: That’s Keith Elwood.
DK: That’s, that’s the pilot.
JW: Pilot.
DK: Yeah. And then —
JW: That’s John Evans, the navigator.
DK: Yeah.
JW: And there’s Dave Richardson the rear gunner.
DK: Right. Ok. I notice on here. You mentioned a couple of the Cook’s Tours.
JW: Oh, yes. Yes.
DK: So, what did they involve then?
JW: That was, that’s funny. I had a, I don’t know whether I’ve still got the letter. I had a letter from, oh here it is, from a woman at Downham Market. It was in the book. Have you seen the book, “Yours.” There was a letter in there from this woman that when she was in the WAAFs she flew on a, what they called a Cook’s Tour. She said, “But nobody will believe me.” So I wrote back. Wrote and told her and said that was quite right and and I got a letter to thank me.
DK: So, did you do a number of the Cook’s Tour’s?
JW: Only two.
DK: And did, was there WAAFs on board yours?
JW: No. I can’t. In fact, one of them, one of them had ATC boys.
DK: Oh right. So, and can you remember whereabouts in Germany you went to see the damage?
JW: Oh, we went to Cologne. I can’t really remember now. Actually, it didn’t sort of —
DK: Right.
JW: I I can’t remember other than Cologne. Obviously, we went. What I can remember is coming back we flew, we circled around the Eiffel tower. I said, ‘Well that’s something nobody else had done.’
DK: So, what was people, what was the, the people on board, what was the reaction when you saw the damage on the cities down there?
JW: Well, I honestly, I can’t say what they because I suppose most of them were in the, they weren’t where I was because I was sitting at the, at my place and there’s no room for anybody else there but, so they were either in the cockpit standing where the pilot, behind the pilot or in the bomb bay or even some of them had a ride in the upper turret.
DK: And were they mostly ground crew then on the Cook’s Tours?
JW: Most of them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I can’t remember any WAAFs.
DK: Right. But you were able to confirm this WAAF that written it in. She’d written a letter then.
JW: Yes.
DK: Yeah.
JW: I’ve got the, if I can find it here. That’s such a —
DK: Right.
JW: Picture. [pause] Oh you never, I don’t think you’d ever read it now. Oh, I must have thrown it away, I think. She put, “Dear Mr Webster, thank you for writing to the editors of, “Yours,” regarding the Cook’s Tours. I’ve received thirty letters from people who either went on one on the trip or verified they did take place. It brought back a lot of memories. One lady wrote to me from — ” I can’t see what it is, it’s gone. And told me there is a table in the Crown Hotel there with names of crews carved on it. I’d love to go back. I wish I had written down the names of the crew I flew with and the WAAF corporal. She passed out going over the Channel. It was quite [pause] especially when —”
[pause]
DK: Right.
JW: “When the pilot dived down at a ship. I’ve often wondered what the message was in code. I could see flashing. I also remember seeing Cologne Cathedral and Essex.”
DK: Essen.
JW: Essen. Oh yeah. Essen. I thought it was Essex. Essen. “I was posted to Bletchley Park after the trip and I was demobbed on the 11th of April ’46. I said I would never volunteer for anything again.” [laughs] Oh it goes on. It’s torn out.
DK: Does it have her name there? The lady’s name.
JW: Yours sincerely, Mrs K Dorrington.
DK: Dorrington.
JW: Queens Road, twenty. That’s from Epping in Essex.
DK: And what’s the date of the letter?
JW: 9.9.’95.
DK: Right. So, a while ago.
JW: Yeah. She was probably in a worst state than this letter you know.
DK: So you mention here Operation [Sun Bombs]. A trip to Castel Benito.
JW: Oh yes. I think that was to give us a holiday more than anything. We were there about three days. All we did was sit around the swimming pool and, well, and went swimming. And it’s funny there was a Flight Lieutenant Banbury who was in 138 Squadron and I’ll always remember he stood on the diving board and he did a dead man, you know where they [pause] I’d never seen it done before. But the funny thing is after I was demobbed I happened to see in one of the local papers that a Flight Lieutenant Banbury had been killed at Watton flying an Anson with some ground staff on board and he hit the caravan coming in to land.
DK: Oh right.
JW: To think he’d flown a Lanc and all that and got crashed off in an Anson.
DK: There’s two more operations here. You’ve got Operation Sinkum.
JW: Oh yeah. That that was just flying out over the Wash dropping a lot of the spare bombs. Old bombs.
DK: And then Operation Spasm.
JW: Yeah. That was a trip to Berlin.
DK: Oh right.
JW: The first ones that went they were lucky. They took cigarettes and bought them for marks and they came back and they could change as many marks as they liked. When we went we could only change back to marks what we’d changed. Took out.
DK: Right.
JW: Yeah.
DK: Can you remember where you landed in Berlin?
JW: Yeah. What was the name of it?
DK: Was it Templehof, was it?
JW: Temple. I think it was.
DK: Yeah.
JW: Yeah. That’s the only one I can —
DK: So, you flew to Templehof and landed.
JW: Landed.
DK: In a Lancaster.
JW: In Lancs. Yeah.
DK: Oh right. And so what, what did you think of Berlin now the war’s ended and you’ve landed there in the centre of the city?
JW: I can’t remember much. We saw the Reichstag. We went to the Olympic Stadium. But apart from that I, I know I went in somebody’s bedroom. The chap, I was after stockings and he took me in to this, his wife was still in bed and he fished under the pillow and came out with these nylons for cigarettes. But —
DK: Was Berlin damaged? Was it?
JW: Well, it was what we saw of it. Yeah.
DK: And you didn’t see any Russians there or anyone or anybody else.
JW: No.
DK: So you were just in the British Sector.
JW: Just in the British Sector. Yeah.
DK: And was there many Lancasters on this trip to Berlin then to land there or, can you remember?
JW: Well, not from my squadron there wasn’t.
DK: No.
JW: I don’t know whether. I suppose other people, I don’t know if other people went there.
DK: Ok. Well, I’ll stop that. Thanks again. I’ll stop and turn it off.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Jack Webster
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
David Kavanagh
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
2016-10-04
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AWebsterJK161004
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:48:28 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
Jack Webster applied to join the RAF in December 1942 and attended a selection board at RAF Cardington, and was eventually called up in June 1943. After initial training he went to 4 Radio School at RAF Madley passing out from there with eighteen words per minute on Morse Code. From RAF Dumfries Advanced Flying Unit flying in Dominies and Proctors he was posted to 12 OTU Chipping Warden where he crewed up with a Canadian crew, his pilot Flt Lt. Keith Elwood. After completing their heavy conversion on to Lancasters at RAF Bottesford, they were posted to 514 Sqn at RAF Feltwell where they completed one sortie to a synthetic oil installation at Huls. He and his crew were then posted to 138 Squadron at RAF Tuddenham and carried out a further four sorties with them. He and his crew also took part in Operation Manna and Operation Exodus. He left the RAF in 1947.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942-12
1944
1945
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Great Britain
Netherlands
England--Herefordshire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Norfolk
England--Northamptonshire
England--Suffolk
Scotland--Dumfries and Galloway
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
12 OTU
138 Squadron
1668 HCU
514 Squadron
Advanced Flying Unit
aircrew
bombing
Cook’s tour
Dominie
Heavy Conversion Unit
Initial Training Wing
Lancaster
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
Operational Training Unit
Proctor
RAF Bottesford
RAF Chipping Warden
RAF Dumfries
RAF Feltwell
RAF Madley
RAF Tuddenham
training
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/571/8839/PFraserDK1607.1.jpg
828f411fd5d597dfada38965fb175eb1
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/571/8839/AFraserDK161104.1.mp3
fee1470852ea916db2fe36f9a192f8dd
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
Fraser, Donald Keith
D K Fraser
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Fraser, DK
Description
An account of the resource
12 items. Two oral history interviews with Warrant Officer Donald Keith Fraser DFM (1924 - 2022, 1566621 Royal Air Force), a memoir, his log book, photographs and service material. The collection also contains an interview with Sylvia Fraser, his wife. He flew a tour of operations as a flight engineer with 101 Squadron.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Donald Keith Fraser and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-11-04
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.
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 fourth of November two thousand and sixteen and we’re with Donald Fraser in Whitchurch in Shropshire to talk about his life and times particularly in the RAF. So, Donald what are the first things that you remember in life?
DF: I was born on the twenty fourth of August 1923, at a small place in Fifeshire called Kincardine-on-Forth. We stayed there, my Father was a gamekeeper along with two of his brothers who had come through the First World War and they took on game keeping as their career afterwards. We were there for two years and moved from there, he got, he had head keepers in an estate in Fifeshire, Moray estates, in order to earn more money and he was head forester there. Unfortunately, he was killed by lightning and I was six-year-old, the family at that time was, I had an older brother and sister and the younger two sisters, so there was five in the family, and he was killed on January the tenth, roundabout there, it be 1911 or something, which meant that, it was sad for the family because at that time there wasn’t the same facilities to get at that time. So, Moray estates were very good, they gave my Mother a house in Aberdour, and she stayed there all her life, but it meant [emphasis] that at the age of eight I used to deliver milk in the mornings [laughs] horse, horse and cart and the same in the evenings, in the summer time, and then when I became eleven, I could no longer do that by the same horse and cart, so I joined the cooperative who delivered the milk at half past six in the morning, so I still had time to do delivery before we went to school, and at weekends we used to do delivering groceries and that for the coop, they also, it was interesting because we were in the, the scouts at that time, and the scout leader was a Mr Fisk who had a large house in Aberdour, and he used to invite some of the scouts to go down in the evenings and weekends to do work in his garden. We got four pence an hour it was in old money, four pence an hour and we got that when we’d enough money to make a pound, which took about sixty hours to get a pound. [laughs] So, I joined school going to Aberdour school, and then at the age of eleven, it was two schools, there was Dunfermline school which if you were taking languages you went there, if not you went to tech log school at Burntisland, one was seven miles away to the west and then it was four miles to the east, so we went there and that. I enjoyed school, school was good and I was usually first or second in the class on maths and technical subjects all the time I was at school, however the school people wanted us to go onto university but that wasn’t on [unclear] so I applied, the situation at that time was very similar to it is now, there wasn’t many applications, there wasn’t many jobs available but I was interested in forestry and trees, and also in mechanics, so I applied to a company in Kirkcaldy to see if there was a vacancy in mechanics, there wasn’t, but I also applied to Moray estates and there was a vacancy as a forestry personnel on the estate, so I took that up and of course I stayed there until I joined the RAF. It was interesting and just what I wanted to do and the staff there was two older men who had a lot of knowledge in forestry and they gave us a good insight onto what was happening, and Moray estates it was just on the south, [laughs] north side of the Firth of Forth, and there they had Donibristle House which was always kept fully organised in case they ever wanted to come back there, they only came once or twice a year but all the staff was there all the time, St Colme’s House where all the information was kept on the estate, and in Aberdour opposite the only really good hotel was the large entrance to the [pause] driveway into the estate itself, marvellous entrance for that and it still stands today and that, so that was that
[Tascam noise]
DF: My, because of my age I was a little bit in front of the other people and I went to school that sort of, almost a year earlier which meant that to join the forces, all the ones I was with, was leaving early because I was that little bit, my brother was eighteen months older than me and I was in the same class as him, and so the time came and we were all leaving to go to the forces whatever it was and people used to start asking, ‘why aren’t you going?’ you know, [laughs] not realising we were younger at the time. So, I volunteered for flying duties with the RAF and had the usual examinations and such, I was given the opportunity to start training as a flight engineer because of my, what I said, my mechanical interests, and that was in 19, July 1942. Again, we, our first call on joining was Blackpool, we went to Blackpool and there we stayed for almost a year because we done the mechanics course and then we carried on to be a fitter’s course. Blackpool was a marvellous place to be, really is, the tower was still open and so was the Winter Gardens they were still open at that time, and lower floors not the top floors and so it was interesting to be there. We used to have bath nights twice a year, I think there was about ten thousand RAF people there at the time, and twice a week you had to come in the evenings and join up to go in for a bath or it was a shower in fact, and that happened twice a week from all the different site places in there, and to get to the baths, and it was one of these quick things, in and out [laughs] and that, and we were stationed Montague Street which was in the south, south shore, and we used to do our training at the [pause]
SF: Amusement, amusement park
DF: At the amusement park which is still there today, and we used to do all the training in there, and we used to go by buses from there, out to a small airfield south of Blackpool, which had been [unclear] been turned into areas for training, and we done our training there, and we used to be run back morning and night, on buses, and the landlady was foreign in our house, and she had to supply our breakfast and an evening meal and they were very good, and they used to make me with the same landlady for a year, so we must have done something right. [pause] After Blackpool we went to St Athans to do our flight engineers course, which was supposed to be a six weeks course. When we got there, we were told it was a two weeks course because they were so short of engineers, they had to put us through, so we were doing a twelve-hour day, and it only took a fortnight to get through that, but and then we went to Lindholme, and when we reached Lindholme there were only one aircraft and that wasn’t a Lancaster it was a Halifax, that’s the only time we’d seen or been inside the aircraft. So, we reached Lindholme our crew was already there and they’d been there for quite some time, to go through the usual rules and regulations to be able to fly the heavy aircraft, and we were crewed up with a WL Evans crew, and I remember him, a way of obtaining these people, engineers and all that was everybody was put in a room and there was the pilots there because it was the engineers they were looking for, and the engineers was a case of, you like me and such like, well it must have been that their eyes met and I think that was how [laughs] we joined their crew, in fact he said that he was given instructions from his crew that he had to be back but he had to be bringing a Scottish person back [laughs] and then we done, I had done five hours, five hours flying time when we reached the squadron, 101 Squadron and that was mid-July 1943. Unfortunately, on the way between the, there was two crews with the name of Evans going to the 101 Squadron at the same time, there were sixty crews going but two of them had the name of Evans, AH Evans and WL Evans, and when we reached the squadron, I for some unknown reason was crewed with AH Evans instead of WL, and they asked what we wanted to do and we hadn’t done any flying so it didn’t matter, after a little we said we’ll just leave it and we’ll go with AH Evans, but the other pilot Wally Evans said, ‘no that’s not your, you’re our crew, and you are going to be flying with us,’ so that’s changing all the paperwork, and that’s what happened
[laughter]
DF: We went on our first and second operation the two, the two crews together and the third one we came back but they didn’t, [pause] and that was more or less, I don’t know how you, how you take that, but it was luck or what it was but we are still here today and the other crew, that was how close it was you know, these days, and we stayed on at Ludford, it took us from July forty three until March forty four to do our tour of ops, thirty operations. Now, do you want anything on, on the operations itself?
CB: Yes, what, the useful thing is to know how the crew gelled?
DF: Oh yeah
CB: How you worked and what ever happened on your operations, because thirty is a lot of operations to have done
DF: It is a lot yeah, but well, somehow we were a very good crew, we all gelled together and I never had a glass of beer all the time I was on the station, I said, I not gonna drink at all until we’re finished, funny enough our bomb aimer was the same, he said he wouldn’t drink, so the two of us, the two of us were non-drinkers, but we decided that if we were going to get through we had to work as a team and a certain thing in any team, you’ve got your medal man, whatever you want to call them, and we decided that we should have somebody that could take over the pilots job, somebody could take over the engineer’s and the wireless operator was the difficult one because it was one of these ones that you didn’t get many people who knew the wireless operators job anyway. So, it was decided that the inflight engineer, I would do as far as I could get training, and that’s where we’re talking about the link training, get training on that and so we could fly the aircraft and bring it in if necessary, only, the bomb aimer had started as a navigator but he was ill for a time so he come off that and he came back in as a bomb aimer, so he had the basic treatment and that, on navigation somewhere, he decided that he’d be the one that would take over the navigation. The gunners that didn’t partake as far as the flying the aircraft, well they were surplus to requirement, [laughs] and the bomb aimer also took over the engineer’s job if necessary so we had a people who could switch from one to the other, to keep the, as far as possible, and it worked, it worked very well really, we done a lot of training, I don’t know what the training is, done training and that and everybody, we done what was necessary, we used to when we went to the briefing, we normally, we went there and after the briefing the navigator and that went to do their necessary things, but asked that we went along with them so as we knew the route, and if it was possible on a very clear night, if there’s any objects that we could give as information to, to the crews, there was a navigator such as a right bend on the river was at an angle, something that was obvious you could find out, you used to say well we are just passing so and so now which gave a little bit in the occasion we were on line, where we were and that helped us I think. The other thing was, we decided that we were not there to shoot down fighters, our job was to get to the target and back again, so our gunners was not to fire unless they were being fired on, and during a complete tour never once did our gunners fire at anything for all the thirty operations. We had some narrow escapes, I think the, which we would call part trips which meant we got them back again without any difficulty and we had probably half a dozen raids, other ones would probably get shot up going over, actually we done twelve operations to Berlin out of thirty so we had a good go at the Germans on this, and to most people that was the most dangerous target to be on, especially for the time and all that, but we found that if we could keep putting in the middle of the formation we were safe, it was the stragglers that got out to the side were surely caught by the fighters or the Ack Ack. On many occasions we had one or two big holes in us but not to do a lot of damage, I think it was on our twelfth operation and we ended up in a large thunderstorm and of course you had to go through them, you couldn’t dive out from it and that, you had to go straight through, and at one time we were at twenty thousand feet, the next minute we were down to about four thousand that was how the, the affected us, and round the, inside the aircraft was all the little electric jumping across from side to side and that, and it was quite difficult the fact that it took the two of us, myself and the pilot, to pull us out of the dive we got in, but we managed it about four thousand feet, that was one of the not so nice times. On our twenty first, again to Berlin, we got hit just going into the target by Ack Ack, we had a fire in our starboard inner engine and all our communications went. One of my jobs was to always look out, out for the gunners and if you’re looking back through the aircraft you could see if the guns were working or not, and this time the mid upper guns wasn’t, it was just silent and just lying in the one situation, so I decided after I looked over at the engines, switched off the engine and that, to go back and see what was happening. So, on the way through I collected a portable oxygen bottle and my torch, went back and as I went past the navigator, not the navigator, the wireless operator, I gave him a touch and pointed back, he came back with us and as we reached the middle of the aircraft, here was our upper gunner just get his hands on the rear door, he was just going out without any parachute or any at all, so it seemed to make a lot of sense and took the two of us up all our time to manage to stop him so, getting the door open, however we did and we got him onto the rest bed in the aircraft and he was okay after that, although he was off ops the next morning, he just disappeared from the station, that was one of the bad nights. The other, very bad one I think was, we were caught, it was the seventeenth of December 1943, it was again [laughs] Berlin and this was supposed to be the easiest flight that we’d ever have, [unclear] the weather was just right, there was a heavy fog over the Netherlands, and when we got to Berlin there was just a nice opening where we could drop bombs, turn and come straight back, so it was a straight in and straight out, which meant of course you only got fuel to do that, so it was I think it was a six inch, six hour trip, which meant thirteen, fourteen gallons of fuel, they hadn’t given you any leeway at all. Anyway, when we started off, when we got to the Dutch coast it was bright moonlight
CB: Ah
DF: And instead of fighters, the air fighters mainly on the ground, were all flying, and I think going out to Berlin there was about fifty aircraft that was shot down, we got to, near Berlin and the weather was thick, completely different to what we’d been told, anyway we bombed and on the way back we had a contact from base saying, ‘we were under thick fog, all United Kingdom, east coast was under thick fog, make your way north to Hull,’ didn’t tell us where to go in Hull, just make your way north to Hull, which we did, and the, as we were going along the bomb aimer shouted out, ‘look out I just passed a barrage balloon.’ So, we thought at first that they’d forgot to take them down, so we decided we’d better go inland off the coast in case there’s any more high up still on the coast line, so we turned round and luckily these beacons, controlled beacons, there was two in that area and one of them came on and said, ‘we’ve found you, we know where you are but we can’t see you,’ and the other one said, ‘well, you must be very close to us because you’re very loud, do you want us to put up a searchlight?’ We reported and said, ‘that would be good,’ which they did, but instead of going up in the air it went along the ground, and the first thing the pilot and myself saw was a double storied farm building just in front of us and it must have been just one of these things that happened. So, the, it meant that we were in a few feet of the ground, so it was, in fact it took the two of us to pull, luckily, we were running with a control booster on, normally you wouldn’t if you’re trying to save fuel you wouldn’t, but for some unknown reason I had it on and the aircraft didn’t splutter it just gradually went up and we managed it just like taking a horse over a high jump, managed to just get it over, and the report from the, the rear gunner and this was afterwards not at the time, he had written for some other booklet they was, but he saw, because he was looking back instead of above, what he saw was chickens running from the coop [laughs] in the farmyard [laughs]
[laughter]
DF: And he was pressed over his guns because of the building up [laughter] and we caught our rear wheel on the gate as we were, [laughs] we went through so we decided that we knew then how high we were
[laughter]
DF: So, we decided we’d go back to base rather than play around because we’d probably pick up some better information there, probably get a lucky break, so we went back again and as we’re going along the bomb aimer shouted out, ‘oh I’ve found a, I’ve found the café that we usually go for a coffee in the mornings,’ so that was good, they said well your just, just below us, so we thought well if we turn we’ll get on to the outer ring of the lights, you know, about three miles out we were of the outer ring and airfield, so we got there but flying then about two, two hundred feet but there, the airfield was so close that they were overlapping
CB: Yeah, yeah
DF: So, we came round here thinking we were going to go into our own airfield, somehow we missed that and we kept on and the, we landed in the end at Wickenby, so we landed, we couldn’t ask permission to land, we landed, we thought we were on our own field, the people said, ‘you haven’t landed here where are you?’ You know, so we both looked at each other and thought we’re on the ground aren’t we, [laughs] and then we heard a second voice come on saying, ’this is Wickenby we think somethings landed on our airfield, we can’t see you the fogs so thick, stay where you are and we’ll be with you sometime when we can pick you up,’ and about half an hour later they came and we were on their ground, we got a nights, had some, what do you call it? [pause] meal at that time and we stayed the night there.
[paper rustling]
DF: In the morning [inaudible] tea, got mess there or something. We had a few holes but not too bad so we decided we’d be alright and safe to take it home to Ludford, anyway we tried to start the engines up, they did, they started up, they ran for about anything from two or three minutes and then they all one by one they faded away that was
[unclear whispering]
DF: End up there, [unclear] anyway that was the worst one I think, after that I don’t think we had many bad ones but the case may as you say we had good ones but in that case some bad ones. So, we finished our tour of operations in March 1944 and we’d done our thirty operations, in fact we’d done thirty-one, one was taken as an abortion but we had dropped our bombs on an air plant in Belgium and after when I looked at our operations I decided that would count as one, so if we hadn’t have been counted we had to make the thirty up, we’d have been on the Nuremburg one the following night, so we were lucky. [pause] The crews just, we just parted at that time and until the end of the war we hadn’t any contact with each other at all, but that’s another story, we did find out for some of the crew the time afterwards. But, anyway I was posted to Lindholme to do instructing, but before starting that I went on an instructors course and got an A1 pass, and I went back there, and that were just before D Day and at that time we didn’t know what was happening, but all the, these aircraft that were used for training on was bombed up, but there was only two people as a crew, pilot and engineer, we didn’t know what it was about, and the two of us that was on the crew was, we found out afterwards, that if anything had gone wrong on the landings, that these aircraft would have been used to drop their bombs on whatever was necessary at that time and it was said that we’d have to drop out, bail out before any plane whatever it was necessary, and coming out before it hit the ground, obviously I don’t think we’d have survived, anyway, you wouldn’t survive at two thousand feet, but that was what was happening at that time, luckily it wasn’t necessary, so we didn’t, didn’t go, the bomb was unloaded later on. And, then we, then moved from Lindholme to Cottesmore, no sorry, Bottesford, Bottesford first, and this was August 1943, and as I said before, I was twenty one on the twenty first of August, and we’d just been there for a week and this was our first night out, we decided to have a run round and see what the countryside was like and there was three of us who went that time there was a Jack Molton who up until a few years ago, we were still met each other up, and another person from Scotland he was Jock, Jock Wright, and when we got to Bottesford we were just on, just off the A1 road, and when we got down to, on the main road we decided to, instead of going left to Newark where you go right to Sleaford it took us, so we travelled along there for three or four miles and there was a sign to Marston on the left hand side, well there wasn’t a sign it was just a road in there, and we decided to go down there, and that’s where we made it down to a little place called Marston and there was a pub just on the corner, and that was the first drink I had from joining the RAF, [pause] and after that we seemed to make that our common meeting place. Bottesford was a nice easy going place compared with what we had just been through, and enjoyed our time there training up the other people coming through, and of course VE Day came at the same time we were there, and I was at Buckingham Palace on VE day in London receiving a medal, it was, went down on, my Mother and sister, and my sister Jane they, they came down from Scotland, I met them on the train at Grantham and we went into London, and I think I remember eleven o’clock was the time when we, it was the King at that time of course and everything was over by, just after lunchtime, but my first time in London was [laughs] all in happy moods and that, and my Mother and them stayed in London because we were booked in for that night and I came home on the train late, must have been early evening, back to Grantham and Sylvie was going to meet me there on a bike, but what, what happened is that Marston was a mile off the main road and then you had the main A1 road to London, London that way and north that way, and she was going to bring the bike and pick me up at the end of the lane, anyway she’d asked somebody who worked in Grantham if they had seen an airman walking, and they said no, there wasn’t any airman, and she’d seen one of the lorries with the back open and quite a lot of airmen on it and when they passed her they gave her a normal wave and all this, you know, so she thought that I had got the transport to road end was going home to Bottesford to change and then come back down again, so she came back home, but half an hour, three quarters of an hour after that, her sister get when she was looking out the window said, ‘oh Jock’s,’ I was Jock at that time, ‘Jocks coming down the road there, Sylvie, Jocks coming down the road there,’ and she said, ‘no [emphasis] he can’t be,’ it was, I’d walked all the way from Grantham. [laughs] That was VE day
CB: Right, let’s stop there for a mo.
[interview paused]
CB: Now Donald as you were 101 Squadron, then you were the eighth, you had the eighth man, so who was he and what did he do and how did you link with him?
DF: Yes, our eighth man was part of the crew, he joined us on the first night that ABC was being used, I’ll have to come back to his name
CB: Yeah
DF: But he, he sat just behind the navigator on the Lanc where normally would be the bed for people getting injured and that, and his place was there, and he worked from there, he was just one of the crew, that’s all, we, we had using his [pause]
CB: So, ABC stood for?
DF: ABC
CB: Airborne Cigar
DF: Airborne Cigar
CB: Yeah
DF: Yes, that’s right and
CB: His job, what was his role?
DF: His role was to jam the German night fighters from contact with the ground with instructions, and he done this by jamming on a certain band, outside on the Lancaster was two long spikes, down the way, one in front of the aircraft and one halfway down, and this was his means of contact, and he jammed night fighters, he could speak a little bit of German but he could understand German, and he just jammed the night fighters from that. Unfortunately, by doing that he left the aircraft, the one he was on, the aircraft so they could be contacted by the German fighters that wasn’t involved in that time, and I would, probably the heaviest losses of Bomber Command
CB: Because, in essence, his transmission created a magnet for the night fighter
DF: That’s right
CB: Which was able to lock onto it, was that right?
DF: Yes, they could lock on to us, but we, we were, say on a squadron with twenty-one aircraft on that night, and got the time going through the clouds, save us twenty minutes would be all going well, on 101 Squadron, every minute along the route of covering
CB: Oh right
DF: Of covering the band going to the target, didn’t always work that way because you can’t get people to navigate to that degree in that night, but that was the obvious thing, it was to cover the whole time that they were in the air, and afterwards of course, the squad er, Bomber Command didn’t fly without 101 being there, so we, we had to do a lot more raids and operations than the other squadrons to keep that
CB: And, it was because it was so easy to detect a 101 Squadron Lancaster, that the losses were higher, is that what you’re saying?
DF: That’s right
CB: Right
DF: Much higher than
CB: Now, what did he actually do?
DF: What did he do?
CB: Hmm
DF: He listened for the German ground crews contacting their air fighters, and he jammed that by using the noise from the engines to do it, and he just jammed the
CB: So, there was a microphone in one of the engines, which one was that?
DF: The starboard inner I think it was, and that’s, so that’s what happened, [laughs] but it worked very well for a time and then of course like everything else it, well [emphasis] it was used throughout the war even on VE Day and all that was used, but generally speaking it done some good at times
CB: So, as the flight engineer, you had other things to look after that were electronic, what about your rear scanning detector Monica, how, what did that do and what did you do about it?
DF: Well, we didn’t have Monica on 101, they talked about it and decided that it wasn’t for 101 they would rather be without it, rightly or wrongly but that was, we had the usual, the others, the usual ones that, what do you call it? the little six-inch strips of metal
CB: Oh yeah
DF: [inaudible]
CB: Oh yeah so you had Window
DF: We had Window
CB: And you had H2S or not?
DF: We had H2S, yes
CB: But no other detectors?
DF: No, not really
CB: Right, because Monica had the same problem
DF: That’s right
CB: Of identifying you and that’s why they didn’t want it, was it?
DF: That’s why we didn’t have enough to carry on with
CB: So, just quickly with your special ops man, how, where, was, how did he integrate with the crew and where was he accommodated?
DF: He was accommodated in a little cubby, coming down here, that’s your navigator, here was the wireless operator, he was the next one down there just in there, same as they had, just a desk and that in there, and that was where, on most of the aircraft, was the bed, the, what do you call the bed now?
CB: Yeah
DF: The resting bed
CB: The resting bed
DF: Was there, so it was taken out and his little cubby hole was put in there
CB: Right. And on the ground, was he in your nissen hut or was he somewhere else?
DF: No, he wasn’t in a nissen hut he was somewhere else
CB: And why was that?
DF: I don’t know, they seemed to keep them apart
CB: Hmm, one suggestion was that if they talked in their sleep
DF: Well, I was going to say, one suggestion was that, if they talked in their sleep it might cause some problems, but we had, we didn’t change our one, we had the same person all the time
CB: So, in a social context when you went out as a crew, did he join you?
DF: He joined us at times, yep, which was, I think better than helped to gel the crew together
CB: And what were the ranks in the crew? Were there all NCO’s or was there an officer?
DF: To start with all NCO’s, after about probably seven or eight, the pilot was upgraded to [pause] pilot officer and such like, and I think he was, no he wasn’t squadron leader, he was lieutenant when the crew was finished
CB: At the end of the tour?
DF: End of the tour, yes, he was the only one
CB: Okay
DF: That was commissioned in that time. We were asked afterwards but I went to fly in the RAF not to sit at a desk and such like
CB: So, how did your ranking go during the war time?
DF: The ranking, I came in as a warrant officer, so ended up as a sergeant, flight sergeant, warrant officer and I remember having an interview with the CO of the, what do you call it?, North Luff, Luffenham airfield just before you were demobbed, wondering if we wanted to stay in the RAF, and he gave us some indication of what could happen, at that time they were very short of engineers, ground engineers and funny enough during the time when I was at Cottesmore and that, I had plenty free time so I took on doing the ground engineer’s exam, and I was probably the only aircrew personnel that ever took it, and I got a rating of eighty one percent, so when I came for an interview, whether wanted to stay on or leave, he bought this up and of course I still said I wanted to go back to civvy street, but they promised probably lieutenant or squadron leader or eventually, or another thing we were interested in was the flying and the, the business side of it, the British Airways which at that time was only from Assyria to India somewhere like, which was not much [unclear] so we decided to come out and take up forestry again
CB: Fast backwards to your Berlin raid, there were all sorts of challenges on the battle of Berlin, er, what about searchlights, how often did you and was there any particular incident that was noteworthy?
DF: There was only one as I say, the blue searchlights that was the one that was the main, we had been caught once or twice with other searchlights, they didn’t cause us much damage
CB: So, what happened on this occasion?
DF: Well, as I was saying, we were caught in searchlights, and if you are caught, there’s three of them usually at a time, if you run out of this one the next one caught you and so on, so you were just held in it all the time, and as I say, rays worked in conjunction with the Ack Ack’s, if you were held long enough the guns could pick you off, and that’s what happened to quite a lot of people, we were lucky that somebody below us took
CB: So, what happened, instead of you what else happened?
DF: It was a Halifax aircraft, it was travelling below us, they never reached the same elevation as Lancasters, and all of a sudden it just blew out the sky, it was caught by, we think was [unclear]
CB: What were the relative heights that day?
DF: They would have been about eighteen thousand, we probably about twenty, twenty-one, the distance in travel on two aircraft
CB: And how many of the crew actually saw that incident?
DF: The gunners, myself, that would be all I think, yeah
CB: Right
DF: We reported it on of course on our debriefing afterwards
CB: You talked about the end of the operation, you were awarded the DFM, how was that communicated to you and how did you feel about it?
DF: I don’t think it was communicated to us, I think the first we knew about it was
[Tascam noise]
DF: When we got it in writing saying you had received it, the DFM and would we go to Buckingham Palace on the date, we didn’t know of course it was VE Day at that time, but that was the first, I was quite pleased with what was happening with, we didn’t even know at that time whether the whole crew had got it or not until later on
CB: So, this, this wasn’t at the end of your operational tour at all?
DF: No, no, it came
CB: How much later was that? Where were you at the time?
DF: I think we were at Cottesmore, it must be about, must have been about six months later anyway, at least that
CB: So, you finished your tour erm, in forty-four, middle of forty-four
DF: Yeah, yeah
CB: Then you went to Lindholme
DF: Yeah
CB: Then you went to Bottesford
DF: That’s right
CB: So, how was that working, that at Lindholme you went to Bottesford
DF: Yes, Lindholme
CB: For what reason?
DF: Well, the tour doing [unclear] at Bottesford, as I say went to Lindholme and from there I did this instructor’s course, and then was posted straight when we came back from that to Bottesford. Bottesford before that had been a Lancaster airfield, but it had also been used on D Day by the Americans, and it was in such a mess, it was windows out and all the holes of the firing through the roof and all that sort of thing, I think it was just them they bought and went
CB: What before they left they?
DF: Before they left
CB: So, what were they using the airfield for exactly?
DF: A holding point for the Americans before they went on the D Day landings
CB: The troops?
DF: The troops, yeah
CB: Right
DF: Yeah
CB: So, that was a bit disruptive?
DF: It was
CB: And the crews who you were training at Bottesford, where did they go next?
DF: They went to wherever the casualties were
CB: It was a, it was an OTU was it?
DF: It was a heavy
CB: Conversion
DF: Conversion, yes
CB: Heavy Conversion Unit, right okay
DF: So, they went to the squadrons which were, was requiring aircraft
CB: Right, okay, good. So, you were there until after the, after VE Day?
DF: Yes, and then we went to, after that we went to Cottesmore
CB: Hmm, hmm. What did you go there for?
DF: The same thing, it was just more or less, seemed to be a transfer, Bottesford was a wartime drome, it was closing down
CB: Yeah
DF: So, we went in Bottesford, went to Cottesmore
CB: Yeah
DF: Which was a, which was a
CB: An expansion period airfield
DF: Yeah
CB: Yeah
DF: And after that we went to North Luffenham
CB: Hmm
DF: Didn’t, time, didn’t spend much time at Cottesmore, then we moved on to Luffenham
CB: Another expansion period airfield
DF: That’s right where ever this, was demobbed from there in 19, end of 1946 that was
CB: So, where were you actually demobbed from?
DF: From, some place in London, [pause] somewhere near Paddington, I can’t remember, but it was a London address, I can’t remember
CB: Okay. Right, so you knew you were going to be demobbed in, well in advance, how much notice did you have?
DF: Well, we didn’t have a lot of notice, say, probably knew about a month beforehand, but prior to that what we had been crewed up to go to the Far East with
CB: Tiger Force
DF: Tiger Force, and we were getting ready for going on the week it was VE Day
CB: VJ Day
DF: It was cancelled
CB: Hmm
DF: So, we didn’t go
CB: Right
DF: Luckily. We’d done our training, we used to train on the, on the Trent, going down with a below the levels, but the Lancaster, below the lower levels that are the size of the Trent
CB: What planes were you training on then?
DF: Still Lancasters
CB: Still Lancasters
DF: But we could get it below the levels, bank levels [laughs]
CB: Yeah
DF: It was just flight engineer and the pilot, just the two
CB: Oh right, just the two?
DF: Yeah, I think it was a bit of
CB: Bravado, was it?
DF: [laughs]
CB: Needed a bit of excitement after everything else?
DF: I think, I think that’s true, but it was also a good way of training for what we might be up against with going out there, nothing about it
CB: So, after VJ day, it’s, that’s still some time before you were demobbed, so what did you do then?
DF: We were still doing training, training was kept going but the, the length of training was, well it was just a five-day week at that time, but what we did was to keep the students employed, we had one old aircraft and we, it was working, the engine was working, so we got the students to dismantle the four engines, I think there was about twenty students, there was five on each, dismantled the engine and had to put it back again, they had to run with [unclear] and that was just kept them going for another month or so, extended the time they were on the unit
CB: So, you had the opportunity of staying on
DF: Yes
CB: And er, what was the offer?
DF: The offer was if we stayed on, we could go in as, we’d get a commission and eventually we could possibly reach the grade of squadron leader, I think that what was said
CB: But, you wanted to do what?
DF: I wanted to go back to forestry. So, we demobbed and we went back to our home in Aberdour, we didn’t, it was only for about a fortnight, before that I had been in contact with the, prior to going into the forces when I was eighteen, I’d been in touch with the Royal Botanical Gardens in Edinburgh, to see about becoming a probationer however, the probationers then was only for gardeners sons, and they could become a probationer, and then they done the full course that you do in the university better then on time, they usually do it in the evening, classes and that it, it’s different from going to university and they done the work in the botanics during the day, but they wouldn’t take me because I wasn’t a son of a gardener, however after the war we tried again and by this time we had some very good friends, one who was the scout master as I said, but he was also in the Scottish, Scottish office during the war, he spent a lot of time in Edinburgh, and he got to know one of the professors in the botanic gardens, and I asked him if he could do anything to help us, which he did, and after being demobbed, for, I think about three weeks, we joined the Royal Botanic Gardens as a probationer. [laughs] One of the highlights of that was, at this time, it’s coming off this altogether, but there was a tree forgotten tree, a lost tree Metasequoia, which botanists from China in 1939 had found just the remains of this tree, had been lost for a century or something like that, and he was going to go back out again and see if he could find anymore but the Chinese, he was Chinese, Chinese obviously during the wartime didn’t have any money or anything to do, so he had said he’d seen it in 1939. In 1944, the Americans decided that they would put, give them money to go out back again to see if he could find it, which they did, and he found the tree and collected seeds from it, the seeds went as normally to various botanic gardens throughout the world, and then the UK, twelve seeds came to Edinburgh University, twelve to Cambridge and twelve to Kew, and I was at the botanic gardens in Edinburgh at that time and I got the opportunity to sow these twelve seeds, and now there’s millions of the trees growing, they were propagated afterwards from cuttings and that, so that was one of the major things I think in that [laughs]
CB: So, that’s in Edinburgh
DF: That’s in Edinburgh
CB: Where you were a probationer
DF: Yeah
CB: How long did you do that?
DF: We, we, the idea was to be a probationer and then either go to the rubber or the tea plantations abroad, or if there was any good jobs going in the UK, take that on, the difficulty in that, that the colonies didn’t want the British people after the war, they were doing it all themselves, so that sort of fell through. In the meantime, the Forestry Commission research branch, and it was a mister [pause]
SF: Edwards, was it?
DF: No, [pause] the one before that [pause] anyway he, he was Scottish research officer for the Forestry Commission, and he came in to the botanics one day when I was there, and when you started botanics you had to do a project, the project that I took to do, I had been looking at [unclear] books from the forestry on that and the Christmas trees at that time were in demand, but they had a problem because it was Norway spruce they used, and generally speaking in the spring, those trees got frost damage which spoiled them, but I found it was two different types of trees, one that flushed early and one that flushed later, and what I done when I got to the botanics, I got two thousand cuttings from each type of tree and planted them in pots, and it was when he came there he saw all these pots lying there and said, ‘what’s going on here?’
[phone rings]
DF: He said, ‘oh let’s [inaudible]
[interview paused]
CB: Story there, so you, you were interrupted by the phone
DF: Yeah
CB: Yeah
DF: So, we had these ready cuttings all in
CB: In pots, yeah
SF: [talking on phone]
DF: He came along and said, ‘what’s going on here?’ and one of the other probationers said, ‘well you’d better ask Donald, he’s across there, he’ll tell you,’ so I told him what we were doing, you know, and said, ‘well, do you want to go into research?’ I said, ‘well, I’ll have to think about it,’ he said, ‘well, we’re at the moment looking for people to come and into the Forestry Commission research, we want to increase it after, we done it after the first World War, and the second World War we are going to [unclear] going to increase the whole policy in forestry, we are going to build up more planting then,’ and I said, ‘well give me time to think,’ so we did take another three month and he came in again and said, ‘well if you wish you can start with us anytime you want,’ I said, ‘what’s the duty like?’ ‘good,’ so we left the botanics and joined them, and the first job I was then, was on the [unclear] department, which was travelling the country picking out various plantations of trees, different ages, measuring them up and getting a volume, which was going to be used for all the tables for the future
SF: [inaudible whispering]
DF: So, we measured all the trees up, we used to do that in the summer and then in the winter we used to go back to the office and work out all this, and these tables are still used today
[background noise, cups rattling]
DF: And, about the cuttings, they were sufficient survived and they were by the Forestry Commission and they were planted in a forest in south Scotland, and last I heard about
[loud cup rattling]
CB: [whispers] I’ll do it
DF: Was that
CB: [whispers] Keep talking
[cups rattling]
DF: In 1995
[loud crash and smash]
DF: They were growing and had reached the height of a hundred feet
[loud footsteps]
SF: Thank you
DF: They’d been planted in twenty-five groups, like a chequer board, twenty-five trees in each group, and the last I heard was as I say, in 1995 was still growing, you could still see the chequered in the air in the south forest
[kettle boiling]
CB: So, this was a beginning of a glittering career for you?
DF: It was
CB: So, where did you move from? In the Forestry Commission they moved you about, to where?
DF: In the Forestry Commission, they well, we didn’t move very far, in the Forestry, this I done forty seven, forty eight until we, as I said, we married in 1948, August seven 1948, and after that I asked for a transfer back to a base, and I was given Tulliallan, now Tulliallan is the same place as where I was born I was born in Tulliallan in some, in 1923, and also at that time the manager of Tulliallan nursery was a Mr Simpson and he bought the chickens and hens that my Father sold to him before he left there to go into Fife, now it becomes rather personal this because eventually, we went back to Tulliallan and then
[phone rings continually]
DF: Mr Simpson had been manager of this nursery and acres nursery when he came out the first World War, now at that time
[laughter]
[phone ceases ringing]
DF: The research, here Mr Simpson was the old type of person and he didn’t think that people should have been not in the war at all, his, his son was an objector to it, so when anybody came round there, all his junior staff was people who hadn’t been during the war, in forestry itself was people that had never been, so when research started there, when they went to ask him for something, he just said, no you can’t do this, I’m not going to do that, I don’t think you are the right people to do that. Anyway, I went there and at that time it was a, Ferguson was the name of the research forest at that time, and we had a meeting with him, ‘what do you want to do?’ so I said, ‘I want to do research on nurseries,’ and he’d got it all here. He says, ‘I don’t think you’ll manage to do that,’ and I said, ‘why?’, so, ‘Mr Simpson won’t give us any land, he’s just dead against us,’ and I said, ‘whys that?’, and he said, ‘I don’t know I think it’s probably because we’ve never been to the war,’ so I said, ‘well I’ve never been let down by anybody before, I’ll go and see him.’ So, the research people had been there probably six months and I went to see Mr Simpson and went into his office and he said, ‘I suppose you’re another one of these people,’ I said, ‘what people?’ ‘who’ve never been to the war,’ I said, ‘well I am, I have been it was hard,’ ‘what were you doing in the war?’ ‘flying Lancasters,’ and he jumped off his seat, came round and shook our hand [laughs] and he said, ‘I remember a Mr Fraser, twenty odd years ago being in a lodge down there,’ I said, ‘that was my Father,’ and he said, ‘yeah, I bought his chickens from him,’ [laughs] and I went back to, [unclear sentence] I went back to the research people and said, ‘look we can do anything we want and [unclear] go through with it Mr Simpson,’ ‘how did you manage that?’ I said, ‘just by talking to him,’ and that, and we became great friends and he’d never been on holiday since he went there, and this year, that was the year we were there, he wanted to go away for three weeks, and believe it or not, Sylvie and I went into his house, and looked after his house while he took three weeks holiday, they, they couldn’t think at that without, and we were even there, oh we used to go round and see him and after we left there, you know, that on the way to go round from Fife to Edinburgh, if it was very bad weather, was round the road and across the Kincardine Bridge and back round the other side and that, and we used to go round that way and see him. And, this night, what 1970s, we called round and his missus said, [unclear] ‘Arthur is, he’s had a stroke but he won’t allow me to get the doctor,’ she said, ‘I knew you were coming tonight,’ so I said, well we weren’t, we just because we couldn’t get back to [unclear] ‘I knew you were coming,’ so I said, ‘that’s alright I’ll sort him out, so I went down, got the keys for the office, phoned the doctor and then he went to stay in one of the new towns near Kirkcaldy in Fife, and we saw him until the end. After he died, it must have been 1980 odd, we went to see her when she went back to the west of Scotland with her son, was this time but he was still a known objector to the war, so that was that, a funny situation
CB: You’ve raised a really interesting point here, that the business of LMF, which we’ll come back to, but here you have the situation of a conscientious objector
DF: Yes
CB: And the effect on his father. So, what was his father’s attitude to his son?
DF: Not very good, he didn’t, he didn’t go and
CB: Did he disown him or did he simply
DF: Well, he ignored him
CB: Have nothing to do with him?
DF: But, as I say, after we went, that same year he went to see his son and he spent three weeks with him
CB: And he did what?
DF: He spent three weeks with him on holiday
CB: Oh, I see, with him
DF: With him
CB: Yes
DF: Yeah, so we had sort of sorted that out
CB: The reconciliation took place because of your?
DF: Yes
CB: Very touching
DF: It is very touching
CB: Hmm
DF: There we are. So, so anyway we joined the team at Tulliallan, we done the experiments there on various things within the nursery itself on, weed control was one of the main things, the cost of weed control was enormous because you had people sitting on seed beds, months and months in the summer, just pulling up weeds, so we tried different chemicals and that until we got the right one that would do that we also wanted to make sure that we grew a seedling large enough in one year to transplant, line out, transplant it out after one year, at the moment, at that time it was taking three years instead of one year, so we’d get a plant fit for a forest planting, because the Forestry Commission was going to increase a lot. As a one, a two-year-old plant and believe it or not, after so many years we managed it and they cut, well the chemicals and that helped to cut down the whole system and that
CB: Did you then do cross fertilisation how did you manage to?
DF: Well, the cross fertilisation was another part of it, from then I stayed there until we got a house there in 1950, stayed there until 52 and then the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh where I’d been previously, they decided they wanted to do experiments for students on forestry, so this landed me very well, and the Edinburgh university, the university bought a small estate outside Edinburgh, south of Edinburgh called Bush estate, and there was the land where they were bringing all their outside interests together, the veterinary college. The potato industry they were doing [unclear] about potatoes, the horticulture, bee keeping, all the departments at the university had an external department out there, and this forestry also wanted, the university wanted a forestry section there to, so I was posted there as a research forester for south east Scotland, and covered the botanic gardens and the Edinburgh university at the same time. We used to teach the students how to grow trees during the summer and Easter holidays and that, they all had to do so much practical work at that time before you could be, take the course, and then built up relations there, I was there for, too 1971, that’s a long time from 53 to 71. We built up a complete structure of research in that area of south Scotland, as you know south Scotland had probably more
[loud bang]
DF: Dukes and Earls and that, then anywhere in the UK across the borders and that, and they got all them interested in the forestry, and so much so, I think you’re talking about cross pollination and that, one of the things we did during the fifties and sixties was select the best trees in the UK
[sound of footsteps]
DF: And we called them plus trees [pause]
[background noise]
CB: We are just going to pause for a mo.
DF: Bills and all that
AM: Yeah
DF: So, they wouldn’t accept that, funny enough, after time, I used to lecture to the schools
AM: Yeah
DF: [laughs] on forestry and tree breeding and that but they wouldn’t accept
[loud stirring of cups]
DF: The Forestry Commission at our house
[loud bang]
DF: Was down in the New Forest
AM: Yeah
DF: And they used to run courses there every year, and one of the courses was on nursery technique to cover the trade and the Forestry Commission nurseries
[background noise]
DF: And who took the courses? But, me [laughs]
CB: But they didn’t accept you because you didn’t have a university degree?
DF: That’s right
CB: Right, there’s obviously a logic in that, but we don’t know what it is [laughs]
AM: You’re not switched on, are you?
CB: Yes
AM: You’re not switched on?
CB: Yeah, we are
AM: Sorry
CB: Right
DF: So, yes, we went to Bush as we said, it was a covered the whole of
CB: Whole of the UK
DF: The UK
CB: Hmm
DF: And, we had selection for plus trees as we called them, that was the tree which was ten percent
[crockery noise]
DF: Better than the trees round about it in any plantation, the straightness of stem can make it a perfect tree to be ten percent better than the others, and we selected these and put a yellow band around them and then we went back later and collected
[crockery noise]
DF: [unclear] material for grafting from these trees, we grafted these trees onto other plants
Unknown female: [inaudible whispering]
DF: Where we, all this as done for the north of England and that was at Bush nursery, I think, Sylvie helped us and with that, that we used to do a whole day grafting and that, on the nursery, four thousand a year we used to do, and this applied for seed orchards being planted within the UK, but all that grafting was done, and I done the whole lot
CB: Fantastic. Just a final one before we pause again. How did you come to move to the south from Edinburgh?
DF: Well, this is later on. I left the Forestry Commission in 1971.
CB: Yeah
DF: For the same reason as you just said, I wasn’t a UK graduate
CB: Right
DF: And I joined the economic forestry group
CB: Right
DF: Which was the
CB: This er
DF: Largest forester group in Europe as their nursery director
CB: Right, right we’ll stop there now
CB: Because that was a commercial enterprise
DF: That’s right, yeah
CB: Yeah. Okay I’m stopping now
[interview paused]
CB: So, we’re talking about change to a commercial world
DF: Yeah
CB: What was the name of the organisation and how did you come to join that?
DF: The economic forestry group was the name of the organisation [pause]
CB: Yeah, and what did you do? Why did you go there?
[paper rustling]
DF: I fell out with the Forestry Commission research branch after all these years, and the same thing as you were talking about before, not being a university graduate. The northern research station was built in the area of Bush and it was finished in 1969. Now, I’d been running the forestry research in east Scotland for twenty odd years, and people just used to call in as they’re going into Edinburgh if they were wanting any advice and that, and just saw me and went to me again, and the research station came and they bought in all the different people on, what er, entomology, pathology, and bought all these heads of department in and they all had offices in there, but, and the people were coming up from the service when they were meant to research. Reception said, ‘oh can I see Donald,’ and the girl in there said, ‘oh no, but you can see doctor so and so,’ ‘oh I don’t want to see him, when will Donald be in?’
[laughter]
DF: ‘oh he’ll be in tonight,’ you know, ‘oh I’ll give him a ring tonight.’ [laughs] And this happened, and they got so fed up with it in there that, and I also had an office in there, and I had a secretary also, they all had to put the, all their requirements through the, this pool doing the typing and all that, [unclear] so I was getting preferential treatment from everybody, and the head was, was in charge of research at that time and he collared me one day and said, ‘look Don we’ve got a problem here, you are being posted to Perthshire,’ I said, ‘I’m not, what reason? Because I says, ‘there’s no research there,’ ‘no it’s to a unit,’ I said, ‘no I’m not,’ I said, ‘well, I joined the Forestry Commission research branch, I’ve got a note to that effect from JB McDonald when we started, you can’t do that,’ ‘well that’s what’s going to happen,’ and I said, ‘well, if that’s what’s going to happen there’s my resignation there now,’ and I left like that, [laughs] so they didn’t even [laughs]
AM: Bit of a shock
SF: Well it was because Brian was only three, I think it was, and I thought, hmm this is going to be interesting [laughs]
DF: So, anyway the forester group had an office in Edinburgh and we’d been dealing with planning with plants anyway, and we knew them quite well, and I was up there on an interview to become one of their managers, area managers, and we were having this interview and the phone went, and this was their headquarters saying did I know they had a vacancy for a nurseryman to take over their nurseries, running the nurseries, I said, ‘no I hadn’t heard anything about it,’ so they said would you like to
SF: Have an interview for that
DF: Interview on that, and I said, ‘yeah,’ and they said, ‘can you go down to,’ where was it? Just outside
SF: Farnham
DF: No, just below Oxford. I said, ‘yeah, I’ll go down tomorrow,’ so I went down
SF: Oh yes
DF: And had the interview, two days later I got the job and that was the start of it, yeah, but it was a, it was a challenging job because economic forestry group at that time, was doing all the planting, you know you could get grants for planting and all this, and a grant for good one thing was ninety percent of that and
SF: Tax
DF: Tax was more or less you were paying ten p in the pound for your forestry and that, and that’s a lot of people doing it and that, but when I joined them they had all different people growing the plants for them which, we were going to be responsible for giving them the best quality plants at the right price, we had to control all that ourselves, so
[phone rings]
CB: Hang on
DF: So, if we were going to control all
SF: [on phone] Hello, yes
DF: The quality we had we had to have it all in our own hands
SF: [on phone] Yes, I’m here
DF: At that time, they had
SF: [on phone] can you hear me now? Yes, I can hear you
DF: Getting, growing procedures to various nurseries throughout, throughout the country, in the north and Northern Ireland, used to grow seven million for them and the various small companies used to supply them with plants, but to me that wasn’t good enough, we were going to be responsible for that, so within two years, at that time we had two nurseries running forestry, one in Scotland in a little mill just outside Perth and one a mile from here just up the road, and that was the two nurseries that belonged to economic forestry group, then another two that was down in Devizes and then Cambridge, which was used for high quality trees and shrubs for the different markets, so we decided that to stop all the contracts we had with Northern Ireland and Northern Ireland decided to take me to court for breaking contracts, which I said, you can’t have no money so [laughs] that, anyway they dropped that so that was seven million we dropped that to sell. Nurses in the north of Scotland was also growing for us, and we cut all these, increased our own volume in our own nurseries, doubled the size of both nurseries and in the end we were growing, the company was using forty million trees a year and I decided we didn’t want to grow forty million and we grew twenty percent less, so we started growing two million of our own stock which gave us a market still market in the [unclear] if it was a bad year for one species we would still be in the market to get that species from other people, and the, that worked very well. The people that didn’t join us afterwards, used to come to say, ‘what provenances of pine do you want?’, I would say, ‘so and so’, ‘oh’, ‘the next time I orders I’ll get that in case you want them,’ ‘so we will probably want them,’ and when it started before that I used to go to the nurseries and say, ‘have you got any Scots pine?,’ ‘yes,’ ‘what origin?’ [laughs] ‘er what origin do you want?’ and I would say, ‘oh [unclear] for the north west,’ ‘oh that’s what they are,’ ‘come off it, can I see your books?’ [laughs] many times it wasn’t the book they give you the sort you wanted, so afterwards we got known as the person that if you wanted anything, contact me, and it was a responsible thing, because we were responsible for the whole of the UK more or less, had we chosen the wrong provenance or anything of these things it would have been disastrous for the private sector and that, because we were selling plants that were planted by our company for their future, you know, but it worked out well. The only time I used to have to, had the possibility of stopping any planting that was being done, if I didn’t think it was the right provenance for that site, which meant a lot of travelling, we used to do fifty thousand miles a year looking at different sites to make sure that the right species and the right provenance was going on. Scot erm, [unclear] spruce was the main species and that was the one that needed all the rain, but it gave the best quality tree in the end, but there was a range of that available from Oregon up to Alaska, right down the west coast of America which meant that if you got, say trees from Washington, half way up, they were very fast growing, but they couldn’t stand the winter frosts on certain sites, on the other hand if you wanted to, to put them on a high elevation to increase your level of trees, get them from Alaska, and you could plant them there, and of course people at that time, didn’t want to have different species but one species on the site, so they could all get off together, so we used to, at the bottom of the valley, probably only put in plants from Washington, and as you go further up Queen Charlotte Islands and at the top just to get the next twenty feet of growth, these high ones from Alaska and that’s what made the difference between these people making a profit and not making a profit. On the other hand, there’s of course, that once they were selected and that, initially the seed was producing something like fifteen, sixteen percent of quality trees per thousand, after the selections were done, and I was talking about plus trees and all that, but that quality went up to sixty percent, and then when the seed orders came in it went up to eighty percent, so eighty percent of the plants planted on the hillside was becoming timber size instead of sixteen percent a few years back, and that’s what saved the UK
CB: Amazing
DF: It is
CB: The erm, you worked on continuously did you or did you, until what age?
DF: I worked on until, I was still working when I was eighty, eighty odd
CB: Right
DF: And even when I retired I joined Booker, who was in agriculture and forestry and became their advisor on forestry for, until they pulled out in two hundred, two thousand and two, I think it was
CB: During your long career in forestry, what papers or books did you produce in support of the cause?
DF: None in that really, no, it’s all just making profits for the company
CB: Yeah. Can we go back now to the wartime? Your experiences include twelve raids on Berlin which at that time was a very difficult time
DF: Yeah, it used to
CB: How did you, how did you feel about those raids?
DF: Well, it was always said at a few, and this came from an office, used to say us, when you joined them, I think they used to say, ‘what do you intend doing?’ and said, ‘flying for thirty ops,’ and said, ‘you’ll be lucky,’ so I said, ‘why?’ he said, ‘well the normal time here is five weeks,’ I said, ‘oh that’s a lot of nonsense, surely,’ so he said, ‘well, we’ll wait and see, but you’re on Berlin tonight,’ and I said, ‘yeah that’s all alright, you know,’ ‘well, if you do Berlin once, you’ve done alright, if you do it twice, you’ve done very good, you won’t do a third time,’ I said, ‘why?’ ‘nobody’s done a third time,’ I said, ‘well I’ll proper show you,’ and that’s the attitude we took. I, I knew, and that in fairness, but if I could get that airplane off the ground with five or six tons of bombs on board, and standing on that in the aircraft with two hundred gallons of fuel in your wings, if we could get off the ground, we’d come back again, and that happened
CB: You were clearly hit by flak quite a number of times?
DF: Yes, oh we were
CB: Did you get engine out more than once?
DF: We had engines out, two, yeah, I would have to look up the book but probably three or four times, once we had two out on the same side, on the starboard side, but we managed to get down and that, and once our undercarriage got hit and it wouldn’t come down but just by doing that, quite a high pull up, it came down, it locked and that allowed us. These things you [unclear] as you went along
CB: Sure. What were the ways of getting the undercarriage down if the hydraulics didn’t do it?
DF: There was a hand, hand
CB: Was that a pneumatic pump or was it a?
DF: It was a hand, yeah you just pumped it back and forwards and that, it wasn’t a very good way of doing it, but I think we all knew how to use it once and other times
CB: One other time?
DF: Yeah
CB: So what sort of damage, other damage did you get to the aircraft?
DF: Well, we often had our communications cut off, but somehow on three or four occasions I managed to get our intercom going again which was the main thing, because even if our oxygen was gone we could come down to ten, ten thousand feet and cope without oxygen so that was alright, you knew you could, the cables were running inside the aircraft, so you, you could sometimes spot where you could do it, and I always carried extra, whatever we could get, bits of string and wires and all that, very good, join up things and that
CB: So, what sort of repairs did you have to do when you were in the aircraft on, on sorties?
DF: It was only small things like that, you could only do, it means sometimes you would see where there was a break in the pipeline, as long as you knew where the pipes were running and that, that’s one thing we studied correct a lot or the heating to your different persons, I mean the, all the heating went into the, underneath the navigator’s seat, it all came from ducts in the engines to there, and he of course would occasionally turn it off because he got too hot, and the other [laughs] members suffered because of that, but the main thing was the mid upper and rear gunner was to, suffered, because temperatures of minus forty, if their suits didn’t work there was a problem
CB: The heated suits?
DF: The heated suits, yeah
CB: As the engineer, what was your, the aircraft is ready to go, brakes off, gathering speed on the runway, what are you doing as the engineer during that period
DF: Well
CB: As you get airborne?
DF: We, we split that up between the pilot and myself
CB: Hmm, hmm
DF: The pilot revved up the engines, as soon as they were at their peak I took over the four throttles
CB: The throttles? Right
DF: And he took, because that was a, took hold of the steering
CB: Hmm, hmm
DF: And he looked after that, I looked after the engines and the programme to push up there, the throttles, and if we was up we weren’t going to get off on time, I would put it through the gate up to the, which I didn’t like doing because it didn’t do any good to your engines
CB: Right, okay
DF: But occasionally
CB: So, this is an important point really because here you are going along needing to get airborne, how soon did you take the throttles after you started rolling?
DF: Just as soon as it started rolling
CB: You did
DF: Yeah
CB: Right, and so you would advance them slowly?
DF: I’d advance them, and advancing the starboard, that little bit
CB: Starboard outer?
DF: Yes, the starboard
CB: To avoid swing?
DF: To avoid a swing
CB: Hmm
DF: And keep it going like that
CB: And then all of them would be level?
DF: That’s right
CB: So, could you take off without going through the gate?
DF: Occasionally, yes if
CB: If you were fully loaded?
DF: Yes, if we weren’t going too far
CB: Hmm
DF: You know
CB: Oh right, so lighter fuel load? Okay. So, when you say going through the gate, what does that actually mean? In terms of, to the engines?
DF: It meant it was going through, up to a different level of speed, the engines were going up, the
CB: So is this
DF: Screaming, screaming at you
CB: Is this purely throttle or have you got a super charger coming in?
DF: Super, it was a super charger coming in
CB: Hmm
DF: Yeah, but I didn’t like doing that
CB: No. So, in practical terms you can get off with that, how soon would you return to ordinary engine power?
DF: When we were off the ground, the next thing we’d be together round the garage shop
CB: Right
DF: And, as soon as that was up then we’d pull our engines back, just too sufficient to keep travelling up to a certain height at the speed which the navigator wanted us to be
CB: Right
DF: You know
CB: So, you take off, you’re out of the gate, what are you doing about engine synchronisation, how are you dealing with that?
DF: Yes, that, that was one of the things that caused a lot of problems, you couldn’t get them synchronised, it took sometimes a little bit of working on them, one and the other to get them, but once you got them synchronised
CB: How do you do synchronising?
DF: Just by listening to the engines, just
CB: And you were adjusting the pitch?
DF: Yeah, a little bit but just touching your throttle now and again, just watching them, yeah, you were level or the noise was acceptable
CB: Hmm,
[unknown coughing]
CB: Because in practical terms, synchronising is avoiding vibration
DF: Yeah, yeah, that’s right
CB: Hmm
DF: But, it could, it was done correct, but going well
CB: You talked about erm, the mid upper gunner in one situation, so what was that? Could you just describe the event and what happened?
DF: Yes, the mid upper gunner, that’s when we lost him, that was, that was a trip to Berlin, I think we were probably half an hour away from the big city itself
CB: On the way there?
DF: And, on the way there, yes
CB: Right
DF: And, we were hit by flak
CB: Hmm, hmm
DF: We lost the starboard inner engine, it went on fire, and we lost all the communication in the aircraft itself, and the, nobody could hear anything at all, and that, so as I said before, I used to take on the job of watching the gunners, because you was looking out the side window and that, you could see the turrets swinging
CB: Yep
DF: Backward and forward, and this day his wasn’t, it was just steady and not moving, so after sorting out the engine problems and that, cutting off the engine, I decided as I said, to go back and have a look and see if he was alright, I thought he’d just hadn’t any communication and he was just wondering what to do, you know, and was sitting in the turret waiting for things to happen, so, as I say when we got back I tapped the wireless operator and he came back with us, and we met him just going out the back door you know, his hand was still just on that, opening the door, which I managed to, well, the way we done it was, I hit him over the arms, was the oxygen bottle I think, otherwise I think he would have beat us you know, and then we got him back onto the bed and that was it
CB: What was his composure or lack of it, what did it look like?
DF: [sighs] A man that was determined to get out, that’s what it appeared to be, and I think what happened, he must have thought that, he had seen the engine on fire, he’d heard nothing throughout the aircraft itself, I think he thought that the orders had been given to abandon the aircraft, but because he probably thought he was the only one that was cut off from the, not hearing, and he was going to make himself out, but he forgot to take his parachute
CB: Hmm, so you and the wireless operator grabbed him, what did you then do?
DF: We, we bought him back to the middle of the aircraft
CB: To the couch?
DF: To the couch
CB: Hmm
DF: And put him there and if I remember right, we put a strap round him just to keep him on the couch and that, and of course we, it had to be reported when we came down, and that was
CB: Right, so when you got down, what did you do first then?
DF: First down, we, we asked for an ambulance and that took him to the
CB: Sick quarters
DF: Sick quarters
CB: Hmm, hmm
DF: And, as I say we didn’t see him after that
CB: Right
DF: We just reported it. The, the, one thing, he’d been taken to hospital and that was the end then
CB: What was the reaction of the rest of the crew, including the pilot?
DF: Not very good, we didn’t think it was necessary, we thought he should be back maybe after two days or something like that, but then we were told that he wouldn’t be back and we weren’t very happy about it but there’s nothing much you can, you can do
CB: No
DF: He’d done twenty-one ops, so I think he was, there couldn’t be much wrong with him if he’d done twenty-one, it wasn’t as if he’d only done one, you know, but there we are that’s how it goes [pause]
CB: And er, to what extent did you as a crew, know what happened to people who were classified LMF?
DF: We didn’t know at all, and I don’t think, somehow, I don’t think we wanted to know
CB: No
DF: To be honest. We, I don’t think we took in what we saw in the morning when we went in for breakfast, when all the empty tables
CB: Empty seat
DF: Empty seats, I don’t think we really took in that was another, well it was two crews, three crews, four crews probably, but for ages that would two men, later two people like yourselves, you know, I don’t think we took that in, probably didn’t want to take it in
CB: No. So, it was a topic that was discussed later or not?
DF: It was one that was never discussed
CB: Right
DF: No, and even when we landed at Wickenby after that, the only two people that knew, a few of us alone was myself and the pilot, we didn’t tell the rest of the crew, but no we never discussed that at all
CB: The [pause] remaining ten ops, you had other people come in, was it ten different people, was it
DF: No, it
CB: Only a small number and how did they integrate?
DF: They integrated very well, there was one came in for four or five, he was just finishing his tour, and then another one, I think on the same situation and I think about two to finish off the tour between them, and it got
CB: How would people like that be on their own?
DF: Probably they were sick the night the aircraft went out and the aircraft was lost
CB: Ah
DF: With a different gunner on or whatever he was, yeah
CB: Right
DF: And that’s why we wouldn’t fly, leaving one of our, without our whole crew
CB: Yeah
DF: Or giving a crew member to another crew
CB: Right
DF: We’d rather all go and that, that was the same situation, but we didn’t get that, so good
CB: But erm, in terms of background knowledge of what happened to LMF people, what did you understand was their fate?
DF: [pause] Something I’ve never thought very much about, but I knew they were taken off operations, I didn’t know what happened to them after that, I probably didn’t want to know [pause]
CB: Okay. Thank you very much
[interview paused]
CB: So, we talked about a huge range of things and one of the points is that you mentioned is that as soon as operations finished, the crew was dispersed, so during war time you didn’t actually meet up at all, but after the war and with the formation of the 101 association, what links did you have with former members of the crew?
DF: Well, the first one was with [pause] the wireless operator. I’d written a small article for the association booklet and his son phoned us up the following week, and said, ‘was I the Donald Fraser who flew with my Father during the war?’ and I said, ‘yes I was,’ and he said to me, ‘well, he’s not very well at the moment but if you’re ever down this way,’ that was to Exeter, ‘call in, and if he’s in good health, we’ll go and see him,’ and I said, ‘well yes, if we come down to Woolacombe,’ that’s just who the lady was on the phone, Sylvie was talking to her, and we said, ‘yes, if we come down we’ll call in,’ which we did, and he was in reasonably good health, and we went to see him and saw him at home, and his wife, and we stayed there about two, two and a half hours and it was an unusual meeting and that, because we hadn’t seen him for probably seventy years, and then we met him the following year, and the year after that his son phoned us to say his father had died, so we went to his funeral and represented the squadron at his funeral
CB: And in those conversations with him, did you open the hangar doors or were you talking about other things in life?
DF: I think we were talking about other things in life
CB: Rather than your war time experiences?
DF: Yeah
SF: I think so, I don’t think you really touched on
DF: No, no. Then funnily enough, some weekends we’d go to a small airfield just outside Shrewsbury here
SF: Sleap
DF: Known as Sleap
CB: Oh, Sleap yes
DF: Yes, and this time, just about Christmas because I was showing them what the Christmas lunch was like during 1943, and I showed them, then this other person that was there said, ‘can I have a look at that?’ I said, ‘yes you can,’ which he did and he said
SF: Yes, but it was because all your crew had signed
DF: Yeah, I was going to say
SF: That
DF: They’d all signed
SF: The brochure or didn’t
DF: The menu
CB: Yes
DF: And they said did they all sign that?’ and I said, ‘yes,’ and he said, ‘well, that one there, Grant, he’s one of our family,’ I said, ‘how do you know that?’ ‘because the way he writes his w and his g’s, ’the whole family used to give him problems at schooling on not using the correct way of writing,’ so it worked out
[paper rustling]
DF: That
CB: That’s Jimmy Grant
DF: That’s Jimmy Grant
CB: Yes
DF: Worked out that the person we see here was, Jimmy Grant was his uncle, and he was [laughs]
CB: Amazing
DF: And we saw him last weekend
CB: Did you? [laughs]
SF: Yes
DF: [laughs] He comes and does a lot of the work within the small, we’ve got a small
SF: Museum
DF: Museum there, he does a lot of work within the museum, framing up things and putting things in [unclear] and all that sort of work, so [laughs]
CB: Perhaps a final question, you said that at the end of your tour, you didn’t know that you had all been awarded DFM’s
DF: No
CB: And, it wasn’t until later that you had a notification, so the first question is, how did that get communicated to you?
DF: Well, it was only to me the one, I didn’t know the whole crew had got it
CB: Right
DF: Until this day, I would never have known, if it hadn’t been, since then we’ve met up with these crews and looking at the photograph of our rear gunner, Len Brooks, who is in there, he told us what happened, when we came, was near to the ground and that, about the chickens and that
CB: Yes
DF: He was in another book and his photograph was there along with one or two others, and I saw the DFM
CB: DFM
DF: Was on
CB: Right
DF: His tunic, so I knew he’d got it also
CB: So then, fast forward to when you went to the palace. What was the process that you went through in order, because this is VE Day?
DF: Yes
CB: And, you go to the palace before the
DF: That’s right
CB: Decoration has been made
DF: Yes, absolutely
CB: So how did that unfold as a day?
DF: As a day, we got the, well I got the train from Grantham, my Mother and sister and that was on it before that, and we got into London about nine o’clock in the morning, and we had to be at Buckingham Palace at just before eleven, which we took a taxi obviously to there, we were there in plenty of time, and there was rows and rows of people taken into a large room, and sat there for a time, and then just on eleven o’clock, the King himself came into the front of the room, and they started then, started to call out names, and we went forward and met him, the usual thing, handshake and ‘what did you do, which squadron were you with?’ I replied, ‘well, 101,’ you know, ‘good, a good squadron,’ something else he said but I can’t remember, just [unclear] and then we got it pinned on and that was it, you know. We, after that, I think, must have been half past twelve or one o’clock, something like that, we left there and I took my sister and Mother to the hotel where they were staying overnight, and I made my way to the station to catch the train back to Grantham and I got there, I suppose early evening didn’t I [laughs] and had to walk
SF: Ooh, no, it was the middle of the afternoon
DF: Was it? Oh, I must have got an earlier train probably a train at three o’clock or something
CB: Did they give you a, how many people were there and were they mixed forces or only airforce, in your batch?
DF: No, all airforce
CB: Oh
DF: No, they were all airforce
CB: Did they give you refreshments afterwards or just say that’s it?
DF: As far I, I can’t, I don’t think we did get any refreshments at all, I think we just did that for a small time, whether that changed because it was VE day or not, I don’t know, but London was wild with
CB: And when you walked out of the palace, then what was the reception?
DF: It was a wild place and there was people everywhere just, mostly just having a good time and that, and of course it got worse as the day went on, well, well we didn’t go back to squadron for I think two days after that
CB: Oh. So, you walk out of the palace, how did you feel about that?
DF: Oh, a little bit of excitement, but quite pleased, I can’t remember much
CB: The pride of Mother and sister
DF: Hmm
SF: And your aunt
DF: Hmm
CB: 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 Donald Keith Fraser, One
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Chris Brockbank
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
2016-11-04
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AFraserDK161104
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
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
Cathie Hewitt
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.
Germany
Great Britain
England--Yorkshire
England--Leicestershire
England--Lincolnshire
Germany--Berlin
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1943
1944
Description
An account of the resource
Donald Fraser grew up in Fifeshire, and worked in forestry until he volunteered into the RAF in 1942, aged eighteen. He trained as a flight engineer and completed a tour of operations with 101 Squadron. He recalls operations to Berlin, being hit by anti-aircraft fire, how the mid upper gunner tried to jump from the aircraft, and landing in the wrong airfield in the fog. After he completed his tour he became an instructor, and before he was demobbed he was offered a commission but decided to return to forestry work. He talks extensively about his career working in forestry until his retirement in his eighties and about meeting up with some of his crew seventy years after the war.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
01:59:40 audio recording
101 Squadron
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
Distinguished Flying Medal
flight engineer
Lancaster
RAF Bottesford
RAF Lindholme
RAF Ludford Magna
RAF St Athan
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/792/10773/ADavisAW180116.2.mp3
6f54de70999539d29257311a60350c69
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
Davis, Alan William
A W Davis
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Alan William Davis (1922 - 2021, 425834 Royal New Zealand Air Force). He flew operations as a wireless operator / air gunner with 75 Squadron.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-01-16
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
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Davis, AW
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
GT: This is Tuesday the 16th of January 2018, and I am at the home of Alan William Davis, born 25 July 1922, in Rangiora, New Zealand, RNZAF wireless operator/air gunner, NZ 425834, Warrant Officer, near Amberley, Christchurch, in New Zealand. Alan joined the RNZAF in 1942. He trained in Canada and joined 75 New Zealand Squadron at Mepal, in March 1945. He completed nine operations, three Manna drops, three Exodus and several Baedeker trips, then moving to Spilsby in July for Tiger Force training. Alan returned after war’s cessation and, to New Zealand, in December of 1945. Alan thank you for welcoming me into your home. Can you give me a little bit of your memories of why you wanted to join the Air Force and where you did your training?
AD: Well mainly I think I had the choice of either the Army or the Air Force, I decided to go in the Air Force, but I also did three months in the Army, beforehand.
GT: Where did you join up and where did you do your training in New Zealand?
AD: Went up to Ohakea for a start, in the Air Force Defence Unit, and then we went to Rotorua, to learn wireless, Morse Code and so forth. Then unfortunately I had to have my tonsils out and I didn’t go with the group that I was supposed to, to Canada, I didn’t go till three months later. So I only ever saw one of the original group I was with, in England.
GT: Whereabouts did you do your training in Canada?
AD: Calgary and then we went to Mossbank, for gunnery.
GT: So you did a mixture of the wireless operator and gunnery training, and effectively you -
AD: Yes. The Bolingbrokes and such like.
GT: Became a wireless operator. What was the Bolingbroke like?
AD: Oh, they weren’t bad, course everything was covered in snow then. It was quite interesting, I was quite good at shooting.
GT: Excellent. Did you get excellent?
AD: Well I come third out of about four hundred with competition with all different weapons, machine guns and revolvers and some others.
GT: And then once you’d completed your training, you sailed across the Atlantic to England. Eventful? Did you, any German submarines around?
AD: No, the boat went on its own, it wasn’t in a convoy and I was on the rocket guns. What I was supposed to do I don’t know, [chuckle] but they got me on those and we arrived. It was Isle de France, the boat we went on. Don’t know what happened to it later on, I think it burnt, caught fire in the harbour somewhere.
GT: And that was a luxurious cruise ship, wasn’t it. When you arrived in England they put you on to training units and you crewed up, that was -
AD: No, they didn’t, we went down to Brighton, and was there for a while and then they shipped us up to the North East coast of England, I can’t just remember the place, because D-Day was, getting ready for that. When we come back, everyone, and we crewed up and went to Westcott and Oakley and Bottesford for conversion.
GT: Yep. Your log book here has you at 11 OTU in the July and August, September of 1944. Can you remember when you crewed up? How did you meet up with your skipper and your other?
AD: Oh, we were just lining up there and the captain was sort of, the skipper was more or less picking the chaps he wanted. We had about one, two, three, four; started from the original one, the other three, the flight engineer, the bomb aimer - we were a bit hard on bomb aimers - ended up four of ‘em, and the mid upper gunner, he was changed.
GT: I see you did all your training on Wellington aircraft here, and your final tally and summary at Oakley, Westcott and 11 OTU all together, a total of eighty seven hours there. So from there you moved on to your Heavy Conversion Unit, so can you tell us a little bit about your movement to Lancasters from there?
AD: Yes. The first time we went up in Lancaster with the instructor, I looked out the left hand side and I saw two engines stopped. I looked out the other side and there was another one stopped: was flying on one engine! Saying don’t be worried, it was, still fly on one engine! Bit nervous for a start. [Chuckle]
GT: The pilot was stopping an engine for?
AD: Yes, just more or less showing our pilot that the plane was quite safe on one engine.
GT: And that was at Bottesford, 1668 HCW, HCU RAF Bottesford. And you were there from the beginning of December ’44 until the end of February ’45.
AD: Yeah. About six weeks longer than we should have been because bomb aimer trouble, one didn’t return.
GT: He went away on leave and didn’t come back.
AD: No. Waited round for weeks, they gave us a chap who’d already done a tour and he absolutely had the DT’s. He was shaking and hard to understand so after a while they took him off, gave us another one, he was quite good and then he got wounded on our fifth bombing trip, had to replace him.
GT: Gosh. From your HCU did you have a choice of where you were going to go? What squadron?
AD: No, they just, I can’t remember, I think we just went to 75.
GT: And your first flight, and first indeed operation, was on the 6th of March,1945.
AD: Wing Commander [indecipherable].
GT: Wing Commander [indecipherable] was your skipper, as wireless op, you finished and did there all the trips as a wireless op I see. So your first war op was the oil refineries at Salzbergen. Any trips of yours eventful were they?
AD: Yes. The fifth one where the bomb aimer was wounded, we lost, we had a bit of problems with the engine, wouldn’t hold, the inside left engine wouldn’t hold its revs. We went to briefing and the flight engineer said we’d take the, the engineer in charge or something said we’d take the spare aircraft. And when they finished briefing they said well they changed all the plugs on the original plane on the offending engine, so we took it. After we got over the English Channel a bit it started to misbehave, I thought was going to jump off the wing it was jumping around that much. Was misfiring so we had to feather it and then we had a discussion amongst the crew whether we’d drop our bombs and go back home or carry on, so we all agreed to carry on, but of course had to find our own way to the target, cause we couldn’t keep up with the others.
GT: It was successful in the end?
AD: [Indecipherable] Of course we got shot up, we saw three of our own planes shot down, we didn’t realise they were our squadron, till after we got home. One of the crews shared our hut. Some of them parachuted, pilot and the flight engineer they were down, watched it go all the way. Wasn’t on fire, it wasn’t smoking, it was just going like that, all the way down.
GT: Weaving from side to side.
AD: Went down. Splash of flame. Counted them as they jumped, there was five of them got out. There was one of them got there ready to jump and realised he had his parachute.
GT: What was the normal procedure if the crew was lost or missing? Did someone come in and collect all their belongings?
AD: Yes, it happened to us twice. The other crew, they crashed in training at Bottesford, and we heard them talking on the intercom, you know, like the what’you call it? The?
GT: Control tower?
AD: Control Tower, yeah. Evidently he wasn’t, the pilot wasn’t too good at night vision; he was trying to land too high. They told him to go round again. We got in and landed and were standing out on the runway waiting for the truck, saw this, saw this great flash of flame about three mile away, then the boom! When we got back to our hut the service police were there getting all their belongings.
GT: Just a training flight, too. So you completed nine war ops in total. Was any one of them outstanding in your mind?
AD: Just that one where we got shot up.
GT: What were you shot up by?
AD: Anti aircraft. Crack! Crack! Boy!
GT: You remember it.
AD: I remember it, getting closer and closer, you could hear them. When we went there we didn’t think we’d get through there were that many puffs of smoke about our height, there’d be be an odd one or two, all wee bit higher and off a bit, but boy, they were, they were thick.
GT: So you also carried out, and were part of, Operation Manna and were you briefed on what that was all about and what was to happen when you got there?
AD: The food dropping? We probably were but I can’t remember anything about it, really. Just except the flying there.
GT: And you were told that the Germans wouldn’t be shooting at you at all?
AD: Well, you don’t want take any risk, we’re supposed to come in at certain heights and get out soon as we dropped it, no buggering around, but we went down to Italy, I’ll tell you about that. Lucky we’re here!
GT: Oh well tell us about this trip, the trip to Italy, which one was that?
AD: [Laugh] No. That was after the war!
GT: Okay, so the Operation Manna stuff, you were told later on that it was to save the starving Dutch people.
AD Yes, we probably knew from the beginning, yes. Of course a lot of the country was flooded: the Germans opened the dykes and that. We’d see these dykes going along and just dirty water covering all over, see people walking along the banks.
GT: You predominantly did day sorties and I see you did one night.
AD: We did a pre run of it.
GT: What was the difference for you? As a wireless operator, no difference between day and night, did it matter?
AD: Well night was a bit creepy, see a few things going past your window. Night time, cause day time have a good look.
GT: Time to get out the way. Did you have any aircraft above you, that could have dropped a bomb through you or anything?
AD: No, the strange thing about those two planes just out from us, cause what happened, the, when we couldn’t keep up with the squadron, we just went, because DH bombing we just went straight to the target and evidently the others, they were a bit ahead of their time, so they did a dog leg and they come in like that, we were here and couldn’t actually see their letters, see what was going on, one just dropped his bombs, beautiful line! How the hell he got them in line, you know, just the little one, big cookie on top, and the next thing they disappeared and the plane just completely blew to pieces, just like confetti. And then just a short while afterwards, another one, the engine dropped out of. The engineer was [indecipherable] I remember calling out the rest of them and saying the propeller was still going round, suppose they hadn’t used up the fuel yet, then the wing come off and down he went, and then shortly afterwards that other one started going like that and they were jumping out of it.
GT: And you said they were all 75 Squadron.
AD: Yeah. Three of them. That book I’ve got there shows that the planes above dropped [indecipherable] there dropped the bombs must of went off when got hit by a shell or what, cause bombs, they’ll explode just dropped out of a bomb bay on the ground! Real disaster one place there, three people, blew the plane to pieces and about nine others were destroyed.
GT: Was this at Mepal?
AD: No, no another aerodrome.
GT: You’d been told about it?
AD: No, read about it recent.
GT: It certainly happened. Now, you also managed to do some prisoner repatriation.
AD: Yes, we did four of those.
GT: Guys were pretty pleased to see you, weren’t they.
AD: Yeah, Juvencourt I thought, I actually bought a map in Paris when we were there this last time, so I could find out where Juvencourt was, I just thought it was not far inland, but it’s quite a far way, but I can’t find the map.
GT: Short way by aircraft, isn’t it. Just a point of note, the supply dropping sorties, your aircraft did, your crew did: one was Rotterdam and two was The Hague. And then from there you did a mixture of Juvencourt to Tangmere, and also the Baedekers, the post mortems, and that bit of Army co-op bit of variation. What was the Baedekers about?
AD: Oh, they used to go up the Ruhr valley, take the Air Ministry staff and that, most of them looked out the window to start then a bit seasick [chuckle] and then flight engineer used to carry a tin, treacle tin and he called it the tin-rin-tin-shitin. Remember, I don’t know whether you remember just about the wartime there was a thing on the radio about Rintin this wonder dog, that’s how he got the name and he was busy passing that between the different people. [laugh]
GT: Crazy, well your last time on 75 New Zealand Squadron was pretty much the end of July. Your total hours by day were over twenty two hours there, so you did a fair bit towards the end there, especially when there were so many crews vying for flying wasn’t there, must have had so many there, and obviously the war in Europe had finished so you were then shifted to Spilsby.
AD: Well we had to volunteer, an all New Zealand Squadron.
GT: British, Australians and Canadians left.
AD: Yep. Mac MacDonald, Flight Lieutenant.
GT: So you volunteered for that; you were asked directly?
AD: Yes, volunteered for it.
GT: Okay, so your first flight, Lancaster-wise, from Spilsby, 3rd of August, mixture of cross country and formation flying and you also managed a couple of flights here, three at least, in the new Lincolns, the white Lincolns, 75 New Zealand Squadron had three delivered to them by the time VJ Day came around so, they were taking them out to the Asian theatre. What was the Lincolns like compared to the Lancasters?
AD: Well, it was quite longer wingspan, wings, when it was flying about like that, when it was [indecipherable] it was the Lancaster that stayed [indecipherable].
GT: Was the wireless equipment upgraded for the Lincoln?
AD: Nah, I think it was much the same.
GT: Didn’t affect you much between the two types of aircraft.
AD: I think we were the last ones to fly, 75 Squadron in England. [Indecipherable] and us, we went down to farewell the Troop ship.
GT: The Andes?
AD: Andes. Actually it’s in one of those things there: we’re the bottom one.
GT: You’re the second plane in that picture?
AD: If I hadn’t have gone with our crew I would have gone with [indecipherable] because he asked me to be his wireless operator, but unfortunately we went to Berlin and the same thing happened: our crews went. So I went with our crew.
GT: So that was your last flight was 23rd September 1945 in the Lincoln, and it was AA-A, based Southampton, that was for the Andes overflight. But I see further up here just before that, on the 19th of September you talked about the base to Bari in Italy trip.
AD: Nearly ended up in disaster!
GT: So what was that about?
AD: Well, we saw this [indecipherable] farmer ploughing with two horses, so dived on them, I can see the old farmer now, shaking his fist, and he was hanging on to the reins, and the horses went faster and faster and finally they bolted. He went along low flying in the countryside, big high tension lines there and he was having a discussion with the flight engineer and he saying well we’ll go over these or will we go under and last moment he pulled up and hit one of the wires. Didn’t believe us for a start, I saw it, cause I saw the inflight and the rear gunner said yes, you’ve cut them. But, so then they started wondering what the hell they were going to tell the engineering staff because the propeller would have a mark on it. Sure enough, when we landed there was quite a gouge out of one propeller blade it the long bit. Lucky it wasn’t the big heavy cables, was the lighter ones we hit.
GT: Brought you down.
AD: It would have brought us down.
GT: Well, so that pretty much is, was the end of your flying of World War Two there.
AD: I think that was the last flight of 75 Squadron in England.
GT: It would have been.
AD: Almost certain it was.
GT: 23rd of September 1945.
AD: We left the next day I think. We broke up the next day or something.
GT: You left everything sitting at Spilsby.
AD: Pardon?
GT: Left all the aircraft sitting around at Spilsby.
AD: Yes, well, shame, specially all those herring gutted Lancasters they used to carry those twenty two thousand pound bombs. One place, I think it was Spilsby, there was quite a few of them there.
GT: Grand Slams.
AD: Yeah. All they were real odd looking cause they had no bomb doors, they just sort of come up and went along and down.
GT: You guys weren’t flying those.
AD: No.
GT: They were just sitting there.
AD: Yep.
GT: 100 Squadron, 207 Squadron were flying from there. The Spilsby Monument, Memorial, has a mention of an armament crew that were blown up at the bomb dump there. Did that happen when you were there? But, so how did you get back to New Zealand then if the Andes had already gone? Did they put you on another ship?
AD: Yeah, Montcalm, there’s a photo down the bedroom of it. It did a sort of odd course, it brought quite a few British soldiers out to Suez and then it went back to Taranto in Italy, I thought it unloaded them there, or did something, pick some others up and then come back to Suez and then went through the canal, you know, picked up quite a few New Zealand soldiers on the other side.
GT: And when you got back to New Zealand did you demob straight away or you on the Reserve?
AD: Yes, we just went off, well I went on leave. Reserve for several years.
GT: You weren’t called up then?
AD: No, didn’t get called up.
GT: And you’ve been a farmer all your life, is that right?
AD: Actually I declined any assistance and filled in the form on the ship there, and then one of my, brother-in-law said you bloody fool fella, so I applied and I went to about four or five farms and finally found this place.
GT: How many acres did you have in the end?
AD: Five, it was five hundred and forty five. Another chap on, he went away on the ship and came back on the same ship as I did, Harry Denton, I didn’t know him then, he got the other half.
GT: So how many sheep and cattle were you grazing on a that kind of size?
AD: Oh, I had over a thousand sheep. I had up to two and a half thousand at one stage and then we had quite a lot of cattle and calves. Interesting reading through my old diaries, see I used to keep diaries.
GT: How old will you be next birthday?
AD: I’ll be ninety six.
GT: Ninety six, ninety seven, ninety six?
AD: Or more, I don’t know, it’s a bugger since my legs have started going on me, I started wearing that, up there, oh there, that riding helmet, save my head a bit [indecipherable] you feel a bit of a flash sometimes, just lasts a moment or two.
GT: So at your grand age now, you’re still mucking about on the farm and here we are in Amberley, New Zealand in mid January and the temperatures are rising to close to thirty degrees Celsius, which is pretty wicked here this time of year in New Zealand.
AD: Yes, I know.
GT: Alan, it’s a pleasure again catching up with you and thanks very much for talking to me and this will, an interview going to the International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archives and you’re certainly a part of Bomber Command and you having completed operations, Baedekers, Mannas and Exoduses, you did the whole bunch really, that was pretty awesome.
AD: I had quite a good career, lucky with, we did crash a Wellington, went off the runway into a ditch, petrol running everywhere and got out at t a hell of ate and I got into trouble because I didn’t grab the secret code books, well I couldn’t see, was pitch dark and the poor erk that was riding a bike round the perimeter, he was the only person I’ve ever seen who was incoherent, he was babbling away and couldn’t hear a word, didn’t know what he was saying, we damn near run over him! [Laughter] Poor Bugger! Horse galloping round in the paddock next to him.
GT: No regrets, you served your King and your country and you were happy in the end to, with your achievements.
AD: I had a great experience. I’ve been back and visited two of the crew; last time I went back I couldn’t find any of them, rear gunner, Scott, and the navigator. Harry Denton, up here, when he was up here, with some of his crew; I think one of his crew got the VC! And also the, some of the Germans that shot him down, they come out here too and visit him. I’m not too sure whether I met them or not. I met some of the, his crew. Come out here twice I think.
GT: You’re former enemies and you’ve become friends, and that’s the case through most of time.
AD: I’ve been to Germany and had a look at the, some of the wartime graves there. Actually the chap who was supposed to inherit this farm, Lawrence Croft, he was in the Air Force too. I think he got blown out of the bomb aimer’s, I think it was him. I think also one of the wife’s cousins, Albert Chipping, I think he got blown out too.
GT: That was the thing, many of these folk came back to New Zealand and went straight back into working and many of the folk that were still here didn’t know anything of what you guys went through. Did you find that a big problem?
AD: Not really, no.
GT: The folk that you dealt with, worked with.
AD: I suppose it was still a job we had to do. Used to go down at night, have our pints.
GT: What were the, sorry, I meant to ask, what were the pubs around Mepal that you liked?
AD: Oh yeah. We stopped at one there.
GT: Chequers?
AD: Oh Chequers, we used to go to that one, Sutton, and then there used to be, one old Percy had it, at Haddenham, cause there was Haddenham up here, then Sutton here and Mepal over here and there was there used to be a road connecting them, course they closed it when the aerodrome, when the runway went across it.
GT: And you had Witchford.
AD: Quite a bit different now, bit hard to find the landmarks.
GT: Well Mepal Gardens have a Memorial for 75 New Zealand Squadron there.
AD: Yeah, they shifted it from where they actually put it, when, in 1978 when they dedicated it, shifted to another.
GT: Well cared for little garden, that’s for sure.
AD: Pardon?
GT: It’s a well cared for little garden. And 75 Squadron Association in the UK, friends, they hold a reunion twice a year right there, so all your colleagues are well remembered. Okay Alan, let’s sign off. I thank you very much for your interview, your thoughts, your memories and thank you for your service for your King and your country, and your sacrifice. Thank you very much.
AD: One of the lucky ones and it was an experience.
GT: Definitely lucky. Thank you, Alan.
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 Alan William Davis
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Glen Turner
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
2018-01-16
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.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ADavisAW180116
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:31:14 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal New Zealand Air Force
Description
An account of the resource
Alan Davis joined the RNZAF towards the end of the war, training in Canada as a wireless operator and air gunner. He returned to the UK and after conversion to Lancasters was posted to 75 New Zealand Squadron. Alan tells of his training, crew changes and loss of colleagues as well as different operation and experiences. After the war he returned home and settled as a farmer, sometimes returning overseas and seeing old friends.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1944
1945
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Canada
France
Great Britain
England--Buckinghamshire
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Lincolnshire
France--Île-de-France
France--Reims Region
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Anne-Marie Watson
11 OTU
1668 HCU
75 Squadron
aircrew
bombing
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
Operational Training Unit
RAF Bottesford
RAF Mepal
RAF Oakley
RAF Spilsby
training
Wellington
wireless operator / air gunner
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/810/22725/LEdwardsF1805103v1.1.pdf
784a18b19791b15a81164a5c6e63d192
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
Edwards, Frederick
F Edwards
Description
An account of the resource
26 items. The collection concerns Frederick Edwards (b. 1923) and contains his log book, maps, navigation charts, service documents, and photographs. He flew operations as a navigator with 101 Squadron. There is also an oral history interview with his son, Martin Edwards.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Martin Edwards and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-03-14
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Edwards, F
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
Frederick Edwards' Royal Canadian Air Force flying log book for aircrew other than pilot
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.
Description
An account of the resource
Flying log book for Frederick Edwards covering the period from 30 September, 1943 to 30 September, 1946. Detailing his flying training and operations flown. He was stationed at RCAF Rivers, Manitoba (1 CNS), RAF Halfpenny Green (3(O)AFU), RAF Upper Heyford (16 OTU), RAF Bottesford (1668 HCU), RAF Ludford Magna (101 Squadron), RAF Breighton (78 Squadron). His aircraft made a diversion to an ELG at RAF Carnaby. He also was involved in Operation Manna, dropping relief supplies to Holland three times and an Operation Exodus flight to Brussels. Aircraft flown in were, Anson, Wellington, Lancaster, Halifax, Dakota. He flew a total of 21 night-time and 5 daylight bomber operations (total 26) with 101 squadron. His pilot on operations was Pilot Officer Brookin. Targets were Karlsruhe, Merseburg, Essen, Ludwigshafen, Ulm, Koln, Hannover, Hanau, Stuttgart, Mannheim, Bottrop, Kleve, Dresden, Pforzheim, Chemnitz, Dessau, Kassel, Bremen, Kiel, Potsdam, Heligoland, Berchtesgaden. The log book also lists his post war flights.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Mike French
Cara Walmsley
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
LEdwardsF1805103v1
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.
Canada
Germany
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Berchtesgaden
Germany--Bottrop
Germany--Bremen
Germany--Chemnitz
Germany--Dessau (Dessau)
Germany--Dresden
Germany--Essen
Germany--Hanau
Germany--Hannover
Germany--Helgoland
Germany--Karlsruhe
Germany--Kassel
Germany--Kiel
Germany--Kleve (North Rhine-Westphalia)
Germany--Ludwigshafen am Rhein
Germany--Mannheim
Germany--Merseburg
Germany--Pforzheim
Germany--Potsdam
Germany--Stuttgart
Germany--Ulm
Great Britain
England--Leicestershire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Oxfordshire
England--Staffordshire
Netherlands
England--Yorkshire
Manitoba
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Manitoba--Rivers
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
1944
1945
1946
1944-12-04
1944-12-06
1944-12-07
1944-12-12
1944-12-15
1944-12-17
1944-12-24
1945-01-05
1945-01-06
1945-01-28
1945-01-29
1945-02-01
1945-02-03
1945-02-07
1945-02-08
1945-02-13
1945-02-14
1945-02-23
1945-02-24
1945-03-01
1945-03-02
1945-03-05
1945-03-06
1945-03-07
1945-03-08
1945-03-15
1945-03-16
1945-03-25
1945-04-09
1945-04-10
1945-04-10
1945-04-14
1945-04-15
1945-04-18
1945-04-22
1945-04-25
1945-04-30
1945-05-01
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1946-09-30
101 Squadron
16 OTU
1668 HCU
78 Squadron
Advanced Flying Unit
aircrew
Anson
bombing
bombing of Dresden (13 - 15 February 1945)
bombing of Helgoland (18 April 1945)
C-47
Halifax
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Lancaster Mk 2
Lancaster Mk 3
navigator
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
Operational Training Unit
RAF Bottesford
RAF Breighton
RAF Carnaby
RAF Halfpenny Green
RAF Ludford Magna
RAF Upper Heyford
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1436/28604/LWallaceCM413159v1.1.pdf
64199d84e11bf0577a3ba92ddbf4168c
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
Wallace, Colin
C M Wallace
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-08-29
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Wallace, CM
Description
An account of the resource
One item. Colin Wallace DFM flew operations as a pilot with 467 Squadron. The collection contains his log book.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Jude Mathew Taylor 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
Colin Wallace's Royal New Zealand Air Force pilot's flying log book
Description
An account of the resource
C M Wallace’s Flying Log Book as pilot covering the period from 8 July 1941 to 20 January 1945. Detailing his flying training and operations flown as pilot. He was stationed at RNZAF Whenuapai (4 EFTS), RCAF Saskatoon (4 SFTS), RAF Little Rissington (6 PAFU), RAF Docking (1525 BAT Flight), RAF Kinloss (19 OTU), RAF Wigsley (1654 HCU), RAF Bottesford and RAF Waddington (467 RAAF Squadron), RAF Upper Heyford and RAF Barford St John (16 OTU) and RAF Lulsgate Bottom (3 FIS). Aircraft flown in were Tiger Moth, Crane, Oxford, Whitley, Manchester, Lancaster and Wellington. Targets were Lorient, Nuremburg, Gironde (mining), Denmark (mining), St Nazaire, Essen, Bochum, Oberhausen, Cologne, Turin, Hamburg, Milan, Berlin, Munchen-Gladbach, Munster, Kassel, Stuttgart and Hannover, He flew 28 operations (including one early return) with 467 (RAAF) Squadron. His pilots for his first 'second dickie' operations were Flight Lieutenant McKenzie and Flight Lieutenant Theile DSC DSO.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LWallaceCM413159v1
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
1943-02-13
1943-02-14
1943-03-08
1943-03-09
1943-03-11
1943-03-12
1943-03-13
1943-03-14
1943-03-22
1943-03-23
1943-05-27
1943-05-28
1943-06-11
1943-06-12
1943-06-13
1943-06-14
1943-06-15
1943-06-28
1943-06-29
1943-07-03
1943-07-04
1943-07-08
1943-07-09
1943-07-12
1943-07-13
1943-07-23
1943-07-24
1943-07-29
1943-07-30
1943-08-15
1943-08-16
1943-08-23
1943-08-24
1943-08-30
1943-08-31
1943-09-01
1943-09-03
1943-09-04
1943-09-06
1943-09-07
1943-10-02
1943-10-03
1943-10-04
1943-10-07
1943-10-08
1943-10-18
1943-10-19
1943-11-18
1943-11-19
1943-11-23
1943-11-24
1943-11-26
1943-11-27
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Canada
Denmark
France
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
New Zealand
England--Lincolnshire
England--Norfolk
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Oxfordshire
England--Somerset
France--Lorient
France--Saint-Nazaire
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Bochum
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Essen
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Hannover
Germany--Kassel
Germany--Mönchengladbach
Germany--Münster in Westfalen
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Oberhausen (Düsseldorf)
Germany--Stuttgart
Italy--Milan
Italy--Turin
New Zealand--Waitemata Harbour
Saskatchewan--Saskatoon
Scotland--Moray
Saskatchewan
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
France--Pauillac (Gironde)
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
Terry Hancock
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
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal New Zealand Air Force
Royal Australian Air Force
16 OTU
1654 HCU
19 OTU
467 Squadron
Advanced Flying Unit
aircrew
bombing
bombing of Hamburg (24-31 July 1943)
Distinguished Flying Cross
Distinguished Flying Medal
Flying Training School
forced landing
Heavy Conversion Unit
Ju 88
Lancaster
Lancaster Mk 1
Lancaster Mk 3
Manchester
Me 109
mine laying
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
pilot
RAF Barford St John
RAF Bottesford
RAF Kinloss
RAF Little Rissington
RAF Upper Heyford
RAF Waddington
RAF Wigsley
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
Whitley
Window
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/645/11269/BStevensonPDStevensonPDv1.1.pdf
0ca00135d690b4148fa8190b98631354
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
Stevenson, Peter
Peter Desmond Stevenson
P D Stevenson
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Stevenson, PD
Description
An account of the resource
Two items. An oral history interview with Peter Stevenson (b. 1923) and his memoir. He grew up in Lincolnshire and while he was working towards an engineering apprenticeship he rose through the ranks to become a Warrant Officer in the Air Training Corps.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Peter Stevenson and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-08-17
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
CADET 1935-1945
Peter D Stevenson
[page break]
Page 1
CADET 1935 – 1945
By Peter Stevenson, a very junior twelve year old schoolboy when this decade started to a somewhat disillusioned twenty two year old young man who, ten years later when it all ended ‘Who had also served who only stood and waited’; came to the conclusion that though it had been a very interesting and formative period of his own life, had to admit that it had not done a great deal to win the war.
For all that it seemed to be a story worth telling, a story which must be dedicated to the many who had suffered that he might live to tell that story and do his bit towards winning the peace that followed.
[page break]
Page 2
[underlined] CONTENTS [/underlined]
Introduction 3
Chapter One I catch the Air Bug 6
Chapter Two Private Stevenson P.D. KSGOTC (1935-39) 13
Chapter Three The Public School’s Air Cadet Wing (January to August 1939) 35
The 1939 Public Schools Air Cadet Wing Camp at Selsea Bill 37
Chapter Four Formation of the Grantham Squadron of the Air Defence Cadet Corps (1939) 45
Chapter Five ARP Messenger P.D.Stevenson. ‘Goes to War’ (1939) 52
Chapter Six I Join No.47(F) Grantham Squadron Air Defence Cadet Corps (1939-40) 58
Chapter Seven 47(F) Sq. Air Training Corps with No. 12(P)AFU at RAF Spittlegate(1941) 66
Chapter Eight 47(F) Sq. ATC with 207 Sq. RAF Bottesford (1941-42) 69
The 1942 Summer Camp at RAF Bottesford 76
Chapter Nine 47(F) Sq. ATC with 106 Sq. RAF Syerston (1942-43) 82
Formation of No. 830 Company Girl’s Training Corps
Chapter 10 47(F) Sq. ATC with The Magic Air Force (9th TCC. USAAF) at RAF Fulbeck 94
(1943-44)
Chapter Eleven Anticlimax and Finale (1944-45)
Epilogue (1945 to 2006)
[page break]
Page 3
[underlined] Introduction [/underlined]
This is the story of an eventful decade in the life of a young man with two ambitions.
He wanted to become a qualified engineer and, as the clouds of war gathered, to serve in the Royal Air Force with a commission in it’s Technical Branch.
It starts in his school days and progresses through his engineering apprenticeship and Technical College studies and eventual maturity. Running right through this is a common thread of service in a succession of Cadet organisations. It ends by looking back over nearly seventy years, with a tribute to the lifelong benefits he derived from the groundwork skills and benefits which such service left him with, as he pursued a post war career in engineering design and the technical training he passed on to others.
He was twelve years old when these two ambitions began to materialise. This was the age when his grammar school allowed its pupils to chose [sic] between ‘The Arts’ and ‘The Sciences’ and at the same time allow him to join the first of his cadet units. He dropped The Arts and joined the school’s ‘OTC’, the pre war somewhat elitist precursor of today’s Combined Cadet Force. However, before his story can begin to take shape, a wider view of overall scene which surrounded him really needs to be expressed in order to add a necessary perspective.
---O---
As everyone knows, the Second World War ended in the summer of 1945, but those of us who grew up between the wars would be the first to admit the seeds of this second conflict were sown in the months immediately following the ending of the first.
The horrors of Flanders had ceased less than five years before I was born. Its bitter memories had bitten deep into the souls of not only my own forebears, but also into those who had survived the war at the front and the bereavements and privations of those on the Home Front. In spite of the annual Armistice Day exhortations that “We will remember them”, civilian attitudes seemed determined to “Forget” as far as possible.
The man in the street and unfortunately, the majority of those in government authority, who still regarded themselves as being in the centre of the British Empire upon which the ‘Sun will never set’ What went on in the Continent was of little interest and was none of our business anyway.
The Treaty of Versailles had left Germany, crippled and bankrupt both economically and politically. A decade of ineffectual governments, each desperately trying to recover from rampant inflation and chronic unemployment, left the hotbed conditions for the rise of Hitlerism. So far as most people in Germany were concerned, any leader was better than none.
In Britain, equally futile governments thrust their heads ever more firmly into the sand. ‘Disarmament’ (at any cost) was the order of the day from the early Nineteen Twenties onwards. All three Services were cut down to mere cadre status, sufficient only to maintain the Empire and police the Dependencies and Protectorates in the Middle East and elsewhere.
With the destruction of Germany, there seemed no point in arming against what was considered to be a nonexistent [sic] European threat.
Luckily, there were a few people in high places who saw more than the ground immediately in front of their noses. Some of these were prepared to fight all forms of governmental apathy and bureaucratic inhibition. For them, the establishment of an effective defence strategy, backed up by small but technically prepared military force which could be rapidly expanded, should the need arise, was still vital for our future.
In all three services, dedicated and far seeing individuals kept each respective flame alight during a decade and a half of budgetary cuts and personnel reductions. Front line, supply and training establishments were cut to the bone. Withdrawing into a few key locations, they were determined to match diminishing quantity with increasing quality of men, equipment and potential.
Until the coming of the Industrial Revolution, my home town had been a typical sleepy country town, centred in a wide expanse of rich farming countryside. In the late 1700s it had been connected to the
[page break]
Page 4
markets of the Midlands and the South by a canal and at the same time received incoming supplies of coal and other commodities. Grantham began the first phase of its expansion. In the 1840s, it received the next boost with north to south mainline railways and important east to west branch lines. Already astride the Great North Road, it now became an important focal point in the country’s communication network. In the remaining decades of the 19th century, heavy engineering industrial expansion gained it an international reputation for the quality and quantity of its products. During World War One, it converted rapidly into a centre for munitions production and an important army training area. In 1917, two nearby hilltops became flying training camps for the Royal Flying Corps.
When the war ended in 1918, Grantham’s industrial capabilities reverted to the peacetime production of diesel engines, farm machinery and the needs of a local agricultural economy. The big army camps were dismantled and the grounds they occupied returned to pre-war parkland status. The erstwhile Territorial Barracks were returned to the care of the weekend soldiery. One of the airfields was also closed down and returned to agriculture. The other went into ‘Care and Maintenance’ for a while.
However, this was not to be the end of Grantham’s military involvement in the post-war scene. April 1918 had seen the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service merge and become the infant Royal Air Force. During the war both the RFC and the RNAS has found the skies (and the ground) of Lincolnshire ideal for the training of their pilots. Although the majority of the home defence and other operational airfields had been returned to agriculture, it was decided that three of the flying training airfields should be retained. Their levels of activity might very well be reduced but all three were very much in ?Grantham’s hinterland.
The post war reorganisation of the RAF centred very much on the training up of a small but well trained new generation of pilots. Six Flying Training Schools (the ‘FTSs’) would be set up, one in Egypt and five in England, of which three would be in Lincolnshire. The furthest away would be RAF Digby, some sixteen miles to the northeast of Grantham. Next would be RAF Cranwell, ten miles in the same direction. An ex RNAS airfield, it would in time become the first Aviation College in the world, and share its airfields with its own FTS. Finally, Grantham’s airfield would not only have its FTS but would also be the home of the FTS Training Group. {Incidentally, over the next half century, the Air Ministry had great difficulty in making up its mind as to what name this particular airfield should bear. Back in the RFC days it had been called ‘Spit[underlined]tle[/underlined]gate’, the name that not only the locals always used, but also used by most if not all those who served there over the years. At various times, the Air Ministry decided to rename it [underlined] RAF Grantham [/underlined] but after a while decided to go back to the original name. However, this time it was called RAF Spit[underlined]al[/underlined]gate for a while until went back to RAF Grantham again. To avoid confusion, throughout this narrative, it will always be called Spittlegate, the name of the village immediately below the airfield which eventually became incorporated into the borough of Grantham.]
Grantham therefore became very much an RAF town in the 1920s and the decades which followed. The people of Grantham got very used to blue uniforms in the town and aircraft in the blue above. The Grantham shops got trade, RAF families not in the extensive station married quarters, lived in the housing estates, and their sons and daughters went to the local schools.
As already mentioned, the Army was not completely unrepresented in peacetime Grantham. The town was still proud of the fact that it still had a small detachment of Lincolnshire Regiment Territorials. Their members made their way, perhaps a little self consciously, up to the Barracks, and marched much more confidently in the annual Remembrance Day parades, and their annual camp was given much reportage in the local weekly newspaper.
There was however, an ‘Army’ unit which will feature in the second chapter of this account. In it, was much ‘Esprit de Corps’, equal pride in marching behind the Territorials on Remembrance Day, and an equal enthusiasm for its annual camp and ‘field days’.
Grantham had its Grammar School, the King’s School of some six hundred years standing. It was the proud possessor of its ‘OTC’ – the ‘Officer’s Training Corps’. Supported by and largely financed by the War Department, it was hoped by the latter that, following its creation in WW1, it would continue to supply a small but steady stream of ‘officer types’ for its peacetime needs. Few of its boy soldiers ever stood a chance of gaining a permanent commission in the Regular Army but it was felt that the rest would receive enough basic training to make them good ‘rankers’ should the need ever
[page break]
Page 5
arise. In any case, they hoped, this would be a useful recruiting ground for the Territorial Army when they left school.
These OTC units were undoubtedly elitist in their outlooks, closely reflecting the ‘Town and Gown’ mentalities of those pre-WW2 Grammar Schools. After that war, such elitism was anachronistic and the OTCs, became Combined Cadet Force units, reflecting the less class conscious and more technical emphasis of modern warfare.
This then, is the background to this account of a cadet who started his decade of ‘military service’ as a very young ‘boy soldier’ in the Grantham King’s School Officer’s Training Corps.
Ten years later, older and perhaps somewhat wiser, he ended up as a Cadet Warrant Officer in the Air Training Corps in the closing months of the Second World War.
This introduction has been written in general terms with the occasional use of the third person. Something which does not endear me greatly in the few autobiographies I have read is the over use of the first person singular. However, trying to write in the third person often results in something which verges on the pedantic. So, I will do my best to keep the number of ‘Is’ to a minimum and hope the reader will excuse the rest.
I suppose also that I should bow to convention and end this introduction with acknowledgements and apologies. To the many cadets in all the cadet units in which I served I give my heartfelt thanks. From them I learned as much as I gave. To the many servicemen in the units to which we were attached, I also give my heartfelt thanks. To those cadets and servicemen who lost their lives in service, I give my heartfelt gratitude. I shall not forget that famous Kohima tribute ‘For my today, they gave their yesterday’. Mine was not a spectacular or heroic war. I can only take comfort from the other saying that ‘They also served who only stood and waited’.
Apologies too. Memory is a strange beast and after more than sixty years, hindsight is more than a little myopic. Some events are as clear as if they only occurred yesterday but at my age the main problem is “Exactly what was it that I was doing yesterday!” So, if you also lived through those eventful years, bear with me, and if you remember differently, by all means get out your writing sticks, and add your quota of memories to the great memory bank in the skies.
A further apology. Faces I can remember but I have never been able to remember names. If you think that I have not mentioned this person or that, it could well be that to mention this person and not that, could well offend the latter. Better perhaps to be a ‘little economical with the truth’, and this could well apply to events as well.
Oh, and don’t forget. Even if you did have a camera then, you could not get films, and if you did manage to have both, you were not allowed to use them, so the few pictures I do have will be scattered amongst the narrative or may be lurking away in appendices to this account.
[page break]
Page 6
[underlined] Chapter One I Catch the Air Bug [/underlined]
[AIR BUG – Defn. In the 1920s and 1930s the youth of Britain was perpetually being encouraged to become ‘air minded’. If one became thoroughly air minded then one was accused of being bitten by the Air Bug. I admit to have been badly bitten.]
I was not ‘Lincolnshire Born’. My mother’s family was Yorkshire, my father’s was Nottinghamshire, but my grandparents settled in Lincolnshire towards the end of the nineteenth century. I was actually born in Scarborough but I grew up in Grantham. As a result, I consider myself more of a ‘Yellow Bellie’ than a ‘Cuckoo’.
One is often advised to make sure that you choose your parents carefully. In this respect I think I can claim to have chosen well. Although my parents and grandparents (with one exception) could never be regarded as great intellectuals or scholars, I was extremely lucky to find them well endowed with a lively curiosity and interest in local, national and world affairs. Amongst other things, it looks as if I chose to be the grandson of a highly regarded, if provincial, ‘gentleman journalist’ (sadly, an extinct species). His son, in spite of being a reluctant scholar, apparently had dinned into him that type of education which, it is said, is what is left when you have forgotten most of what you have been taught. My maternal grandmother did come from a highly intellectual and talented family and between the lot of them, the genes they passed on to me are much appreciated. I sincerely hope that I have not let them down over the years.
Conversations round the family tables were always lively and I can never remember being talked down to. Even though it was an age when children were not supposed to talk unless asked to do so, I was still expected to have some opinion on most things under discussion.
My father, born in 1895, had a grammar school education and after leaving became a cub reporter under his father’s tuition. Aged nineteen when WW1 broke out, he immediately volunteered. After basic training, his regiment crossed to France where it was involved in the battles of late 1914 and early 1915. Mentioned in Despatches, wounded twice, he was invalided back to England. After eighteen months in army hospitals in Harrogate (where he met my mother) he spent the remainder of the war on the staff of an army training establishment. Demobbed, the best civilian employment he could obtain in his hometown was a dead end clerk’s job in the local police station. Married now and with a son, he came home to start afresh in Grantham.
His time there was not completely wasted. Amongst other things, he had worked for a Ford distributor and had learned a thing or two about selling cars and running a business. Once back home, he got a job as a car salesman with a large garage in Grantham, which he soon managed to get established as the main Ford distributor in Lincolnshire. Above all, he had come back completely ‘Ford Minded’.
Within a few months, the word ‘Ford’ had become magic and anything bearing the word ‘Ford’ was special. I learned all about Henry Ford starting the mess production of the legendary ‘Model T’, the ‘Tin Lizzie’. I also learned that in that Big Country, air travel was becoming big business and that, following the success of the Tin Lizzie, Henry Ford had gone into the aircraft business with the Ford Trimotor which proved a similar success. Promptly christened the ‘Tin Goose’, its reliability, load carrying and ability to work from small rough airfields not only set new standards in travel but was also popular as a freighter. Soon it was being used for travel and freighting in the North of Canada.
At this point, the U.S. Navy came into the picture. If the first decade or so of the 20th Century had been the Golden Age of Polar Exploration on the ground, the 1920s became the Golden Age of the Conquest of the Air. Using a Ford Trimotor, Admiral Byrd and his U.S. Navy expedition, became the first to fly over the North Pole.
Flushed with this success, another much larger expedition under Byrd, was sent to Antarctica in 1928. There they set up ‘Little America’, an air base on the Ross Ice Shelf, from which they laid refuelling bases, which were used to enable a Trimotor to be the first aircraft to fly over the South
[page break]
Page 7
[inserted picture]
In all aeronautical history, it would be difficult to find even one airplane with more drama, more adventure, and more rugged versatility attached to it than the famous Ford Tri-motor.
Affectionately known as the “Tin Goose”, this outstanding airplane, with its corrugated aluminum [sic] skin, was the first all-metal airplane, and the first commercial aviation transport, designed and built in the United States. It was also one of the very first airplanes to carry passengers for the pioneer airlines of this country.
Built by the Ford Motor Company, the first of this most revolutionary aircraft was unveiled at Detroit in 1926. In it, combined for the first time in one airplane were such developments as enclosed pilot cabins, brakes, heaters, full cantilever wings and doughnut tires.
Most of the U.S. airlines bought Ford Tri-motors and many of today’s leading air routes were opened and developed with this versatile airline pioneer. As flown by the airlines, each plane could accommodate 11 passengers in a cabin that had an average width of only 4 1/2 ft.
In 1929 Admiral Richard E. Byrd on one of his Antarctic expeditions, included a Ford Tri-motor, equipped with skis, in his equipment. It was in this Ford that this great explorer made his famous flight – the first time man had flown over the South Pole. This actual airplane is now a part of the aviation exhibit on display at the Henry Ford Museum, Dearborn, Michigan.
Wingspan of the Ford Tri-motor 4-AT is 74 ft. and overall length 49 ft., 10 in. The three engines gave it a cruising speed of 110 m.p.h. and a top speed of 130 m.p.h. Empty weight is only 6500 lbs. Simplicity is the keynote of construction. Control horns and control wires are mounted outside the airplane. Passenger seats are woven reed. Instruments for the side engines are mounted on the strut above the nacelles and viewed from the cockpit. The entire surface of the airplane is constructed of corrugated aluminum [sic].
More than 30 Ford Tri-motors are still being flown commercially today – more than a quarter-century after being built. It is even now, called “the best ship available for carrying heavy loads into tricky fields.”
As proof of the advanced design and efficiency of this famous historical airplane, the Tin Goose will again be produced in quantity. A West Coast company will build 100 Tri-motors from the original Ford blueprints, making only minor changes to take advantage of today’s smaller, more powerful engines. This is a fine tribute to a plane first manufactured 30 years ago and still worthy of being produced again in its original form.
[page break]
Page 8
Pole. In true American enthusiasm for their other passion, the cinema, this expedition was accompanied by a full ’movie’ crew who, on their return, produced an epic film of an epic flight.
Eventually this film was shown on one of Grantham’s cinema screens, and being thoroughly Ford, my father and I went to see it. Now, if I am pressed to name the event which initiated my thoughts towards the air, it would certainly be this film. Subsequently, I went off on my own several times to see it again. Certainly, when it came to aircraft, the Ford Trimotor became my First Love. This film also sparked a lifelong interest in the Antarctic. During the next few years, I read all the Scott and Shackleton Diaries and anything else available in the Grantham Library about Antarctic exploration, but that is another story.
No doubt in the previous seven years, the Spittlegate aircraft had been circling oven the town. It was just that up to that time, they had not registered. Now they were there. Admittedly nothing quite so big and beautiful as my Trimotor, but well worth watching in future.
My grandfather had to report for his paper on the visit of Alan Cobham and his Air Circus. His Press Pass got us both in for free and I had a wonderful afternoon. The flying was certainly thrilling but it was the aircraft on the ground which really fascinated me.
Then I began making my pilgrimage up Cold Harbour Lane, the lane which ran along the north eastern boundary of the Spittlegate airfield. With the wind in the right direction the planes would come sideslipping in, right over my head, engines puttering over and the slipstream whistling though [sic] their rigging. I could wave to the pilots and occasionally they would wave back.
More down to earth, in the autumn of 1932, just after my ninth birthday, I moved school.
This was not in the depth of the Thirties Depression, and my father’s salary, largely based on commission, was pretty low. There were few people around with money to spend on cars. However, my parents had sufficient confidence in me to send me off to the Grammar School.
At the time, the King’s was a fee paying school, although it was possible to pass what was called the County Minor Scholarship exam, which at least paid your fees. Regrettably, I did not pass and since you only had one chance, that meant that my parents were lumbered with my school fees for the next six years. In later years, when I discovered that this took a whole week’s pay every term, I was more than a little ashamed that I had not been a better scholar.
One normally started at the King’s School at the age of eight and for the first four years you were taught to a generally wide syllabus which gave you a good basis on what might be your line of specialisation when you reached the age of twelve. A certain amount of Physics and Chemistry was balanced by four years of simple Latin and ‘The Classics’, while subjects like Maths, History and Geography would continue after specialisation.
Once I was settled in. I quickly discovered that in addition to the usual cross section of boys from the town and the surrounding countryside, there was quite a high proportion of sons of RAF personnel. I quickly became friends with two of these whose parents lived in the town rather than in the married quarters. I had a fair amount of contact with their fathers and was privy to a fair amount of ‘shop talk’, all of which helped to fuel the interest.
Small boys in general are remarkably schizophrenic in their choice of potential careers. My father’s new job had brought me into contact, not only with the Ford car but also the Fordson Tractor. Our family finances had been much helped by us moving into a company house next door to the premises which dealt with tractor sales and repair. In addition to the tractor and implement showroom, there was a replacement parts store and a repair workshop, all of which was accessible to me through a side door in the house. Naturally the presence of a small boy in the showroom was not welcomed when a prospective buyer was there, but this Alladin’s [sic] Cave was open to me at all other times of the day. I soon discovered that tractors were far more interesting than cars. That was probably due to the fact that the car workshop foreman had a short fuse when small boys were around, whereas the tractor fitters were more than willing to show the small boy in question, what went where and why. Also, most of a tractors ‘gubbins’ tended to be on its outside so that you could see what was going on, rather than having to poke around under bonnets and things.
[page break]
[underlined] 26 THE GRANTHAMIAN [/underlined]
* * *
Capt E. Elms.
At the end of this Term the School will suffer, in the retirement of Captain E. Elms, the loss of another link with pre war days. Captain Elms came to the School when the new Workshops were built in 1935, and their continued efficiency has been his constant endeavour ever since. Although Captain Elms came to us from the Estate of Mr. Christopher Turnor, he was no stranger to school-mastering, having spent many years as the Head of a London Technical Institute and being concerned during the 1914-18 war with the training of thousands of men and women for war work.
In 1920 he was granted a regular commission with the rank of Captain in the Army Educational Corps and served on the staff of the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, where he did much pioneer work in the early mechanisation of the regular army.
During his stay with us Captain Elms has introduced the spirit of pride in craftsmanship and a keen desire to produce a good job of work, which has stood in good stead the hundreds of boys who have passed through his hands, and it is with real regret that we learn that Captain Elms is giving up his post here on doctor’s orders. It is to be hoped that the rest from his labours will bring him back to full health and strength to enjoy many years of ease and leisure, which he has so justly earned in the service of The King’s School.
* * *
[page break]
[photograph]
Capt. E. Elms
Handicraft Master, 1934-1946
[page break]
Page 10
The Main Dealership agreement which my father had negotiated with the Ford Motor Company resulted in him having to go down to Dagenham every few months. Since in those days, cars had always to be collected from the works (there were no such things as car transporters) he would combine such a visit with the collection of a new car. He also discovered that a second hand car in good condition would always fetch a much higher price in the London area. So, he would take an old car down, attend his business meeting, and bring a new car back. Again, in those days, cars had to be ‘run in’. This involved driving it very carefully at no more than thirty miles per hour for the first thousand miles. This was especially important in the first hundred miles of the car’s life. The 110 miles back to Grantham was a four hour journey of utter boredom. So, in the school holiday times, he started taking me along with him and once we arrived at the works he hand me over to the Works Guide team. Here was an even bigger and better Alladin’s [sic] Cave and by the time I had gone round with them several times, I had got a pretty good idea as to how the various parts were made and how they went together to make cars and tractors.
By the time I was ten or eleven, I had made up my mind that when I left school, I would become a Ford Apprentice. Then, my apprenticeship completed, I too would go over to the States where I would apply to join Ford’s Trimotor service organisation. Having qualified as a fitter on the ‘Tin Goose’ I would join the U.S. Navy and go on the next Antarctic Expedition. How’s that for teenage logic? Of course, in the way of such juvenile dreams, nothing ever came of it, except that there remained a growing feeling that I would eventually become an engineer, preferably in the field of aeronautics, and perhaps in the RAF
Having finished my junior schooling, I was now at the great crossroads. ‘The Arts’ were not for me and as I moved up into the upper school, I rapidly dropped Latin (what I had learned, often came in quite useful in later life). Music was also dropped (which perhaps was a pity as I could well have done with some basic music theory also in later life). Hopeless at art, this was also dropped thankfully. The time spent on English Literature, History and like subjects was reduced, and opting for ‘The Sciences’ meant the time spent on Physics and Chemistry was increased.
The biggest, most interesting bonus of entering the upper school happened to coincide with what, at the time, was a rather revolutionary development on this old established grammar school’s curriculum. Grantham’s King’s School had, over the centuries, produced a goodly number of academics and a few notable scientists (including Sir Isaac Newton). These however, had been at the time when it was centred in a largely rural environment. With the coming of industry in the 19th century, Grantham had become a major engineering centre and the origins (and destinations) of it’s pupils changed dramatically. In spite of the fact that it did it’s best to retain its grammar school ethos. In order to progress, it had to accept that a significant proportion of it’s pupils would end up (hopefully) in the more respectable levers of industry and technology.
The present headmaster was a progressive, doing his best to lift the school out of the stuffiness of decades of the Town and Gown mentalities of his predecessors. His Board of Governors was a good mix of local dignitaries, with enough industrialists to reflect their pupil spectrum. His local government Director of Education was also progressive in his outlook. The end result was that basic handicrafts in the working of wood and metal would replace traditional Art subjects such as painting and sculpting for those pupils opting for the Sciences. To bring this about, a well equipped workshop was built and equipped with wood and metal workbenches, simple machine tools, a forge and brazing equipment. A ‘Handicraft Master’ was appointed, who proved to be a lifelong inspiration to all those pupils who thenceforth aspired to become engineers or, failing that, proved in later life to be good handy men about the house!
If I aspired to be an engineer, then this man became my mentor from the day the Workshop opened for business. Before going on to other matters, I really ought to pay tribute to one other mentor of that time. I mentioned earlier that the foreman of the car garage did little to
CADET 1935-45 CH.1.V4.doc
[page break]
11 11
[photograph]
de Havilland Gipsy Moth [inserted] (MILITARY VERSION) [/inserted]
[photograph]
NOTTS ASSEMBLY. – The Fleet of the Nottinghamshire Flying Club and privately-owned craft at Tollerton. The club-house is standard pattern devised by the ill-fated National Flying Services.
[inserted] WHERE I HAD MY FIRST FEW FLIGHTS WITH TOBY MARTIN (HIS GIPSY MOTH WAS PROBABLY HAVE ONE OF THOSE NEAREST THE CAMERA [/inserted]
[inserted] two postage stamps [/inserted]
[inserted] I HAD ONE OF THESE WHEN THEY FIRST CAME OUT [/inserted]
[page break]
Page 12
encourage me to frequent his workshop. The same could not be said about his superior, the Service Manager. A qualified engineer, an ex Royal Engineers Major, a specialist in recovering First World War tanks from distressing and undignified situations, he had become a close friend of my father. He also took an avuncular interest in my early technical education, and incidentally took me up in my first few flights in his Gypsy Moth, which he flew from the Nottinghamshire Flying Club’s airfield at Tollerton’ near Nottingham. That soon became my Second Love and added another bite from The Bug.
It would be about this time that Meccano brought out their sets of aircraft parts which produced far more authentic looking models than those you could make up from the standard Meccano components. Looking back, this was perhaps the starting point of my aeromodelling career.
Thus, the stage seemed to be set for me to start on a career as an engineer but, you may well ask, is it not time for a start to be made on all this ‘Cadet 1935 to 1945’ business?
True enough. Please turn to Chapter Two.
[page break]
Page 13
[underlined] Chapter Two Private Stevenson P.D. KSGOTC [/underlined]
By 1935, the antics of Hitler and his Nazi friends were beginning to cause grave concern amongst the regrettably few politicians and others whose heads were not so firmly thrust into the sands of Disarmament. They were only too aware how pitifully unprepared Britain was to defend itself against the growing threat of German Nationalism and it’s associated territorial ambitions. In spite of the Pacifists and the still ongoing years of depression, the Services did get slight increases in their budgets, but after much argument in Parliament. These did enable them to make some attempt to replace out of date equipment and to increase their recruitment and training programmes.
In the case of RAF, this was the time when they started to award contracts for new breeds of aircraft which, in time, would win the Battle of Britain and the air offensives which followed. Closer to home, there was a marked if gradual increase in flying activity at Spittlegate, Cranwell and Digby – to say nothing of more boys at the King’s School with fathers in the RAF. In spite of this, the King’s School was not outwardly pro-RAF. It was, of course, pleased to have an increase in it’s fee paying scholars. Particularly so, when fathers were posted elsewhere and in order not to interrupt their son’s education, left them as School Boarders. On the contrary, the King’s School was firmly ‘Army Property’ in that it had it’s Officer’s Training Corps, a unit of some standing.
During the first world war, when the life expectancy of the front line subalterns was little more than three weeks, calling for a constant flow of ‘gun fodder’, the inland Grammar Schools had been drawn into a ‘catch ‘em young’ policy with the creation of the OTCs. These [underlined] Officer’s [/underlined] Training Corps existed at two levels. In the Public and Grammar Schools, these were Junior OTCs in which the boys, between the ages of twelve and eighteen would be trained up to a ‘Certificate A’ level which qualified them for [underlined] consideration [/underlined] for a possible commission in the Territorial Army. If in the relatively rare case of the pupil going on to University, he could then join the University’s Senior OTC, hopefully passing Certificate B, which most probably gave him possible entry to Sandhurst.
In both cases, it was hope, when the time came for them to be called to military service, these boys of potentially officer grade would have been well imbued with Army discipline and traditions, together with the elements of infantry training and leadership. From the point of view of the War Office in the first war, the OTCs did an excellent and worthwhile job.
So much so, the post war War Department decided that the OTCs were still a [sic] valuable sources of potential officer and NCO material for the Regular and Territorial Armies. Besides, they would provide valuable Leadership and Character Training, ‘buzz words’ which were very much in vogue at the time.
At school level, for those with OTCs, it became automatic thinking on the part of both masters and pupils, that most boys would, on entering upper school, join it’s OTC unless their parents were particularly set against such ‘militarisation’ as the Pacifists put it.
However, in spite of the fact that locally based RAF personnel outnumbered that of the Army by something like twenty to one, and that ratio was reflected in the pupil roll, nevertheless the school was still Army orientated in it’s outlook. In the absence of anything resembling the OTC on the part of the RAF, there would be little or no encouragement from the school for any of those boys who had ‘caught the air bug’. There was therefore no real choice but, if one gained a Certificate A, it might be a useful pawn when one appeared before an RAF Selection Board.
My own twelfth birthday was in August 1935. So, on the first Thursday afternoon of the new school year in September, I became Private Stevenson of No.4 Platoon of the King’s School Company, Officer’s Training Corps, attached for training purposes to the Lincolnshire Regiment of the British Army. The individual concerned no doubt felt considerably less imposing than the title above would have you believe. He was, of course, the lowest form of military life, and it was not long before he was reminded of the fact.
The first parade of the Autumn Term was a proud one for all concerned. The four platoons reflected the age and status of their place in the school’s hierarchy. No.1 Platoon was composed of boys who had, as a result of the previous year’s terminal examinations, moved up into the Upper Fifth and Sixth Forms. They were predominantly fifteen year olds since most of the sixteen year olds had left
[page break]
14
[photograph]
Lt.-Col. M. H. Raymond, M.A. (Cantab.), T.D.
Master 1921-52, O/C. The King’s School
Contingent C.C.F., 1924-52.
[page break]
Page 15
school already. The remaining Sixth Formers were those who had not been promoted NCOs for the other Platoons. No.2 Platoon were fourteen year olds, now in the Lower Fifth Forms. No.3 Platoon were thirteen year olds now in the Fourth Form. These three platoons, mostly in full uniform, were ‘Fallen In’ with appropriate ceremony, and were doing their best of look smart.
For the moment, No.4 Platoon was merely a motley mob of twelve year olds who had been herded into a safe corner of the school quadrangle by a stern looking, very grown up Sergeant (so he appeared to us, he must have been all of sixteen!) These ‘recruits’ had, for their sins, moved up into the Upper Third Forms, and had thereby qualified to join the ‘Old Tin Cans’.
Each move up into a new platoon was an immense rise in prestige (and pecking order) No.1 Platoon were now possessors of two uniforms. ‘Bests’ were for special occasions – special parades such as the Annual Inspection, Founder’s Day and the Armistice Day Parades, as well as going to the Annual Summer Camp. ‘Seconds’ were for those parades when the ‘men’ were supposed to look, feel and work like real soldiers. ‘Seconds’ were identical with Bests, but had reached the point where signs of wear and tear, brought about by drill, exercises, field days and annual camp, ruled them out for more formal occasions.
Nos. 2 & 3 Platoons had to make do mostly with Seconds, although a few whose drill was particularly smart could join No.1for [sic] special occasions. These uniforms were basically WW1 infantry. A round hat, khaki serge jacket with high collar (hot and prickly in summer), ‘Plus Four’ type khaki serge trousers with knee length ‘puttees’ and black boots, the latter having to be provided by parents.
For the first parade of the new year, Bests were worn by Nos 1 & 2 where issued. The remainder of No. 2 and No.3 wore their Seconds. No.3 were immensely proud as they were wearing full uniform for the first time, even if they were a bit tatty in places. The parade had been preceded by frenzied activity in the kit stores when outgrown uniforms were exchanged for better(?) fits.
As for No.4 Platoon, on that first parade, one could say that as yet they did not exist as such.
They were merely a loose scrum of small (so they felt) somewhat apprehensive twelve year olds, herded into a corner by an impressive Sergeant ‘in ‘is Bests’ bearing obviously new stripes, and doing his best to look as important as he feels. Still in our normal school uniforms, we had no external signs of having become ‘Privates’ or anything else for that matter.
We had watched as the Company Sergeant Major, scarcely recognisable as our erstwhile Head Boy, strode out from the school cloisters and howled for ‘RIGHT MARKERS’. Three figures had emerged from a conglomerate of khaki elsewhere in the quadrangle and had been positioned to the former’s satisfaction, whereupon, to a drum beat Nos.1, 2 and 3 platoon ‘got Fell in’. Right Dressed and subjected to an initial inspection by their respective Sergeants (more new stripes) the Sergeant Major called the lot to attention. This was the signal for sundry junior officers to emerge in their turn from the cloisters, revealing that they too, on close inspection bore remarkable likenesses to several of our form masters. Having taken command of their respective platoons, the Second in Command emerged to take over the whole parade, each of which takeovers being accompanied by a succession of ‘Attentions’, ‘Stand at Eases’ and mutual saluting. Having taken up a position of importance on the front of the parade, the ‘2 i/c’ was now approached by the COMMANDING OFFICER.
Having assumed command, he proceeded to inspect closely all three platoons, silently (but sometimes less silently) expressing his dissatisfaction at the regrettable loss of smartness and established Good Order and Discipline, he handed the platoons over to their officers and then headed over in our direction, much to our further apprehension.
Captain Raymond was, on the other days of the week, our senior English teacher and even in that role was something of a martinet. In his military guise, he was even more so, tending to strike terror into transgressors both in class and on the parade ground. His determined step in our direction was to say the least of it, unnerving. He stopped in front of our motley group who, by that time had been herded into some semblance of order by the Sergeant. He regarded each of us in turn (as if he had never seen us before) with a cold silent gaze, expressing obvious disgust. After a pregnant pause, he said “Carry on, Sergeant” and stalked away after acknowledging a crashing salute from the latter.
[page break]
Page 16
The Sergeant proceeded to ‘Carry On’ in more ways than one. He announced that although we were not wearing uniform, [underlined] we were now in the Officer’s Training Corps [/underlined], and we were not to forget it. For our first year in No.4 Platoon, our school uniform was also our OTC uniform. From now onwards it must be maintained to a much higher standard of neatness and cleanliness than it had previously been used by mere schoolboys.
In one’s teenage years (term not yet invented) someone who is three or four years older appears to be an adult even if he is only sixteen in actual fact. He has had three or four years of ‘military service’ by then and may also be a School Prefect. With the latter’s authority to inflict punishment which prefects had in those days, plus his now military authority, the utterings of our Sergeant seemed to have the authority of the Law, if not that of God himself!
Anyway, he told us that our shoes were filthy and by next parade he would expect to see his face in them. Our trousers were little better and he would expect them to be pressed with a straight and sharp crease. Our jackets were similarly over due for a good brushing. Our ties were yanked straight and our caps must be worn straight and level, and we all needed a hair cut.
Having got that lot off his chest, the time had come he said, for us to learn a bit of basic foot drill. We were taught to ‘Stand to Attention’, ‘Stand at Ease’ and ‘Stand Easy’. Detail is largely forgotten (it was seventy years ago) but every Thursdays afternoon it was ‘square bashing, so it seemed. We learned to Fall In, Fall Out, Right Dress and Salute, Right Turn, Left Turn and About Turn. We learned to Number, Size and because the Army at that time marched in Columns of Fours, we also learned that interesting manoeuvre ‘Form Fours’.
Drilling at the Halt more or less mastered, we then had to go on to Drilling on the March.
In the process of concentrating on swinging a stiff arm and wrist (thumbs pressed down etc) up to the level of the waist fore and aft, the command “Quick March” presented, in a few cases some immediate problems. Having established that the first step was always with the [underlined] left foot, [/underlined] this was often accompanied by the left arm being swung forward at the same time. The resulting progress would be somewhat reminiscent of that of a camel. That sorted out, we then had to master upon which step an About Turn was started, how many to get round to the opposite direction and when (and how) to step off again. The same applied to Left and Right Turns on the march, together with Right and Left Wheels. It was amazing how difficult the simple process of walking from A to B had become! On the other hand, our parents were having to get used to sons who now seemed to delight in Marching everywhere rather than adopting their previous ambulatory gait.
We had taken turns at being Right marker and had made a reasonably smart exhibition of ourselves at Falling In, Right Dressing, Falling Out and Saluting, and it was felt by our NCOs that we could be trusted to Fall In with the other platoons at the beginning and end of parades. Came the day when the Sergeant Major howled for Right Markers and four of these strode out, and four platoons ‘got Fell In’ without rousing the anger of all in authority about us.
With that, we really felt we were beginning to be soldiers, especially as now we were ‘in uniform’. Admittedly only just, one might say. We had been issued with khaki webbing belt with a brass buckle and a couple of extra brass fittings, the significance of which we would only learn later. Next was our introduction to that wondrous substance ‘Blanco’ which we learned to apply without getting khaki everywhere. ‘Brasso’ for the brasswork, without getting black stains elsewhere. Wearing this, we were now in the third category of uniform – ‘Mufti’.
This was an Arabic word brought back by the army to describe clothing worn by the soldiery when not in uniform. Two thirds of all our parades would be in mufti, i.e. school uniform plus the by now ubiquitous khaki webbing belt, no doubt to spare the Best and Second uniforms from wear and tear. However, we in No.4 Platoon must not be confused with the ‘real soldiers’ in the other platoons. Their belts would include the ‘Frog’, an extra bit of khaki webbing which would carry our bayonet scabbard when we progressed to rifle drill, but that was not for the ‘sprogs’ in No.4
Although it still feels like it, we did not spend the whole of every Thursday afternoon on the parade ground. We also had lectures on various subjects which, as we learned later, were the beginnings of the subjects on which we would be examined for ‘Certificate A’. Ranks and Badges, Army Structure and Organisation, Rules and Regulations, the first elements of First Aid and Hygiene, Map Reading are the ones which I can remember. No doubt there were others.
[page break]
Page 17
‘Officer material’, we were not being trained as mere ‘rankers’. We were being trained as leaders and we were expected to act as leaders. We must not only learn (whatever it was) but we must also learn to teach – or rather ‘instruct’. Every new drill movement or any other subject was not only taught to a high level of competence, but each one of us in turn must expect to be called upon immediately or at a later date to instruct the others in that movement or subject. Of course, at No.4 Platoon level, this usually involved only simple drill movements, but from the very beginning we got used to standing out in front of the Section or Platoon and take command irrespective of whether we wore stripes or not.
This was all heady stuff. Discipline was always strict but there was also no shortage of praise where praise was due. Having received praise, we also learned to look for praiseworthiness and not be afraid to give it. We all became dead keen and looked forward to new subjects, though most of these were mainly symbolic. The Services make great play on the expression ‘Esprit de Corps’ and every man jack of us from twelve years upwards, stood high, marched high and bawled out our commands as good as the rest.
Which was just as well, for the high point of the spring term’s OTC activity was usually the Annual Inspection. For the OTC boys there was no school work that day, but it was no holiday. It was very much a ‘spit and polish’ affair and even closer attention was paid to hair length, trouser creases, shine on footwear and brasswork and general appearance. Drill movements were practised to perfection.
In addition to our usual officers hovering in the cloisters as we went through the initial stages of Falling In, the presence of the Inspecting Officer and his entourage, visibly heightened the tension. When the parade was ceremoniously handed over, he then proceeded to make his initial inspection. This took time as each man in each platoon was examined from head to toe and questions asked. The platoons not being inspected were thankful to be stood At Ease, but as he finished with No.3 Platoon, the command of ‘Attention’ to us, brought heartbeats up to heart attack levels as we stood strictly Eyes Front. The Inspecting Officer, usually a ‘Top Brass’ from Northern Command, cast his eye critically over us. We appeared to pass muster, and, acknowledging an even greatly smashing salute from our Sergeant, moved on to higher things.
The rest of the morning superficially resembled a typical Thursday afternoon’s activity. I was to learn later that it had been carefully orchestrated to show each platoon at it’s best, drilling, learning and instructing in turn to allow the Inspecting Officer to drop in at will to observe and examine. Apart from foot drill, I don’t think much was really expected of No.4 Platoon, but for all that, he watched us carry out a typical routine of movements at the halt and on the march. We had almost reached the point of relaxing when a couple of us were called out to instruct. So far as I can remember, I was not one of the (?) lucky ones. That happened on one of the later Annual Inspections.
The morning successfully over, we were dismissed for lunch. In the afternoon we were marched up to the School Field, preceded by the Band who had gone through their Counter Marching and other gyrations, bugle calls and drumming displays during the morning. Thereafter the senior platoons demonstrated their tactical and ‘battle’ skills with much shouting of commands and firing orders, together with some hopefully impressive bayonet charges. As yet No.4 Platoon was not up to such extremes and I think we spent most of the time watching, as the Inspecting Officer watched on with a critical eye. The programme over,
the Inspecting Officer expressed his satisfaction of all he had seen, congratulated us upon our turnout etc., etc., accepted a ceremonial General Salute from the Band and a final March Past, received and acknowledged a further round of salutes and departed with his entourage.
We marched back to school amidst sighs of relief for another year.
As the spring weather improved, we were introduced to another ‘delight’, the Route March. Pre war, the army did not have much in the way of troop transport. ‘Footsloggers’ were expected to footslog their way from A to B. for those who had them, this was a uniform afternoon and headed by the band, off we would go through the town and into the country lanes, fifty minutes march and ten minutes break. The first route march of the season would be for five or six miles but later this would be increased to ten miles or so. One hundred and thirty paces to the minute, roughly three miles per hour with our length of leg. The ‘adults’ of No.1 Platoon could, if necessary’, manage the regulation thirty three inch pace, but No.4 Platoon found it hard going. Amongst the other commands such as
[page break]
Page 18
‘March to Attention’, ‘Eyes Left’ to a passing RAF Officer, etc., there would be the frequent cry passed forward of ‘Shorten Pace’. The relief was usually short lived as the Band having had a break from blowing, stuck [sic] up a new tune, to which the forward platoons immediately stepped out in response.
We had by now learned a little about ‘tactics’ in our theory lectures. As the better weather of late spring promised the possibility of dry grass, we frequently marched up to the school field to put into practice the principles of Section and Platoon field movements. We spent much time advancing, retreating and taking cover behind what little cover there was. Most of this seemed to be in the prone position, interspersed with mad, but carefully controlled dashes which were officially supposed to be ‘charges’.
This was all a bit theoretical in the case of No.4 Platoon as we did not have rifles. At twelve years old or so, we were mostly too small to handle the 8,1/2lb, 0.303in Lee Enfield without doing ourselves or others some serious damage. However, we had our khaki belt, and in the best Army tradition, we ‘went through the motions’, as much as anything to impress the other non-OTC boys who were condemned to spend their Thursday afternoons ‘gardening’. These pour souls, rarely in the least interested in things horticultural, were being persuaded by seemingly equally unenthusiastic house masters to cultivate the six small plots of land euphemistically called ‘House Gardens’ in which a few long suffering flowers and vegetables strove to survive.
Whatever their motivations, inspirations or inclinations, we ‘soldiers’ despised the ‘gardeners’/ in the years before we could join the OTC, we had done our share of gardening to level and prepare ground for new rugby and cricket pitches and no doubt there were a few in our ranks who had joined the OTC solely to escape further gardening.
As can well be imagined, the average school field does not contain much ‘cover’ from a military point of view. Our field contained the usual pavilion and gardening sheds, plus a captured WW1 German Howitzer which must have been attacked and defended countless times during the Twenties and Thirties before it eventually succumbed to the WW2 scrap metal drive. Finally there were those House Gardens alongside the eastern boundary.
By the middle of the Summer Term, there would be a fair show of vegetation in these and therefore qualified in the eyes of we, the soldiery, as potential cover. As a result, much to the annoyance and frustration of the house masters doing their best to maintain some measure of order and orderly growth, the gardens were bravely defended and resolutely attacked. Eventually, when combat reached the point where actual bodily harm threatened the vegetation and/or its reluctant cultivators, complaints from the house masters resulted in a Standing Order being issued placing the area ‘out of bounds’. This would hold for the rest of the school year but would have been conveniently forgotten by the commencement of the following year’s Spring Offensives. The summer term had two high points for the older platoons, which were denied to those in No.4. These were the Field Day and the Annual Summer Camp. In both cases, the participants had to be old enough, possessors of full uniforms and competent in arms drill. We were none of these and had to watch the departure of the privileged, taking some small comfort in the fact that in time, such delights would come our way. When indeed it did come my way, there would be much to recount. But it was still painful to have to wait.
Schooling in the Thirties was heavily examination orientated. In addition to the end of the year scholastic exams to decide the Movers Up and the Stayers Down, we also had OTC tests and assessments. I don’t think anyone actually stayed down in No.4 Platoon but we were nevertheless closely advised to revise all we had learned in the past year. In the interest of Esprit de Corps and personal pride, these tests had to be passed with the highest possible markings.
The Summer Term ended with much personal satisfaction on the part of Private Stevenson P.D., knowing that he had been not found too wanting scholastically and would be moving up a Form, but he would also be moving up into No.3 Platoon. His last military act was to carefully blanco and polish his belt and hand it into Stores. For the next few weeks he would revert to civvie life, forget school and the Army and catch up with the RAF.
Once again there would be the pilgrimages up Cold Harbour Lane, that green lane bordering the north eastern boundary of Spittlegate airfield, to check up how the pupils of No.3 FTS were
[page break]
19
[map]
RAF GRANTHAM 1938
[picture]
Avro 504N
[picture]
Armstrong Whitworth Atlas Trainer
[page break]
20
[picture]
Hawker Tomtit
[picture]
de Havilland Tiger Moth
[picture]
Avro Tutor
[picture]
Hawker Hart Trainer
[picture]
Avro Anson
[page break]
Page 21
progressing and to find out what, if any, new aircraft were doing their Circuits and Bumps. Although the pattern of flying did not appear to have changed much over the previous year or two, quite a lot had happened to the aircraft. For Elementary Training, the legendary Avro 504N had given way briefly to the Hawker Tomtit. This in turn had been replaced by the first of the de Havilland Tiger Moths, which No.3 FTS were the first to introduce into training service. In their turn, they had been replaced by the new Avro Tutor. There had also been changes in the Advanced Training aircraft. The ageing Armstrong Whitworth Atlas was replaced by the Hawker Hart Trainer which was fast enough to outpace most of the current fighter types. These were all single engine biplane types, but the RAF would soon be introducing two monoplanes into front line service as the rearmament programme slowly gained momentum. Suddenly our sound spectrum had a new sound as the Avro Anson trainers began their circuits. There was much to see and note, and the fathers of my two school friends, one on the FTS staff, the other on the staff of the Training Group H.Q. were quick to transmit their enthusiasms for the new types. To our delight, the three of us were smuggled in to the hangers one day to make first hand contact with them, and for the first time I was able to sit in cockpits and lay hands on controls.
Feet once more on ground, there were two other significant developments that summer. The Air League of the British Empire, had done much to promote the Hendon Air Shows, and had also taken a large hand in the promotion of the RAF Open Days. Spittlegate was one of the first to open its gates to the general public, and in addition to an impressive line up of its own aircraft, hosted a wide variety of new and tried aircraft from the other RAF units. These were great events, both on the ground and in the air displays forming an essential part of the programme. Naturally, I was in the first group to rush in when the station gates opened.
The other event was also an Air League development. As a continuing aspect of its Air Mindedness programme, it had started a Junior Section. For a modest subscription, its monthly magazine kept its readers up to date with all the latest in military and civil aeronautics. Having been one of the first to join, this magazine was to become essential reading, to the detriment of homework assignments on the days following its arrival. Copies were filed away for reading through again and again through the school holidays.
Like all summer holidays, that of 1936 went all too quickly. The last week was a desperate attempt to complete the holiday homework tasks (which of course had got left to the last possible minute). School uniforms were cleaned and the summer’s accumulated grime was carefully removed from shoes. There was also a most important item to be purchased, a pair of black army style boots!
The first parade of September 1936 was typical. Frenzied activity in the area of the Quartermaster’s Stores over the previous days had equipped the new No.1 Platoon with ‘Bests’ (Appropriately larger) together with Seconds. They had also been reissued with ‘Service’ rifles (i.e. capable of being fired with live and blank ammunition, possessing sharp bayonets, and these were being furiously cleaned, oiled and lovingly examined. The new No.2 Platoon were issued with Seconds and most of them had to be content with ‘Demonstration Purposes’ rifles. These ‘DP’ rifles, long past being safely fired, still carried their regulation Bolt but its firing pin had been removed, so that it could still go through the motions of being fired with ‘DP’ rounds, to the general safety of all concerned. To their delight the new No.3 platoon would now in time be issued with Seconds, but until they had mastered the arts of wearing them correctly, they had been reissued with the inevitable khaki belt, but this differed in one vital respect.
This term, No3 Platoon would begin Arms Drill, which involved the wearing of the bayonet (D.P. and therefore blunt), and this called for the addition of the ‘Frog’. To the uninitiated, this small extra piece of webbing, used to hold the bayonet scabbard when worn, hanging down the left thigh of the wearer, would be the one thing which distinguished the seasoned troops of No.3 Platoon from the riff-raff of No.4 Platoon when Mufti was being worn! As before No. 3 would not parade with arms until they had learned to handle them.
Bearing the appropriate accoutrements, the parade Fell In with the exception of No.4 Platoon which once again did not yet exist. In No.3, we Faced Front and ignored the presence of a heap of very young looking humanity herded into one corner by a very new Sergeant who also seemed to be nothing like as old as our Sergeant. Surely, they didn’t expect to make soldiers out of that lot!
[page break]
[picture]
SIR ARTHUR & LADY LONGMORE WITH THEIR FAMILY AT ELSHAM HOUSE.
[page break]
22
[picture]
[underlined] THE ‘SHORT LEE ENFIELD’ 0.303in RIFLE [/underlined]
[underlined] [which we came to know so know [sic] so very well] [/underlined]
[page break]
Page 23
Following ‘Fall In’, Inspection (usual silent expression of disgust on the part of the Commanding Officer) and ‘Carry On’, our feelings of superiority were instantly deflated by the descent upon us of a new set of newly promoted NCOs. They immediately informed us that our last year’s performance was merely the kindergarten stage, and that we must now set about turning ourselves into real soldiers. Even at the age of thirteen as we now were, to us, the sixteen year old Sergeant appeared to be highly adult, especially as he now had two Annual Camps behind him, in which he had been subject to full Regular Army life and discipline.
However, before we could commence our ‘licking into shape’, we needed to be ‘kitted out’. No old soldier needed to be reminded of that peculiar (in both senses of the work) aroma of the Quartermaster’s Stores, (or in our school, ‘The Armoury’). A mixture of the smells of blanco, webbing, polish on boots, leather, gun oil and above all, uniforms. Well worn and long used heavy serge acquires a lingering scent of mud, rain and sweat, and after prolonged storage in poorly ventilated store rooms, no amount of cleaning, be it the home wash tub or the professional cleaners, can remove it completely.
In spite of the slow beginnings of rearmament, funding at No.3 Platoon level was virtually zero. Our ‘new’ uniforms conceivably many moons ago someone’s Bests, had by the time we were struggling into them, been issued, reissued, worn, patched and washed to the point where it’s khaki was more of a shade than a colour. Its serge had long ago given up the task of retaining a decent crease and defied most attempts at ironing and pressing. Most parents must have been horrified at the garments so proudly brought home later that afternoon. After all, their son, being in the OTC was costing them five whole shillings per term. (Something like £20 in 2006 money!)
For us, the new No.3 Platoon, the afternoon seemed to be spent in being issued with the various bits of uniform and getting them on properly. We were issued with a round service cap bearing the cap badge of the Lincolnshire Regiment. Then a high collared jacket whose brass buttons bore the school emblem. A pair of equally misshaped ‘plus four’ type trousers followed, which had to be held up by a pair of braces. These were fastened by a strap just under the knee. Much to our satisfaction, was the belt, [underlined] complete with Frog. [/underlined] Much less to our subsequent satisfaction was the pair of Puttees. (Magic word from India this time, from.. Hindi ‘patti’ = bandage)
As it’s derivation would indicate, the puttee was a khaki strip some 10cm wide and about two metres long, which would be wound round your carves, starting at the ankle and ending (hopefully) just under the knees on top of the lower end of your trousers, where it is tied with two laces. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Nothing could be further from the truth. The army puttee is of a standard length intended for six foot plus beefy adults down thirteen year old mini soldiers. The winding of a puttee is both art and science. Having put on your boots, you roll up the puttee into a tight roll, it’s top end in the middle. Two turns are wrapped round the ankle and you start to wind it carefully up the leg, clockwise round the right leg and anticlockwise round the left (and heaven help you if the inspecting officer finds that you have wound both legs round the same way). Now comes the difficult bit. The aim is to end up at the top with two overlapping turns, and the art/science is how to manage the major part of the length in the middle. For a start, each wrap round the leg must advance upwards by [underlined] exactly [/underlined] the same amount. Obviously, the smaller you are, the smaller should be the distance between the lower edges of the wraps. This is a state of perfection which takes weeks to achieve, especially since the next problem is ‘How tight?’. Too tight and your feet freeze ‘cos you have stopped your blood flowing. Too loose, and horror of horrors, following a particularly enthusiastic stamping of the feet, the whole lot unwinds round your feet, bang in the middle of an important parade! It seemed to take the whole of the afternoon (and more practises at home) to get everything sorted out to an acceptable standard on subsequent parades. One final item to complete this initial kit issue – a Button Stick, a wondrous relic of those Brass Button Days. A strip of stiff brass with a slot down the middle, allowed it to be slid under the buttons and Brasso applied without fear of getting black stains on the serge beneath. After further instruction on the care of the uniform (deliberately issued a size or so bigger ‘to allow for growth’), we just about made it in time for the afternoon’s ‘Dismiss’.
As with life in the schoolrooms, the first few parades of the new year were devoted to revision. The school holidays had, as we were once again reminded, allowed us to slip back into sloppy ways. Foot Drill had to be brought back to scratch and theory re-polished, so there was a lot of square bashing and theory revision to be done before we could start on anything new.
[page break]
Page 24
Came the great day when, having completed our afternoon ration of foot drill, we were marched off to the Armoury to collect a rifle apiece. The first impact was, of course it’s weight. Carrying it carefully to a nearby classroom, we began our first lesson – ‘The Naming of Parts’. New to us perhaps, [deleted] by [/deleted] [inserted] BUT [/inserted] not to Kipling and the Indian Army. Like 95% of all previous subjects, the lesson was delivered by one of the senior NCOs, with the usual admonition “Learn these names until you can recite them in your sleep, because when I’m finished, one of you is going to instruct the others and every time I see you lot, someone else is going to have to do the same”
We started at the muzzle and worked down steadily to the butt. We removed the magazine and the bolt and we peered up the bore. We discovered the little flap in the brass plate of the butt to reveal the ‘Pull Through’ with it’s bit of flannelette known as the ‘Four By Two’ and beyond that the brass oil bottle. We examined the Foresight which was fixed (It was years before I gathered that John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga had nothing whatsoever to so [sic] with the aiming of a rifle). Then on to the Rear Sight, which was not fixed and had a lot of fiddley bits which we would have to learn to use. The Sergeant then handed each of us five Dummy (D.P.) Rounds which we learned to load into the magazine. Making sure that the muzzles were pointing at the ceiling, we loaded the magazine into the rifle and ‘put one up the spout’. Since these were D.P. Rifles, which had no firing pins, and again making sure our spouts were pointing skywards, we ‘fired’ our first round. Ecstasy!. Loosing off the remaining with gay abandon, we put everything to rights, and with some reluctance, handed them back into the Armoury. We discovered later that these rifles had been formally issued to individuals in No.2 Platoon who were not at all happy that [underlined] their [/underlined] rifles were being used by the ‘rookies’ in No.3.
Having sorted out which end was which, we were now ready to make a start on Arms Drill. Now the Short Lee Enfield Mk.IV or whatever it was (they looked old enough to be Mk.I) was sufficiently long for it’s muzzle to be somewhere around the right ear of some of us when it was standing vertical. It was also heavy enough to seriously threaten the stability of the smaller thirteen year olds if handled too enthusiastically. So, when the day came for us to start, we were stationed sufficiently far apart to ensure mutual safety, and enough NCOs about to assist in individual safety. First, we had to learn new positions of Attention, At Ease and Easy. No great problem and no threat to safety, apart, that is, from someone who managed to drop his rifle. Short lecture on the three grades of army crime – dropping one’s rifle is rated as ‘Major’. The real trouble starts when having had a brisk demonstration of the movement instigated by the command ‘Slope Arms’, accompanied by the shouting of ‘One Stop – Two Stop – Three’ which will become bitten into the souls of all true soldiers, we attempt to do the same. Of course our sixteen year old Sergeant is almost fully grown and from long practice can whip the 8 1/2lb to the first and second movements as if it were mere balsa wood while his body remains virtually motionless. Three years younger and half grown, the 8 1/2lb suddenly becomes 8 1/2kg, requiring major bodily movement to achieve anything like the same effect. Bodies totter and NCOs leap in to restore balance. Miraculously, the rifles are now on our left shoulders but slope in all directions. In the case of an adult, the relative proportions of rifle and body will, given time and practice, achieve a 45 degree slope of the rifle with a horizontal left forearm, with the weight evenly balanced on the shoulder. Unless one is large for one’s age, by No.3 Platoon averages, something has to give if the weight is not to tip the victim backwards. Having more or less straightened us all out, we attempt the ‘Order Arms’ which we achieve without crushing our right toes. We try again with slightly more success. Eventually the lesson ends. Whether it because the Sergeant was satisfied (which perhaps was doubtful) or whether we were exhausted (which was more likely) or indeed, whether one or the other was on the point of tears, which was equally likely.
Subsequent arms drill sessions involved all the normal foot drill movements now with rifles, plus a few extras such as Present Arms, For Inspection Port Arms, Ease Springs, etc. Having more or less mastered these we progressed to Fix Bayonets (“When I says Fix, you don’t Fix, but when I says ‘Bayonets’ you whips ‘em out and you wops ‘em on and you wets a while” (phraseology faithfully passed down from NCO to NCO from pre-Napoleonic days or even earlier). It took months to get it all more or less right and all the time we were being reminded that we were supposed to be in the British Army and not Fred Kano’s (Fred Kano was supposed to be the mythical General of the army of some equally mythical South American Banana Republic state and therefore the most contemptible of military establishments.
The Armistice Day parades came and went with us in full uniform, even if we did have to let No.2 Platoon have their rifles back for the occasion. Our second year in the Corps was aimed at completing our initial training as infantrymen. Background subjects proliferated with field tactics
[page break]
Page 25
playing an increasing part in our training, for this year would be the first in which we could take part in the annual Field Day. Now that we could (more or less) handle a rifle, we had to learn Fire Control and the principles of covering fire and the like. We were presented with posters showing various forms of terrain over which we needed to plan our movements to take advantage of available cover and where to expect enemy fire. The countryside surrounding our school field became suddenly hostile or potentially useful according to whether we were defending or preparing to attack. We now took part in attacks and defensives at both Platoon and Company level which duly impressed this year’s Inspecting Officer, who incidentally, did not appear to be anything like so formidable this year. Maybe it was he was not so formidable, or was it a measure of our growing confidence?
Another annual event which has not been mentioned so far was ‘Founder’s Day’. This was the day when the school opened its gates to all and sundry including fond parents who could see what their little darlings were doing in exchange for their parent’s hard earned school fees. The day would start with a service in the nearby Parish Church in which King Edward, and his merry men, back in the fourteenth century, were praised for their forethought, and other notables including such past pupils as Newton, Lord Burleigh, and Archbishop Wand, were praised for their ghostly presence. After this formality, we trooped back to the school. The OTC in all (or nearly all) their Bests, accompanied by the Band in their Very Bests (Big Drummer in his Tiger Skin etc, [sic]) gave a formidable display of Felling In, being inspected by the Mayor, Foot and Arms Drilling, marching and counter marching, Marching Past and Dismissing all to cries of command ranging from semi bass to semi falsetto.
While the civvies were being suitably diverted, the soldiers suddenly changed into school boys to man impressive displays in school rooms, art rooms, laboratories and workshops.
That out of the way, we prepared for Field Day, No.3 Platoon now qualifying for the first time. In preparation for this we were issued with more kit. This consisted of a haversack which hung from the waist, a backpack which (obviously) went on your back and ammunition pouches which hung down your front, all of which required more in the way of webbing which was fixed to the brass buckle things on the belt that we had spent the last two years assiduously polishing for no apparent reason.
The Field Day was held in the Parklands of a kindly disposed stately home from which his Lordship would observe with interest (and his gamekeepers with apprehension) while the soldiery of six or more local Grammar School OTCs, scared the living daylights out of his wildlife. The various OTCs would be divided into two Brigades, one of which would defend some appropriate strong point while the other attacked. The ground would have been carefully surveyed by the respective Commanding Officers in conjunction with sundry Regulars from Northern Command who would act as umpires for the day, and an approximate battle plan worked out in advance. On the day, the defenders would arrive from one direction and get themselves ‘dug in’ and, suitably camouflaged. Forward ‘O.Ps’ (Observation Posts) would be deployed towards the general direction of the expected attack. Meanwhile, the attackers arrived from another direction, would ‘debus’ and form themselves into something resembling an attack Brigade. Deploying on a wide front, scouting parties would be sent out to probe the enemy’s positions. Much creeping, ducking and crawling, accompanied by soot voce commands would, in due time provoke a volley of blank cartridge fire from one or other of the O.Ps.
Battle was joined. All very confusing at 3 Platoon level, especially as my section’s Corporal managed to get us separated from the main force which resulted in us being declared ‘Wiped Out’, or ‘Captured’ or something before we really got going. Appropriately labelled by an Umpire, we had to sit and listen to the battle raging around us. Those of No.1 Platoon and a few in No.2 who were the proud possessors of Service Rifles had received a ration of blank cartridges and these were being used to most audible effect against an enemy who had apparently been issued with ever more. Very exciting.
The Umpires having inflicted significant casualties on both sides, declared that it was now time for a truce to be declared and emergency rations to be consumed. This was no great help since, although our parents had filled our haversacks with enough emergency rations for several meals, the exertions and the fresh air had caused them to be dipped into long ago and little remained. After lunch, the state of battle had apparently reached the point where the defenders should stage a counter attack. To our delight, another Umpire declared that we had been uncaptured or something and that we could now rejoin the affray. Happily toting our few D.P.SLEs, even if we could not have any blanks to fire, we deployed, worked our bolts, took aim at indicated targets, worked our bolts,
[page break]
Page 26
squeezed our triggers and shouted BANG at the appropriate point. Sometime later we somehow managed to locate a Section of the enemy holed up in an outhouse without them detecting us. We had learned to throw a D.P. Mills Grenade by this time, but these were far too valuable ‘stores’ for them to be carried on manoeuvres. In compensation, we had been issued with a box of matches and a number of ‘penny bangers’. Having discovered that the door to this outhouse had a convenient knot hole which he had used to spy on the occupants, the Corporal lit one and posted it through, to the consternation of those within. The Corporal claimed victory from the observing Umpire.
With some justification, the Umpire ruled that (a) if the Corporal had a Mills Bomb, he would not have been able to post it through the said knot hole, (b) had he opened the door and thrown the banger in, as he would have had to have done had he used a Mills Bomb, his slaughter might have been allowed, but (c) the door had been bolted so he couldn’t have done so anyway. The Umpire then withdrew both us and the ‘enemy’ to a safe distance apart and told us to get on with our war. (It is truly amazing how the memory of such minor incidents remains fresh after so many years when far more important things are lost forever)
However, I think it was about this time that the Head Umpire called for the cessation of hostilities. After much blowing of whistles, shouting and Rendez Vous hand signals, the troops were eventually brought altogether for the Inquest. Unit A was praised for this and Unit B censured for that, but overall the exercise was declared a success (It always was). As for us, we were far too tired and hungry to take much in, and it was a weary mob who ‘embussed’ for the journey home. As was to be expected, someone had lost something, which led to no end of enquiry and recriminations, but in compensation, we had managed to ‘acquire’ several other things of value which was cause for quiet satisfaction and a blind eye.
Field Day over, we settled down to our final term of the year. ‘Settled’ was a misnomer of course. The summer term was always the most hectic term of the year. Masters were desperately trying to complete their curriculum targets. Scholars were desperately trying to make up for lost time and standards and ‘squaddies’ were desperately revising and polishing up their instructional techniques. Behind all this there was an increasing buzz as No.2 Platoon were doing their best to hide their excitement as the time neared for them to go to their first Annual Camp. There was a similar buzz in No.1 Platoon, but this was tempered by the realisation that although it would be their second camp, it would be the last for many.
At No.3 Platoon level, the question of camp was still a matter of biding our time for another year, but that did not remove the feelings of envy. This year it was Northern Command’s turn to stage the Annual Camp, the two thousand or so Senior and Junior OTC cadets would be ‘entertained’ at the big army complex at Strensall in South Yorkshire. Even to those who were unable to go, ‘Strensall’ and 1937 were inseparable. Enviously, during the last week of term, we watched their final kitting up. For some of our NCOs, this would be their swan song. When school opened again in September, not only would we see a new NCO structure with many new stripes on display, the announcement that we had successfully passed all our tests, meant that next year we would be in No.2 Platoon.
We made our final Dismiss of the year, we handed in all our kit. We closed our desks and sang our farewell hymns. We said goodbye to those friends we would not be seeing over the holidays, and went home determined to forget all about school, but not all about the OTC.
For six or seven weeks we were gong [sic] to be civvies, and catch up with the RAF. There was a lot to catch up in 1937. Aircraft which had been mere specifications in the early Thirties, were now coming into service and their successors were well into the prototype and development stages. The biplanes were beginning to go. Sleek monoplanes were increasingly seen.
Much Lincolnshire farmland was being requisitioned for new airfields. New Squadrons were being formed. They might spend a few months ‘working up’ on Hawker Hinds but once their act was together, they converted to single and twin engine replacements. RAF Scampton, just north of Lincoln, reopened and was home briefly to Barnes Wallis’ first geodetic wonderbird, the Vickers Wellesley. It’s long range capability and load capacity was to equip the RAF’s Long Range
[page break]
27
[picture]
Vickers Wellesley
[picture]
Handley Page Hampden
[picture]
ST. VINCENT’S
[picture]
Vickers Wellington
[picture]
Fairey Battle
[page break]
Page 28
Development Flight at Cranwell and in the following year it gained the World’s Long Distance Record for the RAF.
A new Bomber Command Group was formed and established it’s Headquarters in a large house and grounds in Grantham, just down the hill from Spittlegate. Within a few years, tis Group would become a legend and it’s Commanding Officer equally legendary. It’s staff increased and the sons joined the King’s School. ‘5 Group’ and ‘Harris’ entered our vocabularies and the plane spotters reported Handley Page Hampdens and Vickers Wellingtons in the skies to the north.
Things were also changing on the Flying Training scene. Now that the threat from the air was more likely to be from the east, Lincolnshire airfields were needed for combat squadrons.
No2. FTS left RAF Digby for safer skies in the south west and two fighter squadrons moved in. They were originally equipped with biplanes, but these were soon replaced by Hawker Hurricanes. No.3. FTS also left Spittlegate shortly afterwards. Spittlegate became a bomber station. Two bomber squadrons moved in, both working up with Hind biplanes but soon converted to Fairey Battles. More changes of personnel and new faces at school. New aircraft to land in over our hea[underlined]d[/underlined]s up Cold Harbour Lane.
We must have been getting older. The summer holidays appeared to be getting even shorter!
Only days after my fourteenth birthday, so it seemed, we were on countdown to a new school year. Destined for the Lower Fifth, we were also at an age when we were growing up the fastest, and by the time school started again, we would have grown out of last year’s clothes anyway. This was not the only criterion. As members of this year’s No.2 Platoon, we would be getting [underlined] Bests [/underlined] as well as Seconds and we must look as correspondingly smart in our Mufti.
We had no sooner got kitted up and drawn [underlined] our rifles [/underlined] (for this year each rifle was to be the personal responsibility of the person to whom it was issued), and had carried out our first parade of the year, when we learned that changes were in the air. It would seem that the Army was to be equipped at infantry level with the new Bren Gun, a highly accurate, easily manageable machine gun to replace the clumsy, heavy and temperamental Lewis Gun which had been the Army’s lot since WW1. These were to be issued at the rate of three to the platoon. Numbers and dispositions were going to be reorganised into a Platoon of three Sections, each of seven men. Of course it would be years before D.P. Bren Guns would be available at OTC level, but from now on we would ‘go through the motions’ as riflemen.
New Drill and Field Training Manuals would eventually arrive. The principal change in drilling was that the new compact three rank platoon could move off smartly in columns of threes rather than having to go through the ‘Form Fours’ procedure which now became history. (Pity in a way. A good ‘Form Fours’ executed smartly by a well trained squad could be a joy to watch). Other foot drill movements were also affected by this new platoon formation and this all took time to master, both in execution and from an instructional point of view.
Generally speaking, this 1937-38 year followed it’s usual pattern of drill and theory sessions, major ceremonials and new challenges. Increasingly, as No.2 Platoon, we were called upon to instruct even though we were still a long way off from wearing stripes. By now we had well mastered the use of the mnemonic of the day, PODEIR. Called upon to instruct, the first thing we had to do was to carry out our Preliminaries, i.e. collecting any necessary gear, getting the squad into the necessary place for the instruction to begin, and to prepare yourself for the task. Addressing the squad, you needed to clearly state the Objectives of the unit of instruction. “Today you will learn how to clean your rifle correctly’. Next, you need to give a clear Demonstration of what you are proposing to teach the squad. This is then followed by a clear Explanation, repeated often enough for the subject to be thoroughly understood.
[underlined]I[/underlined]nterrogation of the squad is carried out to find out if the subject is indeed thoroughly understood. Repetition of the movement or whatever, on the part of the squad is then carried out enough times to insure that the instruction has ‘stuck’.
The routine was interspersed by a number of small but memorable events. One significant, but not previously introduced member of the instructional team, was the local Territorial Depot Sergeant. As ex Regular, he lived in the Territorial Barracks on the far side of the town, coming down frequently to keep a fatherly eye upon all our doings. As we progressed to higher things, squads from Nos.1 & 2 Platoons, as a pleasant change from field exercises on the school playing field, would march up to
[page break]
Page 29
the Barracks for sundry training activities under his instruction. One of the most popular of these was firing practice on the Territorial’s indoor range. If I remember rightly, a thing called a Morris Tube or some such name, could be inserted into the bore of the standard 0.303in rifle enabling it to fire 0.22in bullets, with quite reasonable accuracy. Thus armed, we could carry out single shot, groups and rapid fire exercises, as well as learning Range Discipline. On other occasions, we carried out Gas Drill.
This was still within living memory of the gas attack horrors of the Great War and we, as a nation were still apprehensive of another war unleashing even more horrible war gases on both the military and civilian populations. The Barracks therefore had a Gas Room, in which we were first of all introduced to synthesised odours of Mustard and Phosgene gases. We would then don and learn to adjust an army style gas mask and sit there while the room was filled with tear gas. As you begin to perspire as a result of the claustrophobic effect of sitting there in a hot stuffy room, the tear gas settling on your sweat, starts to prickle like mad.
At this point the Sergeant yells at you to pull your masks off and clear the room IN AN ORDERLY MANNER1[sic]. Half blinded and choking, we clear the room in a most disorderly manner while the Sergeant reminds us that until that moment we had been sitting in a room full of tear gas with no apparent effect and to emphasise the point, makes us redon our masks and go in for another ten minutes. Not one of our pleasantest exercises.
There was one seldom expressed advantage of marching up to and back from the Territorial Barracks. As may be gathered from the previous commentaries, the King’s School was strictly boys only. On the opposite side of the town, and directly opposite to the Territorial Barracks, was the Girls High School and it’s extensive playing fields. Now the headmistress of this school ran it with an iron hand and was constantly complaining to our headmaster that his boys were making a point of parading past her school in order to fraternise with her pupils. As a result, the road past her school was, in term time strictly out of bounds to any boys who did not have to pass that way. Somehow, to the delight of all but the headmistress and her all female staff, our marches to and from the Barracks, not only had to pass her school and playing fields, but seemed to do so when her darlings were doing their jolly hockey sticks or whatever. Discipline was difficult to maintain on both sides of the fence, and the command “Eyes Front” tended to be ignored.
On an even lighter note, we were once again in the Route Marching season. When we were marching through the town and therefore in the public eye, we would ‘March To Attention’ either to some stirring tune blared out by the buglers, or to the accompaniment of pace taps from one of the side drummers. Once clear of the town, the command would ring out “March At Ease”. After a brief period of semi relaxation, someone would start whistling. Unlike today, everyone seemed to ‘Whistle While They Worked’ or went about their daily life. Of course, from early childhood, we had learned of the sad fate of those unfortunate Green Bottles which had been overcome by the effects of gravity. Also, though we were yet to discover the location of that elusive Meadow which required so many men to mow it and why the first man always had to bring his dog along, we nevertheless sang along regardless. These we soon realised, were excellent marching tunes which could be hummed, whistled or sung aloud with appropriate gusto. We also marched to, whistled and sang about the considerable distance between the centre of London and Tipperary (wherever that was). At our age, it was perhaps debatable whether we should be so enthusiastically singing the praises of the Barley Mow, that establishment’s staff and it’s wide range of barrels containing it’s liquid refreshments. Straying a little nearer the edge, someone might start whistling the tune of Colonel Bogey or one of the more liberal minded officers, the army’s less respectable lyrics could be heard quietly sung by those in Nos.1 & 2 Platoon who had been to Annual Camp where apparently there were few inhibitions on such ribaldry. On the other hand, if the Commanding Officer was striding along at the column’s head there would be an immediate command to “March To Attention” which put a rapid end to such lack of good order and discipline.
Armistice Day, Annual Inspection, and Founder’s Day passed sufficiently routinely to leave no great mark on my memory for the autumn of 1937 to the late spring of 1938, and so did the Field Day for that year. Some of us in No.2 Platoon were able to take Service Rifles, which meant that we could fire blank cartridges. We got involved in black market transactions for ‘gash’ blanks. Apparently, at Annual Camp the Army would dish out far more blank cartridges than the troops were called upon to fire, which meant that the pouches of the said troops arrived back far from empty. It was ‘not done’ to hand these in, and the blanks were smuggled home and hidden away from nosey parents until the next Field Day. Now the usual official issue of blanks was rarely more than ten, but somehow
[page break]
Page 30
enough blanks had mysteriously changed hands, (to some advantage to the vendors thereof), so that when an NCO or an officers [sic] called for say “Five Rounds Rapid Fire” , the resulting volley seemed to go on for far longer than was expected., [sic] even after “Cease Fire” was commanded.
So, inexorably, the Summer Term of 1938 heralded more terminal examinations and OTC Tests and Assessments, but this year it was different. We were fourteen years [underlined] old [/underlined], reasonably competent in Arms Drill, had fired on the indoor range, had experienced two Field Days, passed most if not all our annual tests and assessments and were therefor eligible to go to our first Annual Camp with the ‘veterans’ of No.1 Platoon.
Behind all the anticipatory excitement of going to the Annual Camp was the sobering thought that proud as we would be at also moving up into No.1 Platoon, the height of achievement, the primary objective of life in No.1 Platoon would be the one and only opportunity for most of us to pass our Certificate A. For several months we had been working through and revising all the various aspects of the ‘Cert A’ syllabus, and once we started again in September, it would be the final count down to the actual tests which would take place either just before or just after Christmas. Since a large proportion of these tests had direct reference to the experience we would gain at Camp, that week’s activity was never to be regarded as a fun holiday.
[underlined] The 1938 Tweezledown OTC Camp [/underlined]
Following the previous year’s Northern Command’s camp at Strensall, it was now Southern Command’s turn to host the OTC Annual Camp, and for the good of our souls, it was decided to give us the full Aldershot treatment.
Accordingly, The Chosen assembled in Good Order and Discipline on the southbound platform of Grantham Station on the Saturday morning following the end of school for that year. Kitbags had been issued and were now bulging with Seconds, spare clothing, towels and toilet kits, knife, fork, spoon and mug and items of ‘tuck’ and recreation. We were in our Bests, with boots and buttons gleaming in the sunshine, webbing blancoed to perfection.
Ammunition pouches were empty apart from a few surreptitious ‘extras’ left over from the last Field Day. On the other hand, we all bore full Service Rifles complete with Firing Pins and sharp bayonets (None of your ‘D.P. stuff for this week!). We awaited the arrival of the specially chartered train to take us and other OTC contingents from the north.
When it eventually arrived, somewhat late, our demeanour and composure was somewhat discomposed by the howls, jeers, cheers and catcalls from the contingents already on board. Our Commanding Officers [sic] was not amused, ordered us aboard our specified carriage, delegated the stowage of our kitbags and other spare gear and stalked forward with his other officers with appropriate dignity to the First Class carriages.
We quickly discovered that our carriage was sealed off from the others, no doubt to prevent an outbreak of civil war. We settled down to await developments. As the train gathered speed, we were somewhat surprised to observe yards and yards of paper flying past our windows. An opened window disclosed the reason thereof. In the forward carriage beyond us, two extended arms held a vertically disposed bayonet which had been threaded though [sic] a toilet roll. The slipstream was doing the rest. Any attempt to copy this in our carriage was rapidly quelled. The train approached Peterborough station. Through trains were required to pass though [sic] at ten miles per hour giving platform dwellers opportunity to gaze with some interest at a train full of what appeared to be very young soldiers. The train contents gaze back. Suddenly a volley of rifle fire erupts from one of the carriages to the rear. Amidst screams and shouts, the crowd on the platform scatters. Someone pulls the communication cord and the train screeches to a stop. Officers appear rapidly from the forward carriage, Railway Police appear rapidly from their den. Platform crowd emerges from cover. More shouting and commands. Our train is shunted onto a siding. We await further developments. Whistles, jerks and shunting noises from the rear of the train. Even more behind time now, the train moves off. NCOs work down carriage, carefully searching for and confiscating any further stocks of ‘gash’ blank cartridges. We explore the contents of our haversacks. We never did discover the identity and fate of the contents of the carriage we left behind. their unit was reported as ‘Missing Presumed Lost’ on arrival at Aldershot Station which was reached without further incident.
[page break]
Page 31
We were met by army lorries, manned by Regular Army personnel who made it quite clear that henceforth, everything had to be done ‘at the double’. Our camp was to be held on the Racecourse at Twezledown (or was it ‘Twezeldown’ or even ‘Tweezledown’ or …….) Anyway, there was nothing ‘twee’ about it, as we soon discovered. It was next door to the big Aldershot Army Training Camps, whose staffs were right here to get us sorted. We were tipped out and marched off with kit and kitbags to a bell-tented city of hundreds of tents and marquees. Our homes for the week were allocated, into which our kitbags were dumped. We were told to change into Seconds at the double and fall in outside our tents. Marched off (at the double, of course) to a large marquee filled with straw, we were issued with canvas ‘Palliasse’ covers which we filled with straw. Enthusiasm led to over filling and almost cylindrical objects defied all attempts to lie comfortably for the first night or two. (God help any tent with any discarded whisps of straw decorating the hallowed grass surrounding it) Having disposed of these round the interior of the tent, feet to the middle, we doubled off to another tent to collect blankets and a pillow apiece, only to find upon our return, that a rival unit had obligingly collapsed our tents. Such, we gathered from those for whom this was their second camp, was ‘Army Life’. More confusion as we re-erected them, double secured the guy lines and made our beds up into some semblance of order.
We had of course, consumed our travelling rations within ten miles or so of leaving Grantham so that by now, we were ravenous. However, around this time a bugle sounded ‘Cookhouse’ and we all trooped off to the Mess Tents for a ‘tea’ which just about half filled our aching voids. On our return to our lines, we found our tents in the process of being once again collapsed by a raiding party, the ensuing free fight being quickly subdued by some patrolling VERY LARGE Military Policemen.
Our first day at camp was rounded off by the whole camp falling in to the Main Parade Ground, a last time, we experience the phenomenal parade ground voice of RSM Britten, the Senior Regimental Sergeant Major of the British Army of that era, the terror of all ranks below that of Colonel.
We began to appreciate the true size of the OTC movement as rank upon rank of us were inspected by the Camp Commandant. We were, after all only the top ends of our respective units. That over, we celebrated the lowering of the Union Flag to the sounds of mass buglers sounding the Last Post. A mass March Past and Dismiss gave us the false impression that things were over for the day. Back at our tents, we collapsed onto our ‘beds’ only to be hauled out again for camp experienced NCOs to demonstrate how beds should be made properly and how kit should be disposed of in an orderly manner. Having made up our own beds to their grudging satisfaction, we collapsed again. Ten minutes later, and we were up on our feet again as fatigue duties were handed out and weary bodies were despatched in all directions. After all it was high summer with British Summer Time still giving us much lovely daylight which the Army could put to good use.
Utterly exhausted (so we thought), we were delighted to hear some poor bugler still on duty,play [sic] ‘Lights Out’. Ten minutes later (so it seemed) the damned fool was sounding ‘Reveille’. NCOs were whacking the sides of our tents with swagger canes, bearing another load of Fatigue Duties. Groans of recovery were not mollified by the one P.B.I with a watch announcing that it was only 06.00.
Cookhouse wallahs disappeared in one direction while the remainder were shocked into consciousness by the impact of ice cold water in the washlines. Luckily most of us were too young to need a shave, otherwise this would have been an even greater assault upon the senses
Next came the loose scrum brought about by the next priority of the morning – preparing the tents for kit inspection. Luckily, it had been a fine night so that we were able to learn the mysteries and mayhem of blanket folding and kit layout. What it would have been like if it had been (a) raining or (b) we had been the regulation fifteen to the tent compared with our ten or so, heaven only knows.
Halfway through the morning (the boy with the watch announcing that it was now 07.30), more bugling announced ‘Cookhouse’ and hundreds of aching voids stampeded their way to the Mess Tents. We knew where they were by now. There was no need for NCOs to shout ‘Double up There’.
[page break]
Page 32
Army Porridge, Army Eggs, Army Bacon, Army Bread and Army Butter topped with Army Jam were dolloped, dumped and poured into Army Plates and Mugs, and all these were hopefully washed down with Army Tea. I hoped the Tweezledown worms liked the Army Tea, it took some time to discover where the Army Drinking Water surfaced.
Having gulped that lot down, we dashed back to our tents to don Best Uniforms. In spite of much preparatory brushing and polishing, they were deemed to require further spit and polish before we ere [sic] ready for kit inspection and the morning parade. Of course in our haste, our puttees refused to wind at just the right tension and spacing. Somehow we managed to achieve some measure of perfection before our Commanding Officer made his inspection of our lines. Then out to the Main Parade Ground for the Raising Of the Flag, the Morning Prayers (we hoped He would approve of our turnout even if the General’s Inspection found us wanting)
After this, we dispersed. The events of the day and the days which followed have merged into a blur of memories. Of incessant activity of which the major component seemed to be doubling to mess, marching to parades, doubling to lectures and demonstrations, cookhouse fatigues, fetching and emptying, digging and filling latrines, picket duties, cleaning and polishing kit, guarding our rifles with our lives, foot drill and arms drill, kit inspection and foot inspection, lectures when you could hardly stay awake, day exercises, night exercises and ‘dawn patrols’. Then, when they thought that you still had a little untapped energy left, they took us for Route Marches when we found Aldershot’s Long Valley truly lived up to its name. Learning to obey instantly one minute and being prepared to take command the next. Constantly being reminded that the letters OTC stood for [underlined] Officer’s [/underlined] Training Corps, and that we were there to learn and instruct, to obey and command.
Of course there were the high moments as well as the low. The first ride on a tank and the time you were given the controls of the new Bren Carrier. The rifle ranges where we had or [sic] first experience of firing live 0.303in ammunition at ranges up to 500 yards. The day when they felt we were safe enough to fire a Lewis Machine Gun, terror or ecstasy to a fifeteen [sic] year old. Even firing the murderous Boyes Anti Tank Rifle, a right bastard of a gun which fired a half inch copper bullet with a massive brass cartridge. When fired, it would leap six inches up in the air, drove you the same distance backwards, dislocated your right shoulder if you were not holding it correctly and took two of you to carry it. The morning when we threw our first live Mills Grenade. The calmness of the instructors who hustled us out of the throwing trench when a terrified cadet dropped one at his feet. The same calmness when they went out to place a small charge against one which had failed to explode.
It was only a week, but it felt like a year. The boy with the watch was forbidden to tell us what the time really was. Then, at the final concert on the Friday night, when we were all wished the best of British Luck by the assembled Brass, we suddenly realised it was all over. It had been a week of sheer hell most of the time but we wouldn’t have missed it for a moment. We said goodbye to new friends and promised to write – which we didn’t of course. We promised to come back for next year’s Camp – but we never did.
Of one thing we were quite sure. We had arrived the previous Saturday as mere schoolboys but we would be leaving the following morning as soldiers and furthermore, however old we actually were, we were quite sure now that we were GROWN UP
I vaguely remember getting on the train at Aldershot, but knew nothing until being shaken awake as the train slowed down for Grantham Station. When I staggered in through our front door, my mother was horrified at my appearance. She reckoned that I had lost a stone in weight – maybe she was right. She said afterwards, that I drank a pint of milk without pausing for breath and immediately asked for another, after which I slept for sixteen hours without a break – I don’t remember a thing. When I finally surfaced, my father, the Old Contemptible and P.B.I. of WW1, just looked at me and grinned. [underlined] He [/underlined] knew what we had been through
Uniforms and kit cleaned, repaired and handed in. rifle bore ‘boiled’ and oiled, its bayonet emeried up to its appropriate gleam, both replaced in their place of honour amongst the other Service Rifles in the Armoury and for the remainder of the summer holidays, school and the army could be resolutely ignored in favour of things less earthbound.
[page break]
33
[picture]
Avro Anson
[picture]
Airspeed Oxford
[picture]
Bristol Blenheim I
[picture]
FAIREY BATTLE TRAINER
[PAGE BREAK]
[underlined] A [/underlined]
Form [underlined] M.T. [/underlined]
460
Officer Training Corps.
CERTIFICATE “A”
This is to Certify that
Mr. Peter Desmond Stevenson of the King’s School (Grantham) Contingent, Junior Division, Officers Training Corps, has fulfilled the necessary conditions as to efficient service, and has qualified in the Infantry syllabus of examination, as laid down in the Regulations for the Officers Training Corps. He is, therefore, eligible for consideration for a commission in the Supplementary Reserve, Territorial Army, Territorial Army Reserve of Officers or Active Militia of Canada.
On appointment to a commission he will be entitled to the privileges conferred on holders of this Certificate as set forth in the Regulations concerned, and to any further privileges that may be authorised after the date of this Certificate.
In the event of a national emergency involving the mobilization of the Regular Army and the embodiment of the Territorial Army, he is requested to notify his address immediately to the Under Secretary of State, The War Office, S.W.1, with any offer of service he may wish to make.
THE WAR OFFICE,
Date March 1939.
[signature]
Major-General,
Director of Military Training.
95360) Wt.13585/6884 12,000 5/38 A.& E.W.Ltd. Gp.698 J.4202
[page break]
Page 34
As usual, there was much to catch up. Once more things had changed at Spittlegate. In the preceding twelve months, it had been decided to move No.3 FTS to safer skies elsewhere, and for a brief interval RAF Spittlegate became a bomber station. Into this had moved a succession of bomber squadrons which were in the process of converting from Hawker biplanes to Fairey Battles. Amongst these were 106 Squadron which we will meet again in Chapter Nine. Spittlegate had also become the base for the No.5 Group Communications Flight. Around this time, the airfield itself was considerably enlarged.
In spite of its close proximity to No.5 Group H.Q. down the hill, they then decided that the existing airfield, notwithstanding the extension which moved the Cold Harbour Lane over several hundred yards, would never be big enough to accommodate the heavy bombers which would soon be coming into service. So, the bomber squadrons had left, and Spittlegate once more became a training station. Coming into service in the near future would be a new generation of twin engine fighters requiring an intermediate stage of training between the Flying Training Schools (such as No.3 FTS) and the operational squadrons. These were to be called Service Flying Training Schools and Spittlegate was now home to the new No.12 SFTS. Equipped with many Ansons, Oxfords, Blenheims and Battle trainers, the volume of Grantham’s soundscape was now considerable, especially as the old WW1 training field on the adjacent hill top, once again called RAF Harlaxton, became Spittlegate’s satellite airfield. Added to this, the arrival of the new North American Harvard, smote our ears with its raucous, supersonic prop tip scream and its near fighter performance. Things really were hotting up over Grantham. Frustratingly so.
Behind all this had been the Munich Crisis, the build up of the Civil Defence organisation, the issue of gas masks to the civilian population, practices by the ARP and the first wailings of the air raid sirens. The war clouds were gathering and increasingly it was becoming ‘When’ rather than ‘If’.
The summer holidays of 1938 passed quickly and the autumn term started with a new feeling of urgency. For most of us, this would be our last year at school, with the School’s Certificate Examinations the following June our primary scholastic target. More immediately, however, were the Certificate A Tests and Examinations of the autumn term.
Our first parade was naturally, a notable occasion. As expected, we were now this year’s No.1 Platoon, and we ‘battle hardened’ survivors were now permitted a further visible sign of our maturity. When not ‘bearing arms’ and on general duties, we could now sport a ‘Swagger Cane’ whose silver cap bore the School’s emblem. This gave rise to some further drill movements which we were more than a little proud to show off to the other ranks, as well as to the general public as we strode our way to and from parades. There were sundry promotions amongst those who had stayed on from the previous year, but we had to await the outcome of our ‘Cert A’ before we knew where we stood on the promotion ladder.
Frantic swotting, sweating and general revision, endless practices and brushing up of our drill and its instruction brought us up to the fateful day when we began taking the written papers. Then followed grilling from visiting examining officers from the Regular Army on the more practical aspects. After this, there were generalised interviews, which were obviously aimed at assessing our potential as ‘officer material’. The examining officers left with their sheaves of paper and their non-committal expressions. We were left to stew.
A week or two later, the grapevine announced that the results had arrived. On tenterhooks, we paraded the following Thursday afternoon and awaited our fate. (Oh how frustrating to have a surname so far down the alphabet!) Private Stevenson P.D was at length called out to receive the coveted cloth star to be proudly sewn onto his left sleeve. At the same time he was informed that henceforth he would be Lance Corporal Stevenson in charge of one of the Sections in No3. Platoon, the which duty he commenced with alacrity – but it was not to be for long.
For it was not just the Certificate A results which had been exercising the grapevine of late. Shortly after his promotion, he, plus a number of others were called upon to appear before a Selection Board which had nothing whatsoever to do with His Majesty’s Army.
[page break]
Page 35
[underlined] Chapter Three The Public School’s Air Cadet Wing (January to August 1939) [/underlined]
As can be gathered from the previous chapter, the OTC was pretty extensive in numbers and scope. I have very little idea of how the Royal Navy set about convincing the schoolboy population that a worthwhile career awaited them in that Service, apart from the known existence of certain schools to which families with a strong naval tradition usually sent their sons. There were also the Training Ships who took in boys of school age and trained them up in the manner of the Midshipmen of old. All this was of course, very much of a coastal phenomenon, until the later formation of the Sea Cadets. The Army therefore appeared to have, in the inter war period, a virtual monopoly of military involvement with the inland schools, with a declared aim of ‘creaming off’ the best ‘officer types’ according to its needs.
With the phenomenal rise in the size and effectiveness of the Luftwaffe during and after the Spanish Civil War, and its obvious close support of the Wehrmacht, even our War Department began to admit, albeit somewhat reluctantly, that the RAF should have some access to the schoolboys who would be the fighting men of a future conflict. It should be remembered that even in the late 1930s, aircrew were predominantly commissioned ranks and that therefore the RAF were also looking for potential officers.
It was finally agreed that a small proportion of OTC cadets, [underlined] provided that they had already passed their Certificate A, [/underlined] and who expressed a preference for service in the RAF, should be allowed to join a ‘Public School’s Air Cadet Wing’, for appropriate pre-entry training by the RAF. No doubt the Army, having spent some four years bringing these boys up to Cert A standard, felt that there was enough Army Esprit de Corps in their veins to render them immune to the blandishments of the Men in Blue.
Each interested OTC would be allotted a small number of places which, added to a similar quota from the Senior OTCs, not already in the University Air Squadrons (the RAF having penetrated to Universities much more successfully) would not exceed a total of two hundred and fifty nationwide. These cadets would still continue to wear their OTC uniforms and badges of rank but would also wear a brassard of RAF colours bearing an Officer’s forage cap badge of ‘Crown and Wings’.
In the case of the King’s School OTC, the initial allocation of places would be seven, which was later increased to eight. The rumours came to a head when a notice to this effect appeared on the OTC Notice Board, which produced an instant effect. Names were rapidly added, including my own, but I had doubts as to whether I would qualify. The scheme was undoubtedly aimed at aircrew potential, and I already knew that my eyesight was not up to aircrew standard. Luckily, the list was not over subscribed. The school already knew that my sights were set on the RAF, and that my service in the OTC had been aimed at improving my chances. I suppose that may have been responsible for me not being struck off the list of those due to appear before the promised Selection Board. Naturally, all the other hopefuls were sons of serving officers and were obviously aircrew material and therefore stood an excellent chance of being accepted. In spite of my keenness, I was more than a little doubtful of my own chances.
RAF Spittlegate, to which our section would be attached, had apparently received directives from on high, duly convened a Select Board and sent them down to hear our respective cases. In our very Bests, with Cert A Star prominently displayed, we were called in one by one. The others went in and after some time reappeared with non committal expressions and told to wait. I was called in last. Acknowledging my best salute, I was told to sit.
As I fully expected, the first question was, as a result of seeing my glasses, what was my eyesight standard. I explained that it had been my intention to apply for a commission in the RAF Technical Branch for several years now, and they would obviously need at least one Technical Officer to keep the other six in the air. From their reactions, I gathered that they had not quite expected this answer from a khaki clad figure. I went on to explain that my one purpose of serving in the OTC was to improve my chances of acceptance, that aeronautical matters had been my hobby for several years and showed my Membership Card of the Air League Junior Section to prove it.
After looking at each other once more, one of them started asking questions about the Theory of Flight, Aircraft Construction and general questions on current aircraft types which I managed to answer without batting the proverbial eyelid. I got the further impression that they were not expecting
[page break]
Page 36
all this from a khaki clad fifteen year old. After a few more minutes of this, I was told to leave the room as the others had done.
The others were called in one by one and emerged with appropriate grins. Then I followed, wondering what my fate was to be. I was told that in view of the fact that only the requisite number had applied and that I had put forward a good case and was already well informed, they would accept me on the same grounds.
We were all ‘agog’, the following Thursday afternoon when an RAF truck arrived to whisk us up and away to the Spittlegate airfield. Feeling very superior, from now onwards we would be leaving the ‘Footsloggers’ down in the town to do their footslogging while we:
‘Slipped the surly bonds of earth, and danced the skies on laughter silvered wings, *
Dropped off at the Station H.Q., we were ushered into the Adjutant’s Office, given our appropriate passes, signed the Official Secrets Act and were presented with our PSACW Brassards., to be proudly worn below our stripes – we all had at least one. From then onwards, it became increasingly obvious that those upon high had issued orders to the effect that all concerned were to do all they could to make up for lost time.
Almost immediately, we found ourselves in the Crew Room being kitted up with flying suits and helmets, shown how to don a parachute and what to do should the need arise. Paper work included local air maps and the signing of the inevitable ‘blood chit’. Out on the tarmac, we were loaded into a couple of Ansons. The ‘Annie’ was originally a small passenger carrying civil plane which had been developed into a very useful maritime reconnaissance aircraft. It also became an ideal trainer, in which role it was equipped with dual control, had space for navigation and/or radio desks, an air gunners top turret and even a bomb aimer’s position in it’s nose. Not called upon to fly high, it had a greenhouse of a cabin with large windows on all sides and room enough to move around. It was a perfect plane in which to experience one’s first flight in a service aircraft. We trundled out to the [underlined] other [/underlined] side of that fence along Cold Harbour Lane, turned about and took off. An hour or so later, we came whistling in after a glorious run around the local area. We even thought we could see those poor footsloggers down there in the school quadrangle. The ‘Annie’ may have touched down but I doubt if our feet did for several hours.
Every Thursday afternoon from then onwards, we were shown every possible aspect of a Service Flying Training School’s activities. We were given lectures on the Theory of Flight, Airframe and Aeroengine construction, Meteorology. Air Armament, Air Force History and Law, RAF Command Structure, and the functions of Bomber, Fighter, Coastal and Transport Commands. On the Station Range, we fired Lewis and Vickers Air Guns and learned to strip and reassemble them and clear stoppages. We took over the controls of ‘Annies’ in level flight (mind you, ‘Faithful Annie’ could quite happily fly along in level flight without your help when it was ‘trimmed’ properly) and we did our best to avoid crashing the Link Blind Flying Trainer. We learned to set up the dropping sequence on bomb racks and how to use the current types of bomb sights, how to guide the pilot on a ‘bomb run’ on the AML Bombing Trainers as well as acting as plotter on the Camera Obscura Bombing Trainer.
Although each one of us had been utterly converted to the RAF as a possible career even before we had become Public School’s Air Cadet Wingers, we were determined to show our new friends in Blue that we knew our drill and we ‘Brown Jobs’ could outsmart them anytime. We were of course, something of a curiosity with our khaki and our puttees and the fact that however old and mature we might have felt, we were still outwardly and obviously schoolboys, but we were schoolboys who were being given the VIP treatment.
At the time, we were green enough to take much of this for granted. Later on, as the war escalated, it became a source of wonder how this SFTS, already flat out on desperately needed pilot training, had been able and willing to devote so much time and effort upon who must have appeared to be such mere schoolboys. Much as we would have liked to believe that it had been recognition of our obvious keenness, behind it all must have been some pretty powerful directives from someone or something high up in the Air Ministry.
*From ‘High Flight’ – One of WW2’s best known pieces of poetry, penned by a young fighter pilot learning his trade at RAF Digby.
[page break]
Page 37
Meanwhile the clock had steadily ticked on. It was now early 1939 and for us in the Upper Fifth, the School’s Certificate Examinations were only a few months ahead, and for most of us the end of schooldays perhaps only a month or so after that. Swotting, cramming and mock examination papers ruled our existence. To add to our fears and apprehensions, the clouds of war were also looming ever closer, but at our age, the prospect of war was always a challenge rather than an actual fear.
By the early summer, most people realised that time was running out. In addition to the rearmament programme which now flat out with most of the local factories changing over to munitions and other war essential work, there were quiet moves to call up reservists. The Civil Defence organisation was largely in place and more and more people were to be seen with civilian duty gas masks and tin hats with ‘ARP’, ‘AFS’ and ‘W’ on them, slung over their shoulders. Suitable cellars were being taken over and converted into shelters. There were practices when we all had to don our civilian gas masks and leaflets distributed telling us whereabouts in our homes were the safest places to take cover. Other leaflets and notices in the papers and over the radio told us of the availability of the Anderson Shelters which could be half buried in our gardens, covered over with soil and the turf of the previously cherished lawn. For those without gardens, the Morrison Shelter was also available. This was like a large steel table capable of preventing the family, sheltering beneath it, from being crushed by a collapsing house.
In spite of all this, neither we nor the authorities, local or national, had any clear idea of what to expect if war was declared. Thanks to the appeasement tactics at Munich and the months which followed, Czechoslovakia and then Austria had been occupied by the Nazis, more or less peacefully, thanks to little or no local resistance. Now the Nazi Hate Machine was being directed towards Poland, but it was known that the Poles, however hopeless their resistance might be against the German Blitzkrieg, would not go down without a fight to the death. Both Britain and France finally came to realise that a stand must be made sooner rather than later.
What we could do to help Poland was unknown, but if we did go to their aid, then our fate might well be massive air raids against which we appeared to have little or no significant ability to resist, let alone retaliate.
This then, was the atmosphere in which we came to the end of our last peacetime school term.
We sat our exams and awaited results. To the dismay of the footsloggers, the Army preparations for the 1939 Annual OTC Camp first of all ground to a halt and were then cancelled ‘in the interests of safety’. Not only did the War Office feel that it was unwise to divert the resources of the Regular Army at such a critical time, perhaps the idea of hundreds of schoolboys massed together in a tented camp, might be politically explosive if they were subjected to air attack.
[underlined] The 1939 Public Schools Air Cadet Wing Camp at Selsea Bill [/underlined]
No such disappointment was to be felt by those Lucky Few in the Air Cadet Wing. The RAF, not to be outdone by the Army, had made their plans for an ‘Air Camp’ at the end of July, and much to our glee and anticipation, they had no intention of cancelling [underlined] their camp. [/underlined] Furthermore, it was going to be organised on the basis of ‘Whatever the Army can do, the Air Force can do Bigger and Better’
By now, being very seasoned personnel (or that it [sic] how we viewed ourselves) we were told to kit ourselves out and with RAF Rail Warrants, to make our own way to Portsmouth without an accompanying officer to tell what or what not to do. Compared with our previous year’s journey to Aldershot which was initially, a bit of a ‘rag’, this journey was a much more sober affair. The nearer we got to Portsmouth, the more Service uniforms there seemed to be, and the less of a curiosity we seemed to be.
Although we had been given a very sketchy idea of the week’s programme, we had no real idea of what was in store for us. On the way down we had come into contact with other small parties Portsmouth bound and the mutual sense of anticipation heightened. At Portsmouth Station, RAF transport was awaiting us and we and our kitbags were whisked away to a tented camp at Selsea Bill, a stone’s throw away from the Tangmere RAF Fighter Station.
Here we were met by RAF NCOs who took us to our ‘homes’ for the week. We were no more than four to a tent and in place of the straw filled palliasses we had at Twezledown, we had proper
[page break]
38
[photograph]
Supermarine Southampton
[photograph]
Saro London
[photograph]
Short Sunderland
[page break]
40
[photograph]
Gloster Gladiator
[photograph]
Hawker Fury II
[photograph]
Boulton Paul Defiant
[photograph]
Handley Page Heyford
[photograph]
Armstrong Whitworth Whitley
[page break]
Page 41
Next day (Monday), began the ‘real work’. At Tangmere, our Anson fleet was awaiting us and after kitting up again we took off and in loose formation, flew up towards London to land at RAF Northolt which was the H.Q of Fighter Command at the time. We were lectured on the command structure of Fighter Command, the disposition of the Fighter Groups and their Sector control rooms. We saw the Northolt Operations Room in action against a simulated air attack on London. It was to be some time before we realised that some deliberate vagueness on their part was disguising the exact nature of certain ‘information received’ i.e. our early Radar system. We toured the hangars and examined at close quarters an impressive array of Fighter Command’s aircraft. They ranged from the last of the four gun biplanes such as the Gloster Gladiators and Hawker Furies, to the latest eight gun monoplanes, the Hurricanes and Spitfires, together with the ill fated twin seat Boulton and Paul Defiant with it’s four gun turret, upon which much hopes had been placed, only to find them sitting ducks for the Luftwaffe a year later. We swarmed all over, under and into these and had their details pointed out by enthusiastic pilots and ground crews. Taken round to the firing range we saw a Hurricane, with Merlin engine at full throttle, loose off all it’s eight guns at a target which disappeared most impressively in the blink of an eyelid. After a lunch (fully up to the standard which we now came to expect from the Junior Service) we adjourned to the tarmac. Seated en masse, we were given a thrilling display of formation flying, aerobatics and dogfighting. Being so close to London, the RAF had opened it’s doors to the media, including newsreel cameramen. In 1989, when viewing an episode in the TV series ‘Fifty Years Ago This Week’ there was a short item on this Northolt display under some caption such as ‘Future Fighter Pilots?’ unbeknown to the those [sic] in the foreground, the camera had panned over our massed ranks, and there, a few feet in front of the lens was the King’s School contingent. Frustratingly, it was off the air before I could get my video recorder in action.
It was Bomber Command’s turn the following day. Once again our fleet of ‘Faithful Annies’ were waiting at Tangmere to take us up to Upper Heyford, a bomber station on which a similar display was laid on. Again Bomber Command structure, history and traditions were explained in detail and its aircraft lined up for our inspection. There were the last of the biplanes and the new generation of monoplanes. Many of these were the ones we were beginning to see in the skies over Lincolnshire, but this was the first time we could examine them in detail on the ground. More demonstrations and displays on the ground and for a lucky few a flight in a Wellington, Whitley or a Hampden. I missed out on that one.
Impressive, if not so aerobatically [sic] spectacular was the air display which followed, and with that we ‘emplaned’ for our flight back to Tangmere. This was our last flight in our Ansons.
It was road transport the following morning, through Portsmouth to Southampton. Awaiting us there were RAF Air Sea Rescue boats which took us roaring down Southampton Water, past the Imperial Airways passenger flying boat base to Coastal Command’s seaplane and flying boat base at Calshot. Once again, we were given the full treatment on Coastal’s organisation, duties and aircraft, both land and sea based, (including it’s extensive pigeon lofts) by its air and ground crews. We saw seaplanes and flying boats launched and beached, rescues of ditched crews and plenty of opportunity to examine exteriors and interiors. Of course, since this was the main base for the Schneider Trophy seaplane races which had given Britain three successive World Air Speed Records, we had to learn all about how the Supermarine seaplanes designed by Mitchell, the ‘First of the Few’ had led the way to the design of the Spitfire.
Then, to our delight, we were ferried out in RAF launches to waiting flying boats. Some of us went out to the graceful Sunderlands and the rest to big but still graceful biplane boats, mostly Southamptons, and Londons. Once aboard, moorings were cast and we taxied out into Southampton Water. With engines roaring and impressive bow waves to port and starboard, we were ‘up on the step’and away into the Big Blue Yonder. (It was amazing how well our organisers had got the Met Office to lay on a full week of wonderful weather! – with the exception of one thunderstorm later in the week which caused a slight diversion) These stately beasts, cruising along at one hundred knots or less, enabled us to emerge into the gunners cockpits at the front and rear of their hulls, so that we could look vertically downwards a thousand feet onto the shipping coming up and down Southampton Water and the naval shipping in Portsmouth Harbour. We renewed our aerial acquaintance with the Isle of Wight and the Yachting round Cowes, had another look down to our camp at Selsea, but all too soon, we were ordered to sit ourselves amidships while the monster prepared to land.
When we had taken off, the roar of the four engines and the strangeness of the take off, had largely drowned the hiss of water against the hull. Now with engines throttled back, we were unprepared for
[page break]
Page 42
sound of contact with the sea. For a second or two, we thought we had landed on a shingle beach!
The following morning, only too aware that today was Friday and therefore our last day, we piled aboard our transport again for the short hop across Portsmouth to the Fleet Air Arm base at Lee on Solent. This was at the time when the Navy had not quite completely taken over from the RAF, and the day was to be a kaleidoscope of Fleet Air Arm, RAF and Navy uniforms. One was never quite such at any one point who was exactly running our show, but it was quite obvious that although they were in last wicket, they were certainly not going to be outdone by what we had received at the hands of the RAF over the previous days. Furthermore, they proposed making quite sure that their share of we ‘likely lads’ would, in time, come their way.
Our day was spent looking at Swordfish and Walrus aircraft, together with sessions on ancillary equipment such as torpedoes and airborne mines, catapult gear and aircraft carriers. At nearby Gosport we went round the workshops where the ‘tin fish’ were being serviced and tested and saw divers being trained in the Diving Tanks. Then after a naval lunch we were taken out in navy pinnaces into the Solent to watch a demonstration at fairly close hand, of torpedo dropping. All in place, the first demonstration was to be by a Swordfish (the ‘Stringbag’ to us by now). Down it came with appropriate dignity, and its ‘fish’ was duly launched. According to the experts in charge of our boat, the drop was a perfect one, cleanly entering the water and at the end of its run, floated gently up to the surface ready to be retrieved by one of the other pinnaces.
In distinct contrast to the bumbling Swordfish with its biplane wings, rigging wires, fixed undercarriage and open cockpits, a long sleek monoplane shape came into view from the direction of Southampton Water, with its torpedo neatly slung beneath, looking far more menacing. Our commentator told us that what we were about to see was still on the experimental list. The aircraft was the Vickers Wellesley, the Barnes Wallace predecessor of the Wellington which we had met on the Bomber Command day. Obsolete as a bomber, the Fleet Air Arm has hopes that the Wellesley would be a faster, longer range, shore based torpedo bomber to replace or augment the ageing Swordfish.
It came in fast and low, and down dropped its fish. There was an immediate sharp intake of breath on the part of our matelots as it appeared to enter the water at a queer angle. A second or two later it emerged at an even stranger angle and appeared to do its best to bite the tail off the Wellesley, which departed at high speed. Striking the water tail first, clouds of spray masked what appeared to be two half torpedoes which promptly sank to groans from the navy accompanied by comments generally in the line of “What can you expect from having to use RAF pilots” and “I suppose some poor bugger is going to have to go down tomorrow to fish out the bits”
We were hurriedly returned to shore, bade farewell and transported back to camp. We were told to start packing for our journey home the following morning. We had noticed a lot activity [sic] in the direction of our Mess Tent and were told to keep well clear until called for our evening meal. During the week, the meals in the mornings were generally informal, but we had tended to be more circumspect in the evenings (as befitted our maturity!) Tonight, apparently things would be rather special and we were to appear as smartly turned out as possible. Also, we were to consult a seating plan and when called upon to do so, be prepared to move smartly and without fuss to our allotted places and stand to attention behind our seats.
When the call came, we marched to the Mess Tent by units, where were [sic] met by RAF Mess Waiters who conducted us to our seats where we stood carefully At Ease. The transformation of our mess tent was astonishing. It was now an Officer’s Mess. The tables in front of us had spotless linen tablecloths and serviettes. Precisely positioned cutlery and tableware, was even graced by flowers and in addition to tumblers and carafes of water, each place had a wine glass!
When we were all in place, all two hundred or so, we were called to Attention and the most amazing collection of ‘Top Brass’ from all three Services entered in immaculate Mess Uniforms complete with Medals, Orders and other marks of distinction. They took their places at the top table, and at a nod from the senior officer, we were instructed to take our seats. We were then [underlined] served [/underlined] by mess waiters. It began to dawn upon us that not only had our mess tent been converted into an officer’s mess, but that we were also being treated as at least potential officers, as well as being regarded as guests of the RAF despite our khaki uniforms and obvious immaturity.
[page break]
Page 43
Between courses we were addressed by one or other of the senior officers of the Fighter, Bomber and Coastal Commands and the Fleet Air Arm. They hoped we had enjoyed our week and looked forward to us joining their ranks. Each was respectfully if enthusiastically applauded. We certainly had and we certainly would, if and when.
Finally, the senior officer turned to the ‘civvie’ at his side who was obviously the guest of honour, and announced that he wished to introduce ‘Viscount Norwich’. A whisper had already gone round the table as to his identity. He was better known to the general public as Mr. Duff Cooper,
At this time, perhaps the most controversial political figure apart from Winston Churchill, he hated everything that Hitler and the Nazis stood for and had been at the forefront of the rearmament lobby from the early 1930s. At daggers drawn with the pacifists and the appeasers, he had resigned as First Lord of the Admiralty at the time of the Munich Pact. Detested by Chamberlain and his government, he was sidelined with Churchill and branded by the Conservative Press as a ‘War Monger’, but that never stopped him voicing his vociferous opinions on every available occasion..
His address was brief and to the point. After giving us a brief resume of the current political situation and the apparent build up of troops on the Polish frontiers, he launched into an attack on Nazism, finishing with prophetic words on the line of “Gentlemen, within a month we will again be at war with Germany, and this time the survival of Britain will be decided in the air” (He might have been two weeks out with the beginning of the first, but he was dead right a year later about the second, by which time Churchill was back and Duff Cooper became one of Winston’s principal ministers)
Duff Cooper’s speeches were known to be great rabble rousers and he certainly got us to our feet. Whereas the Service officers had been given restrained applause, Duff Cooper sat down to crescendo of cheering and clapping. However, we were all astonished when a chorus of booing came from one quarter. Later, we were to learn that the Oxford University contingent had included a number of members of the ‘Oxford Movement’. This had emerged following a highly controversial debate in the University Debating Society at the time of Munich which passed a motion ‘That this house will not go to war for King and Country’. How and why such opinion had attended this camp would remain a mystery. Maybe they had come ‘just for the lark’, in which case it was a pretty expensive lark for the British Taxpayer.
Order restored, we returned to our tents. It had been a great evening and we were naturally elated, but at the same time we were somewhat subdued. Tomorrow, we would be returning to ‘civvie life’, but we had the feeling that we had heard the last notes of an Overture to War, and most if not all of us would be inextricably drawn into that war. The majority of those who had attended were unquestionably aircrew potential, and in the years that followed, I often wondered how many of them made the ultimate sacrifice.
The following morning, tents empty except for neatly stacked bedding, kitbags full once more, we had our final parade and dismiss, we saluted and thanked our officers. We said good bye to our new friends and wished them good luck. We threw our kitbags into the waiting transport and followed them in. at Portsmouth Station, we ‘entrained’ and all too soon it seemed, our kitbags were upon our shoulders once more as we left Grantham Station, and scattered to our various homes in which it seems, we never stopped talking.
After a week during which we had been treated as officer cadets and responsible adults, it was not easy to drop back into being a mere schoolboy once more, even if it was school holidays. However, following the usual practice of these who had attended Annual Camp, my uniforms would stay at home until the commencement of the new autumn term. These were carefully cleaned, pressed and hung away, but my Air Cadet Wing Brassard, prominently on display on my bedroom shelf, was there to remind me when: “I joined the tumbling mirth of sun split clouds, and did a hundred things you did not dream of” (another quotation from ‘High Flight’). Thinking back then and in the years to follow, I often wondered how much it has all cost and whether the RAF, felt in due time, that they received value from their investment
Incidentally, I have it on record that the camp was visited and inspected by Air Chief Marshall Sir Arthur Longmore. I cannot remember now the time and circumstances of his visit, whether perhaps he was one of the dignitaries on the top table at our farewell dinner or whether his visit was at some
[page break]
Page 44
other time. In view of the significant part he took in the formation of the Grantham Squadron of the Air Defence Cadet Corps (which is recounted in the next chapter) it could well be that he was equally significant in the setting up of the Air Cadet Wing. I hope someday, that an inspection of Air Ministry Records might throw some further light on this.
I lost touch with the others who had gone to Selsea. They were all aircrew material and as the only ‘groundhog’, I could well be the only survivor. I must also go back to the school records sometime and find out who, if any, survived. As for the Public School’s Air Cadet Wing, the Selsea camp was most probably its swan song. It could well have died a natural death with the outbreak of war.
My own future was far from clear. I was still dead set on becoming an engineer and now that war seemed imminent, I would be into the RAF as soon as I was old enough and further qualified to do so. There was a 50/50 chance that I might stay on at school in the Sixth until the time came for call up, in which case I would also stay on in the OTC. In the event neither of these came to pass. Naturally I hoped that I would be able to maintain my contact with No. 12 SFTS at Spittlegate. This did happen, though not through the OTC and the PSACW. When it did, it was in very different circumstances.
As will appear in a following chapter, the declaration of war delayed the opening of school until well into the autumn. Eventually, I decided to leave school and start an engineering apprenticeship, This left my ground clear to join the Air Defence Cadet Corps, now well and thriving as its Grantham Squadron, attached to RAF Spittlegate to which I marched as a humble cadet, rather than being picked up by RAF transport and treated as a privileged guest, but that was no grounds for regret.
[page break]
Page 45
[underlined] Chapter Four – The Formation of the Grantham Squadron of the Air Defence Cadet Corps [/underlined]
(and the appointment of its first Commanding Officer)
August 1939, with my feet firmly on the ground after the Public Schools Air Cadet Wing camp at Selsea Bill, this was for me, a time of indecision. For a great number of my school friends, there was no choice in the matter. They would have to leave school and find a job as did most schoolboys at that time. My closest friends were all sons of RAF officers and would all go on to the Sixth Form and on to higher thinks, but what was I to do?
By now, I was equally determined to become an engineer and if possible to combine this with a career in the RAF as an Engineering Officer. The international situation had now moved firmly from the ‘If’ and ‘When ‘state into the ‘How Soon’ and as August progressed, war seemed to be matter of sooner rather than later. There was no question of me trying to join up immediately – there were far too many records about me, civil and military to show that I was only just about to celebrate my sixteenth birthday. ‘Call Up’ would be a good two years ahead and the war, if it was declared, could well have been decided, one way or the other long before that. In the end it seemed to be the best policy to sit tight and await developments. It would undoubtedly stretch our family resource4s for my parents to grubstake for another year or so in the Sixth Form. In the meantime, until the immediate future seemed a little clearer, when at the beginning of the new school year in September, I would be staying on at school.
What eventually did happen, I will hold over to the next chapter, for what I want to do now is to turn back the clock six months or so, or for that matter even back to the first decade of the 20th century..
There can be very few people around who have not heard of the epic first flight of a powered aircraft by the Wright brothers. Of course there had been nearly a century of unsuccessful attempts before that and people like Lillienthal were becoming quite proficient at building and flying man carrying gliders and box kites as well as the well established mania for constructing and flying lighter than air craft. The man in the street was becoming well aware of the fact that the air was the next great adventure.
To encourage ‘air mindedness’ not only in the mind of the man in the street but also in the minds of influential policy makers and financiers, the year 1908 saw the formation of the Air League of the British Empire. Throughout the First World War and increasingly in the post war years, the Air League campaigned vigorously for Britain to take the lead in all aspects of aeronautics. They supported the ‘air circuses’ like Alan Cobham, the legendary Hendon Air Displays, the RAF Station Open Days, and the later Empire Air Days, all at a time when the disarmament lobby was doing its best to persuade the Government to reduce all the armed forces to a state of impotence.
As already mentioned, in the mid 1930s the Air League formed a Junior Section aimed at giving the maximum encouragement to Britain’s youth. Amongst its various publications one now learned that the Air League was proposing to form an Air Cadet Corps.
News of the setting up of an organisational structure and appointment of senior officers, the design of an appropriate uniform and training programmes, was followed by the announcement that the first Squadrons of the ‘Air Defence Cadet Corps’ had been formed in the London area, to be followed by the formation of other squadrons in the Home Counties. Was there any chance that an ADCC squadron might be formed in a little town like Grantham, and if it were, would I be able to join it?
I think I need to break off at this point and name a few names who will become significant later. Anyone who knows anything of the history of the RAF will know that Air Marshall Lord Hugh Trenchard will forever be remembered as the ‘Father of the RAF’. In the post WW1 years, he collected round him a number of young officers, some of whom had fighting experience in the latter years of the war and had served with some distinction in the course of the RAF’s involvement in the policing of the troublesome territories which had become Britain’s responsibility in the 1920s and 1930s. By the time the clouds of war were again gathering in the 1930s, many of these officers were occupying high rank in the various commands of the RAF both at home and abroad. Others, equally distinguished, had reached retirement age but had not retired from public duty.
[page break]
46
[photograph]
[underlined] AIR CHIEF MARSHALL SIR ARTHUR LONGMORE [/underlined]
Sir Arthur Longmore was arguably the most influential of the ‘Founding Fathers’ of the Grantham Squadron of the Air Defence Cadet Corps in 1939, which in 1941 became No.47(F) Squadron of the Air Training Corps, the only ‘Founder’ Squadron on Lincolnshire
[page break]
Page 47
One of the latter was Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir John Salmond who had been appointed Commandant and Chief Executive of the infant Air Defence Cadet Corps. One of the other officers still in active service was Air Chief Marshall Sir Arthur Longmore. Amongst the many ‘cornerstones’ of the early RAF attributable to Lord Trenchard was the setting up of the RAF College at Cranwell and the College’s third Commandant was Arthur Longmore, who on his appointment took up residence in Grantham where he and his wife quickly became involved in Grantham affairs. However by 1938, Sir Arthur Longmore was O.i/c RAF Middle East but that did not prevent him, when on leave, from continuing to interest himself in the wellbeing of Grantham, and when he was not at home, Lady Longmore was just as dedicated.
I now need to introduce another name who was crucial to the formation of the Grantham ADCC Squadron. Stanley Foster was a successful Grantham businessman, young and active and much involved with Grantham affairs. He was soon elected to the Grantham Town Council and in the 1938 to 1939 Mayoral Year was elected Mayor. Over the years he undoubtedly had much contact with the Longmores, and it would appear that Sir Arthur, well aware of the activities of his erstwhile service colleague who was now Commandant of the ADCC, had suggested to Stan Foster that the possible formation of a Cadet Squadron would be a desirable thing for the youth of Grantham.
Today, the Air Training Corps is very much a part of the RAF and as such it is almost completely funded from the RAF budget, but the Air Defence Cadet Corps before it became the ATC in 1941, was entirely a voluntary organisation. True, almost immediately a squadron was formed, the local RAF gave considerable material help, but a new squadron depended almost entirely upon local sponsorship, donations, subscriptions and fundraising to pay for rental and maintenance of its headquarters, administration, provision of uniforms and other running expenses. It was vital therefore that a well publicised inaugural meeting needed to be held to drum up a considerable level of local support. With this in mind, the Grantham Journal reported in its 7th January 1939 edition that such a meeting was to be held on the following Monday, and for those interested, an ADCC uniform would be on display in the Grantham Gas Company’s showroom.
And so it came to pass, as the saying goes, that on the 10th of January 1939 an inaugural meeting was held in Grantham’s Guildhall, and the Grantham Journal on the following Friday gave a lengthy report on its proceedings. Upon the stage in front of considerable audience of local celebrities, townsfolk and would be recruits, sat an impressive array of ‘top brass’. Centre stage was Stan Foster in full Mayoral Insignia and flanking him was Sir Arthur and Lady Longmore, who in their turn had brought along Sir John Salmond, Commandant and Captain Hazelwood, Area Organiser of the ADCC
In turn each spoke of the desirability of forming a Cadet Squadron and gave an outline of its likely aims and aspirations, whereupon the Chair called for a show of hands to approve the proposed formation. (Carried Unanimously). Next Stan Foster called for generous financial support and within a short time £89 was promised (quite a lot of money in those days) enough to get things moving.
The next item on the agenda was the appointment of Squadron Officers and it is at this point that i [sic] must again break off the narrative to record my own personal involvement in this meeting and that of my father. At the time of this meeting I was still in the King’s School OTC. although nominally I was still a ‘P.B. Infantryman’, I had already been seconded to the Public School’s Air Cadet Wing section. Also it was also in my penultimate term before sitting my School’s Certificate/Matriculations examinations. In spite of this I was determined to attend the meeting whether or not I would be allowed to join. However, my hands would be firmly handcuffed in a manner of speaking.
Recently, we had had a change of Headmasters, in place of the previous somewhat liberally minded head, we now had a rather straightlaced, rather narrow minded, disciplinarian who was determined to uphold the King’s Grammar School image. In spite of the fact that the majority of his pupils were sons of ordinary town and country folk, he did his best to establish a ‘Town and Gown’ separation of the activities within the school and those of the world outside. As we have seen it was usual and expected that at the age of twelve the ‘normal’ pupil would join the OTC. However, if a given pupil’s parents objected to the ‘militarisation’ of their son, he was allowed to opt out and join the ‘gardening brigade’ on Thursday afternoons, but they were nevertheless considered ‘second class citizens’. Out of school, a boy might join the Scouts but this again was somewhat discouraged.
When the idea of the formation of the Air Cadet squadron was mooted, he came down with a firm edict – no King’s School pupil was permitted to join the ADCC if he was already in the OTC. This effectively tied one of my hands!
[page break]
48
[photograph]
COUNCILLOR S. FOSTER
Mayor-Elect of Grantham, 1938-9
Councillor ‘Stan’ was one of the most popular and enthusiastic Mayors of Grantham in the 1930s and 1940s, and it was during his time as Mayor in 1938 that he was instrumental in the staging of the inaugural meeting in the January of that year which led to the formation of the Grantham Squadron of the Air Defence Cadet Corps. He not only chaired that meeting, became an enthusiastic member of it’s subsequently appoined [sic] steering committee but also ensured that the Squadron enjoyed the full support of the Borough Council. Accordingly he has every right to be regarded as one of our principal ‘Founding Fathers’.
[page break]
Page 49
My father’s outlook was equally firm. For a number of years matters aeronautical had tended to occupy a higher priority for me than my schooling, in spite of a sudden new found determination to catch up lost ground, I still had a lot of lost ground to catch up. My father’s foot went down firmly – “Your Matric Exams are coming up in a few month’s time and you are already in the Public Schools Air Cadet Wing. No way will you be allowed to join anything else. Subject closed!”
“But I still want to go to the meeting to find out what it is all about”
“All right then, but only if I go along with you to make sure that you don’t do anything silly and get yourself signed up” – And so we both went!
In view of what was to happen next, it would be appropriate to outline my father’s previous history. Philip Stevenson was born in Grantham in 1895 and was educated at the Sedgebrook Grammar School which later merged with the King’s School. After leaving school he spent a year or so as a cub reporter with his father who was a journalist and branch manager of the Nottingham Guardian Group. Aged nineteen at the outbreak of the Great War in August 1914, following the patriotic fervour of the time, he immediately volunteered for the Army, eventually joining the Seaforth Highlanders. After infantry training in Scotland, his Battalion was sent over to France where he took part in the battles during the retreat from Mons during which he was slightly wounded and received his first ‘Mentioned in Dispatches’. Returning to the Front he survived the various skirmishes during the winter of 1914/15, but when the Spring offensives flared up, he was seriously wounded in the battle of Neuve Chappelle. Invalided home with a further ‘Mention in Despatches’, the award of the Meritorious Service Medal and the Mons Star, he spent the next eighteen months in various military and convalescent hospitals in the Harrogate area. Assigned to light duties he was seconded to the Headquarters Staff of the Ripon Reserve Training Establishment, one of the largest Army training setups in the country at the time, responsible for the infantry training of some twenty six thousand recruits per annum. There he quickly made his mark, was promoted Sergeant and became Personal Assistant to the Commanding Officer.
Demobbed, all the ‘Land Fit for Heroes’ could offer him by way of a job was clerk to the Grantham Borough Police Force which in the 1920s boasted a Chief Constable, two Sergeants and ten constables to provide a 24/365 service for the good people of Grantham! A dead end job, he stuck this for several years but by 1927, married with a young son, he decided to try for a better life in the United States. However before he could bring his family over to join him, all his available capital was lost in the Wall Street crash and it took him nearly a year to save enough money to pay for his ticket home. When he eventually arrived back in Grantham, he did have something in his favour. In the States he had become a quite proficient ‘hard sell’ car salesman and it was not long before he managed to get a job as salesman to the local Ford dealer. In spite of the deepening depression of the early 1930s, he was able to make quite a few successful ‘sells’, particularly to the local RAF personnel (who seemed to be the only sector of the community with money to spend on cars!) During the course of these negotiations he got to know quite a few of the RAF officers at RAF Spittlegate/Grantham, the new No.5 Bomber Group Headquarters and at RAF Cranwell. Significantly, these included Sir Arthur Longmore who, succumbing to Philip Stevenson’s powers of persuasion, ‘bought Ford’, and it would appear that during sundry conversations, Sir Arthur learned quite a bit about Philip Stevenson’s past military history and experience.
So, back to the inaugural meeting and the point in the agenda where officers for the new cadet unit were to be appointed. Obviously the first of these would have to be a Commanding Officer. Before anyone else could start to nominate somebody, Sir Arthur, pointing to my father said “Mr Stevenson is our obvious choice. He has all the necessary military administrative experience we need”. (Or words to that effect – this was nearly seventy years ago). Point taken. Carried unanimously. Signs of embarrassment on the part of my father but, since I had noticed that as the previous proceedings had obviously aroused in him more than a little interest, he accepted his nomination with creditable alacrity.
Further nominations and volunteering filled the remaining vacancies for Adjutant and the four flight commanders which our possible cadet roll could justify, and the final item on the agenda was the enrolment of recruits. The audience certainly contained a high proportion of hopefuls and these formed an orderly if excited queue at the desk set aside for the purpose. Prominent amongst these was the first cadet already in uniform. For the purpose of the meeting, the uniform which had been on display in the town had been adorning the body of Tony Teague, who I suppose can be considered as Grantham’s first ADCC cadet.
[page break]
Page 50
As the Grantham Journal reported the following Friday, the evening’s activities resulted in the initial recruitment of 45 cadets. The new squadron’s strength might now be six officers and forty five cadets amongst whom would be found Mr. P.P.L. Stevenson – Commanding Officer, but sadly and frustratingly, not Peter D. Stevenson amongst the enlisted recruits.
My father and I had much talk about on the way home and over the next few days.
The Grantham Journal really took us to heart and practically every issue from the [sic] on contained news of the increasing tempo of the new squadron’s activities. In the January 14th edition they not only reported at length the inaugural meeting but also included a picture of Sir John Salmond, Sir Arthur and Lady Longmore, and Stan Foster. The following week they reported that the subscription list had doubled to £167. On the 28th January there was a report on a meeting at Elsham House, the Longmore’s home, during which a support committee was formed, Messrs Stevenson and Ruxton were officially appointed Commanding Officer and Adjutant respectively.
On the 4th February it was reported that ADCC Headquarters had officially confirmed the setting up of the Grantham Squadron and the official appointment of Cadet Squadron Leader P.P.L. Stevenson as Commanding Officer, Cadet Flight Lieutenants A. Chapman, F.F. Hall, I.G. Smith and G. Widdowson as Flight Commanders. It was also reported that a Headquarters building had been secured. (This was the Victorian town house building on St. Peters Hill next door to the General Post Office which was to be the home of the Grantham Squadron throughout the war years. It had been unoccupied for a number of years and had the advantage of having a useful number of large and small rooms as well as the remains of a large walled garden which, when cleared, made a useful Parade Ground)
On February 11th, the Journal reported that the Squadron had been officially affiliated to No.12 SFTS at RAF Spittlegate. The 25th February edition published a photograph of recruits being medically examined, and that 48 cadets had now been accepted and fully enrolled. The first batch of uniforms had been ordered, the first lectures had taken place, and a first party of cadets had visited No.12 STFS at Spittlegate.
I am not sure now at what point in time another very important personage joined the ranks of the new squadron. Fred Dawson was an ex-Coldstream Guards Sergeant who had a most impressive list of accomplishments of value to our Squadron. In addition to being an excellent drill instructor, he had in his time been a Physical Training Instructor, Army Boxing Champion and coach, a Black Belt Judo Instructor, a born leader with a genuine interest in bringing out the best in boys. For all that, he was not exactly the easiest person to get on with and had a short fuse when it came to suffering fools gladly. Anyway, he very soon made his presence felt, instructing cadets and officers alike in the niceties of foot drill and soon sorted out a short list of cadets who were potential N.C.O. material. Originally titled ‘Sergeant Major’ in the A.D.C.C. days, he became Cadet Warrant Officer when the A.D.C.C. became the Air Training Corps in 1941. Following the age old traditions of Sergeant Majors and Warrant Officers, he soon took upon himself the aura and responsibility of the second most important person after the Commanding Officer (with whom he reserved the right to disagree forcibly if he felt the circumstances warranted). He served with the Squadron until 1943 when he got at cross purposes with the C.O. over something or other, whereupon he thumped in his resignation. However, when the war ended and the Squadron had a new C.O., he once again became ‘S.W.O.’ for a further spell of duty.
On April 22nd 1939, the first picture of the cadets in uniform was published together with one showing the complete squadron on parade on the Grantham Cricket Ground.
By this time, the Squadron had be [sic] officially numbered No.47. At A.D.C.C. Headquarters back in 1938 had decided that all the Squadrons which had come into being in that year would be designated ‘Founder’ Squadrons. In the event, the number of squadrons which had actually been formed before the year’s end just fell short of the magic number ‘50’, so the powers that be relented and awarded coveted (F) to the first fifty, and Grantham at No.47 just scraped in and to this day proudly calls itself No.47(F) – the only (F) Squadron in Lincolnshire.
[page break]
Page 51
The Squadron was now well up and running and all through that last summer before the outbreak of war, squadron progress and achievements was steady and noteworthy.
On June 3rd, the Squadron proudly presented itself in Ceremonial Order for inspection by Sir Arthur Longmore. ‘Father of the Squadron’, no doubt having been kept fully informed by Lady Longmore who had worked tirelessly in the background supporting and encouraging ‘her’ squadron!
Regrettably however I was, during these formative months a watcher from the wings. However at least I had the Commanding Officer across the dinner table who was able to give me a daily running commentary on the way things were shaping up. of course I was as jealous as hell, not being able to join in with all the ‘fun and games’, but my father, with his Commanding Officer’s hat on, was quite adamant that I would not be able to take part in any way in Squadron activities until I was entirely free to join as a normally recruited and enrolled cadet. That of course could not be until I had left school, the O.T.C. (and the Public School’s Air Cadet Wing and passed my terminal examinations – he had a point!
So far as the Squadron was concerned, perhaps the high point of that summer’s activity was when a small and favoured group of cadets went over to Great Hucklow in Derbyshire a [sic] had a week’s gliding camp. Naturally I envied them greatly but was more than compensated by the stupendous time I was having at the same time at the Selsea Bill camp.
It is all a long time ago now and any of those teenage cadets who may be still alive today, are now in their eighties! My great hope is that one day I can locate one of those first A.D.C.C. Cadets who can still remember those early days and fill in the gaps in my narrative.
[page break]
Page 51a
[underlined] THE HEADQUARTERS OF No.47(F) Sq. ADCC/ATC on St. Peter’s Hill, Grantham [/underlined]
[photograph]
[underlined] GRANTHAM BOROUGH COAT OF ARMS [/underlined]
[underlined] AIR LEAGUE OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE MOTIF [/underlined]
[picture]
[underlined] THE CAR STICKER I DESIGNED FOR THE 1939 ADCC FUND RAISING CAMPAIGN [/underlined]
[page break]
Page 52
[underlined] Chapter Five – ARP Messenger P.D. Stevenson. ‘Goes to War’ [/underlined]
Several times in previous chapters I have referred to the ‘Phoney War’, that period from the declaration of war by the Allies on September 3rd 1939 and the Spring of 1940 when the ‘Hot War’ started with the invasion of Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium and France by the Nazis. How did this affect us down at ground level in Grantham?
Through the dark days of 1938 and early 1939, against a programme of appeasement on our side, Hitler had progressively occupied country after country without serious opposition by means of apparently overwhelming strength of arms. Then, in August 1939, he invaded Poland and for the first time came up against real and fanatically dedicated opposition, in spite of the relative weakness of the Polish Army and Air Force.
Propaganda films from Germany had got us used to seeing superbly equipped and disciplined German troops goosestepping into whichever country he chose. Now we saw in the newsreel and newspaper stills, these troops in action, backed up by dive bombing and ground strafing by the Luftwaffe, and began to realise what ‘Blitzkrieg’ really meant in practice. We saw what the cost was to the Poles, but what we did not know, was the price paid by the Germans.
Many, if not most people in Britain honestly believed that this ‘Blitzkrieg’ would be immediately called down upon us as soon as we declared war in honour of our recent pact with Poland. We felt we had good reason to be worried in Grantham. For a start, it was an important communications centre. The A1 passed right through the centre of the town and at one point it was so narrow that a single bomb could block it completely. At three other points it passed over or under the main east coast railway line and again at these points, a single bomb could block both lines of communication. It was also a principal junction point in the rail network with important branch lines to the east, north and west.
At that time Grantham also had a considerable military significance. Spittlegate Airfield, a mere mile or so from the centre of the town had been an important air base since WW1. It was now the hope of an important flying training school, operating round the clock to train up pilots for future combat and it has a satellite airfield a mile or so away on the opposite hilltop, also flying round the clock. In 1936, a large house and grounds in the south east of the town had become the headquarters of Bomber Command’s No.5 Group which was to become a legend in the bomber offensives later on in the war. All these facts, we felt sure, were well known to the Luftwaffe.
Grantham was still a very important heavy engineering industrial town with a considerable potential for the production of war material to which it had been rapidly changing over the past year or so. The main factories were largely concentrated in the south of the town and were surrounded by large concentrations of their workers houses.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, a very modern highly equipped factory ‘British Manufacturing and Research Co. Ltd’ (BMARC) or ‘Marcos’ to the locals) had been built to mass produce the Hispanio Suiza 20mm aircraft cannon and it’s ammunition. At this time this was the only cannon factory in the U.K. and would be forever famous for it’s part in the forthcoming Battle of Britain and the subsequent air battles.
Therefore, we were quite sure that Grantham, as a primary strategic target, would receive early attention from the Luftwaffe, and although it did not do so the day war broke out, we did not think that we would have long to wait.
Now that the subject of air raids has been introduced, it might be well to digress a little onto the subject of air raid warnings, since these were to intrude so frequently into both our public and private lives.
In those very early and rudimentary days of Radar, then known as ‘R.D.F.’ or ‘Radio Direction Finding’, a chain of large signals stations along the east and south coasts were set up, each with four huge aerial pylons and associated buildings. One of these pylons still stands at Stenigot on the top of the Lincolnshire Wolds.
[page break]
Page 53
These ‘Chain Home’ stations could relay back warnings of the approach of enemy aircraft to the Fighter Command Group Headquarters who in turn would alert the ARP organisations in the threatened areas. These radar stations could only face out to sea and could not detect aircraft which had passed behind them. The responsibility of keeping a track on them now passed on to the Royal Observers Corps who would similarly keep Fighter Command, and thus the ARP, fully informed.
From the Munich Crisis in 1938 onwards, Civil Defence had been progressively stepped up. starting with the hopefully reassuring issue of gas masks to the setting up of Wardens, Casualty and Rescue, Demolition, Gas Detection and Decontamination, Evacuation, Emergency Shelter and Feeding organisations and teams, ARP had moved on in the last months of peace to the sandbagging of key buildings and the provision of public air raid shelters. The general public were also encouraged to build their own shelters. Many thousands of kits to build the earth covered Anderson Shelters (which could be built in one’s back garden) or the steel table like Morrison Shelters which could replace the dining table indoors if one did not have a suitable garden area.
With the approach of war, the ‘soundscape’ of Grantham had also changed significantly. The starting and stopping times of the shift workers in the various factories had for more than a century, been announced by a great variety of steam or compressed air whistles, horns, hooters and even the occasional bell. (If we were temporarily transmitted back to the Nineteen Thirties, we might well be astonished at the amount of whistling and hooting which went on at certain times of the day!) It might also be remembered that the Great Depression was but a few years back and that in spite of the urgent rearmament programme, we had not yet reached full employment. The shop foreman’s authority was still absolute and he could sack you on the sport [sic] if you were a few minute’s late more than once a week. If you were a factory worker, your life was indeed ruled by the factory’s hooter. For the matter, most of the townsfolk measured the passing of the day by the hearing of the various hooters rather than looking at the Town Hall Clock or looking at your pocket watch.
As Grantham geared up for war, these were all ‘grounded for the duration’ so far as the workers were concerned. ‘Marcos’ had been the first and only factory to have installed a ‘new fangled’ American style electric siren, which is now forever remembered as the wartime ‘Wailing Willie’. Until such time as others were installed elsewhere in the town, this would be our first warning that enemy aircraft had been detected crossing the coast. This ‘General Alert’ state would exist until the Observer Corps reported that the enemy were now within twenty five miles of the town. Then one of the steam hooters in one of the factories would sound off a number of blasts. This was the signal for all and sundry to drop everything and dive for the shelters. These blasts were promptly christened ‘The Pips’ and for the next few years would rule our lives also. So much so that at the end of the war, all factory hooters and sirens were banished from our lives and only the sirens were retained as flood warnings and other civil emergencies.
All this and other ARP procedures had been exercised on quite a number of occasions before war was declared, as well as preparations for a total ‘Blackout’. On that fateful day of Saturday 3th, all street lights and other exterior lighting was extinguished until the threat of air raids ended nearly five years later. Millions of yards of black cloth blackout curtaining had been issued or purchased and blackout screens constructed, so that no chink of light could aid the marauding bomber crews. All car, lorry, bus and even cycle lights had to be fitted with hoods so that the light could not be seen above waist level. If you had a torch, then it could only be shone downwards and the Warden came down on you with a ton of bricks if you lit a cigarette or pipe without a shaded match!
A somewhat lengthy digression perhaps, but appropriate to what is to follow for now we come to that fateful day. One of the corner stones of my career as an engineer was undoubtedly Edward Elms. He had been the head of army apprentice training in WW1 and in the 1920s, during which time he had been Commissioned and had attained the rank of Captain before returning to ‘civvy street’. In the mid 1930s he had joined the teaching staff of the King’s School. Up to that time the Kings had been a typical Grammar School accepting the need to teach Physics and Chemistry and, for the less technical, Biology. Reluctant acknowledging the fact that the majority of it’s pupils would never go on to University and that most likely a goodly proportion of them would go into the town’s industries, it had been decided upon high that the school would break from tradition and build a build a craft workshop in which the (regrettably) technically minded amongst it’s boys could learn the rudiments of wood and metal working and technical drawing.
[page break]
Page 54
Though he was officially referred to as ‘Captain Elms’, having a head of dead white hair, to us he was always ‘Snowy’. He was always a strict disciplinarian while on duty and could have a short fuse at times, but he soon became a hero to those who worked in well with him and measured up to his high standards of workmanship. By 1939 I was his willing slave and allowed great freedom of action in his workshop. As the most practically minded of the masters, he soon became ‘Mr. Fixit’ and we did many extra curricular jobs together. It was not surprising therefore that when Snowy stated that he had bought a set of Anderson Shelter bits and pieces, we were both to be found in his back garden creating havoc on his cherished lawn. We had reached the point where the appropriately shaped hole had been dug, the soil stacked nearby and a start made on the assembly of the corrugated iron pieces, when Mrs. Elms came out to say that Mr. Chamberlain was to [sic] about to make an important announcement on the ‘wireless’. We listened in silence as he made that now famous speech which ended with the fateful words “….and it is my duty to say to you, that a state of war now exists between Great Britain and Germany”. Snowy broke the ensuing silence with “I suppose we had better get it finished”, so back we went into the garden.
We had not been working long before Mrs. Elms came out again to say that her father was on the line and wanted him urgently. Now, it might be said that Snowy’s wife happened to be the daughter of the District Council’s Director of Education. Be that as it may, the fact was that the said Director of Education was also now something high up in the Civil Defence for the area. It would now appear that the Civil Defence people had realised that if the Luftwaffe decided to have a go at Grantham’s industries, the main telephone exchange was well in the line of fire. If it got knocked out of action, communication would be lost between the Civil Defence Headquarters and the various ARP Posts around the town.
The gist of the message was, could Snowy organise ASAP a corps of ‘likely lads’ to act as ARP Messengers who could carry essential messages through Hell and High Water if the phones went dead. He came out into the garden with an urgent expression on his face.
“Drop everything” (or words to that effect) “Get on your bike and find as many boys over sixteen as you can and tell them to report to me. While you are doing that, I will find out how many the HQ and the Posts want messengers. As the boys come in, I will allocate them and arrange for the necessary kit. Oh, and by the way, you are Number One”
There followed a hectic day. I was able to contact a number of erstwhile Fifth Formers who were either waiting for the school to reopen or, having left, had not yet started work. In addition, I was able to contact a number of ADCC Cadets who were over sixteen and would be willing to ‘work nights’ as ARP Messengers. Suffice it to say that by nightfall, we had a messenger in each of the ARP posts and several at the ARP Headquarters, and in the days which followed, we were able to recruit enough to give each Messenger ‘three nights on and one night off’. All that remained was to wait for the action to begin.
We found that a goodly proportion of the ARP Posts were situated either in the outbuildings of pubs or not far away from one (Surprise, surprise!). I was not all that pleased to find that Snowy had allocated me to the Post nearest to his home and that too was in the back building of a pub. In compensation though, Messengers were to be paid, not a great amount, but better than what I got when I started as an engineering apprentice a month or two later.
Although later we were to have armbands and tin hats with ‘M’ upon them, that first night we would have no distinguishing marks, so it was decided that where we had a uniform, we should wear it. At nightfall I made my way across town and up the hill to my allotted post wearing my OTC uniform but now equipped with a tin hat and a civilian duty gas mask, basic rations for the night and feeling very official and ready for the worst. Having reported to the Head Warden of this particular post, an outbuilding more or less unrecognisable under hundreds of sandbags, I was given a quick tour of it’s layout and equipment. Warden’s gear, gas detection and decontamination, search, rescue and demolition gear, first aid gear, stretchers, blackout and gas screens and bunks for those who were not outside on duty.
Following this was a load of information on the organisation of the ARP at Post and Sector Level and communication with the ARP Headquarters in the Guildhall.
[page break]
Page 55
This had all taken some time and we, that is the Head Warden and his No.2 (who was on duty that night) and myself, had no sooner sorted out who was going to be on standby and who could kip down on the bunks for a while, when our first ‘Distant Alert’ was sounded. Marco’s ‘Wailing Willie’ sounded for real for the first time and the heartbeat of Grantham started to flutter.
There have been many stories of the air raid warnings which sounded off in the London area not long after Chamberlain had finished his announcement. In Grantham we missed these, which we blamed on jittery fingers down south, but for all that, we felt sure that Grantham would get a right pasting much sooner than later.
The phone started ringing and we all started putting our gas masks and tin hats ‘at the ready’, trying hard to disguise our own flutters. A few minutes later, breathless figures were heard pushing their was [sic] through the blackout screens. Having reported and collected their gear, they left for their dispersal and patrol areas.
After a brief pause, we were then presented with our first casualty. The curtains parted and a helmeted figure wearing a gas mask, staggered into the room, collided with an equipment stand, collapsed on the ground and passed out cold! We stretched him out, removed his sweat soaked facepiece. Gasping for air, and much to our relief, he began to revive. The face began to resume a normal colour but for all that, the Head Warden did not like the looks of him and called for an ambulance to take him off to the local hospital. It later transpired that he, a fairly corpulent man in his fifties, had immediately donned his gas mask when the siren had sounded and had started to cycle furiously up the steep hill which led up to the ARP Post. Furthermore, he had neglected to soap the inside of his gas mask visor so that within minutes his perspiration had completely fogged his vision. In the blackout, he had collided with the kerb several times and come a cropper each time. a small incident perhaps amongst the thousands of more dramatic ones which would happen in Grantham over the next year or two, but remembered long after we had become inured to shocks and surprises.
On this occasion too, this was a false alarm. The All Clear was sounded shortly afterwards, the Wardens reported back, took off their gear and departed thankfully if uneasily, and we went to our bunks for the rest of the night.
The night flying aircraft from the Flying Training School and the nearby Bomber Command bases which had been hurredly [sic] grounded, were soon aloft again which, in a way was reassuring as the silence before the All Clear had been uncanny. For months now, only very bad weather had given us a night free from aircraft noise. This silence, if only for a short while on an otherwise fine night, had brought up all ears, straining to detect a different engine note.
In the nights and weeks which followed, we had quite a number of General Alerts and a few ‘Pips’ which caused an even greater straining of ears.. [sic] With the urgency upon us to train up every available pilot, the RAF decided to fly on during General Alerts and only ground their aircraft during the most likely of the Local Alerts. With the sky full of circling Ansons, Oxfords, Battles, Harvards Trainers, and Hampden Bombers, it was next to impossible to sort out the odd Ju88, Dornier or Heinkel. Many of these alerts would be merely precautionary but there were quite a few genuine intrusions as ‘Jerry’ probed our defences in the same way as we were probing his. Although there had been by this time, quite a few daylight incidents by and on both sides, as yet the air war at night had not developed into the holocaust we had been led to believe. There had been a tacit reluctance on both sides to accept responsibility for being the first to cause civilian casualties.
As September drifted into October, the ‘Phoney War Blues” began to creep in. as false alarm followed false alarm, sheer inactivity began to erode the initial high morale and dedication of the first few days and destroy the underlying sense of purpose. Some of the Wardens on duty soon discovered that the landlord of the adjacent pub was not averse to leaving his back door open after closing time. On a number of occasions I had to do a quick cover up job when, as being apparently the only one on duty, I had to ‘go fetch from the toilet’ or whatever when some senior ARP man or the police made an unscheduled visit. There were occasions when I wondered if the Wardens were going to be capable of coordinating their own movements let alone those of the sector wardens if the sirens went.
[page break]
Page 56
Sometimes we only just made up our team of Wardens as some of them had drifted off to other jobs. The Messengers too began to drift away. By the beginning of October, there was talk of the schools opening again and the sixteen year olds who had been planning either to go back to their Sixth Form or to find jobs began handing in their notices. I was beginning to feel restless too. On a number of occasions I felt sure that I had been sent off on a fool’s errand just to prove to Headquarters that someone was on duty at the Post.
In the meantime, I had being [sic] doing quite a bit of research. Part of this was into what the RAF expected of me when the time came for me to register for military service and partly into what I could do constructively with the year and a quarter which intervened. When the time came for the school to reopen, I had already decided that, since the University route to engineering qualification was now ‘closed for the duration’, another year or so in the Sixth would serve no useful purpose. It became obvious that making a good start on an engineering apprenticeship combined with the Ordinary and Higher National Certificate in Mechanical Engineering courses which would eventually lead on to Corporate Membership of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, would be a good bargaining point when it came to my appearance before the appropriate Selection Board.
So, where to start. There was still no sign of the local Technical Institute opening. This would be the bottom rung of the National Certificate course, but at least I could do something about starting and [sic] apprenticeship with one of the local engineering firms.
At that time, Grantham had three major engineering concerns and a number of smaller ones. Of the former, Marcos were out for a start. Flat out, working three shifts, seven days per week, all they wanted were unskilled machine operators and assemblers. If you started with them, you would be put on a machine and once you had mastered it they would clap a ‘Reserved Occupation’ order on you and you would be stuck on that machine for the rest of the war. They didn’t want the bother of apprentices.
The other two big companies were of world fame as fine engineers and had very sound apprenticeship schemes, but by early October their apprentice intake was already full and as soon as they heard of my ambition to go into the RAF as soon as they would have me, they firmly showed me the door.
This left the smaller companies. One of them again had a good apprentice programme but this too was already full.. I began to despair, but at this point my father stepped in to take a hand. A friend of his was the Chief Engineer of a small American firm making coal mining machinery. Admittedly they only had an assembly shop with a few simple machines. They had no facilities for the other manufacturing processes in which practical experience was necessary for eventual qualification. Following a successful interview with him, he agreed to take me on as an apprentice draughtsman for the couple of years or so before my callup. (Of course, as in the case of the First War, there were still a large number of people who blithely believed in the old ‘Over before Christmas’ nonsense, but most people were resigned to the fact that we were most probably facing up to a long hard fight which we had only just started)
At first I was none too enthusiastic. Although by this time, having been taken round the workshops, met the Foreman and seen the product, and had got a fair idea of what the company stood for, I was still ‘Johnny, Head in Air’. Later on in the war in a dramatic semi-documentary film about the RAF and the families involved in it, there featured one of the most famous little poems of the war. It started with the two lines:-
Do not despair for Johnny Head in Air,
He sleeps as sound as Johnny Underground
Now for me, Johnny Head in Air, you could not get anything so Johnny Underground as a Coalcutter. However, it seemed as good a place to start as any, and so a starting date was agreed upon, and I went away to ‘put my affairs in order’
My first job was to hand in my notice as an ARP Messenger. I was not popular and made to work my week out. I was no longer a Messenger.
My next job was to go to my OTC Commanding Officer and tell him that I had decided to leave school and therefore would no longer be one of his NCOs and therefore may I hand over my OTC uniforms and the other equipment. Expressions of regret and offerings of good wishes.
[page break]
Page 57
I then went to Snowy Elms to tell him that I was not only leaving the Messengers but I was also leaving school. Even more expressions of regret and more good wishes.
Next to the school office to say that I would not be coming back to school when they decided to open again. My departure suitably recorded. I was no longer a schoolboy. I was instructed to white to the HQ of the Public School’s Air Cadet Wing to say that, having left school, I was therefore no longer in that organisation. (I never got a reply so I assumed that it had died a natural death with the outbreak of war) I was no longer a PSACW Cadet.
Having done all that, I paused for breath and asked myself what was left? The answer was that I was now a mere sixteen year old ‘civvy’ waiting to start off as an apprentice next Monday morning at 7.30 am sharp. (What happened then is, of course, quite another story)
But, and it was a big but, [underlined] I was now free to free to join the Grantham Squadron of the Air Defence Cadet Corps! [/underlined] And that is a matter for the next chapter.
[page break]
Page 58
[underlined] Chapter Six I Join No.47(F) Grantham Squadron Air Defence Cadet Corps [/underlined]
By the Autumn of 1939, the Squadron had been in existence for some eight months and had become a smart, well disciplined and well organised unit. Basic training was well advanced and the roll count had passed the hundred mark. A few of its cadets had already registered for military service and there had been a few changes in the command structure as one or two officers had been called up. In addition to the officers, the squadron had a number of civilian instructors, notable amongst whom was one of the principal civilian signals instructors from the Radio School at Cranwell. He was to serve us faithfully through all the war years, and the name ‘Betts’ was to be ever associated with the ‘beeping’ of morse buzzers which seemed to be a constant background to our evening parades.
Our association with RAF Spittlegate had, over the months, become very close and practically every parade saw at least of one of their instructors down at our Headquarters holding forth on a wide variety of subjects. Every Sunday morning too, a strong contingent of cadets would be seen marching through the town and up the hill to the airfield. Once there, the various ‘trades’ would disperse to the hangars or instruction rooms and by this time most cadets had had their first flip’, especially those who had opted for and been accepted for aircrew when the time came for their callup. These were taken off to Navigation rooms, the Meteorology section, parachute packing etc., and many of the Ansons, Oxfords and Blenheims, away on navigation exercises would have a cadet on board glued to the windows and their air maps.
At Headquarters, most rooms were now plastered with wall charts and model aircraft hung from the ceilings. Now that war had been declared, most of the windows were painted out of fitted with blackout screens or curtains. However, by the time I joined, most people had got used to gloom and groping around in the semi dark. The Orderly Room buzzed and the neighbours got used to the yells of command from the parade ground to the rear of the building. The Town also got used to seeing the blue of the ADCC uniform both as the cadets made their way to HQ for parades and also marching parties ‘showing the flag’. We were still heavily dependent upon the support of the townspeople’s subscriptions and donations for most of our running expenses. In this respect the support committee, headed tirelessly by Lady Longmore, the Mayor (Stan Foster) and the others who had formed the guiding committee when the Squadron was formed in January, worked away in the background.
It might have been noticed that the possessive ‘our’ had crept into this account. My father, who was of course, the Squadron’s Commanding Officer (and was very proud of how the Squadron had developed), talked much at home of all the doings at ‘Cadets’, Nevertheless he had been quite adamant that I should take no part in its activities until such time as I could join it officially. I suppose we had both known that in time I would join the Squadron, but although as yet I had not done so, we both felt that 47(F) was [underlined] our squadron. [/underlined]
Well, I had sat and passed my Matriculation exam in July and had left school, so there would be no more examinations to sit until the end of the Technical Institute’s terminal examinations next summer, the war permitting of course. I was no longer in the OTC or the Air Cadet Wing for that matter. I had left the Messengers and was now waiting to start my engineering apprenticeship and my night school studies. So, there was apparently no reason why I should not join the Air Defence Cadet Corps. There was, however one problem which had to be thrashed out before there was any talk of me signing up.
The problem was that I was the Commanding Officer’s son. As soon as I made it known that I was now free and keen to join, my father had made a point of discussing it with his officers.
He now made it quite plain to me that I would only be allowed to join on the strict understanding on all sides, and mine in particular, that I did so as an ordinary cadet. I would have no rank and no privileges, given or expected, until such time as I had earned commendation and recommendation for promotion. Furthermore such recommendations must come from other officers than the C.O. and only after such time as I had passed my basic training requirements and there was a vacancy for such a promotion to fill.
By the time I actually presented myself at the Squadron Orderly Room to be enrolled as Cadet No.308 Stevenson P.D., it was well known to the officers and others, what my previous experience in the OTC and the Public Schools Air Cadet Wing had been. I made a point of playing this down and stuck to plain facts on my enrolment form. I cannot remember now whether it had been discussed, but from now on, as soon as we were in uniform, our family relationship was formally and firmly
[page break]
Page 59
dropped, even at home. Henceforth he became my Commanding Officer at all times, to be meticulously saluted and addressed as ‘Sir’. Furthermore, we made a point of never leaving our house, walking along to the H.Q., or leaving the building together, in order to emphasise this ‘no favours’ relationship. This policy was rigidly adhered to throughout the four years he was in command of the Squadron and, henceforth, so far as this commentary is concerned, he will always be referred to as ‘The Commanding Officer’.
Formalities over, measured for uniform, added to the list for the next visit by the Medical Officer, regarded with some curiosity by the existing cadets and sternly by Squadron Warrant Officer Dawson,
I took my place amongst the ‘sprogs’ of No.4 Flight. In the drill session which followed, I did my best to show that there was not much in the ADCC Drill Book that I had not already mastered in the OTC. At the end of the session, I was told by W.O. Dawson to report to his office at the next break. Wondering what I had done wrong on my first night, I duly stood before him, standing stiffly to attention. I can’t remember his exact words now but it was something like ”I know full well that your foot drill is probably as good as or better than most other cadets and could probably instruct the recruits in drill as well as most of my NCOs, but don’t try so damned hard to show it. They are all obviously watching you and it may be misinterpreted as trying to get promotion the moment you arrive. I’m not asking you to act stupid, just pretend to be just average for the moment. Understood?” “Yessir” say’s I somewhat surprised. He then barks “And you should know by now that you don’t address your Warrant Office as ‘Sir’, do you Cadet Stevenson?” “No, er, [underlined] Mister [/underlined] Dawson” says I. “Dismiss” says he, and I do so, just managing to avoid saluting him.
In due time I had the inevitable medical which I passed A1 except for eyesight and eventually got a uniform which more or less fitted me. Having had four years of khaki serge with high collar, apart from the colour change, it did not feel much different. Naturally, it had no stripes or other insignia to indicate that I was anything other than the lowest form of life.
The maximum strength that an ADCC Squadron could hold was two hundred cadets, divided into four flights. If its strength would be likely to exceed this in the long term, then another squadron had to be formed. In those early days of the Squadron, our numbers hovered around the hundred mark on the books, with average parade strength of seventy to eighty.
For us, this was a convenient size at around twenty in each flight. When the weather was bad or when the parade was at night after blackout, we could just about parade the whole squadron in the largest of our rooms. After that, there were enough relatively big rooms to accommodate a flight in each and the walls gave some indication of which flight was using it.
Flights One and Two were, in general, the older more experienced cadets, with No.1 Flight being mostly cadets who would be opting for Aircrew when their time came, having passed their medical examination and had the necessary educational standards. No.2 Flight was mainly Ground Trades. Numbers 3 and 4 Flights were essentially ‘feeder flights’ with reasonably experienced cadets in No.3 who had either not yet made up their minds, or had not yet attained the necessary acceptance levels. No.4 Flight naturally ended up with the ‘sprogs’ and the very youngest cadets. Right from the start, the minimum age for entry had been fourteen, since a very large proportion of the children of this typical industrial town, still left school at fourteen.
Naturally, for my sins, I was dumped in No.4 Flight, and would stay there until such time as I could justifiably deserve to be something better. So, I bided my time, held my tongue and did my best to behave as a new recruit. However, once a recruit had got a uniform and had mastered enough basic foot drill not to disgrace the Squadron, he was permitted to join the Sunday morning contingent up to Spittlegate. Consequently, when I was allowed to join the chosen, I was very ‘chuffed’.
Completely resigned now to the fact that I could never be accepted for aircrew, I joined the Trades Group on their way to the hangars, determined to learn as much as possible about engines and airframes ‘in the flesh’ in manner of speaking.. Of course, this was by no means terra incognita as I had been there quite a few times in the Air Cadet Wing days, now several months back. This time however, the emphasis was more ‘hands on’.
At this point I think there is a need to revert to the subject of my apprenticeship and its associated technical studies. I had made a start in the workshops of the coal mining machinery company and was getting used to making a cold dark start at 7.30am six days a week. (The normal working week in the factories was still a standard 48 hour week, 7.30am to 5pm Mondays to Fridays plus 7.30 to 1pm on Saturdays. These were the hours worked by the apprentices, but the men had their standard week increased ‘for the duration’ by compulsory overtime to a 54 hour week. Sometimes,
[page break]
Page 60
when there was a rush job, the men were called upon to work Sunday mornings also. These working hours took a hefty slice out of one’s week for a start!
Unless one’s ambitions were to be no higher than a shop labourer, then attendance at night school was a conditional part of your apprenticeship. In my case, with my sights being set somewhat higher, this would involve, for the first year, attendance at the local Technical Institute for three nights per week during the Institute’s autumn and spring terms. It was sheer luck that these three school nights did not coincide with either of the two Cadet nights. Thus my new working week involved five and a half working days and every night Monday to Friday at night school or Cadets. Add on Sunday mornings at Cadets plus two or three hours homework and private study and my week was beginning to fill up quite nicely!
There was still another demand upon available time. The Technical Institute had, like many other similar institutions, postponed the beginning of their courses until the air raid threat had receded. Instead of their usual opening at the beginning of September, it was now late October and they had lost five or six teaching weeks. As a result, instead of an evening’s instruction being two one hour sessions, 7pm to 9pm, in order to make up for lost time, the evening would comprise three one hour sessions from 6.30 to 9.30pm.
By late 1939, my life was roughly divided into three existences, my daytime apprentice’s life, my night school life and my evening and Sunday morning’s ADCC life. Time left over (if any) could be spent on non-essentials such as eating, sleeping and the trivialities of ordinary life!
During the three months of ‘Phoney Peace’ we had quite a few intrusions by the Luftwaffe. At first these seemed to be largely exploratory, but having apparently found that the Grantham area was not one with antiaircraft or balloon defences, they must have decided that we were open for attack and we began to get our first bombs. Unlike the ground war, which was to explode into dramatic action the following spring with the invasion of the Low Countries, Grantham’s air war built up slowly.
Their principal target was the 20mm cannon factory and as soon as it was effectively located, the intruders adopted a regular nightly pattern whenever the weather was favourable. In the winter months with daylight ending in the late afternoon, as early as 6pm on some nights, the Distant Warning sirens would start their wailings (There were now several of them at various parts of the town). The Spittlegate and Harlaxton trainers and the local Bomber Command aircraft would still be aloft, but we on the ground would be held in suspense. The intruder, having passed through the radar screen would then fly around until it got amongst our own aircraft circling round our air bases. After a while, with a bit of luck on their part, our Observer Corps would lose track of them with the result that they would not be able to initiate the ‘Pips’ to send us scuttling for the shelters. We would wait for an hour, perhaps two, and nothing seemed to happen. Sometimes the intruder would switch on his own navigation lights and join in with the circling trainers, no doubt making absolutely sure of his position. Then perhaps, with fuel getting low, he might line up behind a trainer starting his landing approach and silhouetted against the airfield’s flare path, he would fire a burst with his forward guns. All too often, his aim was accurate.
Successful or not, he would then circle round to make a low, fast bombing run over the centre of the town and loose off a stick of bombs into the industrial part, hopefully hitting his primary targets but all too often, falling short and hitting the housing areas. With the ‘Pips’ sounding desperately, we would dive for shelter but the horse had flown.
Quite apart from the actual damage and casualties inflicted, the object of these attacks was obviously intended to cause as much disruption as possible to our war work and the training of our pilots, therefore, the timing of these raids would vary considerably, with several intruders keeping the sirens going off and on throughout the night at times. All this was very tiring of course, and nerves began to suffer. In the event, the cannon factory received very few direct hits and was usually back in full production the following day. Various books have been published illustrating the damage inflicted upon the mainly working class housing to the south of the town and on the bombing run in. these dramatically underline the fact that in the early 1940s, per head of population, Grantham was the most heavily blitzed town in the U.K. and suffered the highest casualties.
Even amongst all this death and destruction, these [sic] was perhaps a wee excuse for a little bit of dry humour. One night at Cadets, we were in one of the front rooms having an Aircraft Recognition session under an RAF instructor who had come down from Spittlegate. The room was blacked out as usual with shutters in place and his screen backed onto the window. The Distant Warnings
[page break]
Page 62
sounded but we decided to carry on. Spittlegate’s trainers were still flying around, some of them quite low over the town. In addition to the aircraft silhouettes being projected on the screen, there was a quiet running commentary going on as the various engine notes were identified. “Oxford”, “Anson” “Blenheim” etc.
However, the sound of the engines notes of the Blenheim and the Ju88 were very similar, so that when a particularly low aircraft passed over our heads, a small voice from the audience said “Blenheim”.
A second or two later, there were five enormous explosions as a stick of bombs tore the guts out of part of the factory a quarter of a mile south along the main road (incidentally killing one of the fitters with whom I had been working earlier on in the day} [sic]. The blast, in the way bomb blast tended to go, ricocheted along the road and hit the front of our Headquarters, blasting out several windows including the one in the room where we were sitting. However, by this time we were adept at diving for cover and before the glass hit the floor, had there been light to see, I doubt that a single head would have been above desk level. In the ensuing silence which usually followed a bomb, an equally small but audible shaken voice said “It wasn’t, you know”. Another brief silence was followed by shrieks of equally shaky laughter, after which we decided that we had had enough aircraft recognition for the night. The parade was dismissed and I went along to my own factory which had also lost the majority of its windows. There was not much in the way of coal mining machinery produced during the next few days until we had cleared up the mess, replaced the glass in the windows and restored the blackout.
Running ahead a bit perhaps , but there was another incident which caused quite a bit of amusement in the Squadron and at RAF Spittlegate as well. It was in the tense months following Dunkirk with the threat of invasion hanging over us. There was even more activity at Spittlegate to put every possible pilot into the air. At that time, the RAF Regiment had not been formed and the ground staff had to man station defences in addition to their work in the hangars and elsewhere. Round the clock working, disturbed nights and picket duties were taking their toll and flight commanders were doing their best to arrange 24 and 48 hour passed wherever possible, to reduce the strain.
By this time quite a few of the more senior cadets had become proficient on the station firing range, not only with rifles but also with mounted Lewis and Vickers machine guns. Our C.O. received an urgent phone call from the officer responsible for station defence. Would it be possible for a small selected group of these senior cadets to come up to the station and take over some of the perimeter patrols and act as backup to the defence posts for half a day or so next Saturday. Agreed, rounded up and delivered.
Now there happened to be a gate in the perimeter fence on the eastern boundary of the station, conveniently accessible to the Officers Mess and Married Quarters. Crossing the green lane outside the gate gave access to a footpath leading to the little nine hole golf course which the RAF tended to use as well as the town residents. When Saturday morning’s duties had been appropriately completed, it was the Station Commander’s habit to change into civvies after lunch and partake of a round or two, which this Saturday he proceeded to do.
Some time later, our Commanding Officer was called to the telephone by a somewhat irate Group Captain. It would appear that the said Group Captain had, suitable garbed and kitted with golf gear, left the station by this gate and had been let out by one of the stations ground staff on picket duty. However, while he was enjoying his game, a tall and somewhat burly ADCC Cadet, armed with a pick axe handle, had taken over.
This cadet is approached by a civilian in golf gear who shows every intention of entering the station.
The ensuing conversation goes something as follows:
“I’m sorry sir, civilians are not permitted to pass through this gate”
“But I am the Group Captain ‘X’ in command of this station”
“Very good sir, may I see you [sic] pass?
Too late the Group Captain realises that his pass is still in his uniform pocket, back in the Mess.
Tried bluster and words of authority. Cadet unmoved, sticks to his instructions.
“May I suggest sir, that you make your way round to the Main Gate Guardroom where they will be pleased to check your identity and let you in. I am afraid I am instructed to let no one in without the appropriate pass”
Group Captain realises that he was not going to get past this large and burly figure of authority and by the time he had walked a further half mile around the station perimeter, he is in no mood to accept further frustrations. It seems that the guard on duty recognised his Commanding Officer and let him
[page break]
Page 63
in with appropriate ceremony. The C.O. strode on a further few yards, stopped, turned round and stormed into the Guardroom to demand from the NCO in charge, why he, in civilian clothes, had not been requested to show his pass. Group Captain walks through the camp to the Officer’s Mess and demands a drink to cool his ire. Refreshed, he sees the funny side of it and tells the other officers present how he was denied entry to his own camp by mere [sic] boy who effectively barred his way.
Joke goes round the camp like wildfire and the Group Captain rings up the Cadet C.O. to report what happened. Cadet C.O. extremely apologetic, promises to tear off a strip when the Cadet in question next parades. No, says the G.C.. Pass on my appreciation of his devotion to duty etc., etc.
(I very much regret that the name of the cadet has not remained in my memory bank even if his actions have. He surely should appear upon the Squadron’s unofficial roll of honour!)
Having ‘slaved in the galleys’ for a respectable period, I eventually got my big break, but it came in rather a strange way. Thanks to my previous experience in the OTC, the Air Cadet Wing and my own general knowledge in matters aeronautical, there were quite a few subjects in which I was ‘ahead of the class’. There were of course quite a few new subjects which I attended assiduously, but in those subjects in which I was not exactly wasting my time, there was a tendency to use me as a ‘gopher’ (The later expression for someone who is told to “Go for this” or “Go for that”) The fact that our home was but a stone’s throw from the Cadet HQ also contributed in a way. I soon got into the habit of opening the place up on parade nights, getting the fires going and taking along parcels of uniforms etc., which had been delivered to my father’s business address nearby. This had brought me into contact with the Squadron’s Equipment Officer who was a quiet but likeable Scot and I drifted into giving him a hand from time to time. The fact that I had done a ‘fatigue’ or two in the OTC Armoury and knew my way around the issue and storage of uniforms etc., also helped.
Cadet F/Lt MacKay was also Stores Manager at one of the big engineering firms in the south of the town, now flat out on war work. he was beginning to find it difficult to get to Cadets every parade night and suggested to the other Flight Commanders that when I was not involved in my own personal training, and he was unavoidably absent, I should as his officially appointed assistant, be in charge of the squadron equipment store and be responsible for the receipt, storage and issue of uniforms and other items.
The suggestion was accepted in principle but the Adjutant pointed out that responsibility and authority must go hand in hand. He said that if I was to be in charge of the stores when the Equipment Officer was absent, then I should have at least a couple of stripes to represent the authority required. However, since at the moment the Squadron had a full complement of NCOs, the appointment should be non-substantive. In other words, I would be an Acting Corporal whose authority did not extend beyond the door of the Equipment Stores. I supposed it was a start, even if it was only half a step on the rung of promotion. The C.O. agreed, the existing NCOs were told of my exact standing and I was accepted as not representing a threat to their seniority or authority. I think that the very strict ‘no fraternisation’ policy which the C.O. and I had stuck to so carefully, had paid off in the long run.
There were no real problems at Cadet H.Q., but when we were up at Spittlegate, there were a few occasions when my declining to use my stripes was misunderstood.
Matters came to a head rather suddenly one Saturday afternoon. It would seem that there was some sort of ‘flap’ on at Spittlegate and our C.O. had received a call that morning from the Duty Officer asking if it was possible for a working party of Cadets to go up there and lend a hand. I was asked if I could drum up some volunteers plus a senior NCO to take charge.
When the time came for the main party to move off, there was no sign of the Sergeant who was supposed to march us up. Having waited for ten minutes or so, I left a message asking him to catch us up and assume command. Fully aware that I did not really have the authority to do so, I formed the group up and gave the command to march. Up at the Spittlegate Guard Room we checked in as usual and waited for the Sergeant. After a further ten minutes, I decided to exceed my brief once again and marched the group up to the Duty Officer, where I was told to take them ASAP to the hangars. I tried to explain that I was not really a full NCO, but it fell on deaf ears. In the hangars, the Flight Sergeant told me to find out where help was needed, as help was apparently needed urgently. Again I tried to explain that I was only an acting corporal but all I got was a “Stop arguing and get on with it” sort of look, so I stopped arguing and got on with it, putting the cadets where they were needed. Nobody seemed to object and we spent the rest of the afternoon helping, holding, fetching and taking and generally making ourselves useful. When eventually a halt was called, the Flight
[page break]
Page 64
Sergeant came over, thanked us and said that he had arranged for transport to take us back to the town.
Back home, the C.O. asked how we had got on. Not wanting to ‘shop’ the Sergeant who had not come to take charge, I was deliberately vague as to who was actually in charge, and left it at that. Next morning at our usual Sunday morning parade, I was told to report to the Orderly Room. Rather to my surprise an RAF driver was there, with the C.O. looking hard at me. “Who was in charge of yesterday’s party at Spittlegate?” After a certain amount of havering I was forced to admit that Sergeant X had not turned up, so I had decided to take them up myself rather than wait any longer. “I tried to explain, but they were too busy to listen”. Well, says the C.O., it appears that they want the same party under the same NCO to go back again for the day and they have sent down a truck to take them up. They seem extremely pleased at the way the cadets got stuck in yesterday.
At this point either the Adjutant or one of the Flight Commanders chips in – I can’t remember which. “We will be losing Sergeant Y soon, may I suggest that Corporal Stevenson be promoted Sergeant with immediate effect so that he can take full command of the party” The C.O. looks appropriately non committal until nods from the other officers signify their approval. “Carry on, Sergeant” says he, so there was I, up another rung. “And see me in my office tomorrow night” says Dawson with a look which warns me not to get cocky about it!
Assuming command can be a very individual thing. Around this time an amusing relationship built up. Again, I have unfortunately forgotten names, but it concerns two cadets who became close ‘buddies’ as a result of their experiences on the firing range at Spittlegate. One of these was a tall well built, sixteen year old ‘townie’, the other a diminutive fourteen year old country boy. The former proved that, as soon as he got a rifle in his hands he went completely ‘gun shy’, failing to hit anything, since he firmly shut his eyes the moment he started to squeeze the trigger. We were convinced that the country boy must have been born with a shotgun in his hands. He was completely gun mad, but obviously well trained in the handling of guns by his father. He was determined to fire everything the RAF had to offer. Rifles, Lewis and Vickers air guns and even the vicious 0.5inch Boyes Anti Tank Rifle whose ‘kick’ would drive him backwards a good six inches. (As was to be expected he became an Air Gunner when he joined up) Meanwhile, the range instructors had done everything they could think of to get the big cadet to overcome his gun shyness but to no avail. Then, quietly, the country boy decided to take over.
We never knew how he did it but, taking the pair of them to the far end of the range, he spent the next half hour quietly talking to the big boy. Soon, steady cracks signalled that the big cadet was not only firing away confidently but was also doing some respectable scoring. After that, they were inseparable and were both the first to volunteer for range practice.
It was surprising how many jobs the RAF at Spittlegate could find for us to do. Volunteers were also called for helping out at the Officers Mess. Before I got my ‘Three’ up, I trod very carefully about volunteering. Too little volunteering and I could be accused of shirking, too much and I could be accused of angling for promotion. Somehow, I managed to get ‘wished’ into helping out in the Mess but it was a job I hated. Becoming a Mess Orderly was not on my list of possible careers in the RAF. Maybe it was because I had already found out that alcohol did nothing for me, and so I could be regarded as ‘safe’. Certainly, had I been that way inclined, I could have knocked back many a drop or dram as there were times when the few orderlies were busy elsewhere and I was in sole charge of the bar.
While on the subject of volunteering, this may be the point to introduce another member of our team who would feature frequently in the doings of the Squadron over the next five years. I cannot remember now whether she came to us in the ADCC days or whether we had become ATC by then. Right from our inaugural meeting in January 1939, our weekly local newspaper, the Grantham Journal, had given us excellent publicity. By now, the sub-editor had been calling in at least once a week to see if there was a story, and during these visits, she had come to the conclusion that the secretarial side of our Orderly Room was far from orderly. What was needed was a ‘woman about the place’. Her offer of assistance was enthusiastically accepted, and so we acquired the services of Miss Llwelyn-Owens who became an integral part of the Squadron’s doings over the next five years.
She was short, dumpy and very efficient. She reorganised our filing, straightened out our records, typed or [sic] letters and memos, tidied the place up and became our Squadron Mother. In her early thirties, she was of course middle aged to us, but what she lacked in height and good looks, she more than made up in personality. She broke no hearts amongst the cadets but they became her
[page break]
Page 65
willing slaves. She was ‘interesting’ and naturally well informed, and once she was on the strength, she stepped up our publicity. Much more about our ‘Miss Owens’ later.
Also on the subjects of ‘Mothers’, we must pay further tribute to Lady Longmore. We were still mainly dependent upon public donations and subscriptions for our running costs and our support committee, under the leadership of Lady Longmore worked tirelessly to bring the cash in. whenever Sir Arthur (now Air Chief Marshall) was on leave, she would make sure he added glamour to the occasion. We have already called him the ‘Founding Father’ of the Squadron and by the same token Lady Longmore was surely our ‘Founding Mother’
Meanwhile, we cadets spent our daytimes at our apprenticeships or other jobs, our evenings at night school or at Cadets, and our night times wondering when the Luftwaffe would have yet another go at the cannon factory and the other factories. In spite of the fact that we frequently had to dive for the shelter (the H.Q. building had some useful cellars which had been requisitioned by the ARP) training continued apace, the recruits came in and the first of our older cadets had left for the Forces. The RAF certainly thought we were doing a good job. The Battle of Britain was over and it was London’s turn to feel the effects of their Blitz. The threat of invasion had passed and the country was girding itself for a long hard struggle. 1940 ended and a New Year of uncertainty began. The Air Defence Cadet Corps, (several hundred squadrons strong now) felt, with some justification, that it was a creditable part of the overall war effort.
Rumours had been going around for some time that the RAF was of the same opinion and that the Air Ministry was making active steps to take over the responsibility of the Air Cadet movement. As 1941 began we were told that this was to take place within the month and that the ADCC would now become the ‘Air Training Corps’ with effect from the beginning of January. Our officers would have temporary commissions in the RAF Volunteer Reserve. The Cadets would have new uniforms and retain their ranks. Everything, with the exception of purely welfare expenditure, would be paid for by direct per capita grants from the Air Ministry. From now on, we were to consider ourselves as being an integral part of the RAF.
WE HAD ARRIVED!
[photograph)
[page break]
Page 66
[underlined] Chapter Seven – 47(F) Sq. Air Training Corps 1941 – No. 12 (P)AFU at RAF Spittlegate [/underlined]
1941 was a fairly momentous year for the Squadron. It started with us becoming No.47(F) Grantham Squadron [underlined] Air Training Corps. [/underlined] Our officers were now commissioned in the RAF Volunteer Reserve and would reappear in normal RAF officer’s uniforms. Nominally though, they dropped a rank. Commanding Officers of cadet squadrons were remustered as Flight Lieutenants, Flight Commanders as Flying Officers and so on.
Cadet ranks remained essentially the same. New uniforms would be reissued in a style more or less resembling the standard RAF ‘erks’ outfit although it would still retain the high ‘choker’ collar.
Existing ADCC uniforms would be converted to ATC by new buttons and other insignia.
A new training syllabus was introduced which was intended to match in with the training at the RAF Reception Centres and the Initial Training Wings (the ITWs’). The intention was that an ATC cadet having, passed specified training standards, would be exempted the early stages of RAF training or at least placed on a ‘fast track’ programme.
New training manuals soon arrived. These were now printed by HMSO bearing the age old Air Ministry preface ‘Promulgated by Order of the Air Council for the guidance of all concerned’. Much of it was merely a more official version of the training material which had been issued by the ADCC, which in itself had been modelled on the ‘Square Bashing’ stages of RAF recruit training at the beginning of the war. There were however, a number of new subjects which we had previously introduced on an ad hoc basis after our cadets had more or less passed their initial ADCC training requirements.
The Battle of Britain had seriously depleted the reserve of fighter pilots and Fighter Command was working flat out to build up its strength once more. The Battle of the Atlantic was calling on Coastal Command to increase its patrol and anti-submarine capabilities. Bomber Command, now the only branch of the services capable of carrying the war into the enemy’s camp, was losing many crews on ineffectual bombing and leaflet dropping missions. Soon too, they were expecting a new generation of heavy bombers to enter squadron service, aircraft with several new air crew categories to meet the increased crew sizes. The training of aircrew, especially pilots, had to be stepped up for us to survive
At Spittlegate, the emphasis had changed from general pilot training to a more specific need for night fighter pilots. Airborne radar, though still in its early stages, was beginning to improve our interception success which had not been all that successful to date. Better, heavier and more powerful night fighters were also coming into service. The station ceased to be No.12 Service Flying Training School and now became No.12 (Pilots) Advanced Training Unit. i.e. No.12(P)AFU. There were very few changes in personnel, it was just a case of taking trainee pilots, already up to general ‘Wings’ standard from other SFTSs, and converting them specifically to be night fighter pilots or ‘Intruder’ pilots. In each case there was a greater concentration on blind flying, night flying, long distance navigation and the use of aircraft more similar to the Radar equipped Blemheim, Beaufighter and Mosquito night fighters which would soon be in service
In spite of the increasing tempo at Spittlegate, we were still welcome. As far as possible we ‘earned our keep’ by making ourselves as useful as possible in the hangars and elsewhere, in exchange for opportunities to use the firing range and go for flights when there was a seat going. Since we were only on the station in daylight, much as we would have liked to have gone on night flights, we were unable to do so. Daylight flying usually involved the pilots under training at the beginning of their courses, but as they became more proficient in handling the aircraft, they not only moved over to night flying, the actual flights were of longer duration. They were also more dangerous and a number of crews were lost.
We were lucky in that throughout all the war years, when our cadets flew on countless occasions at the various stations to which we were attached, we never had a single cadet injured. This was in spite of flying with pilots who were still very much learning their trade on the one hand, and in aircraft liable to engine failure (e.g. the Blenheims at Spittlegate and later the Avro Manchesters at RAF Bottesford), The nearest we got to a casualty, was when a young cadet, off on his first flight (in a MkIV Blemheim with its underslung gun pod) had the interesting experience of a wheels up crash landing on the airfield. More or less beneath his feet, the pod was wiped off over a hundred yards of grass and the propellers took up some rather curious shapes. When everything came to a halt, the crew and the cadet lost no time in hopping out to a safe distance. The arrival of the crash and ‘blood wagons’ created more mayhem. While the first enjoyed covering the Blenheim with foam, the latter
[page break]
67
landing on the airfield. More or less beneath his feet, the pod was wiped off over a hundred yards of grass and the propellers took up some rather curious shapes. When everything came to a halt, the crew and the cadet lost no time in hopping out to a safe distance. The arrival of the crash and ‘blood wagons’ created more mayhem. While the first enjoyed covering the Blenheim with foam, the latter [sic] put in some useful practice treating non existent casualties. Now it has always been the RAF tradition that if a crash occurs and the pilot and/or crew are uninjured, to restore nerves and morale, they immediately go up for another flight. In spite of this being his first and somewhat eventful flight, our very young cadet immediately insisted in going up with them again! Certainly one for the Squadron’s records.
In the background to all this, Britain was now on its own. The Battle of France had been lost and the Battle of Britain won the previous year. The war in Europe was in stalemate with armies facing each other across the Channel. Britain was reeling from the Blitz, as most of its major cities received nightly attacks from the Luftwaffe, which it had to be admitted, were a lot better at finding their targets than our Bomber Command was at finding theirs. Until airborne Radar was fitted to ageing Defiant and Blenheim night fighters, there seemed little we could do to stop them. Interception did improve and by the time the first Beaufighters came into service, we were able to fight back, hence the ongoing drive to get night fighter pilots through the Spittlegate courses as quickly as possible. The end result was that although we were still welcome in the hangars and other ground facilities, there were far fewer opportunities for those of our cadets who were opting for aircrew to gain air experience.
Our cadet roll had settled down, it would seem, to around one hundred or so with again around seventy to eighty on parades. In addition to those who lived in and around the town, there had been right from the start, a significant number who were prepared to cycle in from the surrounding countryside. We even had one cadet who cycled down the Great North Road from the outskirts of Newark, some eleven miles each way! (His devotion to duty was not confined to the ATC. He served with distinction in the RAF when his time came, became a ‘Regular’ in the post war RAF and rose to wear ‘Scrambled Egg’ upon his cap). We had a very strong contingent from the large village of Colsterworth, some nine miles south of Grantham, and in time this would lead us to forming a Colsterworth Flight, but more about that later.
It would also be around this time that a new category of ‘cadet’ joined our ranks. Conscription into the service had become the norm. thanks to the excellent and well recognised pre service training contributed by the Sea Cadets, the Army Cadets and the Air Cadets, it had been decided that any young man who ‘Registered’ at seventeen and a quarter and who was not already a member of the Cadet movement, must attend the Cadet unit of the Service into which he had been accepted. Most of those who joined us, saw the advantages of becoming a regular cadet and were soon absorbed into our ranks. Others, who seemed determined to remain ‘civvies’ until the last possible moment, declined our uniforms and remained something of an ‘awkward’ sub-flight, reluctantly parading to the rear of No.4 Flight, when they bothered to attend and were correspondingly treated with some contempt by the other cadets. They were however recipients of the same training programmes.
Thankfully, an increasing flow of well prepared training material was now coming through from ATC Headquarters, together with a much more coordinated training programme. This meant that by now, after some two year’s experience, there was much less for our own officers and other instructors to improvise or ‘swop up’. Unfortunately in a way, none of our offices at this time were ‘technical’. As a result there were a few significant gaps in our coverage of the subjects needed to meet the new emphasis on aircrew on aircrew training. But, as the saying goes, “Its an ill wind that blows nobody any good”
Once I had been promoted to Flight Sergeant, I was able to fetch out those instructional skills which had been so carefully instilled in me back in the OTC days. All the usual introductory subjects for recruit training in the ‘square bashing’ phase presented no difficulty and wherever possible, I did my best to train my Sergeants and Corporals to present them themselves. This gave me time and opportunity to concentrate on subjects which I really liked and derived great satisfaction in presenting. Theory of Flight, Airframe Construction, Meteorology and, increasingly Map Reading and Navigation, all of which were ’technical’ and essential to aircrew aspirants.
It was around this time that the Flight Sergeant rank was introduced. Furthermore, quite a few of our senior NCOs had been called up and in best ‘dead man’s shoes’ tradition I was now more or less the senior Sergeant. As more Corporals were promoted and given more responsibility, so I was able to
[page break]
68
delegate a goodly number of my elementary subject instruction to them and concentrate on my ‘technical’ subjects and thereby became more of a squadron instructor than a mere administrative NCO, awaiting callup.
This new status was reinforced by the fact that by mid 1941, I had passed my Ordinary National Certificate in Mechanical Engineering. Having Registered the previous autumn, I had appeared before the appropriate Selection Board and had been officially accepted for entry into the RAF Technical Branch. This was dependent upon the completion of my engineering apprenticeship, and passing my Higher National Certificate in two year’s time. I was now ‘deferred’, subject to annual appearance before the Selection Board. As a result I could now look forward to at least another two year’s service in the Squadron. A coveted crown had been added to my uniform above my three stripes, and so up I had gone another rung.
My situation was somewhat helped by the various stages of my apprenticeship which involved alternation periods in the works and the drawing offices. Office hours were of course less demanding and at lunch hours, my drawing board could be used to work up diagrams, charts etc., for my ATC lectures. Even my technical studies helped in a way. Once having mastered the theory of vector forces and motions, it was easy to covert [sic] the basic principles into navigation exercises and aerodynamics. Another thing which helped was that once I had passed my second year exams at the Grantham Technical School, instead of attending three evenings per week, I now attended the Newark Technical College’s part time day release National Certificate courses. These involved a four day working week at my factory and a fifth whole day plus one evening at the Newark Technical College.
As mentioned earlier, our attachment to Spittlegate had become somewhat less satisfactory as a result of their new responsibilities and working practices. Our CO had been working away quietly for sometime [sic] getting No.5 Bomber Group H.Q. personnel (from the top downwards) interested in our activities and also in the town’s ‘Wings for Victory’ and other war savings drives. We never got Arthur Harris down before he moved on to become Commander in Chief of Bomber Command, but his successors as O. i/c 5 Group certainly added lustre to 47(F)’s prestige from time to time. While on the subject of ‘name dropping’, we not only had AVMs Bottomly and Cochraine ‘drop in’ from time to time but Sir Arthur and Lady Longmore continued to help us whenever possible. We certainly had friends in high places.
This new relationship with No.5 Group suddenly bore fruit. For the past year there had been frenzied activity on requisitioned farmland just north of the village of Bottesford on the Lincolnshire/Nottinghamshire border, and in the autumn of 1941, RAF Bottesford became operational. Into it moved No. 207 Squadron, a newly reformed 5 Group squadron which was to become famous in a number of very significant ways. Furthermore, No.47(F) was going to be attached to them for the next year.
[page break]
Page 69
[underlined] Chapter Eight 47(F) Sq. Air Training Corps and RAF Bottesford 1941-42 [/underlined]
As already mentioned in earlier chapters, our Commanding Officer had built up connections with members of the staffs of many of the local RAF establishments and these included the headquarters staff of No .5 Bomber Group which was already beginning to gain its legendary reputation. As a result of some gentle arm twisting, 47(F) was now attached to RAF Bottesford, a new bomber station some twelve miles in the opposite direction from Spittlegate.
During the 1930s rearmament period, the ‘Golden Age’ of RAF architecture had given Lincolnshire a number of superbly designed airfields with classic accommodation and mess blocks, hangars and service buildings, such as those to be found at Coningsby, Digby, Scampton and elsewhere. As the war approached, many older fields were given a more hurried facelift. Then, when war was declared, a massive programme of even more temporary airfield construction threw up dozens of ‘hostilities 0nly’ airfields in our and surrounding counties.
Bottesford was typical of these. A grass airfield with only a concrete perimeter track, dispersal sites for aircraft and a minimum of corrugated iron, steel framed maintenance hangars (Most daily maintenance and minor repair work on bomber bases would be done in the open dispersal areas during the war) Dispersed accommodation sites with uninsulated Nissen huts for the ground staff and slightly less uncomfortable wooden huts for aircrew were backed up by a few more permanent brick or concrete structures such as the H.Q., Control Tower, Officer’s and men’s messes, fire and rescue buildings etc.
Into this, with it’s concrete barely dry, had come No.207 Squadron. Formed originally as a Royal Naval Air Service Squadron in WW1, it had been disbanded when that war ended. It was reformed in 1940 at RAF Waddington where it originally worked up with Handley Page Hampdens, the ageing workhorse of No.5 Group in those early WW2 years. Although at the time it was initially intensely proud of the distinction, it had the ill luck to be chosen as the first squadron to fly the ill fated Avro Manchester. Having converted, the whole squadron was moved down to Bottesford where they were now getting to grips with putting this ‘monster’ into operational service.
At this stage of the war, Bomber Command was still thinking in terms of bigger, but still two engine ‘heavies’. Of the four principal manufacturers of bombers for the RAF throughout the war, Vickers would stick to mass production of their two engined ‘Wellington’, the ‘Wimpey’ of everlasting fame. Shorts, who were flat out making Sunderland flying boats for Coastal Command, decided to save valuable time by using the Sutherland wings with their four radial engines, grafting on a new slim fuselage, tail plane and undercarriage. They called it the ‘Stirling’ and in the event, the Stirling was the first ‘heavy’ to go operational. Hurried into service, it proved to be a typical ‘camel designed by a committee’. It was slow, it lacked the ability to carry large bombs and had a low service ceiling. It proved reasonably reliable but was not popular amongst the crews called upon to fly it.
The two other manufacturers (and the Air Ministry) were pinning great hopes on a new super-engine then under development by Rolls Royce. Essentially, it was two earlier (and reliable) vee-form twelve cylinder Kestrel engines, one upright and the other inverted, driving a common crankshaft. Hopefully, this new engine, optimistically named the Vulture, would in the hands of Handley Page and Avros, power two new two engine ‘heavies’ which would be much faster and with greater bomb loads, greater range and service ceiling than the Hampdens, Whitleys and ‘Wimpeys’ of No. 5 and other Bomber Groups. Rushed into service before it was properly developed, the Vulture proved a disaster and the two engine aspirations of Handley Page and Avro were dropped in favour of four engine developments.
The 207 Sq. air crews selected to fly this first of the new generation of aircraft, upon which Bomber Command were pinning even greater hopes, had been carefully gleaned from experienced Hampden crews from other 5 Group squadrons. These included quite a few, who in turn would be poached by Guy Gibson when the time came to form 617 Squadron, the Dam Busters.
By the time 47(F) appeared on their scene, 207 was just about settled in and getting their Manchesters operational. I am not sure how welcome we were when we first arrived, but 5 Group H.Q. in Grantham appeared to have told them that we were coming and could possibly be put to good use on the ground, and please would they give the cadets as much air experience as
[page break]
Page 70
possible. In the case of the ground trades, they too were to be given as much experience of a similar nature.
We were not to know this when the Sunday morning Bottesford party assembled for the first time at Cadet HQ to await the arrival of the truck to take us there. All agog in anticipation of our first visit to a fully operational bomber station, we were not surprised to see an armed guard on the gate. Having passed through the barrier we were told to enter the Guard Room where the Security Officer watched as our Identity Cards were checked and our names recorded, whereupon he gave us a short sharp talk on Station Security. Nothing, repeat nothing, which we would see, hear or learn on this or any other visit, was to be discussed outside the station perimeter, and we were left in no doubt as to the penalties we would suffer should we be found to have done so. Pointing to the ‘Careless Talk Cost Lives’ posters which after eighteen months of war were everywhere, he said “This is for real here and don’t you forget it”
Suitably subdued, we formed up outside and marched as smartly as possible, we were escorted to the Duty Officer’s office. After a similar warning, we were taken on a brief tour of the central service area facilities and then onto the tarmac in front of the hangars where we had our first face to face encounter with the Manchester. At Spittlegate, we were all used to the ‘Faithful Annies’, the ‘Oxboxes’, the Blenheims and the Harvards which were all very much of a size but in comparison, the Manchester seemed ENORMOUS. Propellers which seemed big enough for a windmill, tyres as big as the average cadet, engine nacelles as big as a Harvard’s fuselage, a cockpit canopy twenty feet up in the air and a bomb bay big enough it seemed, to carry a bus. Although, we were to gather later, they were beginning to have grave doubts about the engines, they were immensely proud of the Avro airframe. We were proudly shown around its ‘innards’ and sat for the first time in power operated gun turrets. We had occasionally glimpsed a Manchester in the distance, but since they were instructed to keep well away from Spittlegate and Harlaxton’s training air space we had not seen them close to. During the morning there had been one or two of them doing flight tests and we had stood in wonder as they taxied out and, with savage roars from their huge Vulture engines, they took off circled around, and landed.
After some grub in the airmen’s mess (a distinct improvement on Spittlegate’s NAAFI wagons!) we broke up into ‘trades’. Our aircrew cadets marched off to the navigation and crew rooms where we made sure that they appreciated that we knew all about putting on Sidcot suits and parachutes and knew our flight drill. Since there were some more flight tests scheduled for the afternoon, a lucky few were taken out, installed in upper and rear turrets or in second pilots and navigator’s seats in the ‘office’ and away they went into Bottesford’s air space. Back on terra firma, they were drooling with excitement.
Meanwhile, our ground trades had dispersed into their respective work areas. The Armourers for example, as soon as they could, demonstrated that they too knew how to strip a Vickers or Lewis Air Gun and clear the usual stoppages, but now they needed to learn the same for the Browning air guns which were used in the Manchester turrets. A new piece of gear which they would get to know very well in the ensuing months, was the machine gun belt filling machine. We had seen the long trays which lined almost the whole length of the rear fuselage of the Manchester which guided yard upon yard of rounds into the turret guns. This was no mere demonstration. These rounds if fired, would be for real. Down in the bomb dumps, we looked in awe at hundreds of real live bombs of all sizes, and air drop sea mines. They were also introduced to the chore which the RAF were only too pleased to hand over to the ATC in later visits, the loading of canisters with hundreds of the RAF’s little 4lb hexagonal magnesium incendiary bombs, which we learned to load [underlined] very carefully [/underlined]. Earlier on we were given a demonstration of what would happen if one was dropped on its live end. Very spectacular. We never dropped one! In the hangars, the fitter trades similarly indicated that hangar life was not a closed book to them.
As was to be expected, this was our introductory visit. They got to know us and we got to know them. We definitely wanted to come again and they seemed very willing to have us back. From our point of view, the change in atmosphere had been dramatic. At Spittlegate, we had been used to a more or less round the clock tempo with aircraft flying, at all hours of the day and night, weather permitting. Maintenance had also been an ongoing, more or less regular routine. The only ‘flaps’ had been the result of attempts to bring a course back on time after a spell of bad weather or to urgently complete the training of a given course.
[page break]
Page 71
At Bottesford, all seemed very different. The weather was of course the all deciding factor as to whether the station was on a ‘Stand Down’ or ‘Operations On’ status. On this, our first visit, the station was on ‘Stand Down’. All hands seemed to be working hard but steadily during daylight hours to get all essential maintenance up to date, damage repaired, aircraft air tested and training exercises completed. At nightfall, we were to find that, apart from late working in the hangars, there was an air of relief as air and ground crews collapsed for well earned rest and a chance to catch up with lost sleep. It was to be very different on the day we went to Bottesford when ‘Ops’ were scheduled for the following night, but more on that subject later.
We were a much bemused party which returned to Grantham late that afternoon. There was an overwhelming urge to chatter on about all we had seen and done. However, we NCOs, remembering the admonitions of the Security Officer, jumped down hard on any talk involving ‘sensitive’ matters, and our officer in charge reiterated our security responsibilities when the time came for us to dismiss. There was one thing we could say, we quite sure we had fallen on our feet when it came to our new attachment.
It was not long before our now quite regular visits to Bottesford settled down to a regular routine. Air crew category cadets, on arrival would make their way to the Navigation Section. There, they would go over the exercises which they had done at cadet H.Q. under my supervision and would work through previous ‘plots’ which had been done in recent operational sorties over France and Germany. At this time, many of these sorties involved the dropping of sea mines in areas of the North Seas, Baltic, Channel and Biscay coasts. Such navigation and position fixing had to be very accurate and we learned a lot of how it was done ‘for real’. Once the 207 navigators felt that we could make quite a good job of working out a simple plot, they would get us to work out one for a Manchester which was due for a flight test that day. Then to our delight, they would take us up on the test and the pilot rather than just ‘stooging around’ (as the saying went in those days) would follow our courses as we sang them out. with us glued to our air maps as we map read our progress over the ground, at the end of a half hour triangular flight, if we did actually arrive more or less back over the airfield, we really thought that there was something in this air navigation business, and how we were guiding this huge powerful machine around the skies. However, it should be added that this sort of thing was more characteristic of our visits to Bottesford later in the year.
While this was going on with our air crew cadets, our ground trades were similarly busy in the hangars, armaments sections, and out on dispersals. As it had been at Spittlegate, our cadets who were also engineering fitter apprentices, were soon helping out with maintenance and repair work. Of course the training aircraft at Spittlegate had suffered occasional damage as a result of forced landings, overshoots and ground collisions etc., but now we had our first experience of battle damage. One or two Manchesters had come back from mine laying sorties with the tips of their propellers bent back. Because the mines had to be dropped from a very low level in the dark, the pilots were experiencing the same difficulties of judging their height as the Dam Busters did two years later. Often these same aircraft came back with their bomb doors ripped off and one came back with seaweed in its radiator intake. On one occasion, one came back with a long length of German balloon cable wrapped round one of its propellers. When low flying exercises were on the go, twigs and small branches on one’s wing tips were regarded as great trophies.
These were the lucky ones. Somehow, their pilots had managed to regain control and bring their damaged aircraft back home. Others didn’t and paid the ultimate price. Practically every weekend when we arrived, the ground staff were grooming up replacement aircraft for ones lost on operations or, increasingly, regrettably and disastrously, those which had crashed or failed to return due to engine failures. It was obvious to all now, that the Vulture, rushed into production before it had been properly developed, was a complete failure.
There had been crashes and fatalities at Spittlegate either through aircraft failures, pilot errors or, sadly, through intruder gunfire, but these had rarely been talked about. Whether this was to keep such matters away from our young ears or whether it had been standard practice to keep up the morale of their trainees, I have no idea. At Bottesford, discussion of by now regular losses seemed unavoidable. I do know that certain badly damaged aircraft were ‘out of bounds’ to us until such times as certain rather unpalatable evidences of the less heroic aspects of war had been cleaned away. What they also did their best to hide from us was their undoubted loss of morale and confidence in the Manchester. The general opinion amongst the aircrews was that they were far more likely to lose their lives to a Vulture than a Messerschmidt [sic]. In spite of this, there seemed to be
[page break]
Page 72
no reluctance to taking us up on test flights etc. We, being young and ‘good keen types’ were only too pleased to sign the inevitable ‘blood chit’ before take off, and make sure that little or nothing of this leaked back to our parents!
The replacement Manchesters by this time were all Mk.2 versions. In spite of their loss of faith in its engines, they still considered that the aircraft (with engines running well) was a delight to fly, but then on one bright sunny early summer morning they had something new to show us. There on the tarmac was a Manchester Mk.3. Still the same fuselage and tail plane but the Vultures had gone. The wingspan had been increased by ten feet each side and two new outboard engine nacelles housed sleek ‘vee twelve’ Merlins. This was the prototype of the legend to come.
Both aircrew and ground staff were ecstatic. It was doing the rounds of the Manchester squadrons to get their opinions as to how it handled and what they thought of it. For the first time, we heard in place of the Vulture’s snarls, the gentle purrs of four Merlins ticking over, changing to a purposeful roar as the ‘Mk.3’ took off and shot us up at zero feet.. This was to be the sound of ‘Bomber County’ for the next five years.
Very shortly after we started going to Bottesford, we arrived to find that operations were ‘on’ for the following night. The whole camp was in a very different state and was now working in top gear. We were there to give4 a hand wherever it was needed, irrespective of trade or category. Final checks and adjustments, much running up of engines, bombing up, fuelling up, arming up, frenzied but purposeful activity. Later on in the war, the country would be immensely inspired by Laurence Olivier’s production of Shakespeare’s ‘Henry V’ and the lines in the Prologue to the Battle of Agincourt could never be more apt to the scene on ‘Ops’ night at Bottesford or any other Bomber Command station that night or any other night of the escalating bomber offensive:
“And in the tents, the armourers accomplishing the knights,
With busy hammers closing rivets up,
Gave dreadful note of preparation”
Everywhere was a noisy and ascending crescendo of activity.
This was to be an early evening takeoff and as the crews were called to final briefing there was a palpable increase in tension. This heightened even further as we watched the crews, loaded with parachutes, charts, code books and other gear, climbed up into the lorries which would be taking them out to dispersal. Another pregnant silence and then the noise began.
First one, two, ten, twenty, forty and often more engines coughed into life. Clouds of smoke followed by another pause, then each engine in turn would be run up. Full revs, full boost, mag drop, temperatures, pressures, fuel checks and all the other pre-flight checks were carried out and we knew what was going on now. Then, when all was satisfactory, the whole squadron, with all engines ticking over, formed a slow procession round the perimeter like a great noisy herd of elephants, to the down wind point of the airfield. A red light would appear on the south horizon. This would be the hazard light on top of Bottesford village church, a nasty reminder that the aircraft, loaded to capacity, would have gained little height by the time they passed over it.
By this time, most of the station not directly involved in the take off would have collected near the take off point to cheer and wave them off as the Green from the control trailer gave the clear to go. By this time we had our favourite aircraft or crew and would be shouting as loudly as the rest.
One by one, they would roar off and away to join the other 5 Group aircraft also clawing for height. Bottesford at that time was at the south west edge of 5 Group territory so that we did not see the bulk of their take off, but as happened on so many ‘ops’ nights the noise of hundreds of Rolls Royce engines not only filled the night sky, but nearer to the bases, even went so far as to make the ground shake. We were fighting back now and repaying with interest, and 47(F) were doing their bit. On these ops nights, when we were there, we slaved in the bomb dump loading up the incendiaries, in the ammunition huts we would help loading up the machine gun belts, and everywhere else we would be fetching, carrying, cleaning up and taking messages.
We saw the other side of the coin when we arrived on the station on the morning following a night op. All too often in those Manchester days, the station was subdued. The airmen had grim expressions and quite a few WAAFs had red rimmed eyes. This introduces another difference we had noticed between Bottesford and Spittlegate.
[page break]
Page 73
At Grantham, the WAAFs seemed to us at least, to be ‘motherly’ types who, if we were not careful, would ‘fuss’ around us. However, those in the Parachute Section were somewhat different. The Packing Room was always a haven of peace, where the ‘chutes’ were quietly issued and taken back into store, regularly unpacked and hung up to air, taken down and meticulously repacked. All very calm, caring and impressive. I had noticed that there was no shortage of volunteers amongst the older cadets when a party to the Parachute Section was proposed, and I also gathered that it was not just the parachutes that they were hoping to see. The packing of a parachute is a very precise procedure and calls for the exact placing of the various panels and shroud lines and a cadet invited to ‘have a go’ would invariably have his hand gently guided to the exact spot. To a seventeen year old boy in those far off very inhibited days (compared with today of course) these particular WAAFs who seemed to be cut above the others when it came to charm and good looks, could be quite disturbing in such ‘hands on’ circumstances. The effects were not lost on the other cadets, or the WAAFs either, who seemed quite prepared to join in with the fun!
At Bottesford, the WAAFs were far more tight lipped and serious. Pleasant enough and tolerant to we cadets, but acutely conscious of living in an adult and at times brutal world where death, injuries and bereavement were just round the corner, perhaps that very night.
There would be empty spaces in the dispersals and men busy cleaning up the plane interiors as well as patching flak and bullet damage. The more senior cadets would help wherever possible whilst the more junior cadets were taken to less dramatic chores. We grew up fast, very fast at times.
On the subject of favourite crews, 207 was beginning to create its heroes and its legends. One of these was a Canadian Air Force pilot. In actual fact he was an American who, at the outbreak of war had crossed into Canada and joined the RCAF. He had come to England and was posted to 5 Group and was one of the chosen to form 207 at Waddington. A superb pilot he had built up a first class Manchester crew and was well into his second tour of operations. Around this time, the German Navy was becoming a prime target for the RAF and although daylight raids had proved suicidal, the growing threat of the German battleships such as the Tirpitz and the Bismark on our Atlantic conveys was calling for desperate action. The call was for low level daylight attacks to be practiced, and low level flying was what this American loved. His idea of a pleasant Sunday morning’s jaunt was to do just what the powers that be wanted. If they wanted low flying that would suit him down to the ground (in all senses of the word!) Several cadets had come back telling how he preferred to fly [underlined] round [/underlined] trees rather than lifting up to fly over them. Since I was usually the NCO in charge of the Bottesford parties, I nearly always allowed the other cadets to go up on any available flight tests, navigation or low flying exercises, but eventually my turn came and I was delighted when the American came out and climbed in. Of [sic] we went, hedge hopping our way down to the Fens to the consternation of man and beast. There are few things more mind blowing than having a Manchester, of worse still a Lancaster, suddenly roaring over your head, fifty feet up and doing two hundred mph. The Lanc although quitter at height, gave little or no warning of its approach when ‘down on the deck’.
I had managed to grab the mid upper turret, the best place to be when you are practising map reading but this is not easy when tree tops get in the way of your view! According to my air map there were some H.T. lines ahead. We are still at fifty feet. With some temerity, I decide to warn the pilot. Pilot grunts. Still no change of altitude. Pylons appear ahead. We stay at fifty feet. Generally speaking, breathing stops. H.T. cables pass [underlined] over [/underlined] our heads. Breathing recommences. It was therefore no surprise to me to learn a year or so later that Joe Macarthy and his crew were among the first to be poached by Guy Gibson when the time came for him to form 617 Squadron.
By late spring of 1941, we were not only welcome at Bottesford but, when there was some sort of a ‘flap’ on they actually started to ask us to lend a hand. These were usually ‘ops’ and sometimes, for security reasons, we were not allowed to leave the station until after take off. At other times, they asked us to come on the Saturday and be prepared to stay overnight, in which case we were allocated a Nissen hut in one of the dispersal areas. As senior Sergeant now, I was usually put in charge of such parties and once again my previous experience in the OTC and Air Cadet Wing camps came in useful. Having drawn mattresses, blankets etc, the cadets needed to be introduced into the niceties of blanket and sheet folding, pillow and personal gear arrangement and display. ‘Fatigues’ were allocated, the inevitable Magnet Stove coaxed into reluctant and smoky life, the fire bucket relieved of its fag ends, after which we could get on with the war!
[page break]
Page 74
Once on site, we were treated just like the other airmen and joined parties marching off to the mess halls. (It is interesting to reflect on the fact that in those days one never ‘proceeded’ as an individual, one invariably marched as a group.
After nearly three quarters of a century, certain events stand out in one’s memory as clear as a bell, others are completely lost and many although well remembered, are difficult to pin down as to time and place. Not so the 29th of May that year. This was the night when the RAF made history and 47(F) did their bit to make it so. It started when we received a call for as many cadets to go to Bottesford as possible, prepared to stay overnight. When we arrived it became obvious that the ‘flap beyond all flaps’ was on. Every aircraft capable of flying had to fly. Over at the bomb dumps we loaded the inevitable incendiaries. Machine gun belts were filled in the armament section and as usual we lifted, held, took, carried and cleaned up. Engines roared and meals were snatched. Eventually the aircrews were called to briefing. On arrival were [sic] had been warned that no one must make any contact with the outside world and the reason for the flap would be explained later.
When the time came for 207 to take off, the skies were already filling. In addition to the local 5 Group aircraft, they started climbing up from the west which was Operational Training Unit’s airspace, which was strange.
Tired out, we staggered off to our Nissen hut with the promise that all would be made clear in the morning. We were not to see the headlines in the papers until later on in the day, but at a collective briefing just after breakfast, we were told that the RAF had made its first ‘Thousand Bomber Raid’ on Cologne, and 47(F) had been there to help.
Naturally our visits to Bottesford were the highlights of our ATC weeks, but back at our Grantham H.Q. many other things were going on apace. Following the introduction of the new ATC Training Programme and associated training manuals, came the Proficiency Certificate tests. Having by now become an instructor in quite a few subjects, as I was still technically a cadet, it obviously seemed right that I should pass my Part 1 as soon as possible. There was therefore a lot of swotting up on the part of the NCOs and senior cadets to get their four bladed propeller badges indicating that they were ‘Proficient’. There were a number of categories, Pilot/Observer, Wireless Operator, Flight Mechanic (Engines) etc., as well as those for ground trades.
The pilot/Observer syllabus now included a first introduction into Astronavigation, as well as the usual Dead Reckoning Air Plots, Map Reading Exercises etc.. For the Part 1 Certificate Astronavigation only involved the recognition of the principle constellations and individually important stars.
Being now very much of a ‘county boy’ (our family having moved away from the Luftwaffe’s bombing run in 1940) the night sky had become a great fascination to me. Britain was still a domestic coal burning society with central heating being almost unheard of, and we were often beset with autumnal ‘pea souper’ fogs. At many other times of the year the sky could be crystal clear. With the imposition of the total blackout, there was no [underlined] ‘light pollution’ as we know it today. Also, our night vision was far better than it is today since there were no flashing vehicle headlamps to blind us, since all road users (cyclists included) had to hood their lights so that nothing shone above the horizontal.
It was usually well on into the autumn before we could start on star identification. With the imposition of Double Summer Time in the summer months and ‘single’ Summer Time in the winter months (to help the factory workers enjoy a bit of evening after their overtime) it never became properly dark until after evening parades had dismissed. When we could go out into the parade ground for star identification, it was usually well into the winter months, and here I mean real winter. Not the snow free, late autumn, global warming, cold snaps we chose to regard as winter today. having memorised one or two of our Star Charts we would, on a fine cloud free night, go out and first identify the Plough whose ‘Pointers’ would guide us to the Pole Star. Dependant [sic] upon the month, we would go on to identify the constellation of Cygnus, the Swan whose nose, tail and wing tip stars would be so vital in the astronavigation to follow. The Square of Pegasus, Leo the Lion and when the Orion group came above the eastern horizon, to really show one’s prowess in star identification by identifying the Pleiades and see if you could count more than seven.
Of course this was most important if you were intending to be a Navigator on the first steps to mastering astronavigation. At the same time it was felt vital by the RAF that [underlined] anyone [/underlined] in the aircrew could make the difference between life and death if he could, by the briefest of glimpses through a break in the clouds, identify Month and then West, the way home for a crippled aircraft whose other navigational aids had either failed or had been destroyed by enemy fire.
[page break]
75
[photograph]
A.T.C. Form 3
[crest]
AIR TRAINING CORPS.
Certificate of Proficiency
Part 1
This is to Certify that
Cadet Flight Sergeant Peter Desmond Stevenson of No. 47.F. (Grantham) Squadron is granted a Certificate of Proficiency in that , during his membership of the Air Training Corps, he has fulfilled the necessary conditions as to efficient service and has qualified in the Pilot/Observer syllabus of training, as laid down in the Rules and Regulations of the Air Training Corps.
[signature]
Air Commodore
Commandant, Air Training Corps.
Date 11-2-1942
[page break]
Page 76
[underlined] The 1942 Summer Camp at RAF Bottesford [/underlined]
With the threat of invasion now safely behind us, ATC HQ in conjunction with the Air Ministry decided to hold, wherever possible, summer cadet camps at local RAF stations. Numbers would be limited and there would be much competition for the places. At Bottesford there would be a one week camp for twelve cadets with an officer in charge. In the event none of our officers could get away on the week involved, but in view of our experience in running our own Nissen, they were quite prepared to accept a senior cadet NCO as camp leader.
Eventually a short list was established and the cadet’s employers were persuaded to allow the cadets concerned an extra week’s holiday. (War time holiday allocations were limited to one week ‘for the duration’). My own firm by this time, was a strong supporter of our Squadron and I had no difficulty in making sure that I was on the list, which ended up with me being in charge.
As luck would have it, my written report of the following week’s activities is still in existence and as a result I can give a blow by blow account of a most wonderful week.
On Saturday 16th May, the chosen few assembled at Cadet H.Q. complete with kitbags and gear for the week. A camp lorry took these out, while we cycled out in commendable order befitting the occasion. (We needed our bikes because everything at Bottesford was always a long way from anywhere else). ‘Arriving at the Guard Room at ’13.00 hrs’ (etc., etc.) we assembled before being marched off to our camp site. It would seem that the concept of a summer camp was taken literally. Fully expecting to reoccupy our Nissen on the far side of the ‘drome, we were slightly surprised to find ourselves in a tented camp more or less opposite to the Station Headquarters. Here had been set up a small marquee which became our ‘Orderly Room’ and store for spare kit, four bell tents for our accommodation, and another for our bikes. Bedding was delivered and an attack made on the resulting chaos, since in addition to three barrack room ‘biscuits’, two sheets, a pillow and pillow case apiece, we were issued with no less than six blankets each. They obviously didn’t intend us feeling cold.
Our party comprised three sergeants who occupied the Senior NCOs tent, a corporal and two cadets in No.1 tent, four cadets in No.2 Tent and the other three cadets in No.3 tent, so we had plenty of room. Thanks to my Twezledown and Selsea camp experience, and our overnight stays in the Nissen, we lost no time in telling the airmen who had been detailed to look after us that we were quite capable of running our own camp. Order was ultimately achieved, just in time for ‘tea’ to be declared.
After that, the rest of the day was declared ‘free’. The more energetically disposed went off to the exercise area and the assault course, while the less so, opted for the NAAFI. Sgts Kirk and Rudkin and myself had all passed the Pilot/Observer’s Proficiency Part 1 earlier on in the year and we were getting lined up for the first Proficiency Part 2 examinations. These were going to take place in July, so that any spare time for us this week would be devoted to swotting.
Reveille was ordered for 06.30, but being the first day of camp, it was no great surprise to find all ranks were already exercising themselves on the station assault course by 06.00 (somehow this enthusiasm was not repeated on subsequent mornings!). having set our camp to rights, we made our way over to No.2 Airmen’s Mess which was about half a mile away – Bottesford was well dispersed and most things seemed to be at least half a mile from anywhere else! Back at our camp, we readied ourselves for Kit Inspection, but as our Oi/c Camp was also Duty Officer for the whole station, that duty fell upon myself, so I borrowed the dignity of an inspecting officer and regarded all efforts (including my own) with appropriate severity.
We were expecting to be sent off to the hangars and elsewhere for the usual ‘Fetch and Carry’ duties which normally preceded a chance for a flight, when we were ordered to report to the Station Adjutant in the HQ. He told us to divide into two groups. One group, comprising our Wireless Operator/Air Gunners and other trades, was to report to the Station Signals Section for a morning’s instruction on aircraft wireless equipment. The other group, Pilot/Observer, was again to divide into two smaller groups, one to report to A Flight Commander, the other to B Flight. (By this time, almost all the Mancesters had been replaced by Lancasters)
[page break]
Page 77
Since A Flight was not flying that morning, we were taken to the AML Bomb Trainer where we were instructed on how to use the new Automatic Bomb Sight which was just coming into service. Having dropped ‘three sticks’ apiece, we went over to the Spotlight Trainer for half an hour’s Turret gunnery practice. This was a concrete dome shaped building, in the centre of which was a mid upper turret connected to an external hydraulic power generator. Using a projector, the instructor could flash onto the interior of the dome, either a spot of light or the silhouette of a fighter aircraft. In the case of the latter one had first to decide its identity ([underlined] before it [/underlined] shot [underlined] you [/underlined] down) then follow it with a spotlight projected from the turret gun cluster and ‘fire’, having allowed the appropriate ‘deflection’.
This would all be accompanied by a lot of Merlin engine noise and gunfire as appropriate, according to whether you were shooting at it, or it was shooting at you. The only things missing was the turret being thrown all over the sky as your skipper ‘weaved’, and the smell of cordite from your guns. All very exciting. This was followed by a very interesting session when we ‘assisted’ in the compass swinging procedure for one of the newly delivered Lancs. Stationed in the centre of a circle round which were marked the various ‘True’ headings from True North clockwise round the compass, the aircraft was carefully turned to various key headings and the readings of the on board compasses compared. The errors caused by the various bits of magnetic material in the aircraft were duly noted to produce the Deviation Chart, vital for accurate courses to be calculated by the Navigator. All valuable knowledge for those of us hoping to get a question on Variation and Deviation in our Proficiency Part 2 exam and for me as part of my Navigation Instructors lecturing.
While all this was going on, the cadets attached to B Flight were having an equally exciting time. Bomber Command was hoping that the extra speed, firepower and range of the Lancaster would enable them to mount daylight attacks once more after the disasters of the early war Wellington attacks, had forced the bombing offensive into night operations. It was back to low level flying singly, and in formation. This morning it had been a one and a half hour low flying practice, ending with a low level bombing run over a bombing range.
After lunch two cadets went on a night flying test, and since 207 Sq. was on operations that night some cadets went on the Link Blind Flying Trainer for a while and the rest of us dispersed into the hangers [sic] to make ourselves useful.
All very thrilling, but not quite what we had expected. I never knew whether the week we had at Bottesford was a result of direction from ‘upon high’ or whether it was Bottesford thanking us for services previously rendered. It was probably a bit of both.
The following day there was even more flying for the cadets with formation flying, low level flying and bombing runs over the Clifton Pastures bombing range near Nottingham. Sgts Kirk, Rudkin and myself, anxious to hone up our navigation skills, opted to spend most of the day in the Navigation Section, totally absorbed in plots on air maps of the U.K and the Continent, and working out the routes recorded in the navigator’s logs of some of the old Manchester raids.
The next morning, having drawn overalls, the main party went across to No.4 hangar where a brand new Lancaster was to receive a pre-service checkover. Two cadets joined engine fitters on each of the four Merlins, two to the inside of the fuselage and two more for the exterior. In spite of the fact that the aircraft had been rigorously inspected at the factory before it was test flown and delivered, nothing was taken for granted and its acceptance check took most of the day. At lunch, several cadets remarked on how clean and ‘new’ it smelled. (Everyone who has had contact with Lancasters will agree that they had a special smell, especially when they were new. A combination of new paint, aircraft dope, hydraulic fluid, gun belt lubricant and less identifiable smells, and these will persist through out its life. To these will be added the smells associated with its service life, some of which are far less pleasant. Cordite fumes, the rear end of the fuselage just forward of the tail plain where the Elsan lost its contents during violent manoeuvres, elsewhere other traces of the effects of air sickness, fear and wounding, persist in spite of careful cleaning by ground staff. Even today, one has only to poke one’s nose through the door of ‘Just Jane’, East Kirkby’s taxiable Lanc of the BBMF’s flying Lanc and the mind flashes back)
We three Sergeants reported once more to the Navigation Section where we were to be given a navigation problem to work out. However, plans were changed and we went off on another low flying exercise in the Squadron’s last Manchester, which called for some exciting map reading, made just a little more difficult by nearby trees obscuring the more distant landmarks! The flight finished with us leaving our visiting cards at the Clifton Pastures Range.
[page break]
Page 78
In the afternoon, all the others went of [sic] on yet more low flying exercises. So far as I can remember, these were all part of the Augsburg, Capital Ship Bomb, and the Tirpitz/Scharnhorst/Gneisenau urges and purges at the time. We decided to take our plotting problem back to our ‘Orderly Room’ and work away at that for the afternoon.
Thursday was one of my last ‘day release’ days at my Technical College before the end of the year examinations, and granted leave of absence, I left my two Sergeants in charge. In the morning, all went flying again. Since the Squadron was on ops that night, the afternoon was declared ‘free’ but I understood that they made themselves useful again.
Bad weather on the Friday grounded all flying, so we all adjourned to the Armaments Section for a lecture on the Browning Turret Guns followed by participation in one of the station’s periodic anti-gas exercises. The weather improved after lunch, and most of the cadets got a forty five minute flight in night flying tests after the previous night’s operations. We had hoped, as the week progressed, that we might get at least one night flight, but operations and the weather prevented this. However, in compensation for this, most of us were given the chance to take over the controls. (The Mk.1 Lancs still had dual controls). Thanks to the Link Trainers at Spittlegate and Bottesford, most of us could by now, maintain a reasonably straight course and execute some modest Rate One Turns without dropping the nose. Suddenly holding the same in a twenty ton 4000hp, 100ft wing span monster doing one hundred and fifty mile per hour was a rather different matter to being in the Link Trainer humming away in an otherwise quiet room! However, we did not disgrace ourselves and managed ‘straight and level’, some gentle turns and quite creditable figures of eights.
On the Saturday, our final day, we had a camp inspection by 207’s Commanding Officer, after which we struck camp and got our gear packed away. This was followed by a final flip in flight tests for that night’s operations. We were then told to report to Station H.Q, where the Station Commander, accompanied by the Adjutant, the Station Warrant Officer and the two Flight Commanders, gave us a farewell ‘pep talk’, after which it was back to ‘civvie street’.
What a week it had been! One little statistic from my camp report – The thirteen cadets involved, clocked up a total of one hundred and ten and a half hours flying time between us!
This was now the end of May 1942, and the next priority so far as we three Sergeants were concerned, was the count down to the Proficiency Part 2 examinations in a couple of months time. ATC H.Q. had warned us that the various papers would all be tough ones and that the pass marks would be high. Also, since we would be in the first group of cadets to enter for the examinations, our performances would be regarded as the bench mark for subsequent exams. It therefore behove us to be as prepared as we could be.
There would be papers on the Principles of Flight, Aeroengines and Airframe Construction, Aircraft Recognition, Law and Administration, Anti Gas, Hygiene and two papers on Air Navigation and Meteorology. Failure in any one of these subjects would result in a ‘Fail’ for the whole examination. The examination, lasting two full days, would be held at the RAF’s No.2 I.T.W. at Cambridge and all ATC Squadrons were warned not to submit candidates unless they stood a good chance of passing.
On August 3rd 1942, Sgts Kirk, Rudkin and myself went to Cambridge by train, and by 11.00 we were at the gates of Emmanuel College which was to be our billet for the next three nights. There we met up with eight cadets from No.1045 (Wolverhampton) Squadron, which was the only other Squadron to submit candidates. Having been allocated rooms in the University Student’s Wing, we found our way to the Dining Hall for our midday (and subsequent) meals. The rest of the day was declared free, which I put to good use visiting relatives.
The following morning, a 7am breakfast called for a 6am reveille. Hoping for the best and fearing the worst, we formed up and marched across town to the Cambridge Union Society Examination Rooms (where many a promising academic career has crashed in flames).
Our first paper started at 09.00, Principles of Flight, which went well so far as I was concerned, although I did detect signs of stress elsewhere in the room. Without a break, we went onto the second paper which was ‘Engines’. Every question seemed to be just what was wanted, but again that happened to be my opinion. After a half hour break, we had a one hour paper on Anti Gas. Having marched back to Emmanuel for lunch, and back again to the exams room, a one hour paper on Law and Administration, followed by a half hour paper on Hygiene, which also included some questions on First Aid.
[page break]
79
A.T.C. Form 3A.
657
[ATC Crest]
AIR TRAINING CORPS.
Certificate of Proficiency
PART II.
This is to Certify that
Cadet Flight Sergeant Peter Desmond Stevenson of No. 47.F. (Grantham) Squadron/[deleted] Flight [/deleted]
Is granted a Certificate of Proficiency in that during his membership of the Air Training Corps, he:-
(i) has satisfactorily completed the course of Proficiency Part II Training;
(ii) has passed the examinations in the following subjects and obtained the percentage marks as shown:-
(a) Air Navigation and Meteorology 67%
(b) Principles of Flight 85%
(c) Engines 100%
(d) Aircraft Recognition 96%
(e) Law and Administration 80%
(f) Anti-gas 86%
(g) Hygiene 84%
By Command of the Air Council
[signature]
Dated at the Air Ministry
this 4th/5th day of August 1942.
[page break]
Page 80
That was more than enough for one day and amidst groans from the Wolverhampton cadets we staggered back to Emmanuel. The three of us felt that we had done reasonably well, but the main hurdle would be next morning.
True enough, the two hour paper on Air Navigation and Meteorology was a right [***censored][sic]. The questions looked innocent enough but they all seemed to have hidden traps. Faces were long at the mid morning break, and nerves were somewhat shattered for the final paper on Aircraft Recognition. However, we three did well and by that time we had little sympathy for the Wolverhampton group as it was quite obvious that they had been nothing like ready enough. When results were declared, every one of them failed and I understood later that their Squadron got a rocket from ATC H.Q. for entering cadets who, in the majority of cases, were just not up to it, and had therefore wasted a lot of RAF money and time.
Sadly, although the other two did well on all the other papers, they just missed the pass mark for Navigation, and so they too did not get their hoped for pass. My own marks in the two Navigation papers I must admit, were nothing to be proud about, but at least they were a pass. This, coupled with good marks in all my other subjects, meant that 47(F) could at least claim that one of their cadets managed to bring home the very first Air Training Corps Proficiency Part 2 to be awarded.
Although only a partial success, this represented my ‘good news’ for the summer of 1942. Now for the bad news. The Navigation paper was not the only brute of a paper I sat that summer. My engineering studies had been going on all this time, which of course represented what should have been my main priority, and by the summer of 1942 I was coming to the end of my fourth year of the five year Higher National Certificate course.
It was usual practice for the College to frame the questions for the examination at the end of the Spring Term on the basis that this would be a ‘mock’ for the end of year examinations.
I passed the spring exams with good marks in all subjects and hind sight, I suppose this should have been a warning. in the end of year exams, three out of the four papers were comparatively easy and apparently I did well in them, but the fourth was definitely a ‘so and so’, and none of us did well. In that subject, the spring paper had dealt with aspects in which I was able to perform well and I had achieved high marks, but the summer paper seemed aimed at all those aspects I [sic] which I was nothing like so confident. Net result, I missed that subject by [underlined] one [/underlined] mark!
This was unquestionably disaster. The Institute of Mechanical Engineers who were the ultimate authority in the Higher National Certificate and Diploma courses, were at that time, absolutely adamant that their Corporate Membership qualification (i.e. ‘Chartered Mechanical Engineer’) should never be lowered in quality and prestige by the ‘exigencies of war’. At each and every stage, a student [underlined] must pass each and every subject [/underlined] before he is permitted to progress to the next stage, and that [underlined] this edict must apply equally in peace or war [/underlined].
For two years now, I had been ‘Deferred’ by the Joint Selection Board in order to gain the necessary technical qualification, on the strict understanding that I should indeed pass at each stage. Now, this one mark had failed me for the whole ‘4th Year’ and if I wanted to progress to the final year and eventual Corporate Membership status, [underlined] then I must take the whole 4th Year again [/underlined].
As usual, I had to appear before the Selection Board in the early September to report my progress (or lack of it!) They were not pleased. [underlined] They were not at all pleased [/underlined]. Of course, I also had to report on all that had happened in the ATC for which I submitted written reports. They congratulated me on my attaining Proficiency Certificate Part 1 and Part 2 and my appointment as Navigation Instructor etc., but made it very clear that creditable though it all might be, that was not what I was being deferred for. I was told to wait outside while they discussed my fate. I could well imagine the words on my documents which said ‘Recommended for consideration for a Commission in the Technical Branch’ being firmly crossed out and the words ‘Immediate Call Up – A.C.2’ being substituted. They still had hard faces when I was eventually called back in, but to my immense relief they had decided to give me a last chance. My progress in general they said, was acceptable, but I would be allowed to take my fourth year course again, [underlined] provided [/underlined] my technical studies were given absolute priority – in other words [underlined] more study [/underlined] and [underlined] less cadets. [/underlined]
[page break]
Page 81
Suitably chastised, I returned home to pick up the pieces. It was difficult not to feel somewhat bored when one had to go back to the starting point on those subjects in which one had done reasonably well. However, I took their admonishments to heart and on balance, when I did move forward again a year later, I am sure that the repeat of this year was a definite benefit. Trying to look on the bright side, I did console myself with the fact that right at the beginning, my exemption from the first year of the course meant that I had been a year ahead in age terms.
Following the usual August break, cadet parades resumed again in the September with new recruits to ‘break in’ and the usual revision and ‘smartening up’ of the older cadets which characterised the beginning of another year of training. My own setback had no effect upon the fortunes of the Squadron of course, but the bad news so far as the Squadron was concerned was still to come.
As soon as we resumed our visits to Bottesford, we were informed that there were plans afoot to move 207 Squadron to another airfield. Bottesford had been initially constructed around a typical grass airfield which was quite suitable for the likes of the Hampden bombers of the early war years. Following the introduction of the ‘heavies’ with their steadily increasing all up weights, even the construction of a stop gap concrete runway could not disguise the fact that the airfield was breaking up under the strain.
It was quite a body blow when we were told that Bottesford was going to be closed for a complete ‘airfield work over’ for the provision of a full set of ‘heavy duty’ concrete runways and that 207 Squadron was going to move, lock, stock and barrel, over to RAF Langar, just to the east of Nottingham. Langar was however, the ‘property’ of Nottingham’s ATC Squadrons and our attachment could not move over with 207.
They couldn’t do this to us! 207 Squadron belonged to 47(F) Squadron! But war is war and postings are postings, whether we like it or not. So the Autumn of 1942 was the end of one era but it was also the beginning of another.
[page break]
Page 82
[underlined] Chapter Nine 47(F) and RAF Syerston 1942-43 [/underlined]
207 Squadron’s move from Bottesford to Langar had left us without attachment. In the meantime, the number of cadets coming into Grantham from villages to the south had steadily increased and in order to reduce the distance cadets were having to cycle in and back, we had started a Colsterworth Flight. The village of Colsterworth lies some nine miles to the south of Grantham, and the opening of a new flight there would also increase our catchment area. We could now enrol cadets from villages further to the south which were now within cycling distance of Colsterworth. I must admit that I have little or nothing to contribute to the history of the Colsterworth Flight. Its inauguration came at a time when I was up to my neck with my studies, apprenticeship commitments, and affairs at the Grantham HQ. Our CO was a great believer in the delegation of responsibility [underlined] and [/underlined] authority, and apart from the occasional supply of specialist instructors from time to time, he had every confidence in the capability of the Oi/c Colsterworth to run his Flight without unnecessary interference from Grantham HQ. As a result of this policy, I personally had very little contact with them.
RAF Spittlegate were now able to take a few cadets at weekends and they agreed to the attachment of the Colsterworth Flight to them. Even if we had wanted to do so, there was no room for the main Squadron to return to a Spittlegate attachment.
All of which left us somewhat in the air (or on the ground if you prefer) Thanks to the close relationship which our C.O. had maintained with 5 Group H.Q., we were not long before we had a new attachment. This time it was to a newly acquired 5 Group Station, RAF Syerston, between Newark and Nottingham.
At the beginning of the war, Lincolnshire and the more easterly parts of Nottinghamshire, had been the home to two Bomber Groups. In the south had been No.5 Group (Hampdens) with its H.Q in Grantham, and in the north No.1 Group (mainly Wellingtons) with its H.Q. at Bawtry. As Bomber Command expanded, more new squadrons were formed than there were new airfields to accommodate them. By 1942, 1 Group were expanding more in North Lincolnshire and 5 Group, in addition to gaining newly constructed stations (such as Bottesford), were also taking over some of the more southerly stations of 1 Group’s erstwhile territory, and RAF Syerston was one of these.
Syerston had been one of the last ‘Golden Age’ stations, with elegantly designed buildings and hangars. It had come into service in mid 1940 and had been the home of 408 Sq., a Polish squadron which had used Fairey Battles to ‘work up’ into RAF procedures before converting to Wellingtons and moving north in December 1940. (Incidentally, I never knew until years after the war had ended that the Poles had their own ATC Squadrons in which instruction was carried out in both English and Polish) For the next sixteen months Syerston had gone into ‘Care and Maintenance’ while the airfield received a full set of heavy duty runways. In the late Spring of 1942, the station came back into service with the arrival of its first 5 Group Lancaster squadron.
In early 1939, No.61 Squadron, then at RAF Hemswell, had converted from Blenheims to Hampdens. It moved down to South Lincolnshire in 1941, where it converted to Manchesters. Then having converted to Lancasters, it moved into the newly commissioned Syerston.
Three months later, they were joined by No.106 Squadron. Like No.61, they also had WW1 origins. 106 was reformed in 1938 in the south of England,. Briefly, it came back to Cottesmore for a couple of months while it converted to Hampdens. It spent 1940, at Finningley, and most of 1941 at Coningsby where it converted to Manchester, before it replaced these with Lancasters. By this time, it had begun to acquire its reputation as one of 5 Group’s most prestigious and accomplished squadrons. At Coningsby it had also acquired as Commanding Officer, a Wing Commander Guy. P. Gibson (also of later fame!) which may have had something to do with it. In September 1942, 106 Sq. Moved over to Syerston, and shortly afterwards 47(F) started lending them a hand!
The significance of events is rarely obvious at the time of their occurrence. When it was announced that we would be attached to Syerston, I suppose we took it more or less for granted. I am sure at the time we thought it would be a bit of a let down. No one, we felt could possibly match up to ‘our’ 207 Squadron. How wrong we were, and it took a remarkably short time for it to sink in. In the years to follow, I have often pondered on how we came to get this ‘plum’ posting. I know that our CO had a remarkable flair for ‘Cultivating People in High Places’ and no doubt he had a good deal to do with it.
[page break]
Page 83
At the same time, the hand of Sir Arthur Longmore may well have twisted the occasional elbow. Perhaps too, reports to Group H.Q. of our doings at Bottesford had not gone unnoticed. Maybe it was a combination of all three. Certainly, there were nearer stations to which we could have been attached, and certainly there were other ATC Squadrons nearer to Syerston.
There was no question of us being able to cycle from Grantham, so on our first visit there we were waiting expectantly for the arrival of a truck to take us the twenty or so miles across country. We had a good idea of where it was but the wartime travel restrictions (“Is Your Journey Really Necessary” etc) had meant that we had no real idea of how the station had progressed since its construction had started before the war but had not been completed until relatively recently. The station still exists today, even if it is no longer an operational flying station apart from being an ATC Gliding School. From the A46 main road, the woodland which surround it, still give no indication of the station’s size. One can still see the edges of married quarters as you approach from the south, and as you pass through the camp from the north, the Officer’s Mess and married quarters are on the east side and on the west can be seen the Guard Room, a few of the admin buildings and the end of one hangar. The end of one of the runways comes up to the road but the curve of the ground obscures all other view of the airfield proper.
This was more less [sic] the same initial view we got of Syerston when we first rolled into the station back in 1942. We went through the usual formalities at the Guard Room and were guided up to the Adjutant’s Office where we were placed in the hands of the poor soul who had been given the job of looking after us for the day. As with our first visit to Bottesford, we had the feeling that they were not quite sure what to do with us, but we soon got down to business.
We explained what we had done at Bottesford and they proposed that the first step was to take us on a tour of the station. I think perhaps that I should have explain [sic] that the parties which went out to Bottesford and now to Syerston, were nearly always our older, more experienced cadets who had reached the age of Registration and therefore had more or less decided their aircrew or ground trade categories when the time came for their callup. Visits to RAF Stations were always considered as privileges to be earned. From time to time younger cadets would be included partly to make up numbers but principally to give them an idea of what they could look forward to.
We had already realised that the station itself was a much more ‘up market’ affair than Bottesford. Where Bottesford had grass, Syerston had lawns. The buildings were elegant and neatly arranged. The hangars were vast and their workshops designed into them rather than being in ‘add on’ huts. Lancasters were everywhere. Bottesford had been a one squadron station with between twenty and thirty Lancasters at any given time. Syerston, being a two squadron station, had between fifty and sixty. Not that we could see them all at the same time because, like Bottesford, there were dispersal areas all round the perimeter, many of them tucked away in the many surrounding woods. The bomb dumps we [sic] also twice the size and since the RAF were now bigger and better big bangers, their stock of ‘cookies’ were even more impressive.
What became increasingly obvious, was a difference in atmosphere. Our stay at Bottesford had been at a time when targets were varied, calling for equally varied tactics. We had passed though [sic] the leaflets dropping and mine laying eras, the low level preparations for possible daylight raids, and the early exploratory experiments in the use of electronic navigation, target finding and marking aids. Now, in late 1942, a far more single minded approach to air warfare was being entered. This, in time, would lead to the Battles of Hamburg, the Ruhr and Berlin, and Syerston’s job was to ‘take out’ the industrial potential of the Third Reich. The enemy’s potential to strike back had increased proportionately. The Luftwaffe now had radar equipped night fighters and sophisticated radar aided ground control systems and our losses were mounting. Syerston was definitely a station in which ‘kill and/or be killed’ was an every night affair, a station on which flying was no longer fun but all too often a grim reality.
By the end of our second visit, we had more or less dropped into the same routines with the ground trades going into the hangars, armaments sections and the like, while the aircrew candidates went to their equivalents. Wherever possible, we ‘got stuck in’ and made sure we had earned the chance of a back seat in a test flight. Most of these flights were generally short, relatively speaking, as both squadrons were not [underlined] practising [/underlined] for anything, apart from breaking in replacement crews. Inevitably, some of us ended up in the bomb dumps loading incendiaries and other menial chores in the hangars, but we were not there to be entertained.
[page break]
Page 84
Again it was not long before we were welcomed rather than tolerated. For myself, once the routine had been established, I tended to send other Sergeants over in charge of the parties, and only once in a while went over with them to see how things were going. As a result, events at Syerston have remained less clear in my mind. My main reason for doing so was that a visit there was always a full day’s job, and I needed my Sunday afternoons for my technical studies. So, more and more, my Sunday mornings were spent in our Grantham HQ, either instructing or relieving other NCOs to go to Syerston.
[underlined] No.830 Company Girl’s Training Corps [/underlined]
By mid 1942, male conscription had settled down to a steady flow of boys into the three Services. The Sea Cadets, the Army Cadets and the ATC were all feeding their senior services with increasingly capable recruits who knew their basic drill and basic skills. Conscription had also begun for women over the age of eighteen. Most of them would be directed into war work, nursing and the Land Army etc., but a significant proportion were going into the Wrens, ATC and the WAAF. The three Services complained that there seemed to be no pre-service training organisation to give equivalent pre-entry skills to their women entrants. At the same time none seemed prepared to allow girls to enter their Cadet units. This was of course in an age when segregation of the sexes was still considered essential ‘on moral grounds’.
Without further research, I have no idea of when, where and how the idea of a Girls Training Corps came to fruition. It started, and for most of the rest of the war years, existed in a state more or less equivalent to the early days of the Air Defence Cadet Corps i.e. a largely voluntary organisation which the Services assisted, but only nominally supported financially. It depended almost totally on local financial and material fund raising. Its aims were to give girls below conscription age, basis [sic] skills in nursing and general care, first aid, cookery and ‘good citizenship’ (whatever that meant). On top of that, those girls who, upon Registration opted for one of the Services, would be taught basic foot drill and the basics of that role in which they would serve when the time came for their callup.
Once the idea was proposed, the Girls Training Corps quickly blossomed and spread. As with the early days of the ADCC, the first units (called ‘Companies’) were formed in the south. It was some time before the idea spread to Lincolnshire, but in November 1942, the Grantham Journal reported that a Girl’s Training Corps Company was to be formed in Grantham. Now at this point I need to introduce two personalities, one new and another whom we met earlier on in this narrative.
You may remember back in the early days of the Grantham Squadron, the sub-editor of the Grantham Journal had always given us valuable publicity. Not only that, she had volunteered herself into being our Squadron secretary. For the last three years she had kept us, our records and [underlined] her [/underlined] Orderly Room in good order and discipline. Small dumpy and efficient, Miss Llewellyn-Owens had charm and a definite way with things and when she was called upon to report on the proposed formation of a GTC Company in Grantham, she did a lot more than just report. The other personality was in distinct contrast. One often meets people who are large both in personality and stature. Grantham’s Mrs. Brace was both, collecting and ruling her numerous committees with much verve and vigour. Where our Miss Owens persuaded, Mrs Brace commanded. While Mrs Brace drummed up support, Miss Owens proceeded to persuade, and the first person she persuaded was our C.O. who was ‘invited’ to attend an inaugural meeting which took place a few weeks later.
Grantham had no Sea Cadets and the Army Cadets were still finding their feet, so Miss Owen was determined that if there was any serious talk of cooperation, it was going to be with the ATC. It would seem that history had again a tendency to repeat itself. The meeting was held
Mrs Brace was the obvious candidate for Commanding Officer, Miss Owens became Adjutant (and later second in command). The ATC Commanding Officer was invited to comment and he promptly offered the full cooperation of his squadron’s facilities in those fields of instruction where there would be common interest. Furthermore, until such time as the new GTC Company could find a home of their own, they could use the ATC Headquarters on those nights and other times when they were not in use by the ATC.
At this point I would like to step aside to air some recent concern within 47(F)’s command structure. As the age of conscription was raised, we had lost a number of our younger Flight Commanders but over the four years of the Squadron’s existence since its inauguration, the Commanding Officer, the Adjutant, two of the Flight Commanders and the Squadron Warrant Officer had remained the same.
[page break]
85
[paper cutting]
[underlined] GIRLS TRAINING CORPS COMPANY TO BE FORMED IN GRANTHAM [/underlined]
[indecipherable word]
Registered as a Newspaper 1942 FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 13[inserted]th 1942 [/inserted]
BY-PASS ROAD MYSTERY
Cause Of Soldier’s Death Unknown
BELIEVED TO HAVE “JUMPED” LORRY
The death of L/Bdr. James Edward Moseley, 24, Church-street, Smallthorne, Stoke-on-Trent, who was found lying on the Colsterworth by-pass on the night of October 16-17th, with severe injuries, which proved fatal, is still an unsolved mystery.
The deputy borough coroner, Mr. C.Y.L. Caleraft, at the resumed inquest on Friday, stated death ‘was caused by shock and toxaemia, following injuries’. He was, however, unable to bring in a verdict of how the injuries were caused, though a theory was put forward that deceased had “jumped” a lorry, stunned himself in getting off, and had been run over by another vehicle.
PC Beech said he arrived 300 yards south of the railway bridge on the by-pass at 12.50 a.m. on October 17th. He examined the deceased who had been moved by lorry drivers to the side of the road and found him suffering from extensive injuries. He was conscious and asked if he was off the road saying “Don’t let them run over me again”. In reply to witness’s questioning, Moseley said he had been to Grantham and had returned on a lorry, but did not know how he had met with an accident. His injuries, added witness, suggested that he had been run over. Soldiers were in the habit of taking lifts on passing lorries, sometimes without the drivers knowing.
POLICE EFFORTS UNAVAILING
George Edward Pallister, West Hartlepool, lorry driver, explained that late on the night of October 16th he was driving through Colsterworth and in the light of his headlamps saw an object lying on the road. He skirted it, drew up and found it was a soldier, lying with his head touching the kerb and his feet directly across the road. Two other lorries came up, and together they moved the soldier and covered him with coats, while one driver went for an ambulance and the police.
The efforts made by the police to find anyone who had any knowledge of the accident, were described by Inspector Taylor, who said he telephoned Biggleswade and asked them to stop all vehicles proceeding south, to examine them for bloodstains, etc., and interrogate the drivers. He also requested that the message should be passed further south to the Metropolitan police. Witness then spoke to intermediate stations between Grantham and Biggleswade, so that lorries in cafes could be examined. It was also arranged that the message should be circulated by police wireless and on the following Monday the B.B.C. broadcast a message. Despite this, however, no information about a vehicle or driver who might have been involved had been obtained.
Continued from next column
National Service sent her name to Mrs. Leeke, Grantham Vicarage, by Friday next, November 20th mentioned whether she would like to attend the course at Sleaford? We have been promised most valuable help by the A.T.C. and the Red Cross, and the A.T.S. and W.A.A.F. have cooperated most generously in the work already begun in the county”.
THE G.T.C.
Company To Be Formed At Grantham
At a well-attended meeting in the Guildhall, on Saturday, under the chairmanship of Mrs. G.H. Schwind (chairman of the Kesteven G.T.C. advisory council) it was unanimously decided to form a company of the G.T.C. for Grantham, and later to extend the work to include nearby villages.
Miss Janet Campbell, county commandant of the corps, gave a most inspiring account of its work, which aims at giving a sound basic training to girls up to the age of 18, with optional classes under well-qualified instructors for those who intend to become munition-workers, land girls, nurses or members of the Forces.
The great success of the boys organisation, she said, was due to their keen desire to take their share in winning the war, and in this the girls were no less anxious to do their part. Social activities were included in the programme and a camping site was already in use, thanks to the generosity of Commander J. Cracroft Amcotts. The uniform was simple and applications from would-be cadets in Grantham had already been received. Officers were needed aged 19 and over.
The following committee was appointed: Mrs. Schwind, chairman pro tem., Lady Longmore, Lady Welby, Miss Bellamy, Mrs. L. Bond, Miss Cherry, Miss Frier, Miss Gillies, Miss Hargraves, Miss Jabet, Miss R. Jackson, Miss Law, Mrs. Leeke, Miss E. M. Preston, Mrs. Robinson, Mrs. G. A. C. Shipman, Mrs. Talbot, Miss Townsend and Mrs. Walsh.
Flt.-Lieut. P. P. L. Stevenson representing the Grantham A.T.C., of which he is commanding officer, and promised the active co-operation of the corps.
It was decided to accept cadets over the age of 14 and to invite those willing to become officers to notify Mrs. Leeke.
CHANCE FOR GIRLS, 14-18
Mrs. Schwind writes:-
“the Corps, which is recognised by the board of Education as the pre-service organisation for girls gives the basic training to cadets, aged over 14 up to 18, in drill, fire-fighting, first-aid, handy-women’s jobs, hygiene and physical training, while tuition in other subjects such as aircraft recognition, field cookery, food production, home nursing, shorthand, car maintenance and workshop calculations is provided according to the careers which the girls hope to follow, whether in munitions, land work, nursing or the Forces. Before we enrol cadets (there are already nearly 40 who have expressed a wish to join) we need officers – women and girls over 19 interested in the work and able to give one or two evenings a week. (the more officers, the fewer their hours of duty need be. In addition to the commandant, vice-commandant, adjutant and quartermaster, we need one or two officers for each section of 25 cadets. A week-end course for officers will be held at Sleaford High school on Saturday and Sunday December 5th – 6th. under Miss Janet Campbell, county commandant, at which we hope to have officers from the companies formed or being formed at Sleaford, Stamford and Bourne.
“Will anyone willing to offer herself for this much needed form of
Continued in previous column
[paper cutting]
[page break]
86
[paper cutting]
[deleted] Red Cross [/deleted] cadets on parade
[photograph]
THIS contingent of Grantham Red Cross cadets. Led by Susan Brace, was taken outside the Guildhall towards the end of the Second World War. Taking the salute is an American general.
Third from right is town MP Denis Kendall and on top of the bomb-blast wall is Rothwell Lee. In the background is a building later demolished to make way for the JobCentre.
The picture was brought in by Joyce Szewd, of Sixth Avenue, Grantham.
[/paper cutting]
[paper cutting]
Cadets were girls of the Training Corps
[photograph]
A RECENT picture described as the Red Cross cadets towards the end of the war was in fact the Grantham 830 Girls Training Corps.
Although the Red Cross wore similar uniforms, they wore caps and aprons on parade.
During the war, all youngsters over 16 had to join a uniformed youth group, such as Red Cross, Army Cadets or ATC.
Winnie Barnes, of Ripon Close, Grantham, rang to say she is the lass on the second row, nearest the camera.
Led by Susan Brace, second in command was Miss Llewellyn-Owens, a Journal reporter who later joined the WRNS.
Beryl Neal, of Robertson Road, on the front row ahead of Miss Barnes, said they met in a room on London Road, which became the Kendall umbrella factory.
She said: “We marched around the streets. There was little traffic in those day [sic].
“We learned Morse code at ATC rooms, St Peter’s Hill, by Mr Betts.”
Margaret Burdon, of Grantham, brought in the photograph above of members of the Grantham 830 Girls Training Corps celebrating the group’s third birthday in 1945 in the grounds of Elsham House (now Grantham College), shortly before it disbanded.
Pictured are from from [sic] left – Joan Ray, Audrey Nickerson, Betty Ward, Betty Goodacre, June Bradley, Winnie Barnes, Margaret Smith, Miss Gardner, Mrs Brace, Miss Hall, Winnie Guilliat, Doris Anderson, Joan Parker, Margaret Wilson, Jean Ranby, Pauline Palmer, Doreen Sellars and Mary Shepherd.
[/paper cutting]
[page break]
Page 87
Now as mentioned much earlier, the difference in rank between a Warrant Officer and his Commanding Officer may be considerable, but it [sic] a matter of respective opinion as to which considers himself to be endowed with the superior responsibility, authority or whatever. Over these four years, each respected their relative rank and apparent authority, but of late there may have been some cooling of regard. I may be wrong, but I have always had the feeling that our Warrant Officer was seeking an appropriate opportunity to tell our CO what he could do with the former’s Warrant. Whether it was simply a case of him just having had enough of the job for a while or whether it was more of a case of personalities in disagreement, I never knew, but our W.O. had been increasingly on the point of handing in his resignation.
However, back to the formation of the GTC Company. As part of the package of cooperation, our CO promised to supply drill and other instructors until the GTC could stand on its own feet with an NCO structure of its own. As with the early days of the ADCC, there had been a rush of girls wanting to join. This called not only for their initial drill instruction generally, but also to train up as quickly as possible, a core structure of recruits with appropriate leadership and instructional skills.
While our CO had obtained immediate offers of help from our officers to assist in the drill and administrative instruction of the GTC Section Commanders, it was a very different matter when it came to the point of who would be in charge of other ranks instruction. Our Warrant Officer chose this point to become the ‘Immovable Object’ and refused point blank to get involved. Our CO, realising that the employment of ‘Irresistible Force’ would achieve little or nothing, turned this force elsewhere.
It will be appreciated from all that transpired in the many previous pages, that all the cadet units in which I had served to date had been ‘boys only’. The King’s School was (and still is) a boys only school. Fraternisation with the girls of the Kesteven and Grantham High School across the town had been actively discouraged and a King’s School boy had to be more than a little careful about the town’s other girls with whom he was seen to be associating. In fact, at that time, prefect power and a regime which permitted a fair measure of ‘ragging’ (not to be confused with bullying), to be openly observed with a girl friend (of the right social order of course) was regarded as being a Sixth Form privilege. To do so under the age of sixteen was to invite merciless ragging and unless one was particularly extrovert, one’s later teen age years left one with a ‘wimmin is trouble’ complex.
There were no girls in our family of my sort of age and both before and during the war our homes had been isolated in terms of neighbours. Until the later years of my apprenticeship, my contact with any girls of my own age was negligible. Both the ADCC and the ATC had (until now) been totally ‘boys only’. As for me, until adolescence, I had only thoughts for model aircraft, Meccano, and the like. After adolescence, all I was interested in was my studies, my cadets and keeping my family together in the very primitive conditions in which were [sic] had evacuated ourselves to escape the bombing in Grantham. On top of this, having by now seen too much distress and despair when loved ones ‘failed to return’ I had in effect’Signed [sic] the Pledge’. Until such time as we could get this war business over and done with, I would leave the chasing of girls to the others who had enough spare time to ‘get involved’. Besides, I had a shrewd idea that I was more of an ‘odd fish’ than I cared to acknowledge. If there was a ‘right girl’ out there somewhere she would not only take quite a lot of finding but she would probably get fed up with waiting for me to get my qualifications/commission or whatever other excuses I had for not spending enough time with her.
If the SWO was not prepared to instruct the GTC girls then, the C.O. decided, there were plenty of NCOs in his Squadron who would jump at the chance. ‘Throwing Rank’, he said (in no uncertain terms), that I would be in charge of GTC drill instruction, and in particular would be in charge of a crash course to train up their NCOs. I immediately protested that I had already got too much on my plate, but he promptly slatted me down by saying that I had said that my studies were going well and that I was delegating the majority of Syerston visit supervision to my other Sergeants. “Besides” he said, “It will do you good” (I was far from sure what he meant by that. Neither was I sure how much Miss Owens’s hand was mixed up in this)
Over the years, there had been quite a few ‘social evenings’ in our H.Q. to which the other cadets had brought their girl friends along. We also had a succession of girls helping out at our mid evening cocoa and tea breaks. In addition, beyond the blackout curtains at our front door and the end of parade, there would usually be a certain amount of whispering and giggling as girl friends awaited the emergence of their boys. The sound of female voices was not unknown in our HQ but had
[page break]
Page 88
always been in the minority, but this was no preparation for the sound effects of the first night upon which No. 830 (Grantham) Company of the Girl’s Training Corps had their first parade. As fully expected, there had been no reluctance on the part of the other Sergeants to undertake drill instruction for the GTC cadets. I had made a point of arriving early so that I could hide myself away in my instructor’s office until the last possible moment. As I buried my nose in my affairs, I became increasingly aware of a crescendo of female voices filling the hallway and other rooms, together with voices of authority attempting to produce a semblance of order out of the apparent chaos.
Eventually, order was established and the next thing I knew was that on the opposite side of my desk was a uniform which was not RAF Blue, and a voice which was not one of my cadets. She informed me that the NCO squad was awaiting my instruction. The dreaded moment had arrived.
Now it has taken me sixty odd years to admit it publicly, but the real reason for my reluctance was that I was in a ‘blue funk’ as they say. Without a qualm, I could face a squad of new ATC recruits with calm and authority. I could perform for, and converse with the Topmost Brass of the RAF and other dignitaries without turning a hair. I could command a parade of several hundred strong without a tremor in my voice, but the idea of facing up to a dozen or more ‘wimmin’ was something approaching nightmare. ‘Wimmin’ were a closed book to me and I didn’t want to ‘get involved’ whichever way you like to interpret it. Section Officer Owens had assured me that they had been carefully selected and that they were ‘all nice girls’, but that was no help.
I faced the group. They appeared to size me up and I did my best to size them up. In the same way as a horse will immediately sense a nervous rider, it was obvious they sensed that in spite of my stripes and apparent age, I was more than a little nervous (Under statement)
Throat cleared, I resorted to my usual preliminary patter. I was “Flight Sergeant Stevenson and over the next few parades I would be instructing you on basic Foot Drill and furthermore instructing you on the basic principles of drill instruction etcetera, etcetara [sic]” Sundry signs of interest, what might have been encouragement, and a few more enigmatic signs which might has [sic] been amusement. I pressed on regardless and relaxed very slightly.
As usual, the first thing was the “Stand to Attention”. The usual patter starts at the feet and works upwards. In those inhibited days, ‘gentlemen’ refrained from regarding anything below the female face with anything further than the briefest of glances. Now I was called upon to considering closely the disposition of a dozen pairs of black shoes, topped with a dozen pairs of female ankles above which were a dozen pairs of female legs. Somehow, I managed to sort that lot out.
The next problem was the rest of the figures above. Although they were unquestionably ‘different’ from the dozens of squads I had previously instructed, there [sic] seemed to possess that same cross section of posture problems. Some of them naturally stood up straight and pulled their shoulders back in the approved manner, but there seemed to be a new spectrum of hunching which of course had to be corrected if smartness on parade was to be established. With boys, the usual practice was to stand behind them and, forcible employ ones thumbs and fingers to haul the back into the correct position. What on earth was I allowed to do? Summoning up courage, I picked on one of the ‘stoopers’ who didn’t look as if she would slap my face. I stood behind her and as gently as possible pulled her shoulders back. At the last moment she let out a slight gasp which the others must have heard as all shoulders visibly straightened – to my relief!
There were constant pitfalls for the unwary male. “Arms straight, fingers clenched, thumbs behind the seam of the . . . . . .” Oh, Christ, they don’t have trousers, do they? Do their skirts have a seam down the side? I flounder. One of the more capable ones who seems to be enjoying herself chirps up “Yes Sergeant, there is a seam down there”. Grins and the odd giggle. I press on. More problems when we get to ‘Right Dress’. Boys, in a manner of speaking, present less of a problem. Get their chests lined up, and the rest drops into place. No [sic] so this lot! After a bit, I give up and line their noses up!
Gaining confidence a little, I yell the usual “Come on, stand up straight, pull your shoulders back and stick your . . . .” I stop dead. I must admit that they responded admirably until the whole group collapsed into helpless laughter at my expression, and at that moment our CO and S/O Owens walked in to see how we are getting on. I get a stern look from our C.O. and what might be called an old fashioned look from S/O Owens. (I did not realise that the cadet who was beginning to wind me
[page break]
Page 89
up was her niece, and that later she had thoroughly enjoyed giving a first hand account of their first drill session)
And so it went on.
Somehow I managed to survive the rest of the evening and I had to admit that they were indeed ‘nice girls’ as promised and they were all dead keen to learn. Whoever had short listed them had done a good job. Afterwards, I was amused and somewhat heartened to learn that the other ATC Sergeants had encountered similar problems but unlike me had thoroughly enjoyed themselves. At first I was a little embarrassed when the NCO group were referred to as ‘[underlined] your [/underlined] girls’, but after a while, they were doing so well, I was getting sufficiently proud of them to catch myself calling them ‘[underlined] my [/underlined] girls’. Luckily for my studies and other commitments, the ones who might be considered ‘my type’ appeared to have their own boy friends so I could retire gracefully into my bachelordom and not ‘get involved’. We all seemed to get on well with each other and that was fine. However, in retrospect, I think the C.O. was most probably right when he said it would “Do you good”
For a while, our H.Q. was busy every night with ATC and GTC on alternate nights, but it was not long before they got an H.Q. of their own. There, they could do their nursing, first aiding and caring skills and their NCOs could carry on the good work so far as drilling was concerned, but the more Service orientated cadets still came to us for things like Signals, Aircraft Recognition (They might not be so good at sorting their ‘Flaps’ from their ‘Slots’ but they were good at recognising the general shape and ‘sit’ of an aircraft)
If I remember rightly, for these subjects we began to parade on the same nights and now the barriers were down, our H.Q. became very much ‘co-ed’. I think for a time at least, the classes were kept separate, but at breaks and at the end of the evening’s activities there was a lot of ‘fraternising’ and a noticeable tendency to ‘pair up’ when the time came to shoo them all out. This then was the pattern which seemed to hold for the next couple of years. We definitely paraded as separate units on formal occasions, but so far as instructional and social activities were concerned, there was always a high degree of cooperation. It was an interesting phase of our Squadron’s history
The GTC did not survive into the post war era. When the time came, in less inhibited times, for the various Cadet units to enrol girls on the same footing as their boys, though difficulties might still arise, it would not be the first time that 47(F) had ‘wimmin’ about the place.
We had a second Annual Camp in 1943, (boys only of course) A tented camp was set up for us next door to the Parachute Section alongside the lane which leads off to Syerston village. Sadly, my camp report for that week has not survived, so I cannot give a day by day account of the doings. Although we did not receive the same V.I.P. treatment we had at Bottesford, I can still remember a lot of flying and a lot of slaving in the hangars and other sections, In retrospect, I suppose in a way, this and our attachment to Syerston could be considered the apogee of 47(F)s wartime involvement with the hot war.
As 1942 moved into 1943, I was now in a somewhat curious situation. The ATC had been created from the Air Defence Cadet Corps to meet a wartime need. I am not aware that at that time there had been any specific maximum age for an ATC cadet. No doubt with a callup age of eighteen, nearly if not all cadets would have left for the Forces by that time, and a maximum age limit was hardly necessary. We had no cadets on our strength who were not liable for military service.
Thanks to my Joint Selection Board deferment to obtain my Higher National Certificate as an entry qualification, I was now not only the Squadron’s senior NCO with all those cadets of the same age having already left for the RAF and elsewhere, within eight months, I would be aged twenty. Looking back, I suppose I was one of the few cadets who had been in the ADCC/ATC for the whole of the war period to date.
As a result, my future in No.47(F) was to say the least of it, a bit uncertain. There was the Selection Board stipulation that I must be in some form of pre-service training, so my having to leave the Squadron on age grounds might well present a problem. I suppose I was just about old enough to apply for a commission within the ATC, but we were up to strength on the unit’s officer count, and the ramifications of applying seemed somewhat complicated. The matter was solved however before
[page break]
90
A.T.C. Form 3
[ATC Crest]
AIR TRAINING CORPS.
Certificate of Proficiency
PART I
This is to Certify that
Cadet Flight Sergeant Peter Desmond Stevenson of No. 47.F. (Grantham) Squadron
is granted a Certificate of Proficiency in that, during his membership of the Air Training Corps, he has fulfilled the necessary conditions as to efficient service and has qualified in the Flight Mech (E) syllabus of training, as laid down in the Rules and Regulations of the Air Training Corps.
[signature]
Air Commodore
Commandant, Air Training Corps.
Date 7 – 8 – 43
[page break]
Page 91
that decision was made. Our Squadron Warrant Officer suddenly decided that enough was enough, and thumped in his resignation.
The CO (naturally) decided that a suggestion replacement should be from his fellow officers. Net result, would I be prepared to resign as a cadet, and apply for consideration as the Warrant Officer. In August 1943, therefore Cadet 308 Flight Sergeant Stevenson P.D. ceased to exist. He handed in his uniform, received a W.Os clothing allowance and was next seen sporting a rather smarter uniform, service shirt and tie and the W.Os ‘Crown on his lower sleeves. As far as duties were concerned, there was not a great deal of difference, as his predecessor, over the previous months had been only too pleased to hand over his more irksome duties to his senior Flight Sergeant.
That was the good news I suppose, but life always seems to balance this with a bit of bad news. The latter affected the Squadron as a whole. Lincolnshire’s air bases were to undergo another, and even more drastic upheaval. No.5 Group was to move to occupy more of the north and east of the county and its Headquarters would also move north. Nearly all their bases to the south and west were to be handed over to the Troop Carrying Command of the U.S. 9th Army Air Force whose headquarters would now be in 5 Group’s erstwhile home in St. Vincent’s in Grantham. Syerston’s two Squadrons would separate to other bases and we could no longer be attached to them. Calamity indeed!
‘The Yanks were Coming, the Yanks were Coming’ – and we were left to make the best of it. The autumn of 1943 was, to say the least of it, the beginning of yet another phase in the 47(F) Story.
[page break]
92
[A.T.C. LEAVING CERTIFICATE OF SERVICE]
[page break]
[A.T.C. crest]
[photograph]
WARRANT
To P.D. Stevenson.
As Commandant of the Air Training Corps for the Midlands.
I do hereby appoint you to be a Warrant Officer of No. 47F (Grantham) Squadron, from the Twelfth day of August 1943.
[badge]
You are therefore carefully and diligently to discharge your duties as such as required by regulations and to observe and follow such orders and directions as you shall receive from a superior officer.
[signature]
G/Capt
Eighteenth day of 1943.
93
[page break]
Page 94
[underlined] Chapter Ten – The Magic Air Force 1943-44 [/underlined]
Before I start on this penultimate chapter, a word about its title. Leslie Thomas, the prolific author of highly amusing accounts of WW2 service life, produced a masterpiece in his ‘Magic Army’. This started with an hilarious account of the impact of the invasion of the Dorset countryside and coast by the first elements of the United States ground forces who came ‘over here’ to finish this war of ours for us. It was centred around a small seaside community of local yokels, guarded from the enemy by a more or less forgotten detachment of British artillerymen. Its gun was of dubious reliability and had barely enough ammunition to do more than scare the pants off a ‘tip and run’ German reconnaissance plane. Into this scene had marched the first elements of what would eventually be an overwhelming army of American servicemen. They had come to prepare the ground. They had come from many parts of the United States and some of them had been recruited from the Deep South with complexions which were a distinct contrast to those of the Dorset folk. (In these days of political correctness, one has to be careful with one’s phraseology) Their military bearing and behaviour was also in distinct contrast to that of the Tommies manning their gun. The story ends in tragedy but don’t let that put you off. It will give you another facet to the eight months or so when the Grantham area was host to another American invasion.
These were not by any means the first U.S. units who had come over here to join the fray.
For the past two years, East Anglia had been the Forty Ninth State as the U.S Eighth Army Air Force battled its way with ever increasing strength (and appalling casualties) in its daylight raids over the Continent. As the planning and preparations for D Day progressed, the combined operations of the British and American Airborne Forces resulted in many of the airfields surrounding Grantham being freed from RAF activities to make room for the Troop Carrying Command of the U.S Ninth Air Force. Grantham’s St. Vincent’s, had become their Command Headquarters, and it was their staff personnel who were first seen about the town. Having more or less established themselves, the time had come to ‘call in the Cavalry’ and shortly afterwards the aircraft and their ground personnel began flying into the airfields.
The aircraft were mostly the rugged, reliable and much loved C-47, better known to us as the Douglas Dakota, and the much less reliable and largely hated C-46 Curtis Commando which had a nasty habit of bursting into flames at awkward moments (It was eventually withdrawn from service). Equipped with these, came the various Troop Carrying Groups
Now in the U.S Air Forces, what we know as a Squadron, they know as a ‘Group’ and what we know as a Group, they call a ‘Wing’. Each of their Troop Carrying Groups had about seventy aircraft which were too many to administer as a single unit, so to make it even more complicated, each was made up four sub units (roughly equivalent to what we would call a Flight) which they now called Squadrons, (TCSs) each of which has a different unit number. Get it? – well perhaps not.
O.K let’s start again with a specific example. Together, the 14th TCS, the 15th TCS, the 53rd TCS and the 59th TCS made the 61st TC [underlined] Group [/underlined] which went to RAF Barkston Heath. This TCG with others at RAF’s Folkingham and Fulbeck in Lincolnshire, Saltby (Leics), Cottesmore (Rutland) and Spanhoe (Northants) together made up the 52nd Troop Carrying [underlined] Wing [/underlined]. 52nd TCW plus two other TCWs in the south of England then made up the 9th Troop Carrying [underlined] Command [/underlined] whose H.Q was at Grantham. In each case, these Troop Carrying Wings were stationed close by the various British and American Airborne Divisions who would fly to war with them.
One other thing we need to establish in the way of definition, was the question of the terms of occupancy of the various airfields used by the Americans way back in the early Forties when our overseas investments were all used up, the Lease Lend agreement with the Roosevelt administration ended up with the British Government agreeing to lease British bases f.o.c. to American Forces in exchange for ships, aircraft and other war material. Thus, a British airfield remained the property of the RAF, who would equip and maintain its buildings, runways etc., leaving the Americans free to concentrate on their flying. Thus, even though a given airfield might be known to the Americans as ‘No.683 Base’, it was still RAF Fulbeck with an RAQF Station Commander, with its flying operations under the command of a U.S. Army Colonel.
Having allowed the staff at St. Vincent’s to settle in, our C.O. went to work. Thanks no doubt to the two years he had spent in the U.S. in the late 1920s he was soon on friendly terms with the Troop Carrying Command’s General Beresford. Invited down to our H.Q., he apparently liked what he saw and promised to attach us to Fulbeck which was going to be the 9th TCC headquarter’s airfield. This incidentally, was just down the hill from Fulbeck Hall which was to be the place in which the detailed planning of the Arnhem operation was to take place, and close to Stragglethorpe Hall which was the Headquarters of the British 1st Airborne Division.
[page break]
95
2 [underlined] GENERAL GILES, Commandant 9th TROOP CARRYING COMMAND USAAF INSPECTS NO.47(F) GRANTHAM SQUADRON AIR TRAINING CORPS 6th February 1944 [/underlined]
[underlined] 6th February 1944 [/underlined]: Sunday. The weather was cold and dull, which was rather unfortunate because during the morning there was an inspection of the A.T.C. by an American named General Giles. There was also present at this little function the Mayor and Mayoress and Sir Arthur Longmore. The latter appeared to have aged considerably; or perhaps it was the cold, for the wind was bitter.
[photograph]
[photograph]
GENERAL GILES INSPECTS THE A.T.C.
[photograph]
A familiar sight at North Witham, Barkston Heath, Folkingham and Fulbeck were the C47 Dakotas of the US 9th Troop Carrier Command. These particular aircraft are from the 434th Troop Carrier Group, possibly at Fulbeck.
[page break]
3 Page 96
When the time came for our first visit to Fulbeck, we awaited the promised truck with both interest and curiosity. Well, we waiting and then waited a little longer, but eventually a large truck bearing the now familiar large white star on its bonnet (sorry ‘hood’), rolled to a halt outside our H.Q. “Sorry” said the gum chewing driver, “I got lost”. We piled in. thankful to hand over the navigation, we set off. We were offered a stick of gum. “Sorry”, we said, “We are not allowed to chew sweets when in uniform”. We get a look of surprise. We eventually arrive. Used to several years of RAF Security, we are now somewhat surprised to roll through the gate with no more than a wave from the driver to the guard who is too busy chatting up a couple of Land Army girls to do more than languidly wave back. (We gathered later that a staff car bearing a General’s flag and stars was about the only thing to warrant a guard turnout) Our driver dumps us somewhere in what appears to be the nerve centre of things and in the best of service traditions, proceeds to ‘get lost’.
Eventually, we find someone who seems to have some idea of who we are, but it becomes quite obvious that they have no idea of what to do with us. They play safe, and while they detail someone to take our cadets on a guided tour, our Flight Commander and I do our best to thrash out something constructive. It takes some time to convince them that we are anything more than a glorified Boy’s Club, there for a bit of fun. Having heard what we had done at Bottesford and Syerston, they agreed to attach our ground trades to the equivalent functions in their hangars and on dispersal, and allow the aircraft cadets access to Navigation and Signals section etc. They also promised to give all our cadets as much air experience as possible. In fact they immediately bundled all of us into a Dakota and gave us a twenty minute flip. I don’t think the flight was for any specific purpose from their point of view. They were just being friendly.
Before this happened, it had been lunch time and we were led (we soon learned that no one ever marched in this Magic Air Force) over to the ‘Enlisted Men’s Canteen’. We dutifully queued up and it was our turn to be surprised (not that we had stopped being surprised from the minute we had arrived) Huge plates were dolloped with huge quantities of food. Naturally, individual meals are long since forgotten, but the general impressions last. Apart from immediate perishables, the Americans had agreed to be responsible for the importation of all their food, and the one thing the Americans had decided upon at the outset, was that they were not going to go hungry. They were still in a state of astonishment at how well we looked on what they considered were the starvation rations we were living on. So, when meat was on the menu, we got the equivalent of a week’s ration on our plate. If it was egg[underlined]s[/underlined], then it was in the plural at a time when our week’s ration was one fresh egg, and only aircrew, who were on ops that night got a fresh egg for their breakfast. Sugar was on the tables in great bowls, and the ‘kawffee’ was real coffee and not the ‘Camp’ chicory extract we had been drinking for the last four years. At this stage of the war, though we were certainly not starving, we were hungry most of the time. This of course showed externally when we compared our bodies with our new friends. We were not exactly skinny but in comparison they did tend to bulge better.. I must admit that our meals and ‘kawffee breaks’ were a highlight of our visits to Fulbeck, but with qualifications. Certainly the quantity was there, but to the more discerning palate, the standard of cooking left much to be desired.
Later on, we discovered a further interesting example of Anglo-American cooperation. By then we had got to know the RAF ‘Care and Maintenance’ staff, and it would appear that to be posted to a USAAF base was initially considered to be the ‘reward’ for not having measured up to the requirements of a General Service Officer. Once there, the ‘perks’ more than balanced any remaining stigma. Quite apart from the generally relaxed atmosphere, with little if any of the usual RAF ‘bull’, the general standard of living was measurably higher. The small RAF team soon dropped Officer and O/R segregation and shared a small communal mess. This received the same per capita rationing level as the USAAF, but used RAF catering staff to do the cooking. As Warrant Officer, I and any other ATC Officer would be invited, indeed advised, to eat with the RAF.
It was interesting to see the considerable expansion of this RAF Mess over the months we were there. Apparently, the USAAF officers, once invited to eat with their RAF colleagues, asked for their ration allocations to be routed (sorry ‘rowted”) to the RAF Mess in order for them to enjoy much higher cuisine standards than pertained in their mess. Not all of these US based ration allowances were consumed on the premises, as can well be imagined. We understood that the Fulbeck RAF officers (and I suppose the same applies to the other 9th TCC stations) became not only very popular with their own families and friends, but also with their colleagues on adjacent RAF stations.
[page break]
97
[underlined] YOUTH DAY PARADE – MAY 4th 1944 [underlined]
[photograph]
[underlined] GENERAL PAUL WILLIAMS 9th TROOP CARRYING COMMAND USAAF – INSPECTING OFFICER [underlined]
[photograph]
No.47[F]GRANTHAM Sq AIR TRAINING CORPS
[photograph]
No.830 Grantham Co. GIRLS TRAINING CORPS
[page break]
98
[underlined] YOUTH DAY PARADE – MAY 4th 1944 [underlined]
[photograph]
KINGS SCHOOL J.T.C.
[photograph]
THE U.S.A. POLICE GAVE EVERY HELP
[photograph]
YOUTH DAY, SUNDAY, MAY 7TH. THE ASSEMBLY IN THE CAR PARK
[photograph]
AN AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPGER
[photograph]
THE ASSEMBLY IN THE CAR PARK.
[page break]
6 Page 99
This was not the only ‘grey’ market which developed and was quietly turned a further blind eye upon. This one had interesting ramifications. During the week before one of our visits, some of our cadets would ‘accumulate’ a quantity of U.K. currency, for which they found a ready market amongst the GIs who were dating up English girls. Now in possession of dollars and cents, our cadets could look forward to the arrival of the ‘chuck wagons’ which heralded the ‘kawffee breaks’. These treated the cadets the same as the GIs. Available on these were sweets and cigarettes in quantity and, more importantly, [underlined] off ration [/underlined]. Furthermore, the cadets also discovered that, provided they had American currency, they we [sic] free to buy things in the ‘PX Store’ (more or less equivalent to one of our NAAFI Shops). These were fabulous sources of things virtually unheard of unless one was well into the British Black Market. Our next currency transaction was from dollars and cents into the new wartime wonder – Nylon Stockings. Once our poor inhibited, blushing cadets (by now unmoved by a Lancaster turret full of blood and guts) had screwed up their courage to effect the transaction, their popularity rating with the GTC went up by leaps and bounds.
This was not the only forms of negotiable currency. Thanks to the generosity of our new American friends, Grantham and the surrounding district had soon learned that ‘gum’ and the Herschey Bar (for ‘Herschey’ read ‘Cadbury’) were in plentiful supply. We were correspondingly popular on next parade night. This brings me back to the GIs Mess Halls.
When we had first collected our midday meal and taken them back to the mess tables, we were puzzled by the large earthenware jars with big wooden spoons in them. Carefully observing our nearby GIs, we gradually discovered their contents and their use. Thanks to having gone with my father up to London pre war, I had been introduced to the delights of the American Waffle. The latter seemed to be a very popular sweet course at Fulbeck, and Jar No.1 was Maple Syrup ([underlined] Real [/underlined] Maple Syrup not ‘flavoured’) By 1943 the British diet was not only frugal, it was also dull and bland. Our idea of heaven at that time was probably limited to something like a small spoonful of sweetened condensed milk. Maple Syrup was not only unobtainable in wartime Lincolnshire, it was virtually unheard of. Since we were also permitted to go back for more, we certainly went back for more, and in spite of its stickiness, some even migrated back to Grantham..
Jar No.2 was more of a mystery. We observed the thickly spreading of a light brown gooey paste onto waffles or thick slices of bread, [or even onto slices of fried bacon!]. Not to be outdone we did the same. The resulting impact on our wartime taste buds was dramatic to say the least. Some faces immediately registered disgust, while others froze in expressions of gastronomic bliss. Somehow, small quantities again drifted back to the unsuspecting Grantham public and these produced the same effect. I honestly think that at that time, nothing else so divided the British wartime public into two opposing camps. There seemed to be no half way, one either adored or loathed PEANUT BUTTER!
Please don’t get me wrong. In spite of our American friend’s efforts to augment our wartime diet, we were not there just to eat and indulge in a little grey marketing. We soon convinced them that we knew something about aircraft and the flying of them. Our ground trade cadets demonstrated that Douglas airframes and Pratt & Whitney engines held few secrets.
What did surprise the cadets was the quality and quantity of the tools which were issued to the American airframe and engine fitters. Those of our cadets who were engineering apprentices, came back drooling about the tools they had used in comparison to the ‘War Economy’ finish of the tools in our factories and what the RAF had to use. New words came into their engineering vocabulary such as ‘Stilson’ and ‘King Dick’. I don’t think our cadets got involved in another form of East/West trade but it was a little surprising how many American tools managed to drift into Grantham factories during the eight months the 9th were with us.
It was a little different when it came to our flying experience. Again at first we had to convince new USAAF aircrew after new aircrew that we [sic] not just after a joy ride. The Dakota does not have so much room ‘up in the office’ as the Lancaster but it does have a lot more windows along the fuselage. After all it was a military version of a very successful air liner. It also had a huge pair of rear doors, big enough to drive a Jeep through. Since they always seem to fly with these doors wide open, there was always a terrific view of the countryside beneath. The airliner passenger seats had gone, of course, but there were bench seats all along the side. Unless one stood up, there was not much to see out of the windows except for the sky and the wings. However, once they got the message of what we wanted to do in the way of map reading exercises, they fixed us up with boxes we could sit on round the doorway, together with a safety belt anchored back to the parachutist’s trip cables up in the roof just in case in our enthusiasm, we happened to fall out.
[page break]
7 Page 100
Flight formalities were not minimal, they were non existant [sic]. They had never heard of ‘blood chits’ and considered them quite unnecessary (“Our C47s don’t crash, Chum, unless the pilot does something stooped”) Flying suits? (“We don’t go high enough to get cold, Chum”) Parachutes? “C47s don’t get into difficulties and you would be too low for them to open properly”. All very reassuring. We make our way over to the Dakota indicated and climb up the ladder and enter. The interior is seen to have other occupants, local yokels, Land Army girls, even Italian Prisoners of War who we had seen earlier on [sic] perched on benches outside the flight office hoping for a flip on this bright and sunny Sunday morning. Having been plied with gum and Herschey Bars, we all wait for engines to be started. From the front, one of the crew brings in a bucket which he places in the middle of the cabin. “Aim in it, not at it please” he announces and with that, off we go.
We head off into the blue and the map reading class gets going. We locate this and we identify that we mark our track on our air maps and note our changes of direction. After twenty minutes or so, one of the crew comes back and cheerfully shouts “O.K. boys, where do you reckon we are?”. We ring our present position. “Good” says he and goes back forwards. As he goes through the door, we hear him say “O.K. Skip. We’re on course”. There were apparently, the odd occasions in the early days when the ATC Cadets at the back were the only ones on the plane who were sure of their position and gave the folk up front a course for home.
It was indeed not easy to remain uncritical. There poor navigators had trained in the Mid West where the roads were dead straight and it was a case of “Follow State 66 until it crosses a river, then turn left. About ten miles on, the river will be crossed by a railroad track. Turn right and look for a small town. If you can’t find it, land near a farm and ask them to call us so that we can give you a course for home” (“Geezus, in this goddam country, before you get a chance to identify one town, you have passed over four more”).
We were only there on Sundays to see their activities on the ground. Away from Spittlegate’s airspace, the 9th were flying round the clock, desperately trying to get new crews into close formation flying, then to get squadrons to formate in Groups, and finally to get Groups to formate in Wings. Impressive enough in daylight, but when they got round to night flying, the sight of several hundred troop carriers, sometimes towing gliders, with undimmed navigation lights and master navigators and formations, was mind blowing. When all that passes over your head at six hundred to a thousand feet, the noise was terrific.
Not so impressive was the impact of the invasion on the ground. As D Day approached, the build up of the Paras in the Grantham area increased proportionately. Grantham was a focal point for both the British 1st Airborne and the American 82nd and 101st Airborne. Neither of course had been recruited on the basis of their finer feelings. The latter sadly displayed the usual ‘Over Paid, Over Sexed, and Over Here’ characteristics which led to pitched battles in Grantham’s streets, aggravated by the invasions of Nottingham’s ‘Ladies of Easy Virtue’ who arrived by the car, bus and train loads on pay nights, to be shipped back again by the Grantham and Military Police the following morning, usually the worst for wear. (I often wondered how many ATC/GTC romances started when the ATC Cadets were recruited to escort the GTC Cadets safely home through the blackout when parades ended.
On the 5th of June 1944, the 9th airfields sprang into life carrying the spearhead troops into the early airdrops of the Invasion. They suffered many casualties and returned visibly shaken. This was obviously not the war they had expected. Our honeymoon period with them evaporated. We helped but were not entertained, and as the Normandy battles developed, there were more drops and more losses. For D Day, the 9th only dropped American troops, but as the preparations for Arnhem progressed, it would be the British 1st Airborne who would be travelling with them and Fulbeck became a much greater focal point of Anglo-American cooperation.
Meanwhile, the Allied advances into France and the Low Countries had liberated German airfields closer to the front line and the first of the 9th Airforce units began preparing to move over to the Continent. This would eventually include the Command Headquarters at Grantham. They all began to make farewell noises.
By the mid summer of 1944, The Magic Air Force had flown!
[page break]
8 Page 101
While we had been ‘enjoying’ ourselves at Fulbeck on Sundays, quite a lot had been happening back in the Squadron in Grantham. Amongst other things, we had , over the previous Syerston and Fulbeck periods, established an attachment with the RAF Regiment. In the First World War, Belton Park just outside Grantham had been the birthplace of the Machine Gun Corps. In World War Two, the same park had been chosen for the birth of the RAF Regiment. Just outside its southern boundary had been established the Regimental Headquarters, Barrack Blocks Parade Ground, and Gymnasia to train up specialist troops for the protection of RAF airfields.
Here, suitable recruits were put through their paces. The RAF had of course been teaching their airmen ditching and sea survival skills since the beginning. Now, with the increasing success of the various Resistance Movements in Occupied Europe to channel our aircrew survivors back to Britain, capture avoidance and other ‘escapology’ skills were being taught to aircrews as part of their normal training, and the RAF Regiment were just the people to teach those skills. When we were not going to Syerston of Fulbeck, we would spend a happy(?) hour of two learning the best way to use the Boche’s coal scuttle helmet to break his neck, or to use a piece of piano wire to remove his head if you think the former is too quick for your liking, as well as quite a few of the less gentle aspects of unarmed combat. Then again, how to jump out of the back of a lorry doing twenty miles per hour and use a parachute roll to prevent you breaking your own neck. Again all very exciting if not exactly pleasant
For my part, the Spring and Summer of 1944 had been the big run up to my Finals for my Higher National Certificate in Mechanical Engineering which I sat in July. The various papers were not exactly easy but I walked away feeling fairly confident. I was now waiting anxiously for the results to come out.
During the spring, ATC Headquarters had announced the staging of a three day, No.1 ATC Warrant Officers Training Course at RAF Cardington. This was to be a fairly intensive work out of RAF Rules and Regulations, Drill Instruction and the administration of big parades, and lots of other subjects which to tell the truth, seemed just a little bit irrelevant if I was leaving the ATC for a technical commission in a month or two. Much of the detail of this course is now forgotten. Perhaps., the most lasting impression I have left of Cardington was spending several hours learning all about the construction and flying of Barrage Balloons. (Balloons and Airstrips have always been a passion of mine)
All that was mostly the good to medium news. Around mid summer, our C.O. had been showing signs of overwork. Right through the previous five years, he had been tireless in running the Squadron, liaising with Spittlegate, 5 Group and the USSAF, taking a major part in the organisation of the various ‘Wings for Victory’, ‘War Weapons Week’ and similar events as well as holding down a rather difficult civilian job. Regrettably too, like so many of his generation, he was a fairly heavy smoker and lately had been putting on too much weight. His doctor read the Riot Act.
Luckily, there had been moves in the higher administration of the ATC, the result of which was the creation of a Lincolnshire Wing to coordinate the activities of the now quite considerable number of ATC Squadrons in the County. This would be a desk job, and as the senior Squadron Commander, he was promoted to Squadron Leader.
Effectively, 47(F) lost its C.O. and the senior Flight Commander was promoted to replace him. Sadly, after a month or two in his new appointment, Squadron Leader P.P.L. Stevenson suffered a massive heart attack and went into intensive care for several weeks. He survived, just, but his ATC days were over.
By the late autumn of 1944, both the Allies and the Russians were hammering at the gates of Germany. The end seemed to be in sight, even though there was still to be much bitter fighting both on the ground and in the air. The bomber offensive was at its peak, but apart from Spittlegate, Cranwell and Digby, the other airfields round Grantham were most quiet, and somehow, apart from the nightly roar of Bomber Command in the skies to the north and the very occasional air raid warning that a suicidal Luftwaffe intruder was about, the war had passed our part of Lincolnshire by.
[page break]
102
[signature] [missing letter] Burges [indecipherable word] (Best Regards)
[symbol] [underlined] No. 1. A.T.C. W.O.’s. Course. [symbol] [/underlined]
[underlined] Cardington. 1944. [/underlined]
[Back Row, left to right]
[underlined] Munass [/underlined] 392
[underlined] Masterson [/underlined] 4071
[underlined] Cook [/underlined] 996
[underlined] Wright [/underlined] 391
[underlined] Gabrad [/underlined] 231
[underlined] Cabboll [/underlined] 220
[underlined] Hirst [/underlined] 1053
[underlined] Andrew [/underlined] 387
[underlined] Harvey [/underlined] 877
[underlined] Bruce [/underlined] 1383
[underlined] Stevenson [/underlined] 478
[underlined] Hodgkinson [/underlined] 124
[Middle Row, left to right]
[underlined] Bishop [/underlined] 1303
[underlined] Guest [/underlined] 1990
[underlined] Lister [/underlined] 1341
[underlined] Dorricott [/underlined] 57
[underlined] Wood [/underlined] 481
[underlined] Jackson [/underlined] 2133
[underlined] Parmenter [/underlined] 1116
[underlined] Austin [/underlined] 1861
[underlined] Major [/underlined] 1456
[underlined] Watts [/underlined] 1904
[underlined] Russell [/underlined] 398
[Front Row, left to right]
[underlined] Munn [/underlined] [indecipherable number]
[underlined] Edwards [/underlined] 1476
[underlined] Powell [/underlined] 1148
[underlined] Butler [/underlined] Wolverhampton Wing.
[underlined] Hearn [/underlined] 79
[underlined] Sgt Pearson [/underlined]
[underlined] Sgt Bridges [/underlined]
[underlined] Dawson [/underlined] 1968
[underlined] Harby [/underlined] 1942
[underlined] Malier [/underlined] 1547
[underlined] Brown [/underlined] Colchester Wing.
[underlined] Bourdoe [/underlined] 38
[photograph]
[page break]
103
10
[photograph]
Barrage balloons being towed by their winch lorries
They can be rapidly deflated, transported to another site, and re-inflated
[photograph]
[page break]
Page 104
[underlined] Chapter Eleven Anticlimax and Finale [/underlined]
August 26th 1944. It should have been a day of celebrations, but in the event, it was a bit of a damp squib.
It was my 21st Birthday and it therefore marked the end of my engineering apprenticeship. I was now a Junior Draughtsman in the Design Office of an internationally renowned company producing construction equipment. I was also the acolyte of its revered Chief Designer and we were engaged in some important and interesting design and development.
I went down to our village Post Office to collect our mail (Our isolated farmhouse home was way off the village postman’s beat). On this very day, in addition to greeting cards from our scattered family, there was one letter for which I had been waiting anxiously for a week or two. Yes, it was my exam results. With bated breath I tore it open. I HAD PASSED!
I shot off home and dashed off a letter to the Joint Selection Board to say that I now had the necessary Higher National Certificate and now awaited their instructions. This posted, I returned to an empty house. My father was now just out of intensive care in one hospital in Nottingham, after his heart attack.. My mother was in another Nottingham hospital awaiting surgery and my brother was in yet another recovering from another operation. I was dreading to think how they are going to manage when the time came for me to go. At present, not one of them was capable of looking after themselves, let alone the others.
Thank goodness it was a sunny day. For the first time in years, I went for a day’s walk in order to have a good think.
Throughout my life September, rather than January, has always been the beginning of my year. The new school year, the new OTC year, the new Air Cadet year and later on in life, the beginning of various forms of technical training programmes. This year, hopefully, it would be the beginning of a completely new life.
For 47(F) it would also be a new year. It had a new Commanding Officer who would undoubtedly want to make some changes in order to ‘make his mark’. One of his first jobs would be to establish a new ‘attachment’, now that the USAAF had gone. Recently promoted Flight Lieutenant, Albert Chapman had been one of the first officers to be appointed at the inaugural meeting of the Grantham Squadron back in January 1939. At that time, he had been a civilian driver in Spittlegate’s Transport Section, and had remained in the Section throughout the intervening years, this being unquestionably a Reserved Occupation. He therefore had a fairly firm ‘foot in the door’ at Spittlegate which he now used to re-establish 47(F)’s attachment to its original parent airfield.
Spittlegate was still a very active training station. No. 12(P)AFU was still churning out night fighter and intruder pilots, but the pressure upon them to do so was beginning to ease slightly and they seemed more than willing to welcome us back.
The overwhelming Allied air supremacy, coupled with the Luftwaffe’s increasing shortages of experienced pilots and aviation fuel, meant that our losses were beginning to fall. In fact, unbeknown to us, the Air Ministry were already beginning to question whether they now had more than enough aircrew trainees to finish the war, now that Allied forces were well established on the Continent once more.
With our usual August break over, Cadet H.Q. opened its doors to a new if uncertain future, welcoming back its old cadets and signing on the usual intake of new recruits
The Joint Selection Board had merely acknowledged my letter informing them of my H.N.C. pass and said that instructions would follow. In the daytime, I continued my Design Office work. In the evenings, on parade nights, I continued to function as S.W.O. and started lecturing again, feeling more than a little restless. On other nights, I rediscovered the delights of doing nothing that didn’t need doing, apart that is, from looking after the family. My father had returned home almost completely disabled and anxious to learn what his Squadron was doing under the new C.O. The rest of my family came home also, but they were far from fit to resume their previous lives (my brother was only twelve and still ‘poorly’). Much as I looked forward to the arrival of my papers, we could only bless the days when they never arrived.
[page break]
Page 105
Eventually, towards the end of September they did arrive with a Rail Warrant to the RAF Reception Centre at Cosford, but also with instructions to stay put until further orders. Thankfully, in a way, the further orders seemed to go into ‘hold’ for most of October.
Then, I was asked once again to go before the Selection Board. There, somewhat apologetically, they informed me that recruitment for commissions in the RAFTechnical [sic] Branch had closed! They had already got enough Engineering Officers to finish the war without my help in effect. Before I had a chance to express my disgust, they started questioning me closely about the work I was doing at Aveling Barford, the construction machinery manufacturers with whom I had just completed my apprenticeship, and some general questioning about what I knew about airfield construction equipment.
Without explaining why, I was told to go back and again wait for further instructions. For another two or three weeks nothing happened, then a letter arrived offering me a commission in the RAF Airfield Construction Service. After due deliberation, I come to the conclusion that this might be useful practical experience towards my eventual membership of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. I wrote back, accepting. Again nothing happened. Again I am called back to the Board who then questioned me about Aveling Barford’s post war ambitions (as if I would know as a 21 year old junior draughtsman!) Throats were cleared and the Chairman said that even though the war was still unfinished, the Government was giving urgent thought to the question of Britain’s part in the reconstruction of Europe and the revival of the British economy. We will need to ‘Export or Starve’ blah, blah, blah, and in this respect it was obvious to them that my future should lie in the engineering industry. Ye Gods, after nearly ten years of doing my best to get into the RAF, was this the best they could offer!
I went back home and told my parents that they still had a son, to their obvious relief. I went back to my works and told them they still had a Junior Draughtsman, and they welcomed me back. I went back to 47(F) and told them they still had a Warrant Officer and they also welcomed me back.
However the bad news was not yet over. ATC Headquarters then delivered a bombshell. Although in the event, the war in Europe still had another six months to run, the Air Ministry had decided to cut drastically, the funding of the ATC. Future recruitment into the RAF was also to be reduced and acceptance standards drastically raised. In future, Squadrons must be self supporting for all activities except those specifically details for the training of cadets of the required acceptance standards. There was a lot more to it which said in as many words that the future of the ATC was more in the shape of boy’s clubs in which ‘good citizenship’ was to be encouraged and more blah, blah, blah. Out of this, a few selected entrants will be recruited to replace servicemen due to be demobilised.
This called for a lot of hard thinking regarding the future of the Squadron. Although I for one, was far from happy about a new ‘boy’s club’ image for the Squadron, our new CO seemed quite willing to take up this new change of image. In a way, this was not surprising. Right from the start, mas Flight Commander, he had always been a great supporter of any sports and social activities, and having a teenage daughter, was very supportive of our cooperation with the GTC Company. Since their inception, there had been quite a few social events, quite apart from sharing training facilities. Although each unit had its own headquarters and to the outside observer, functioned as two separate units, parades over, apart from uniform differences, that outside observer could hardly be blamed for thinking that they were a single unit.
In view of what is to follow, I think I need to admit that I have always been (and still am) a pretty unsociable cuss. I don’t like loose crowds and I loathe ‘parties’ and I did my best to avoid getting involved in these ‘socials’.
Inevitably, a ‘Funding’ meeting had to be held. This not only included both our officers and cadets, but al [sic] a similar contingent had been invited from the GTC. They of course, having had much less financial help from official sources, had always needed to rely heavily on fund raising. We, on the other hand, had received reasonably generous grants from the Air Ministry. Now that we needed to raise funds, the GTC might give us a few tips.
Ideas were called for. The GTC officers told us that the general public, after five years of whist drives, jumble sales, ‘coffee’ mornings, summer fetes, Warship Weeks, Wings for Victory, comforts for the troops and so on, a further round of such activities was not likely to raise a significant amount of the needful, especially as the general public still believed that the ATC was fully supported financially by the RAF. Silence prevailed.
[page break]
Page 106
During the previous year or so, our Headquarters had acquired a most useful addition. The RAF had offered us a redundant 60ft x 20ft wooden accommodation hut and this had been duly erected to one side of our parade ground. This had proved invaluable since it was large enough to parade the whole Squadron indoors on dark or wet evenings and enabled a certain amount of drill on the march to be carried out. It was in this hut that this combined meeting was being held, in which I was taking a determinedly back seat. Raising money for social and sporting events was definitely not my reasons for joining the ATC.
Fortunately or unfortunately (depends upon the circumstances) I have a habit of observing the existence of a number of ‘twos’ which, by what was later called ‘lateral thinking’, I would then put these together to make a dozen or so. During the foregoing discussion, I observed at the far end of the hut, the various officers sitting behind a large table, doing their best to look helpful or intelligent. To their side is the upright piano of doubtful tonal value which we have recently acquired from somewhere or other. After parades, this frequently formed the focus of a mixed group of cadets, Although never standing a chance at the International Eisteddfod, they frequently sang their intentions to ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ and ‘Hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line’ etc. accompanied by one of our cadets who could thrash out at [sic] tune on this long suffering instrument.
I also recollected that another popular ATC cadet was a great comic, and that one or two of the GTC girls had quite reasonable singing voices. Somehow at this point, William S managed to assure me that ‘All the world’s a stage, etc Much to my later embarrassment, I heard myself saying “If we could make a stage at this end of the hut, do you think we have enough talent in the two units to make up an ATC/GTC Concert Party?” Too late, I realise that I am now the centre of attention. Expressions of interest and approval from the table, hubbubs of interest from the cadets. The redoubtable Miss Owens assumes command, “What an excellent idea”, and within minutes the inevitable committee is formed and before I can protest further, I am press ganged into service. “Good” says I to myself, “If I can supervise the erection of the stage and any props they might need, I can stay well in the background and leave any ‘acts’ to the others”. – so I thought.
The committee, chaired of course by Miss Owens, agreed that the whole programme should be designed to put as many cadets onto the stage as possible from both units. Miss Owens agreed to find and stage manage, a multi character one act play. Audition as many cadets with instrumental skills. Can we think of any songs with multi part singers. Muggins suggests Pedro the Fisherman which is the rage at the moment. Accepted, and ‘on the night’ Muggins has been ‘volunteered’ into the part of Nina’s father – “One day her father said to her etc”. (How old do they think I am?)
Can you think of a finale that brings everyone back onto the stage? You are good at writing, Can you work up a sketch on these lines? I suppose I could. So it went on, but after a bit, I had to admit that I began to enjoy being something other than a technical student or a technocrat cadet. Maybe I’m not so old after all.
There was no doubt that during the two months or so that that it took to work up this Concert Party, training suffered a bit, but now that the pressure was off, no one seemed to mind. It was a long story and if anyone was a success. It brought in several hundred pounds for the two units (which was a lot of money in those days. Afterwards, it was inevitably a bit of an anti-climax. Hopes were expressed that we might stage another one next year, but in the event this proved to be a ‘one off’.
Quite suddenly, I decided that I had had enough. This was no way to finish one’s war. What can one say when your children ask “What did [underlined] you [/underlined] do in the war, Daddy?”
There is little comfort from the saying “They also serve who only stand and wait” I could say “Well, while I was waiting, I probably knocked several hundred hours off the training time of several hundred Cadets and Registered Men before they were called up. I also loaded up several hundred incendiaries, helped service a few Lancasters and swept out a hangar or two. Oh, and I nearly forgot, I probably saved the life of an injured airman”.
It had happened like this. In early January 1945, I was cycling home around midnight after one of the last rehearsals before the concert party was staged. These were the days when we had [underlined] real [/underlined] winters and for more than a week it had been freezing hard. There had been reports that skating was possible on the Grantham Canal. It was a bitterly cold, and no one was about by that time of night.
[page break]
107
[photograph]
[photograph]
[page break]
JOURNAL, FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 16th, 1945.
YOUNG PEOPLE’S REVUE
A.T.C. and G.T.C. Show at Grantham
No 47F (Grantham) Squadron A.T.C. and No 830 Coy. G.T.C. made their debut on the stage on Friday and Saturday, when they presented their revue, “Blue, White and R.A.F. Blue.” in the A.T.C. hut and played to packed houses.
A critic who has had nothing to do with the organisation of the show says that there were three features about the revue which placed the entertainment much ahead of the usual run of amateur shows – first the number of original items put over, second the complete absence of prompting, and third, the even run of the production and the lack of irritating delays.
Considering this is the first show staged by the organisers – the producer and arranger was W/O. P.D. Stevenson, and the dramatic section was under the direction of Jun. Commandant J. Llewelyn-Owens – they are to be congratulated on overcoming three most important factors which so often mar amateur efforts.
LOVE BUG v AIR BUG
The chorus opened the programme with their signature tune, “Blue, White and R.A.F. Blue.” which was followed by “Pedro the Fisherman.”
The next item was a sketch, “Love Bug versus Air Bug,” the G.T.C. cadet being taken by C.S.L. M. Shepherd and the A.T.C. cadet by W.O. Stevenson. Then came the theme from “The Warsaw Concerto,” played on the piano by Cpl. Turner, and the chorus returned to sing, “Long ago and Far Away.” “I had a Dream” (first public presentation) and “Swinging on a Star.”
Cdt. Tuckwood, A.T.C., gave a clever dialect rendering of “Albert and the Lion.” and a humorous “Advertisement Drama” was enacted by Cdt. 1st Cl. J. Hook as Rupert Chislethorpe, S/L. Sellors as Mrs. Westerby, Cdt. W. Guilliatt as the maid, Cpl. Bramley as the narrator, and F. Sgt. V. Hutchison as Mr. Westerby.
[deleted] They were followed by Cpl. Bennett and Cdt. Sharp on their harmonicas, aided by Cpl. Howlett on the spoons and then the chorus wound up the first half of the programme with their marches past – “Forty-Seventh Squadron A.T.C..” and “Girls of the G.T.C.” [/deleted]
After the interval came a one act play. “The Batercom Door,” with the following cast: Prima donna, A/S/L. J. Bradley; young man, Cpl. F. Bramley; old gentleman, Cdt. 1st Cl. J. Hook; young lady, S/L. D. Sellors; old lady, A/S/L. P. Palmer; Boots, Cdt. Feneley.
VERY GOOD ACTING
The standard of acting was on the whole quite high. The principles had been chosen with care, and they showed an ease which was really refreshing.
Though all did well, Cdt. Hook deserves special mention. He was undoubtedly the star actor, and with more experience, this young man could create a reputation. Praise must also be given to June Bradley for her changing moods as the prima donna.
It was unusual to find so many original items in an amateur show – songs, a sketch and dramatic poem. These were the work of W/O. Stevenson, and their enthusiastic reception should encourage him to produce more.
The final tableau was a fitting end to a most successful show. While a poem describing the work done by ex-cadets of both A.T.C. and G.T.C. was declaimed, representatives of the different services into which they eventually go (not forgetting the miner !) marched on to the stage, and ended by singing, “There’ll Always Be an England.”
A TRIFLE STIFF
A little criticism may be levelled at the combined chorus of A.T.C. and G.T.C.; they were just a trifle stiff and were far too serious. The voices were well blended, but they need more practice to bring out the volume.
Make-up was by Junior Commandants Mrs. Worth, J. Llewelyn-Owens and M. Gardner.
An appeal was made on the opening night for the two corps’ welfare funds by Mr. W.J. Marshall, chairman of the welfare committee, who said that A.T.C. plus G.T.C. equally X.T.C.
The chorus consisted of: A.T.C. – F./Sgt. V. Hutchison, Cpls. F. Bramley, F. Howlett and Beecham, Cdts. 1st. Cl. J. Hook and Ebb. Cdt. 2nd. Cl. Charity: G.T.C. – Co. C/S/L M. Shepherd, S/L D. Sellors, A/S/L/s J. Bradley and P. Palmer, Cdts. P. Aspland, B. Ward, A. Nickerson, J. Parker, V. Edgley, B. Goodacre, W. Guilliatt, J. Marchall and C. Robinson. The accompanist was Miss R. Chapman.
[page break]
109
[embossed crest]
Royal Air Force Station,
Spitalgate,
GRANTHAM,
Lincs.
Ref: C/49/76/P1 15th January, 1945.
Dear Mr. Stevenson,
re Accident to Blenheim V Aircraft No. AZ.993 near Harlaxton on 5th January, 1945.
I have learned of the invaluable and extremely kind assistance that you rendered to Warrant Officer R.C. Ford, who was one of the two pilots in the above aircraft when it crashed at 23.23 hours on the date stated and I am writing to ask you to accept my most sincere and grateful thanks for all that you did.
I am unable to commend you toohighly [sic] for the initiative you displayed immediately you heard the call for “help” and after you had located Warrant Officer Ford. Your action in covering Warrant Officer Ford with your own greatcoat, having regard to the bitterly cold night, was most thoughtful and kindly.
As you already know the other pilot in the aircraft (Flying Officer G.G. McGolrick) was killed instantly. Warrant Officer Ford was, miraculously, only slightly injured but he had been “wandering about” for one hour when you found him and had you not acted as you did it is most probable that he would have suffered seriously from exposure after the crash. He did develop pneumonia but as far as can be seen at present he is recovering satisfactorily.
Your action in this instance was in keeping with the fundamental principles of the Air Training Corps and, naturally, it is with personal pride that I write this letter to you as you are a member of the Squadron affiliated to this Station. Acts such as yours strengthen the bonds of mutual friendship and understanding between the Royal Air Force and the Air Training Corps.
Yours Sincerely
[signature] (J. COX)
Group Captain, Commanding,
[underlined] R.A.F. Station, SPITALGATE [/underlined]
Warrant Officer P.D.Stevenson,
No. 47 (F) Squadron,
Air Training Corps,
[underlined] High Street, GRANTHAM [/underlined]
[NOTE THAT EVEN THE GROUP CAPTAIN Oi/c RAF SPITALGATE HAD, BY 1945 TO USE [indecipherable words] NOTE PAPER]
[page break]
Page 110
In those days, everybody seemed to whistle the catchy tunes of the day and I was most probably giving ‘Pedro the Fisherman’s’ tune a further airing. As I reached a point where the main road ran parallel to and close to the Grantham to Nottingham canal, I was surprised to hear a faint voice calling “Help, Help”. I naturally assumed that it was some late night skater who had got into difficulties. Dumping my bike, I clambered over the far side. Not risking the ice, I ran back to one of the bridges, crossed over and eventually found him stretched out near the edge and obviously injured. He was in flying gear and he told me that he and his instructor had taken off in a Blenheim trainer from the nearby Harlaxton airfield, when both engines failed and they had crashed some distance away. In spite of damage to his back and one leg, he had tried to find his instructor, but was unable to do so. He had crawled around about for an hour or so, finally crawled along the canal bank until he could go no further, calling for help but no one had heard him until he had heard me whistling.
He was obviously badly shocked and deathly cold, so I made him as comfortable as possible it was obvious that he was in no condition to walk back to the road, so I covered him up with my coat and told him not to move until I could summon help. Luckily there was a nearby house who let me ring Spittlegate sick quarters who sent out an ambulance and a search party. The former got him stretchered up and taken away. The search party admitted that they had no knowledge of the area, so back we went and spent another hour looking for the crash. Eventually, we found enough dead mutton to feed a hundred, (they had apparently crashed into a flock of sheep) Following the blood and gore, we found the remains of the Blenheim but the cockpit area was completely missing. Forty yards or so further on, we found the instructor, still strapped into his seat and who had obviously died on impact. There was nothing else I could do so, frozen to the core, I made my way home in the very small hours.
A few days later, I received a latter [sic] from Spittlegate’s CO thanking me for my “extremely kind assistance blah, blah, blah” and assuring me that my action “was in keeping with the fundamental principles of the Air Training Corps blah, blah, blah”. (As you may have guessed by now, I was getting a bit bitter at the way things had gone). What made it worse, somehow or other the Grantham Journal got hold of the story and the next thing I knew was it being splashed centre front page.
By the end of January, my mind was made up. Removing one of my Warrant Oficer’s [sic] ‘Crowns’ (for old time’s sake) I sent my uniform to the cleaners. Shortly afterwards, when Headquarters were deserted, I hung my uniform behind my office door, put my paperwork, files and training manuals in order. Closing my office door for the last time, I went downstairs, placed a letter of resignation on the Adjutant’s desk. Checking that the place was secure, I dropped the latch on the front door and closed it quietly behind me. I posted my keys through the letterbox. The sound they made as they hit the doormat signified the end of my war. After ten years of being a Cadet, I was now just a plain ‘civvie’.
I supposed it was now my job to do something about ‘winning the peace’.
[page break]
Page 111
The big moment comes when the instructor, waving his bats, signals you to release the tow line and you make a steady, if hardly dignified descent to earth. (The Primary looks pretty fundamental as a flying machine, and its glide angle ensures that there is no risk of you landing in another nearby field). Progressively, you are pulled higher and released later, until the day comes when your log book proudly records that you have stayed up a full minute!
Having done so, you now have to pay more. Your previous flights cost you two shillings and sixpence each. A rough calculation tells us that this was about one fiftieth of a skilled man’s wages in those days,. From now on the price is doubled. By the time you are able to stay up a bit longer, you are introduced to the Club’s next acquisition, a Grunau Baby intermediate glider. This was more or less equivalent to the Slingsby Cadet which the ATC cadets were then using. However, Cadets were taught from scratch in dual control gliders, and never went though [sic] the slide/ low hop/ high hop routine we had to follow on the Primary.
I had reached the point, having stayed aloft for five minutes in the Grunau, and had thereby gained my Second Class Gliding Certificate, when I had to leave the Club. This was a great disappointment as the Club was not only hoping to invest in a high performance sailplane but was also planning to have a week’s camp at the Long Mynd, the Mecca in those days for glider pilots in Central England.
It came about like this. In 1945, I had a week’s cycling holiday in the south of England, my first ‘civvie’ holiday since before the war. In the June of 1946, I decided to do the same, this time exploring the South Wales area a bit. On the way back, I met up with two Lincolnshire lassies who had been doing the same. How one of these became that ‘girl somewhere out there’ who was prepared to put up with this ‘odd fish’ and was prepared to wait until he passed all his technical examinations, is too long a story to be included here. However, within three months we had decided that this was ‘it’, and as soon as my swotting days were over, we would get married. The first priority in the meantime, was to save up enough to do so.
In those days, personal finances were on a very different basis from today. Hire purchase agreements, apart from a mortgage on a house, were only for the impecunious who had not the ‘moral fibre’ to wait until one saved enough to buy something which you needed to pay ‘cash on the nail’. As for daring to go to the Bank Manager (who in those days, you actually knew by sight!), and having grovelled in front of his desk and asked him for a loan, you were definitely ‘guilty until proved innocent’. Something had to go, and amongst our many drastic economies, gliding (which was now getting quite expensive), was one of the first, and to all intents and purposes, that was the last contact I had with aeronautics for the next twenty years or so apart from flights in commercial aircraft.
We got married in 1948. In the next two decades raised two delightful daughters and saw them through school and University, enjoying vicariously their university days denied to us through the intervention of the war years. Our respective DIY skills were used to restore two houses. I had become a Senior Designer with several successful construction equipment designs to my credit. I had left design and put my former instructional skills to good use by becoming Sales and Service Training Manager in another construction, quarrying and mining machinery manufacturer. In the process I had gained the necessary practical experience to be elected a full Member of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.
I had left Grantham about the time when flying ceased at Spittlegate. Over the years I would see it become a Territorial Army Transport Depot, the former hangars and tarmac, home to hundreds of trucks. RAF Digby too, after a brief period as a satellite training outstation for Cranwell, had also ceased flying and had become a hush hush signals establishment. Waddington and Scampton had become V Bomber bases. Cranwell, still flying, was also into the jet age for their traine4rs, but I was not inspired by jets. Like diesel locomotives, they lacked ‘soul’ I felt.
My work over the years had involved a far [sic] amount of air travel. I had crossed the Atlantic at a time when BOAC commemorated the earliest commercial flights by presenting you with an impressive certificate commemorating the fact that you had successfully and safely crossed the ‘Herring Pond’ and ditto when you crossed the Equator. I had flown in an early flight of the DeHavilland Comet, the world’s first successful jet airliner, together with several other ‘firsts’. However, the higher you flew, the less it appeared to be real flying.
At one period, I had, as one of my departmental instructors, a man who was the chief Instructor of the Trent Valley Gliding Club who did his best to persuade me to join. At the time I had neither the time nor the available funds to finance such indulgence, so I resolutely resisted such temptation.
[page break]
Page 112
I was now fifty, and that is an age when one takes stock, looking forwards to unattained ambitions and thinking back to past achievements and experiences. By now the wounds and the resentments of never getting into the RAF, had, to all intents and purposes, healed over. I got to thinking of the summer days before the war, when we lay in the grass along Cold Harbour Lane and watched the biplanes side slipping their way over our heads to land at Spittlegate. Of ‘Faithful Annies’ taking us over the Solent and circling over Grantham. Of Lancasters over Bottesford and Syerston, Dakotas over Fulbeck.
Deep down, some small ember which had been dormant for thirty years or so, started to glow faintly.
I crept into the local model shop. Yes, Airfix do an Anson kit. I buy it, a tube of styrene cement and some tins of Humbrol enamel, and spend a happy week or two building the Coastal Command version which was placed on a shelf in the spare bedroom. It was surprising how often I needed to go in there for a peep at the finished product. (There’s no fool like an old fool, is there?) Having relived my Public School’s Air Cadet Wing Days with its help, I think it would be nice to convert it to an Anson Trainer, so off comes the turret and pot of Training Yellow is bought. Shortly after that, the Annie is joined by an ‘Oxbox’, and then a Blenheim. Why not a Hawker Hind trainer? Easy enough, they were all Airfix, but when it came to the Avro Tutor and the Armstrong Whitworth Atlas which had been used in the 3FTS days, it was back to ‘build from scratch’.
Now well into my ‘Second Cadetship’, two years later, I had seven cases containing the forty two aircraft which had flown from Spittlegate from its opening in 1917 to when it ceased as an operational airfield in 1948. What now? Between times, I had of course built a Lancaster and a Dakota to bring back old times, but it had been nice to work to a theme.
One day, when listening to Radio Lincolnshire, I heard that the farmer who owned a goodly part of the old RAF Metheringham airfield, together with a group of local enthusiasts, had restored some of the buildings at the former bomber base, to form the basis of a small museum and heritage centre to the memory of the three hundred or so aircrew who had lost their lives on operations from there. When the number of the squadron was mentioned, I sat up sharpish, as they say. It was 106 Squadron. The 106 who had been briefly at Spittlegate in the late Thirties. The 106 which had been ‘our’ Squadron, when 47(F) had been attached to Syerston.
Equally sharpish, I joined the ‘Friends of Metheringham Airfield’. I took over the maintenance and repair of the many aircraft models which they acquired. The next job was to make them some cases with models and captions, covering the aircraft history of 106 from its WW1 formation, its reforming in 1938, though [sic] its days of Hawker Hinds, Fairey Battles, Handley Page Hampdens, a nice job of converting a Lancaster kit into a Manchester, and their last days with the Lancaster itself.
There was no doubt that ‘The Bug’ had bitten once more, and after I had completed a few more displays for Metheringham, the next project materialised. I knew that the owners of Fulbeck Hall had set up, within the actual rooms, a small museum covering the planning and execution of the Market Garden operation, the airdrop at Arnham, which had been carried by the Dakotas of the 9th Troop Carrying Command flying from the airfields at RAF Fulbeck and elsewhere. Attention on this museum was focussed in the early 1980s when our house provided accommodation for the Veterans of No.250 Coy RASC of the 1st Airborne Division who went into Arnham in Horsa Gliders towed by Halifax tugs. Having been stationed in our village during the run up to the drop, for most of the 1980s they had a reunion here which naturally included a visit to Fulbeck Hall. I got involved and made up several cases of models showing the British Halifax/Horsa and U.S. C-47(Dakota)/Waco glider combinations, and other aircraft related incidents. Later, Fulbeck Hall changed hands and sadly the new owners closed the museum. Most of the memorabilia went over to Holland to the Airborne Museum in Arnham, but the models now are on permanent display in the Thorpe Camp museum in East Lincolnshire.
Another announcement on Radio Lincolnshire presented the next challenge. The most active local authority on Lincolnshire has always been the North Kesteven District Council who are also extremely active in supporting and initiating aviation heritage in this, the ‘Home of the RAF’ and an integral part of ‘Bomber County’. In combination with the staff at RAF Digby, the wartime Operations Room was restored and another museum created. Although Lincolnshire has always been referred to as ‘Bomber County’, Fighter Command was by no means absent. Before the war, Digby had changed from being a Flying Training School to a Fighter Station, a Sector Station of No. 12 Fighter Command. Again, between times I had ‘adopted’ RAF Coleby Grange as one of those largely forgotten satellite stations whose night fighters and intruders seemed to lack the aura of the Glamour Boys who were flying the Spitfires at the base station at Digby. Again working to a theme, initially for my own amusement, I had developed a display of
[page break]
[missing letters]NGSBY Type 5 GRUNAU BABY 2
[technical drawing]
A single-seat intermediate sailplane built by Slingsby under licence from Germany. Of conventional wooden construction, the Grunau was built by many people from plans sold by the B.G.A. It was also built post war by [missing letters]iotts of Newbury as the Eon Baby. q.v.
Wing span: 13.57m., 44’ 6’’. Length: 6.10m., 19’ 8’’.
Wing area: 14.21 sq.m., 153 sq.ft. Aspect ratio: 13.
Wing sections: Gottingen 535 at root, symmetrical tip. Braced wing, with no airbrakes or flaps.
Weights: Tare 157 kg., 346 lbs. A.U.W. 250 kg., 550 lbs.
Wing loading: 17.68 kg./sq.m., 3.62 lbs./sq.ft. Max L/D: 17.
Placed into production at Kirkbymoorside in 1935. The price was £137.10.0 in 1939.
CLOUDCRAFT DICKSON PRIMARY
[technical drawing]
A single-seat primary glider of wooden construction, designed by Mr. Roger S. Dickson, and built by the Cloudcraft Glider Co., Southampton, in 1930. Many built by gliding club members.
Wing span: 10.45 m., 34’ 3 1/2’’. Length: 5.28 m., 17’ 4’’.
Wing area: 15.79 sq.m., 170 sq.ft. Aspect ratio: 7.
Wing section: Clark Y-H. Wire braced wings, no airbrakes or flaps.
Undercarriage type: Main skid only.
Weights: Tare 81.65 kg., 180 lbs.
114
[page break]
Page 115
all the aircraft and their Squadrons who had served at Coleby Grange during its brief history. These were offered to the new Digby Operations Room Museum and were quickly accepted. Under the leadership of the then F/Sgt Curry, the museum had both grown and prospered. However, when I became a ‘Friend’, the concentration seemed to be entirely on the memorabilia of the many Squadrons (mostly RCAF) who had served in or passed through the Digby airfield. Little credit seemed to be given to its satellite airfields of RAF Coleby Grange and RAF Wellingore, and almost nothing of Digby’s long history as a Flying Training School in the 1920s and 1930s. I decided to fill in the gaps, and after five years or so, there were models displaying the insignia of every Squadron which served, however shortly, in all three stations, something which apparently delights every visiting veteran who, of course is principally interested in [underlined] his [/underlined] Squadron. The Flying Training School history is similarly represented by models of all the aircraft used, together with a model of the Belfast Hangar, that icon of 1920s airfield architecture.
Until I came to live here in Lincoln, I had always been in the popular misconception that Lincoln’s part in the First World War was principally the Tank Story, plus a load of other munitions. It had been a bit of an eye opener to discover that far more important was its role as the country’s largest manufacturing centre for aircraft production. That too, is a long and interesting story.
For some time I had considered the possibility of modelling a complete set of the twelve aircraft made by the three principal engineering firms in Lincoln at that time. Only two of those were available as kits at 1/72nd scale and only one at 1/48th scales. With the intention of these eventually being on permanent display in one of the museum/heritage centres, and also being used for lecturing purposes. I decided to model these at 1/48th scale, since ‘build from scratch’ is much easier at that scale. I had made the first few of these when a ‘Made in Lincoln’ theme was declared as the city’s Millennium project which naturally gave an impetus. Two year’s work and a display of these went the rounds in a series of exhibitions and lectures. Having served that task, they too are now on permanent display at the Digby Ops Room Museum.
Much contact with North Kesteven District Council’s tourist and heritage unit in the meantime, led to an invitation to display my ‘build from scratch’ techniques at their annual ‘Craft and Modelling Day’ at the Cranwell Aviation Heritage Centre, another joint NKDC/RAF museum project. For quite a few years, this was an enjoyable chance to meet up with other aeromodellers. However, it was noticeable that the museum, though graced with a case full of beautifully crafted models of a general interest, the museum as a whole had few models specifically relating to Cranwell’s long aviation history. The various individual aspects of that history are excellently illustrated by extensive wall displays of photographs and text, but lacked what might be described as ‘three dimensional’ impact. Becoming yet another ‘Friend’, I made a start. Further research saw me beavering away in the College Library. This in turn led on to me making contact with the present day Headquarters of the Air Training Corps which is now based at Cranwell.
Here, I was welcomed back into the fold as a ‘Veteran’. I had previously made contact again with today’s 47(F) and gave talks about the Squadron’s early days. Contact too has been made with the King’s School Combined Cadet Corps unit, today’s descendent of its OTC. This now has two uniforms, Khaki/Camouflage and RAF Blue, in more or less equal numbers, though I doubt today that RAF parentage is represented in the same proportion.
My circle was complete. My back may not be so straight, my knees no longer march, I no longer parade in uniform, but whether I am in one or other of the museums surrounded by the memories invoked or surrounded by cadets (both boys and girls now) my heart is still young and on parade with them. Once a Cadet, always a Cadet? Or is it just Delayed Adolescence?
---O---
In my introduction, I made some acknowledgements and words of thanks, but I think it right that this narrative should end more specifically.
I remember, and ask you to remember, those hundreds of aircrew in 207 and 106 Squadrons RAF and those of the 9th TCC to which we were attached, who unhesitating went out to ‘Give Their Yesterdays’ and in particular, Ken Masters who went with me to the Air Cadet Wing Camp at Selsea. He was just one of the fifty King’s School boys who were killed in the Services in WW2 but he was my best school chum.
Also to all those who served in the various cadet units who, whether or not they joined up or like me, ‘also served’ but nevertheless contributed much to this story, [sic]
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
Cadet 1935-1945 Peter D Stevenson
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
BStevensonPDStevensonPDv1
Description
An account of the resource
Peter Stevenson's account of his service in the Officer Training Corps at Grantham and later in the Air Training Corps. Tells of his life in Grantham and the effect of the war on the town. Also his involvement post war in museums and projects to record the wartime activities that took place locally.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Peter Stevenson
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
2006
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
115 typewritten sheets
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Memoir
Photograph
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
United States Army Air Force
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Grantham
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1939
1940
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Steve Baldwin
106 Squadron
207 Squadron
5 Group
air sea rescue
animal
Blenheim
bombing
Churchill, Winston (1874-1965)
civil defence
crash
entertainment
ground personnel
home front
Lancaster
Manchester
military service conditions
RAF Barkstone Heath
RAF Bottesford
RAF Cranwell
RAF Grantham
RAF Harlaxton
RAF Northolt
RAF Syerston
sanitation
station headquarters
training
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2370/43443/LHallidayAH19250108v1.2.pdf
7bcc89a927422e87c65412ad4d41946b
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
Halliday, Archie Henry
Description
An account of the resource
Four items. The collection concerns Archie Henry Halliday (b. 1925, Royal Air Force) and contains his log book and photographs. He flew operations as a flight engineer with 101 Squadron.
The collection was loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Susan Cameron and catalogued by Lynn Corrigan.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-04-19
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Halliday, AH
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
Archie Henry Halliday's navigators, air bombers, air gunners and flight engineers flying log book
Description
An account of the resource
Navigators, air bombers, air gunners and flight engineers flying log book for Archie Henry Halliday from 30 August 1944 to 10 April 1945 detailing his training and operational duties. Training was with No.4 S of TT at RAF St. Athan and Heavy Conversion Units at RAF Lindholme and RAF Bottesford. All operations were flown with 101 Squadron with Flight Officer Withenshaw as pilot. He also flew non operational flights with pilots Flight Officer McKay and Flight Officer Hanney. Aircraft flown in training were Halifax Mk II and Lancasters Mk I and Mk III. Archie took part in 31 operations, on which 25 night operations in which he flew as engineer. The operations were to Karlsruhe, Osnabrück, Ludwigshafen, Ulm, Coblenz, Bonn, Büer, Osterfeld, Nürenburg, Merseburg, Duisburg, Zuffenhausen, Mannheim, Weisbaden, Kleves, Pforzheim, Cologne, Chemnitz, Dessau, Kassel, Essen, Dortmund, Misburg, Hanau, Langendreer, Bremen, Hanover and Paderborn in Germany and Brüx in Czechoslovakia.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-12-04
1944-12-05
1944-12-06
1944-12-07
1944-12-15
1944-12-16
1944-12-17
1944-12-18
1944-12-22
1944-12-23
1944-12-28
1944-12-29
1944-12-30
1944-12-31
1945-01-01
1945-01-02
1945-01-03
1945-01-14
1945-01-15
1945-01-16
1945-01-17
1945-01-22
1945-01-23
1945-01-28
1945-01-29
1945-02-01
1945-02-02
1945-02-03
1945-02-07
1945-02-08
1945-02-28
1945-03-01
1945-03-02
1945-03-05
1945-03-06
1945-03-07
1945-03-08
1945-03-09
1945-03-11
1945-03-12
1945-03-15
1945-03-16
1945-03-19
1945-03-20
1945-03-22
1945-03-23
1945-03-25
1945-03-27
1945-04-09
1945-04-10
1945-03-11
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
Wales--Glamorgan
England--Yorkshire
England--Nottinghamshire
Czech Republic
Czech Republic--Most
Germany
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Germany--Karlsruhe
Germany--Osnabrück
Germany--Ludwigshafen am Rhein
Germany--Ulm
Germany--Koblenz
Germany--Bonn
Germany--Gelsenkirchen
Germany--Osterfeld
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Merseburg
Germany--Duisburg
Germany--Stuttgart
Germany--Mannheim
Germany--Wiesbaden
Germany--Kleve (North Rhine-Westphalia)
Germany--Pforzheim
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Chemnitz
Germany--Dessau (Dessau)
Germany--Kassel
Germany--Essen
Germany--Dortmund
Germany--Hannover
Germany--Hanau
Germany--Bochum
Germany--Bremen
Germany--Paderborn
Germany--Kiel
Germany--Plauen
Germany--Stuttgart
Germany--Hannover
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LHallidayAH19250108
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
Lynn Corrigan
101 Squadron
1656 HCU
1668 HCU
aircrew
bombing
flight engineer
Halifax
Halifax Mk 2
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Lancaster Mk 1
Lancaster Mk 2
Lancaster Mk 3
RAF Bottesford
RAF Lindholme
RAF Ludford Magna
RAF St Athan
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1560/35630/BMillingtonRWestonFv1.2.pdf
8f0a70969cd59c55fef62f5a0d5a383d
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
Weston, Fred
F Weston
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
2016-11-13
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
Weston, F
Description
An account of the resource
20 items. The collection concerns Fred Weston DFC (1916 - 2012, 126909 Royal Air Force) and contains documents and photographs. He flew operations as an air gunner with 101 and 620 Squadrons.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Catherine Millington and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Air Gunner
Based around the WWII service of Fred Weston DFC RAFVR
Description
An account of the resource
A biography of Fred. In addition it includes histories of aircraft and squadrons he served in, Details are included of airfields he served at. Additionally there are biographies of various servicemen associated with Fred's squadrons and service.
At the end there is a biography of the officer in charge of Arnhem, Lt-Gen Sir Frederick Browning and his wife Daphne du Maurier.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Roger Millington
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2005-01
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Cambridge
England--Letchworth
Wales--Bridgend
Wales--Penrhos
Egypt--Heliopolis (Extinct city)
Singapore
France--Cherbourg
Netherlands--Eindhoven
France--Brest
France--Boulogne-sur-Mer
France--Dunkerque
Germany--Wilhelmshaven
France--Brest
Netherlands--Rotterdam
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Berlin
Italy--Turin
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
France--L'Isle-Adam
France--Quiberon
France--Boulogne-Billancourt
Germany--Essen
France--Le Creusot
Germany--Leverkusen
France--Caen
Netherlands--Arnhem
Norway
Germany--Wesel (North Rhine-Westphalia)
Belgium--Brussels
England--Rochester (Kent)
Northern Ireland--Belfast
England--Longbridge
France--Arras
England--Darlington
Italy--Genoa
England--Longbridge
Yemen (Republic)--Aden
Europe--Frisian Islands
Germany--Peenemünde
Germany--Nuremberg
Italy--Sicily
France--Normandy
Netherlands--Arnhem
Netherlands--Eindhoven
Netherlands--Nijmegen
Wales--Pwllheli
England--Yorkshire
England--Leicester
England--Sunderland (Tyne and Wear)
Scotland--Edinburgh
England--Rochford
England--London
England--Cornwall (County)
Scotland--Ayr
England--Friston (East Sussex)
England--Gravesend (Kent)
England--West Malling
England--Hailsham
England--Yelverton (Devon)
England--Bentwaters NATO Air Base
England--Great Dunmow
England--Heacham
England--Weybridge
Wales--Hawarden
England--Blackpool
England--Old Sarum (Extinct city)
England--Kent
England--Folkestone
England--Hambleton (North Yorkshire)
England--York
Scotland--Scottish Borders
England--Cambridge
England--Thurleigh
England--Darlington
England--Hitchin
England--Lancashire
Italy
France
Egypt
Germany
Belgium
Netherlands
Great Britain
Yemen (Republic)
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
England--Bedfordshire
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Devon
England--Durham (County)
England--Sussex
England--Essex
England--Herefordshire
England--Norfolk
England--Suffolk
England--Surrey
England--Wiltshire
England--Worcestershire
England--Leicestershire
England--Swindon (Wiltshire)
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Air Force. Coastal Command
Royal Air Force. Fighter Command
British Army
Wehrmacht. Luftwaffe
Royal Canadian Air Force
Royal New Zealand Air Force
Free French Air Force
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Personal research
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
85 sheets
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
BMillingtonRWestonFv1
1 Group
100 Group
101 Squadron
103 Squadron
105 Squadron
114 Squadron
139 Squadron
141 Squadron
148 Squadron
149 Squadron
162 Squadron
1657 HCU
1665 HCU
18 Squadron
180 Squadron
2 Group
208 Squadron
214 Squadron
239 Squadron
3 Group
301 Squadron
304 Squadron
342 Squadron
6 Group
6 Squadron
620 Squadron
7 Squadron
75 Squadron
8 Group
9 Squadron
90 Squadron
97 Squadron
99 Squadron
Advanced Flying Unit
air gunner
aircrew
B-17
B-24
B-25
bale out
Beaufighter
Blenheim
bombing
Bombing and Gunnery School
Boston
Caterpillar Club
Churchill, Winston (1874-1965)
crash
Distinguished Flying Cross
Distinguished Flying Medal
ditching
evading
final resting place
Gee
Gneisenau
H2S
Halifax
Harris, Arthur Travers (1892-1984)
Harvard
Heavy Conversion Unit
Hitler, Adolf (1889-1945)
Horsa
Hurricane
Ju 87
killed in action
Lancaster
Lysander
Manchester
Me 109
Meteor
mid-air collision
mine laying
Mosquito
navigator
Oboe
Operational Training Unit
P-51
Pathfinders
prisoner of war
propaganda
radar
RAF Bicester
RAF Biggin Hill
RAF Boscombe Down
RAF Bottesford
RAF Bourn
RAF Bradwell Bay
RAF Bramcote
RAF Chedburgh
RAF Chipping Warden
RAF Coltishall
RAF Drem
RAF Driffield
RAF Duxford
RAF Elsham Wolds
RAF Evanton
RAF Fairford
RAF Finningley
RAF Great Massingham
RAF Halfpenny Green
RAF Harwell
RAF Hendon
RAF Holme-on-Spalding Moor
RAF Honington
RAF Hornchurch
RAF Horsham St Faith
RAF Kenley
RAF Lakenheath
RAF Leconfield
RAF Leuchars
RAF Linton on Ouse
RAF Little Snoring
RAF Ludford Magna
RAF Manston
RAF Marham
RAF Martlesham Heath
RAF Mildenhall
RAF Newmarket
RAF Newton
RAF North Luffenham
RAF Oakington
RAF Penrhos
RAF Pershore
RAF Ridgewell
RAF Shepherds Grove
RAF Sleap
RAF Stradishall
RAF Tangmere
RAF Tempsford
RAF Tilstock
RAF Tuddenham
RAF Waterbeach
RAF West Raynham
RAF Woodbridge
RAF Wratting Common
RAF Wyton
Resistance
Scharnhorst
Special Operations Executive
Spitfire
Stirling
target indicator
Tiger force
training
Typhoon
V-1
V-2
V-weapon
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/923/28767/MLeeJR575842-180320-01.2.pdf
edc683f62e931df7aab8f5fc9df9b8b9
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
Lee, James Roy
J R Lee
Description
An account of the resource
23 items. Concerns James Roy Lee (b. 1923, 575842 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a flight engineer with 467 Squadron until he became a prisoner of war. Collection contains his flying log book, personal and official documents, correspondence, a history of 467 Squadron operations and photographs.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Marilyn Palmer 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
2018-03-20
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
Lee, JR
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
[underlined] 467 SQUADRON - R.A.A.F. [/underlined]
Operations from R.A.F. Bottesford and R.A.F. Waddington.
[underlined] ACKNOWLEDGMENTS [/underlined]
Grateful acknowledgment is made for the help with 463 and 467 Squadrons Registers to -
Mr. P. K. (Peter) Dale of Canberra, for his difficult and tedious job of photocopying the entire Operational Records Books.
Mr. Jock Ross, Curator of R.A.A.F. records, Air Historical Branch Dept. Defence, Canberra, for his untiring assistance and research.
Mr. M.G. (Max) Johnson of Brisbane, Qld., for his invaluable and untiring assistance single handed over many months in printing nearly 6,000 pages for the ten copies of each Register.
Mr. John Harrod, N.S.W. Branch 463/467 Sqdn. Assn. for his ever ready assistance and advice.
Mr. Stan Bridgeman of Welwyn Garden City, U.K. for his help and [inserted] ADDRESS OVER [/inserted] research in the U.K., and agreeing to be the Custodian of the Registers in England.
Not the least a long list of 463/467 Squadron Association people who have helped with advice and log book corrections.
Without the help and advice of these people, I would surely have quit when I had assembled my first notes and realised the magnitude of the task and the impossibility of it being really correct, due to the errors and omissions in Operational Record Books, in particular aircraft and numbers and replacements, then the omission of R.A.F. personal numbers and initials.
[underlined] INTRODUCTION [/underlined]
1) There are several points to note:
2) Page 1/2 - 467 Squadron’s history.
Page 3/5 - Crew information.
Page 6/7 - Squadron groundcrew.
Page 8/11 - Pilots Register.
Page 12/52 - Crewmans Register (see note below*)
Page 53/66 - Aircraft and crews lost.
Page 67/321 - Pilots pages with crews (Listed alphabetically).
* To find crewman, one looks up his name and then refers to his Pilot’s sheet
There are a number of individual contributions and personal stories which cannot be included in the Register. We propose to produce them in a separate folder in due course.
H.M. BLUNDELL.
[underlined] 463/467 Squadrons Historian [/underlined]
[underlined] Special Note [/underlined]
The register of operations cease, V.E. Day Europe 8-5-1945.
[underlined] 1985. [/underlined] There are a number of postings, in and out to the Squadron between 8-5-1945 and disbandment which are not recorded here.
[page break]
PAGE 1
[underlined] 467 SQUADRON - R.A.A.F. [/underlined]
[obscured word] Squadron was formed at SCAMPTON, LINCOLNSHIRE 7-11-42.
[obscured word] to BOTTESFORD by 30-11-1942. Moved to WADDINGTON 11-11-1943.
Bottesford Station Commanding Officers: G/C. SWAIN, F.R.O: OBE:DFC.
From 3.3.43. - G/C. McKECKNIE, W. N: DFC.
[underlined] 467 SQUADRON moved to WADDINGTON 12.11.43 [/underlined]
Waddington Station Commanding Officers:
16.4.43. G/C. S.C. ELWORTHY, GCB, CBE, DSO, MVO, DFC, AFC, MA.
31.3.44. G/C. D.W. BONHAM-CARTER, CB, DFC.
14.4.45. G/C. E.D. McK.NELSON, CB.
1.8.45. G/C. D.D. CHRISTIE, AFC.
24.8.45. G/C. A.E. TAYLOR.
467 SQUADRON COMMANDERS:
7.11.42. W/C. C.L. GOMM, DSO, DFC. - - - KIA 16.8.43.
19.8.43. W/C. J.R. BALMER, DFC, OBE - - - KIA 11.5.44.
12.5.44. W/C. W.L. BRILL, DSO, DFC & Bar - - Died 1964.
12.10.44. W/C. J.K. DOUGLAS, DFC, AFC. - - KIA 8.2.45.
9.2.45. W/C. E. le P. LANGLOIS - - KIA 3.4.45.
4.3.45. W/C. I.H. HAY, DFC. - - To disbandment.
467 STATION ADJUTANTS: F/L. BURFIELD-CARPENTER.
F/L. A.D. McDONALD (A18121); F/L. J.M.W. LOVE.
467 SQUADRON moved to RAF METHERINGHAM 16.6.45 and were disbanded there October, 1945.
[underlined] 467 STATISTICS COMPILED FROM OPERATIONAL RECORD BOOKS. [/underlined]
First Operational Sortie - 2/3.1.1943 - To FURZE - Minelaying.
Last Operational Sortie - 25/26.4.45 - To TONSBURG.
[underlined] OPERATIONAL SORTIES ATTEMPTED: [/underlined]
No. of a/c actually took off on operations: 3977
No. of Operational sorties completed: 3795
No. of Operational sorties failed: 182
[underlined] REASON FOR FAILURE OF SORTIE: [/underlined]
a/c failed to return - listed missing 105
a/c early return due to Engine Failure: 28
a/c early return due to Electrical Failure: 10
a/c [ three ditto marks] to Armament Failure: 9
a/c [ three ditto marks] to Oxygen Failure: 9
a/c [ three ditto marks] to Instruments, radio, intercom failure: 12
a/c [ three ditto marks] to Ice in flight & ice damage: 6
a/c [ three ditto marks] to Navigational Error: 3
182
No. of Sorties completed in a/c damaged by Enemy Action: 230
No. of Aircrew listed inOperational Record Books as flown on ops from 467 Sqdn, RAAF: (inc. RAF, RNZAF, RCAF): 1814
No. of Aircrew listed in ORB’s as War Casualty from 467 Sq: (includes RAAF, RAF, RNZAF, RCAF): 760
No. of whole crews posted to 467 Sq. for Ops: 258
No. of whole crews finished tour of ops - 30 or more: 74
No. of whole crews lost on Ops: 115
No. of whole crews still operating when hostilities ceased 8.5.45. and not tour expired: 31
No. of whole crews posted to other Squadrons during tour: 34
No. of whole crews with no Ops. before hostilities ceased: 4
No. of crews from 53 Base who flew on ops from 467 Sqdn and not listed as posted to 467 Sqdn. 6
[page break]
467 Squadron R.A.A.F. - CHANCE ?
Number of crews who flew on Operations from 467 Sqdn. = 257
Number of Operations completed by 467 Sqdn. = 3795
Average number of Operations flown by each crew 467 Sq. =14.76
Number of Lancasters flown by 467 Sqdn. =225
Number of Operations completed b 467 Sqdn. = 3795
Average number of Operations flown by each Lancaster = 16.8
Number of crews lost on Operations from 467 Sqdn. = 115
Number of crews posted in for Operations = 257
Chance of finishing a tour - 2.59
Number of personnel listed in Casualty List and their nationality:
R.A.A.F. 382; R.A.F. 355: R.C.A.F. 28: R.N.Z.A.F. 3.
[page break]
5
[obscured word] still on ops 8.5.45
[obscured letter] asch M G 25 8.5.45
Baker L W 21 8.5.45
Blair John 23 8.5.45
Burr R B 4 8.5.45
Coffey R 10 8.5.45
Conachty Vin 16 8.5.45
Dixon R D 12 8.5.45
Donaldson R 4 8.5.45
Emery N A 14 8.5.45
Fast D E 13 8.5.45
Findlay A C 13 8.5.45
Clark J B 24 8.5.45
Glaholm N 2 8.5.45
Goodall F C 18 8.5.45
Hancock J R 3 8.5.45
Hay I H A 7 8.5.45
Hunter Reg 25 8.5.45
Evans T E 25 8.5.45
Holbrook D J 18 8.5.45
Hudson HH 8 8.5.45
Hutchin A E 4 8.5.45
Jackson J C 10 8.5.45
Marcovitch M 4 8.5.45
Miller P K 3 8.5.45
Nissen C H 4 8.5.45
Palmer R R 11 8.5.45
Peirce P A 8 8.5.45
Pilkington G A 18 8.5.45
Morris Jim 21 8.5.45
Robinson G L 12 8.5.45
Ryan J F 1 8.5.45
Shanehan Peter 26 8.5.45
Stewart C F 6 8.5.45
Swift R A 18 8.5.45
Crews killed or lost in accidents
Allanby W V Crashed 6 3.1.45
Horton P K [ditto mark] 1 12.6.44
Nancarrow J [ditto mark] 0 3.8.43
Crews lost on ops 1.12.42 to 8.5.45 = 99
Crews finished a tour = 80
Crews posted out still operating = 24
Crews still operating 8.5.45 = 34
Crews with no ops 8.5.45 = 3
Captains lost 2Nd pilot = 6
Crews lost in accidents = 3
Station comanders [sic] on ops Sqdn crews = 2
Crews posted out during their tour
Barnett C W On loan from 207 1 9.10.43
Baker G F Posted 463 21 12.3.44
Byers V W Post 617 4 24.3.43
Dunn D C Post 463 12 25.11.43
Fayle A C Post 463 10 25.11.43
Fowler J W Posted 463 1 25.11.43
Hemsworth H Post 83 Sq PFF 14 19.3.44
Kell A E Post 463 14 25.11.43
Kingsford-Smith Post 463 5 25.11.43
Lawrence F Post 460 Sq 7 10.3.45
McEgan E F Post 97 PFF 9 20.8.43
Lock H B Post 463 26 25.11.43
Marks D J Post 97 SqPFF 14 4.5.43
Martin C J Post 463 17 25.11.43
Messenger C L Post 463 17 25.11.43
Nicoll G D Post 97 Sq PFF 5 20.8.43
Pedersen L R Post 463 8 8.2.45
Pond H S Post 97 Sq PFF 8 7.7.43
Roberts J Post 463 10 25.11.43
Ryan W P Post 97 Sq PFF 16 2.9.44
Saunders Alec Post 463 1 25.11.43
Schomberg C C Post 463 1 25.11.43
Scott W/C Post 51 Base 2 5.2.45
Tait J B W/C Film Unit 5 11.5.44
Crews with no ops 8.5.45
Diver-Tuck H 0 8.5.45
Gunson H A 0 8.5.45
Skinner D J 0 8.5.45
Captains lost 2nd Pilot no ops
Ambrose B L [ditto mark] 0 12.6.43
Inkster J M [ditto mark] 0 3.2.45
Eagle R W [ditto mark] 0 1.2.45
Mitchell J [ditto mark] 0 22.6.44
O,Driscoll J [ditto mark] 0 1.7.44
Smith A [ditto mark] 0 17.6.43
Station C/O flying ops Sqn crews
McKecknie G/C Bottesford 4 4.7.43
Bonham-Carter Waddington 5 21.2.45
[page break]
ED5
56 AIRCRAFT AND CREWS LOST FRON [sic] 467 Sq RAAF.
ED534
F/S R.W. Park A414118 KIA
Sgt G. Hopkins 1415465 KIA
Sgt N. J. McMahon A422243 KIA
F/S J. R. Chapman A414922 KIA
F/S J. R. McBean A409478 KIA
Sgt H. O. Miller A420566 KIA
F/S D. A. Reid A414080 KIA
To 467 15.7.43 Lost 29/30.7.43 1st Op Hamburg
DV2
JA901
F/O W.D Marshall A412821
Sgt R. North ?
Sgt M. P. Colvin 1562631
F/O A. T. Youdan 139963
Sgt A. Hallam 1083090
Sgt A. N. Bates 1335839
Sgt J.H. Cowan 1375464
To 467 20.7.43 Crash Landed 16.8.43 2d Op Milan Aircraft damaged and unable to gain height to recross the alps. LANDED Biskra north Africa. Crew safe. THE A/C eventually returned to 467 Sq.
DV
JA675
F/L J. M. Sullivan A404909 KIA
Sgt J. E. Newland 959576 KIA
F/O T. H. Entract 131770 POW
W/O R. E. Grange R54227 POW
Sgt K. L. Harvey 1211431 POW
Sgt D. Spurr 985455 KIA
Sgt A. P. Power 1396149 KIA
To 467 11.4.43 Lost 15/16.8.43 22d Op Milan
EE
ED998
W/C C. L. Gomm RAF 34123 KIA
Sgt J. R. Lee 904884 KIA
F/O T. J. Phillips 126448 KIA
P/O K. Gibson 137520 KIA
F/O A. H. Reardon A411520 KIA
P/O R. N. Pritchard 52099 KIA
W/O L. L. McKenny A416270 KIA
To 467. 7.11.42 Lost 15/16.8.43 24th Op 2d Tour Milan [asterisk mark]
[inserted] PO-N as in ‘HARRIS’ B.B.C. OUR A/C FOR 19 OPS. TAKEN BY W/C GOMM TO DUISBERG 12.5.43 [/inserted]
ED
LM 342
S/L A. S. Raphael RAF 68155 KIA
Sgt V. Smith 980905 KIA
Sgt F. Gray 1317456 POW
P/O R. G. Carter J15862 KIA
F/S D. Fielden 751496 POW
Sgt A. C. Brand 1351257 KIA
F/S F. B. Garrett 1154625 KIA
F/L M. H. Parry 126019 KIA 2d Bomb aimer
To 467 19.4.43 Lost 17/18.8.43 19th Op Peenemunde
E [indecipherable letter]
ED 764
P/O F. W. Dixon A412923 POW
Sgt L. Hayward 1464967 KIA
Sgt C. A. Bicknell 1388783 POW
Sgt E. W. Dickson 1445095 POW
Sgt P. Lowe 1218582 KIA
Sgt R. Hughes 1696212 POW Nobby met Ron Hughes in Cheltenham 197[indecipherable number]
Sgt R. Garnett 1451360 POW
To 467 13.4.43 Lost 17/18.8.43 21st Op Peenemunde
JB 124
P/O H. P. Vincent A416635 KIA
Sgt J. M. Jones 650138 KIA
Sgt F. G. McIntyre A420703 KIA
P/O W. G. Hurle A409411 KIA
F/S L. C. Fitzner A414667 KIA
F/S R. F. Holdaway 1259359 KIA
F/S D. P. R. Schubert A414602 KIA
To 467 15.7.43 Lost 23/24.8.43 5th Op Berlin
EE194
F/O M. R. Good A5303 KIA
Sgt J. A. Beck 641951 KIA
Sgt T. H. Hallam A414348 KIA
F/S B. Kerlin A413610 KIA
F/S A. P. Loxton A414710 KIA
Sgt W. E. Hogarth R149420 KIA
Sgt [obscured name] A417348 KIA
To 467 28.7.42 Lost 27/28.8.43 3d Op Nurnberg
[page break]
197
[obscured rank] GOMM. C. L. DSO.DFC. P.34123 C/O 7.11.42 467 SQ KIA 16.8.43
Sgt Lee.J.R E. 904884 16.8.43 KIA
Sgt Patmore. E. ? 15/17.1.43
F/L Craigie. R.A. E. 13/14.4.43
P/O Gibson.K. N. 137520 KIA 16.8.43
F/O Berisford. N. ? 30/31.1.43
S/L Evans. DFC N. ? 26/27.2.43 [inserted] - 5 GRP NAVIGATION STAFF [/inserted]
F/O Phillips.T.J. B. 126448 KIA 16.8.43
Sgt Dunbar.J.A. B.A424391 8/9.4.43
F/O Parry.M.M. B. ? 13/14.4.43
P/O Campbell.F.G. B. ? 16/17.4.43
F/O Reardon.A.H. W. A411520 KIA
F/O Spencer.D.H. W. ?
P/O Pritchard.R.N. G. 52099 KIA
P/O Hare.W.R. DFC G. 132290 16/17.1.43
F/L Betts.L.R. G. 115097 3/4.4.43 KIA Later not on 467 Sq
W/O McKenny.L.L. G. A416270 KIA
P/O Currie. G. ? 30/31.1.43
Sgt Brown.A. G. ? 3/4.4.43
16/17.1.43 Berlin W4823
23.1.43 Dusseldorf W4823
30/31.1.43 Hamburg W4823
13/14.2.43 Lorient ED699
26/27.2.43 Cologne ED530
1/2.3.43 Berlin PO.V.ED539
3/4.3.43 Hamburg ED539
5/6.3.43 Essen [inserted] ED524 [/inserted] No number
8/9.3.43 Nurnburg ED500
12/13.3.43 Essen ED651
3/4.4.43 Essen PO.F.ED737
8/9.4.43 Duisburg ED695
13/14.4.43 Spezia PO.M.ED547
16/17.4.43 Pilson PO.M.ED547
4/5.5.43 Dortmund PO.C.ED504
12/13.5.43 Duisburg PO.N.ED657
13/14.5.43 Pilson ED657
23/24.5.43 Dortmund W5003
21/22.6.43 Fredischaven ED998
23/24/.6.43 Spezia ED998
24/25.7.43 Hamburg PO.M.ED547
27/28.7.43 Hamburg ED992
7/8.8.43 Genoa ED530
15/16.8.43 Milan ED998
Cosme Lockwood Gomm RAF 34123 posted to command and form 467 Sq RAAF at Scampton 7.11.42, Gazeted [sic] DSO 11.6.43, missing on the 24th op off [sic] his 2nd tour 16.8.43. He led the shuttle raids on the industrial cities of Italy landing in North Africa and bombing Italy again on the return trip. One notable long trip he led bombed Fredichaven then flew on to Blida in Algeria, reloaded the A/C and bombed Spezia on the return trip.
4/5.5.43 Sgt Were. 2nd B/A to Dortmund with W/C Gomm.
12/13.5.43 Lt Dickson USAF Passenger to Duisburg with W/C Gomm
20/21.6.43 F/L Semmence.D.H. 2nd pilot to Fredrichaven and on to Blida with W/C Got
24/25.7.43 Sgt Park.R.W. 2nd pilot to HAMBURG with W/C Gomm
27/28.7.43 F/O Durston.I 2nd pilot to Hamburg with W/C Gomm
Note. There is no further reference in ORBs to F/L Semmence or Ltd [sic] Dickson USAF.
[inserted] P.T.O. [/inserted]
[page break]
[obscured word/s] the 11 supernumery [sic] crew that we took on their first op
7 were killed in action
2 Survived and
2 are not mentioned in the historis [sic]
2) The first 4 chaps returned to complete 2nd tour with 463 Squadron.
3) Des Sullivan ended op in May 1945 SQD LDR - D.SO. DFC.
4) P.O. N was shot down over Peenemunde 1943 while we were on leave.
[page break]
350
F/SGT. Sullivan.D.J P. 415192. To 467, 6.4.43. Tour Ex 31.10.43. 29 Alsace St Carine 6020 W.A.
SGT. Meluish.A.H. E. 156041
Sgt Coyne.J.A.I. B. 547130 27 Cedars Av Redditch Worcester.
SGT Wainwright.J.A. N. 1318811 Posted 29 OTU 31.10.43 99 Dorp St Karrifontein Cape Province South Africa.
Sgt Brodie. P.A. W. 1133622
Sgt Cole.J.K. G. 1444590
Sgt Wells.W. G. 1333704 23/24.5.43
Sgt Thompson. G. P. G. 1586246
13/14.4.43 F/S D. J. Sullivan 2nd pilot to Spezia with F/L Desmond
20/21.4.43 F/S D. J. Sullivan 2nd pilot to Stettin with F/L Desmond
26/27.4.43 Duisburg PO. N. ED764
30/4.1/5.43 Essen. ED764
4/5.5.43 Dortmund ED764
23/24.5.43 Dortmund ED764
25/26.5.43 Dusseldorf ED764
27/28.5.43 Essen ED764
29/30.5.43 Wuppertal PO. N. ED764
11/12.6.43 Dusseldorf W5003
12/13.6.43 Bochum PO. N. ED764
14/15.6.43 Ofer ausen [sic] ED764
16/17.6.43 Cologne PO. D. ED531
28/29.6.43 Cologne PO. N. ED764
3/4.7.43 Cologne ED764
8/9.7.43 Cologne ED764
24/25.7.43 Hamburg ED764
25/26.7.43 Essen PO. N. ED764
29/30.7.43 Hamburg ED764
2/3.8.43 Hamburg ED764
7/8.8.43 Genoa ED764
10/11.8.43 Nurnburg ED764
27/28.8.43 Nurnburg [inserted] PO. O. [/inserted] DV233
30/31.8.43 Munchen Gladbach DV233
31/8.1/9.43 Berlin DV233
3/4.9.43 Berlin DV233
27/28.9.43 Hanover JA902
3/4.10.43 Kassel JB121
26/27.4.43 Sgt Edwards 2nd pilot to Duisburg with F/S D. J. Sullivan
16/17.6.43 F/O Forbes. W. A. 2nd pilot to Cologne with P/O D. J. Sullivan
3/4.7.43 P/O Loftus. W.T. 2nd Nav to Cologne [ditto mark]
24/25.7.43 Sgt Kell.A. E. 2nd Pilot to Hamburg [ditto mark]
29/30.7.43 F/O Fry 2nd Nav To Hamburg [ditto mark]
7/8.8.43 Sgt Holmes.M.F. 2nd Nav Genoa [ditto mark]
27/28.8.43 F/S Fayle .E. A. 2nd pilot to Nurnburg [ditto mark]
30/31.8.43 F/S Farmer. W.T. 2nd pilot to Munchen Gladbach [ditto mark]
31.8.1/9.43 F/O Chappell.L 2nd Nav to Berlin …
3/4.9.43 Sgt McLeah 2nd pilot to Berlin …
27/28.9.43 F/S Roberts.J. 2nd pilot to Hanover …
A415192 S/L Sullivan D. J. Des and crew posted to 467 Sq Tour expired and posted to 1661 CU 31.10.43. 2nd tour as flight commander on 463 Sq. Refer 463 register.
Now retired and lives at the above address letters and information to Nobby, and always willing to help.
[inserted] SGT. WELLS “WENT SICK” ON 5/5/43 AND WE SAW HIM NO MORE. [/inserted]
[inserted] Have amended the ranks to those we held in 1943 PTO [inserted]
[page break]
248
F/O McIVER.K.A. DFC P. A412636. To 467 Sq 20-4-43. KIA. 3-10-43.
Sgt McLELLAND.A. B. Andrew. E. 626056 KIA 3-10-43
Sgt JERVIS.F.P. E. ? 28/29-6-43
F/S GALE.J.K. N. 1490465 KIA 3-10-43
F/S McGRATH. M.E. B. 1389498 Picked up in dingy [sic] O.K.
Sgt MacLEAN. C. W. 1330142 KIA 3-10-43
Sgt SHORT. R. G. 639991 KIA Body picked up at sea 27-10-43
F/S SHAW. F. W. G. 1321440 KIA Body picked up at sea 27-10-43
26/27-4-43 Sgt McIver. K. A. 2nd pilot to Duisberg with F/L E. K. Sinclair.
27/28-4-43 Deodars PO.M.ED547 12/13-7-43 Turin PO. N. ED764
4/5-5-43 Dortmund ED530 27/28-7-43 Hamburg ED530
12/13-5-43 Duisburg PO.W.ED546 2/3-8-43 Hamburg ED530
13/14-5-43 Pilsen ED530 9/10-8-43 Mannheim ED530
23/24-5-43 Dortmund ED530 10/11-8-43 Nurnburg ED530
25/26-5-43 Dusseldorf ED530 15/16-8-43 Milan ED530
27/28-5-43 Essen ED530 17/18-8-43 Peenemunde PO. V. ED539
29/30-5-43 Wuppertal ED530 22/23-8-43 Leverkusen PO. M. ED547
12/13-6-43 Bochum ED530 22/23-9-43 Hanover ED530
14/15-6-43 Oberhausen ED530 23/24-9-43 Mannheim ED530
16/17-6-43 Cologne ED530 27/28-9-43 Hanover ED530
28/29-6-43 Cologne ED530 29/30-9-43 Bochum ED657
3/4-7-43 Cologne PO. W .ED546 2/3-10-43 Munich ED530
8/9-7/43 Cologne PO. F .ED737
8/9-7-43 Sgt C. J.Smith 2nd pilot to Cologns [sic] With P/O McIver
27/28-7-43 F/S Chapman 2nd Nav To Hamburg [ditto mark]
2/3-8-43 F/S Morrison 2nd pilot to Hamburg [ditto mark]
9/10-8-43 P/O Youdan.A.T. 2nd Nav to Mannheim [ditto mark]
17/18-8043 F/O Ricketts.H. 2nd Nav to Peenemunde [ditto mark]
22/23—8-43 F/S Finch.A.M. 2nd pilot to Hanover [ditto mark]
27/28-9-43 Sgt Miller.J.W. 2nd Nav to Hannover [ditto mark]
A412636 Kenneth Archibald McIver DFC and crew posted to 467 Sq 20-4-43. The crew had a difacult [sic] tour all the way. Several times their A/C was flak damaged and returned on 3 engines. Attacking Hamburg and engine failed half way to the target, they pressed on and completed the attack. Attacking Cologne the pilot was wounded in the left arm and the A/C damaged they carried on and bombed the target. Attacking Munich 2/3-10-43 the crew encountered bad iceing [sic] and fuel consumption was very heavy.
Debriefing report from ORBs, F/S McGrath. M. E. 1389498, picked up alive in dingy [sic] 3-10-43. After attacking Munich 2/3-10-43. Only survivor.
Slight broken cloud low. Bombs released on E.T.A. from 20000 ft at approx 2235, ix4000, 84x30 inc, 600x4lb inc, Concentration of Inc and bombs exploding seemed fairly good. Trip very quiet no enemy A/C sighted. route flak free, no trouble encountered until petrol ran short (Cause unknown) except for heavy iceing. [sic] We ditched in the sea approx 25 miles of Beachy Head at approx 0150 Hrs.
Nobby Blundell has corresponded with Mr Bill Smith of Kilmarnock Ayrshire who is Sgt Andrew McClelland’s brother in law and helped in researching this crew.
[inserted] CREW DID NOT WEAR MAE WESTS BECAUSE OF SHORT DISTANCE IN AND OUT OVER THE SEA!!!
[page break]
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
467 Squadron RAAF - Operations from RAF Bottesford and RAF Waddington
Description
An account of the resource
Covers 467 Squadron formation at RAF Scampton and move to RAF Waddington. List station and squadron commanders and statistics from operational record books including first and last operational sorties, operational sorties attempted, reasons for failures of sorties and numbers of crews, total numbers of operations, aircraft and crews lost. List crews still on operations and details of crews killed or lost in accidents.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Nine page typewritten document
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
MLeeJR575842-180320-01
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Leicestershire
Germany
Germany--Hamburg
Italy
Italy--Milan
Germany--Peenemünde
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Essen
Germany--Duisburg
Germany--Dortmund
Germany
Germany--Friedrichshafen
Italy--Genoa
Italy--La Spezia
France
France--Lorient
Czech Republic
Czech Republic--Plzeň
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942-11
1943
1944
1945
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
Steve Christian
467 Squadron
aircrew
bombing of Hamburg (24-31 July 1943)
Bombing of Peenemünde (17/18 August 1943)
killed in action
RAF Bottesford
RAF Scampton
RAF Waddington