1
25
9
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1888/34883/MLutwycheCE561197-170703-04.2.pdf
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Lutwyche, C E
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-07-03
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lutwyche, CE
Description
An account of the resource
31 items. The collection concerns Warrant Officer Charles Eade Lutwyche (1910 - 1942, 561197 Royal Air Force) and contains photographs and documents. He flew operations as a navigator with 114 Squadron until he was killed 24 July 1942. <br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by David Lutwyche and catalogued by Barry Hunter.<br /><br /><span data-contrast="none" xml:lang="EN-GB" lang="EN-GB" class="TextRun SCXW129935705 BCX0"><span class="NormalTextRun SCXW129935705 BCX0">Additional information on<span> Charles Eade Lutwyche</span></span><span class="NormalTextRun SCXW129935705 BCX0"><span> </span>is available via the</span></span><span class="EOP SCXW129935705 BCX0" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559739":200,"335559740":276}"> </span><a href="https://losses.internationalbcc.co.uk/loss/114386/">IBCC Losses Database.</a>
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
561197 Warrant Officer Charles Eade (Bill) Lutwyche
Description
An account of the resource
A summary of Bill's Air Force Career. There are two copies.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
France--Perpignan
France--Nantes
Great Britain
England--Hove
France
England--Sussex
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
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
Two printed sheets
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
MLutwycheCE561197-170703-04,
MLutwycheCE561197-170703-05
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.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
114 Squadron
214 Squadron
49 Squadron
aircrew
killed in action
mid-air collision
Operational Training Unit
RAF Bicester
RAF Eastchurch
RAF Finningley
RAF Halton
RAF Horsham St Faith
RAF Leuchars
RAF Oulton
RAF Scampton
RAF Tangmere
RAF Thornaby
RAF Waddington
RAF Wattisham
RAF West Raynham
RAF Wyton
training
Wellington
-
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Wright, John Alfred
J A Wright
Description
An account of the resource
21 items. The collection concerns John Alfred Wright (1913 - 1986, 563242 Royal Air Force). It contains items associated with his marriage to Kathleen Burchell (Kay) several photographs, and notes about his service at RAF Graveley.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by John M Wright and catalogued by Trevor Hardcastle.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-01-30
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
Wright, JA
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
[underlined] JOHN ALFRED WRIGHT. [/underlined]
13 STIRLING STREET
BUCKLAND
PORTSMOUTH
BORN 4/5/1913 – 1915/16
109 STATION ROAD
COPNOR
PORTSMOUTH
1915/16 – 1929
JOINED R.A.F.
APPRENTICE AT RAF HALTON.
15/1/1929 – 12/10/1948
THE OLD MANOR HOUSE
PAPWORTH ST. AGENS
HUNTINGDON
1944 – 1945 (10 MONTHS)
109 STATION ROAD
COPNOR
PORTSMOUTH
9/1945 – 1946 (9/12 MONTHS.)
16 JENKINS GROVE
COPNOR
PORTSMOUTH
1946 – 1950
65 DELHI STREET
FRATTON
PORTSMOUTH
1950 – 1953
234 LOCKSWAY ROAD
MILTON
PORTSMOUTH
1953 – 1987
[page break]
[underlined] JOHN ALFRED WRIGHT. [/underlined]
[underlined] ENLISTED IN ROYAL AIR FORCE – [underlined] 15TH JANUARY 1929
[underlined] DISCHARGED [/underlined] 12TH OCTOBER 1948
[underlined] SERVICE NUMBER – [/underlined] 563242
[underlined] SERVED AT:- [/underlined]
3YRS 15/1/1929 – 5/1/1932 RAF HALTON, BUCKS.
2YRS 9M 5/1/1932 – 1/10/1934 RAF CALSHOT, HANTS.
2Y 7M 1/10/1934 – 6/5/1937824 (FSR) SQDN – H.M.S. HERMES.
VISITED – PORTSMOUTH, GIBRALTA, MALTA PORT SAID, SUEZ CANAL, ADEN, COLOMBO, SINGAPORE, HONG KONG, AMOY, WEI-HAI-WEI, CHINWANGTAO, PORT ARTHUR, KOBE, NAGASAKI, KOGOSHIMA, DAIREN, CHEMULO, TSINGTAO, SHANGHAI, ILOILO, MACASSAR, BALI, SURABAYA, SINGAPORE, COLOMBO, ADEN, SUEZ CANAL, PORT SAID, MALTA, GIBRALTA, PORTSMOUTH.
3Y 8M 6/5/1937 – 7/1/1941 12 SQDN HE. (IN THE FIELD)
5/1937 – 5/1939 “ ANDOVER - HANTS
5/1939 – 9/1939 “ BICESTER – OXON
9/1939 – 12/1939 “ BERRY-AU-BAC – FRANCE
12/1939 – 5/1940 “ AMIFONTAINE – FRANCE
5/1940 – 6/1940 “ ECHEMINES – FRANCE
6/1940 – “ SOUGE – FRANCE
6/1940 – 7/1940 “ FINNINGLEY – YORKS.
7/1940 – 8/1940 “ BINBROOK – LINCS.
8/1940 – “ THORNEY ISLAND – HANTS.
8/1940 – 7/1/1941 “ EASTCHURCH – KENT.
1YRS 7M- 7/1/1941 – 8/9/1942 35 SQDN RAF LINTON ON OUSE – YORKS.
2YRS 6M. 8/9/1942 – 3/3/1945 35 SQDN RAF GRAVELEY – HUNTS.
[page break]
[underlined] H.M.S. HERMES. [/underlined]
NOV. 1934 PORTSMOUTH
GIBRALTA
MALTA
PORT SAID, SUES [sic] CANAL,
ADEN
COLUMBO (CEYLON)
[deleted] JAN [/deleted] SINGAPORE
4/1935 HONG KONG.
AMOY
7/1935 WEI-HAI-WEI
CHINWANGTAO
[deleted] 5/1936 [/deleted] PORT ARTHUR (ROYJUN)
[inserted] 5/1936 [/inserted] KOBE, [inserted] 5/1936 [/inserted] NAGASAKI, [inserted] [deleted] 5/193 [/deleted] [/inserted] KOGOSHIMA, [inserted] 7/1936 [/inserted] DAIREN
CHEMULO (KOREA)
[inserted] 8/1936 [/inserted] TSINGTAO – [inserted] 10/1936 [/inserted] SHANGHAI, [inserted] 10/1936 [/inserted] AMOY
[inserted] 1/1937 [/inserted] ILOILO (PHILIPPINES)
[deleted] CELEBES ( [/deleted] MACASSAR – (CELEBES)
BALI
SURABAYA (JAVA)
SINGAPORE
COLOMBO (CEYLON)
ADEN, [deleted] POR [/deleted] SUEZ CANAL
PORT SAID
MALTA
GIBRALTA
[page break]
22/7/1940
1/1/1943
8/6/1944
1/1/1946
[page break]
MENTIONED IN DESPATCHES
22/7/1940
1/1/1943
8/6/1944
1/1/1946
6/5/1937 [underlined] 12 SQDN [/underlined] ANDOVER HANTS.
5/1939 BICESTER OXON
8/1939 BERRY-AU-BAC, FRANCE
12/1939 AMIFONTAINE, FRANCE
JAN/FEB 1940 DET. PERPIGNAN
5/1940 ECHEMINES, FRANCE
6/1940 SOUGE, FRANCE
6/1940 FINNINGLEY, YORKS
7/1940 BINBROOK LINCS
8/1940 THORNEY ISLAND HANTS.
8/1940 EASTCHURCH, KENT
9/1940 /9/1942 BINBROOK, LINCS.
[deleted] [underlined] H.M.S. HERME [/underlined] NOV 1934
GIBRALTA
MALTA
PORT SAID SUEZ CANAL RED SEA
ADEN
[inserted] 1934 [/inserted] COLUMBO (SRI LANKA)
[inserted] 1/1936 [/inserted] SINGAPORE
[inserted] 4/1935 3/1936 [/inserted] HONG KONG – AMOY – [inserted] 7/1935 [/inserted] WEI-HAI-WEI, CHINWANGTAO
[inserted] PORT ARTHUR (RYOJUN) 1936 – DAIREN – 7/1936 [/inserted] JAPAN – KOBE, NAGASAKI, KOGOSHIMA [deleted] CHINWANGTAO
CHINA – WEI-HAI-WEI, CHINWANGTAO [/deleted]
KOREA – CHEMULPO
CHINA – [inserted] 8/1936 [/inserted] TSINGTAO, [deleted] AMOY [/deleted] [inserted] 10/1936 [/inserted] SHANGHAI, [inserted] 10/936 [/inserted] AMOY
PHILIPPINES – [inserted] 1/1937 [/inserted] ILOILO
CELEBES. – MACASSAR
BALI
JAVA – SURABAYA
SINGAPORE
COLOMBO
ADEN, PORT SAID, MALTA, GIB. [/deleted]
[page break]
JOINED RAF. 15/[deleted]1/129 [/deleted] 1929 [underlined] NO. 563242 [/underlined]
[deleted] JOINED [/deleted] RAF 4/5/1931 19YR 9M.
3YR 15/1/1929 RAF HALTON
2YR 9M 5/1/1932 CALSHOT
2YR 6M 1/10/1934 824 (FSR) SQN HMS HERMES
1M 1/4/1937 [deleted] 12 [/deleted] H.M.S. HERMES
3YR 8M 6/5/1937 12 SQN HE. IN THE FIELD
1YR 7M 7/1/1941 35 SQN RAF LINTON ON OUSE YORKS.
2YR 6M. 8/1942 “ RAF GRAVELEY HUNTS
10M 3/3/1945 SHQ. GRAVELEY.
10D 14/1/1946 LPDC
15D 24/1/1946 ACSEA
1YR 2M. 11/2/1946 H.Q.(U) NO. 1 GROUP NO. 1 COMMUNICATIONS FLIGHT PERSHAWAR
2W 29/3/1947 BRD WORLI
5W 15/4/1947 UK.
2M 20/5/1947 IPHU
3M 5/7/1947 8042SE
5M 15/10/1947 ASWDU THORNEY ISLAND.
5M 26/5/1948 ASWDU HQ. BALLYKELLY
12/10/1948 DISCHARGE.
AIRCRAFT APPRENTICE [deleted] 31/12/31 [/deleted] 15/1/29
AC2 13/130
AC1
CORPORAL 1/1/39
TEMP SARGEANT [sic] 1/12/40
TEMP F. SARGEANT [sic] 1/9/42
SUBSTA F “ 2/47
LS & GC MEDAL
1939 – 45 STAR.
DEFENCE MEDAL
WAR MEDAL 1939 – 45
[page break]
10M 3/3/1945 – 14/1/1946 SHQ. RAF GRAVELEY – HUNTS.
10D 14/1/1946 – 24/1/1946 LPDC – INDIA
15D 24/1/1946 – 11/2/1946 ACSEA – INDIA
1YR. 2M 11/2/1946 – 29/3/1947 H.Q (U) NO. 1 GROUP – NO 1. COMMUNICATIONS FLIGHT, PERSHAWAR, INDIA.
2W 29/3/1947 – 15/4/1947 BRD, WORLI. (TRANSIT CAMP) INDIA BOMBAY
5W 15/4/1947 – 20/5/1947 U.K.
2M 20/5/1947 – 5/7/1947 IPHU.
3M 5/7/1947 – 15/10/1947 8042SE
5M 15/10/1947 – 26/5/1948 ASWDU. THORNEY ISLAND. HANTS
5M. 26/5/1948 – 12/10/1948 ASWDU HQ. BALLYKELLY, N/IRELAND
15/1/1929 – AIRCRAFT APPRENTICE
13/1/1930 – AC2.
- AC1.
1/1/1939 – CORPORAL
1/12/1940 – TEMP SARGEANT. [sic]
1/9/1942 – TEMP. FLIGHT SARGEANT. [sic]
2/1947 – SUBSTANTIVE FLIGHT SARGEANT. [sic]
LONG SERVICE & GOOD CONDUCT MEDAL
1939 – 1945 STAR
DEFENCE MEDAL
1939 – 1945 WAR MEDAL
MENTIONED IN DESPATCHES –
22/7/1940
1/1/1943
8/6/1944
1/1/1946
[page break]
12 SQDN
HAWKER HINDS – 1938 – FAIREY BATTLES
35 SQDN
HANDLEY PAGE HALIFAX, 3/1944 – LANCASTERS.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
John Alfred Wright's life story
Description
An account of the resource
Brief but detailed notes of John Alfred Wright's life and Royal Air Force service, places he lived and the dates, stations that he served at, ranks held, medals awarded.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Eight hand written pages
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
MWrightJA563242-180130-010001, MWrightJA563242-180130-010002, MWrightJA563242-180130-010003, MWrightJA563242-180130-010004, MWrightJA563242-180130-010005, MWrightJA563242-180130-010006, MWrightJA563242-180130-010007,MWrightJA563242-180130-010008
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
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.
12 Squadron
35 Squadron
Battle
ground crew
ground personnel
Halifax
Lancaster
RAF Bicester
RAF Binbrook
RAF Eastchurch
RAF Finningley
RAF Graveley
RAF Halton
RAF Linton on Ouse
-
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Wells, Ray
R G Wells
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
2017-04-03
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Wells, RG
Description
An account of the resource
51 items. The collection concerns (1686349 Royal Air Force) and contains his log book, documents and photographs in a separate album. He flew operations as a flight engineer with 158 Squadron. <br /><br /><a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2029">Wells, Ray. Album</a><br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Carole Dukes 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
List of Ray Wells' RAF Stations
Description
An account of the resource
A list kept by Ray of stations that he served or visited.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Ray Wells
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Two handwritten sheets
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
MWellsRG1686349-170403-020001,
MWellsRG1686349-170403-020002
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--Sheffield
England--London
England--Scarborough
England--Torquay
England--Liverpool
England--Diss
England--Hull
England--Ely
England--Gatwick
Germany
England--Devon
England--Kent
England--Norfolk
England--Surrey
England--Lancashire
England--Yorkshire
England--Kent
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.
RAF Catterick
RAF Coltishall
RAF Eastchurch
RAF Hornchurch
RAF Leconfield
RAF Lissett
RAF Riccall
RAF St Athan
-
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050ec2c145fb98c267b86c32860b5151
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722c20116026475658f51dc3399f87dd
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/227/3372/ACharltonR160720.1.mp3
3341eead56faa2593f39be1ed6a64a1f
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
Charlton, Raymond
Raymond Charlton
Ray Charlton
R Charlton
Description
An account of the resource
Two items. An oral history interview with Raymond "Ray" Charlton (1815764 and 201593 Royal Air Force) and a memoir. He completed a tour of operations as a flight engineer with Squadron 57, from RAF East Kirkby.
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
2016-08-05
2016-07-20
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
Charlton, R
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
PL: Hello, it’s Pam Locker and I’m in the home of Mr Ray Charlton of ****. So, if I can just start Ray by saying an enormous ‘thank you’ on behalf of the International Bomber Command Memorial Trust for agreeing to talk to us today, and I thought we’d perhaps start by talking a bit about your family and how you got involved with Bomber Command in the first place.
RC: I am one of five children to the Charlton family. I am the middle one. At the time of the war I’d just turned fifteen and then as it crept along to seventeen and a bit I wanted to join up in Bomber Command. My mother was absolutely [emphasis] against it and would not sign the admittance form, agreement form, so she said ‘You can wait’. So I had to wait ‘til I was eighteen and then I went in. I was sent along to London, Lords (Lords Hill I think it is called), flats there that had just been completed for upgrading. And then I was selected to go to Paignton in Devon and enjoyed that from the start, by the sea, living in a bed and breakfast apartment, run by the RAF of course, not by [unclear] the cooks and everything. But the main hotel in the town, in the village, was used as the headquarters where we dined and everything else, meetings. I found my initial test of weather. I could not for the life of me remember one set of clouds so they sent me off to be re-mustered. I finished up at the Isle of Sheppey, just outside London as you know, and then we had interviews one after another and I decided I’d train as a flight engineer and then from there I was posted up to ‒ now I’ve got it down somewhere ‒ and finished up at Bridlington and then from there it was down the west coast, east [emphasis] coast, to, er , ‒ until we passed out. And then, just to make things easy for everyone, I fell ill with pneumonia, about a fortnight before the exams so they had to keep me back until I recovered. After that I had to wait until the next intake to take the exams, which I had to join, to join with them to do the same exam. And we finished up being selected as trainee flight engineers and we were shipped off to South Wales, St Athans, to do a six months course. Twenty-six weeks of subject, each one taking one week except for the engines which was two weeks and, er, now ‒.
PL: So, did any of your other siblings go into the Forces?
RC: Yes. On one of the evenings attending the NAAFI a Canadian recruit who joined the RAF pulled out a roll of notes and in the queue next to us was a chappie with his eyeballs hanging down, so absolutely flustered. There was over one hundred pounds in a roll of notes. Apparently his father sent him ninety pounds a month to help him to live. Anyway, that night we’d all gone to bed the Military Police walked in, shut all the blinds up, and turned all the lights on and said, ‘Stand by your bed and your lockers’ and I said to the young Mo who stood near me, ‘What the matter?’. He said, ‘Shut up’ and in the end he said, ‘There’s been a robbery’. So I said, ‘Oh dear’ so I said, ‘Well. I don’t want to be funny but think of this as my bed, go into the next billet in the same position as this is’ (‘course they’re all in lines). I said [unclear]. Anyway they disappeared and then we were told we could go to sleep. Next morning I was sent for by the station commander, ‘How did you know that chappie was responsible?’ I said, ‘I didn’t’. So he [?] said, ‘I just didn’t like his absolute horror at seeing so much money, sheer delight to hold it’. So, he says, ‘Well, that was the money that was stolen’. So I said, ‘Oh thank goodness’. He said ‘Well, I’ll tell you this, you know the ruling here, if you get 70% you’ll be recommended for a commission. If you get 65% you will have [emphasis] a commission. So, I said, ‘I don’t want one, various personal reasons’. Anyway, he came out at the end of the exams and I’d got 64 ½ % because the day before was the final exam, oral, and the sergeant said to me, ‘You’re a devil. You know the answers and you’ve given me some wrong ones’. He said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘That’s my reason’. So he said, ‘Well, I don’t know what to give you, so many marks or so many marks’ and I chose the lower, the lower, number he mentioned and that was put on a piece of paper one and a half inches square which I had to take to the station commander’s office and hand it in and I put it on his desk after the normal salute. He said, ‘Is that all you’ve got? Who did this?’ I said, ‘Sergeant So-and-so’ and he bawled down the telephone, ‘Sergeant So-and-so here now’ and he came in and he says, ‘Why did you give this man so many marks?’ He says, ‘Well, that’s what he asked for’ [laughs]. He said, ‘I wanted to give him far more but’ he says, ‘I know he knew the answers but he gave wrong answers deliberately’. Anyway, he says, ‘I want you to alter it. I says, ‘He’s not to’ and refused to let him alter the figure. So I was left and I was ‒, I finished up, as Sergeant.
PL: Can you explain why you made that decision? Or if it’s personal that’s fine.
RC: My family was going through a very financial tight period. My father had lost his farm and prices for what he’d got fetched the lowest you could ever get and he refused to be made a bankrupt. He didn’t want the indignity of being a bankrupt, silly old devil. But anyway, he said he’d pay back every penny he owed and one of his brothers, he owed about £100 and he was the worst one to pay back. He demanded [unclear] until every penny was paid back. Anyway, it stuck and I was posted off to a bomber command, first of all at Swinderby on Stirlings (horrible tumbly things) but then on to East Kirkby where we started our bombing trips.
PL: I’m recommencing with Raymond Charlton.
RC: I’m Raymond Charlton. Now I’ve forgotten where I was. No, I can’t pick it up.
PL: You’ve just gone to East Kirkby.
RC: Well, before I got there I was asked, no, I’m jumping ahead. No, we went to East Kirkby and we were crewed up. Four Australians, the pilot, navigator, bomb aimer, and wireless operator were from different parts of Australia and the mid upper gunner came from Loughborough and the rear gunner came from Norfolk. I can’t tell you no more else. He was the baby of the crew. He was only nineteen. I was an old man of twenty. It was three weeks after I finished flying I became an old man of twenty-one. And then the fun starts. I was sent along to be re-graded for a job but being a VR, not many people know about this, the Air Force could not post you anywhere without your permission or change your job without permission of you. Er, it’s not flowing.
PL: So, tell me about East Kirkby. What was it like there?
RC: East Kirkby was very flat, typical flat Lincolnshire field. When the wind blew there was nothing to stop it. The snow came. The only thing that stopped it was your buildings. Our Nissan hut was completely blocked in one end. We had to use the back end and the floor was lino covered and in the winter months it used to be awash. So how we survived that I’ve no idea. And then of course they decided a very good frost put the kybosh on it. One tap only worked and that was in the cookhouse. Taps all over the camp wash rooms and such like were all frozen. So it was back to ‒
PL: Very uncomfortable.
RC: Very uncomfortable, yes.
PL: And did you share with the rest of your ‒ the rest of your group you were with or with others?
RC: Only the crew. We were put in a Nissan hut which housed two crews. Fourteen of you. And then, unfortunately, it appeared the other crew didn’t come back from a trip and then that happened on one or two occasions so they decided, as the bomb aimer put it, we’ve given everybody the jinx. So they wouldn’t let another crew come back in. They filled that bed up with the instrument repairer. He was a funny chap. Every time an aircraft went out and we were at home he was on his own but when the aircraft ‒, when we were not flying we had to sit up while all of them came back and landed. Well we’d never heard that noise before but he didn’t wake up at all. Then suddenly a tinkle bell went and it was an alarm clock in his kit bag and he woke up. So I says, ‘He never hears the aircraft, only tinkle bells’ but he was a nice chap to work with and did well. Then, of course, when we finished flying, I was posted off to a recruitment camp and they were trying to find us with jobs. First of all it was a young pilot officer still wet behind the ears, then a flight lieutenant, flying officer then a flight lieutnent , then a squadron leader. Then a wing commander came in and says, ‘You are causing trouble’. I says, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘You won’t make up your mind’. I said, ‘I will. I will not take a clerk’s job’. ‘Not even a clerk SD (Special Duties)? ‘No’ I says, ‘I’ll be a clerk when I’m demobbed. I don’t want to be a clerk now’. He says, he went on, ‘Well, the RAF regiment is recruiting officers. Would you be interested?’ I says, ‘Well, I could be’. He says, ‘You’re a funny chap. Three times you’ve refused to have a commission. Now you’re saying you don’t mind’. ‘Well, it’s a different situation isn’t it? When I was flying I didn’t want a commission’. I said, ‘How would I have gone from St Athans as a trainee flight engineer to join a crew, all of them sergeants. How would I feel as a pilot officer?’ I said, ‘That’s one of the reasons why I refused to do it.’ The there was another occasion when three of us were invited to the adjutant’s office to fill in a form. When we finished it I said, ‘Can I have my form back?’ He said, ‘The CO’s not signed it yet. He’s not back ‘til four o’clock’. I said, ‘I’ll have the form now’. So he gave me the form, the adjutant came into the room and I tore it up. I said, ‘This is for a commission and I don’t want it’. Then, of course, oh I forget. What was it? Yes, yes, the pilot said to me one day after muster (while we were flying this is). He says, ‘Can we go for a walk round the perimeter?’ He said, ‘I want to talk to you’. I said, ‘Am I in trouble?’ He said, ‘No, no, no. The CO wants you to change crews and go fly with him, the wing commander.’ I said, ‘Like hell!’ He said, ‘What’ll I tell him?’ I said, ‘Tell him to go to hell!’ Well, apparently he did [laughs]. ‘Cause I met him thirty-odd years later and I says, ‘I don’t expect you remember me’. He said, ‘I do. You’re the one who refused to fly with me. Go to hell!’ He said, ‘Why didn’t you want to?’ I said, ‘I just didn’t want to’. And then I said, ‘I’ve now taken it and come back in the RAF regiment as a Flight Lieutenant so now I’m happy’. I said, ‘Things are straight at home and everything else.’
PL: So, tell me about the relationship you had with your crew.
RC: It was a very, very, very friendly, easy to get along with crowd. Never any trouble. The only trouble we ever had was with the mid upper gunner. He called out one day, ‘My [?] heel was on fire’. His electrically heated suit had set fire at the heel. The connection had so the pilot said, ‘Go and sort him out’. Of course, being dogs body I went down to the mid upper gunner, took his shoe off, his sock off, put a dressing on his heel, ‘cause it was a horrible smell. Burning flesh is not very pleasant. Anyway I put his shoes back on and socks, put him in his perch and I says, ‘Get on with it and shut up’. Anyway, I hadn’t been back many minutes in my position when he said ‘It isn’t half draughty here’. So the pilot in very sharp terms and in terms I’d never heard before, ‘Go and sort him out once and for all and shut him up’. So, I went back and said, ‘What a matter?’ He said, ‘Well, when I sit under this I get a draught on my neck’. So I put my fingers up behind his head and they went straight through a hole. It could only be a bullet hole but I wasn’t going to tell anybody. Anyway, I said, ‘Don’t turn side wards unless you have to, you know, need to move, turn side wards, and you won’t feel it.’ When I got back to the pilot’s position he said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘Shush’, he said, ‘I want to know’. So I went back and said, ‘Bullet in the dome, bullet hole in the dome. Just one in the back’. And then when we landed the bomb aimer knew. He heard me say to the ground crew, ‘You need a new canopy. It’s gone.’ So he says, ‘We’d better go straight back to the hospital ‘cause he’s that bloomin’ thick the bullet’s probably still in his head’. We were really nice to each other normally but that was the worst remark I’d heard about any of them. And we just didn’t bother. But anyway, they changed the thing and, of course, just before then he’d insisted on doing one of my jobs, which was to dipstick the petrol tanks, but on a frosty morning I told him where to walk on the wing. I said, ‘Don’t go to the right or to the left. Keep on that line’. What did he do? He stepped over to the right and then you saw him sliding down the wing. It’s only fifteen feet high and when we got in the aircraft he says, ‘My left wrist hurts’ and I put it in a splint, sat him in a turret and said, ‘Work your right hand and keep your left hand steady’ and I said, ‘You’re all right’. Anyway when we landed we said, ‘We’d better go back to hospital with him’ and they took him there and the wing commander came in and said, ‘You’d better find a new gunner’. He said, ‘We’re a three months repair job - compound fracture’. Now of course sitting there working the turret wouldn’t do any good at all but he had no option. But he was an ex-boxer so you know how intelligent they are [laughs].
PL: So, what about your missions. Tell me a little bit about your tours.
RC: Well, most tours are, most of the tour, were without any remark you can pass. One to Munich once, after climbing Mont Blanc, which is twenty-four thousand feet, we couldn’t go over the top. We had to go round it. While we were getting near to the target the bomb aimer, bomb leader, who controlled where we dropped bombs said, ‘Hold back chaps. Do not drop yet. My boys are down posting the letters in the letter boxes. If anyone drops a bomb you’ll kill one or two of them’. Anyway, in the end he says, ‘Right chaps, boys’. But to get there we’d have to turn out and then back in the crowd. Well you know what it’s like trying to cross a busy road from a side road. You’ve got to wait for a space and that’s what we had to do, wait for a space between all the aircraft going in to the target. We got there, did the necessary, and went home. And then, on another occasion, oh dear, that’s gone.
PL: What did he mean, ‘putting the letters in the letter box’?
RC: They were flying that low to put markers down and to cover any not right, not in the right position to put colour on to cancel it. But they were flying at about fifty feet above house tops. The Lancaster going round and round directing them what to do, where to drop one and he controlled the rest of us. Now, what was another occasion? I had three occasions when the ‒ No, won’t come.
PL: Can you remember where you were sent on your missions?
RC: Well, that was to Munich. And then one day waking up in the morning the bomb aimer said ‘Oh dear, we’ve had it tonight, chop [?] We’re going to chopper [?]. We were shot down over the target.’ Now, funnily enough I’d had a dream myself and it was his remarks that reminded me of it. They always said unless you have a remark, a remarkable namesake you don’t know it, know what the target was, dream was. And I’d had a dream. In fact when we were over the English Channel I pointed to the navigator on his map where we would cross on the way out and on the way back. I said, ‘We shall cross there on the way back’ and I saw every river, every railway line and every forest area in this trip and then when we got over, over the target, I suddenly saw a black spot at, what we’d call ten past two. Look at your watch and look at ten past two. And I said, ‘Now watch it’ and all of us were watching that (the pilot was too busy). All six of us were watching that black spot area and it became closer and I said, ‘Well, that’s it’ and we did the necessary cork screw dive and with that he, this object just flew away. It was a German night fighter, realised we’d spotted him and turned away to look for someone else. But I can’t think ‒ there was three occasions. Never mind, they won’t come.
PL: So, you stayed with the same crew throughout your time?
RC: The crew was with us until we lost the mid upper gunner and then we swapped to Bob, Bob Mott, and he fitted in absolutely marvellous. The pilot and I selected him from the initial conversation ‘cause I said to Tommy, ‘This is the one’. We’d seen one but didn’t like him and then we saw another and then we told the third to go back to duties. And he fitted in as if he’d been with us all the time. We didn’t even realise it was a different man. Just the fact he just had a slightly different voice but the same attitude. We were all keen on doing a job. I’ll always remember one new crew came in to fill up a space, the other space on our billet, and they went out on fighter ‒, fighter affiliation. That’s where a Spitfire armed with a camera attacks you to see what reaction you had. And the mid upper gunner said, ‘He sat on his rest bed telling the pilot what to do’, and I said to our pilot, ‘What do you think of that?’ He said, ‘Not much’ and I said, ‘I think even less of it. How many do we give him?’ And we both agreed one or two trips and then the next night I was put on to fly in his place on their first trip because their engineer had fallen sick and I said, ‘I’m not going to go’ so they threatened me with a court martial.
PL: Why was that?
PL: Lack of moral fibre and I said I’d rather die a coward than live, rather live a coward than die as a stupid idiot and anyway they went off ‒ nobody thing. The next night we were sent on this trip with this same crew to go together in a thing. They didn’t come back. On their first trip they didn’t came back. But what do you expect with an attitude like that in training? We said they didn’t deserve to live but apparently the bomb aimer said we had got a name, putting a jinx on people, because the pilot and I used to say, ‘Give them five trips’, ‘Give them four trips’, and they never went beyond it. You knew by just how they behaved what chance they had.
PL: Was there a lot of superstition?
RC: I think there was a lot of ‒, yes, a lot of people carried things in their pockets, mementos from the family to cover, to guard them. It’s like, we were sent off one day to some oil fields in Poland. Now, on the way out from England all our instruments failed. Of the six main instruments only two worked. We’d got height and speed but not for wing movement or height to ground and we struggled on. The cloud was very heavy. We didn’t see where we were going. When we crossed the ‒, Norway and what not, what do you call that area? I can’t think of the area. Denmark and what not. When we crossed over there not one visible sign of any coastline so we didn’t know where we were. Poor old navigator had to do everything by dead reckoning and we flew off and after a while, flying ages (it was a nine hour trip), the pilot, navigator, said, ‘We must be somewhere near’ and we looked down and we saw some flares about fifty miles behind us. I said, ‘We’ve come too far’. So, of course, we turned back and what we saw my heart jumped because the flak was so dense, looking at a wall of flak, and we had to go in a circle and turn and believe it or not it was an arch like that and we flew under the arch and they said, when we were debriefed, ‘No bullet holes?’ No, not one. He said, ‘You’re the only one’. He said, ‘Have you been on the same trip?’ We said, ‘Well, we’ll prove that when the air camera shot of where the bombs dropped’ and it did give a very clear shot. We were over the target, the oil fields in Poland. Of course Gerry was very short of oil so it was necessary to keep it away from him. But, er, its, we never did, never did solve why the instruments failed. They blamed me, thinking I’d not put on, or removed, the protection of the tube letting the air in. It’s like just a hole in a pipe which told the instruments what to do, air pressure, and everything was registered. It was the six, and there’s two of them, instruments just like those. There was six of them in a block in every aircraft you could see, still is, and everybody accused me of not removing the protection which was on [unclear] the ground. Take it when you go flying, put it in your bag, just a plastic canvas tube cover. But no, that was alright, when we got there, and that was it. Never did find out why it failed. Then there was one funny trip, coming back, just after we’d left the target, I said to the pilot, ‘My oil drum, oil tank, petrol tank, on the wing, starboard side, looks a bit low’. ‘Double check and give me your readings’, so I sat and did all my calculations again. I said, ‘No, I’m fifty gallons short on starboard’. Well, he said, ‘We’ll press on’. Now, we didn’t know what it was. It could have been a hole in the tank and it sealed itself. They did that, they sealed themselves if there was just a small damage, or not. Anyway, I did a ten minute reading every time from then until we landed and as we came into land they didn’t want us to land, they wanted us to go away to some crash ‘drome. The pilot refused flat, ‘Not going, land here or else’. Anyhow, they allowed us in but we had to park somewhere way over, way away from where we normally parked. So, what did they do then? Put an armed escort on it until everything was checked. They recharged the tanks with some petrol and proved that I was very low. I’d only got twenty-six gallons left in both two tanks, which was just about enough to land on. Anyway ‒.
PL: Did they ever find out what the problem was?
RC: No, I still say they didn’t put it in but the petrol boys had a knack, a knack of filling their forms in that nobody could understand. But I don’t think they would do it deliberately. But it never did resolve itself. But the wing commander was very cross over it ‘cause we’d landed that much earlier than we should‘ve done and also not having the petrol right and my form which was normally within fifteen gallons of what it should be was way out. But still there we are.
PL: What was a crash drum? Did you say crash drum?
RC: Crash ‘drome [emphasis]. Aircraft ‒. There’s one in Norfolk. Eight aircraft could land at the same time on the wet. It was a special ‘drome built for crashing on. No aircraft normally use it. You landed and then they pulled you inbetween the trees out of the way so nobody could land at the same spot and it was about six or seven that could land at the same time. It was fantastic really. But he wanted us to go to another ‘drome that was prepared to let us aircraft land if they were not busy. But he refused to even consider it. But having got back it all blew over, but no ‒.
PL: Tell me a little about your job as flight engineer.
RC: Well, it just, my job was to make sure the engines were absolutely lined up with each other, to synchronise all four engines along with the pilot’s help. He’d do two and I’d do two and then we’d join the two inners to make sure they were together and naturally without any [unclear] he was shorter than me. He couldn’t reach all the levers. So if he wanted to, er, put some exhaust, acceleration [emphasis], on he’d have to go down, I’d [emphasis] have to go down and lift it up and hand it over to him to use, to ‒. ‘Cause when we first met he wanted to control all the engine’s controls, but I said, ‘No you don’t. I control those. That’s how I’d been trained’ and after a while he accepted it ‘cause he realised we couldn’t reach half of them. He was too low for him to reach but we never did fall out. My job, well you could say it was getting boring [unclear] ‘cause nothing happened. We never had any false alarms, never any fuses, we just went and we came back and we used to hand the aircraft over to the ground crews. Nothing to report, just clean it up, you know, just check it over. The only time we had any trouble we had to land at an aerodrome called Tarrant Rushton and I said to the ground crew there that had been allocated to our aircraft, ‘I’ll see you in the morning at eight o’clock. Don’t touch a thing’. Well, I got there at eight o’clock and he said, ‘I’ve done it Sergeant’. I said, ‘Have you?’ He said, ‘Yes’. All he had to do was to top up the oil, coolant and make sure the petrol level was right but he said he’d done it all and had checked, it was alright. We took off and I said to the pilot, ‘I don’t like the sound of our outer engine’. I said, ‘She keeps surging and easing off and surge again’. He said, ‘If you want to switch it off I’ll let you switch it off and we’ll go home on three’. I said, ‘No, we’ll keep it running and I’ll keep my eye on it’ and we did. Oh, ah [background noises] and we did, damn you [addressed to a pet?]. Yes, I says, when we got out, I says to the ground crew, our ground crew, he was a sergeant, Corporal Scott. The other one was an aircraft man, he was English, and much younger but he was very keen and very careful. But the engineer, Scott, was absolutely brilliant. I said to him, I said, ‘I don’t like the sound of that engine. She’s surging’. He said, ‘I’ll look at it’. ‘Course, when we went to be looked after he would start up the engine and I went back to him after my breakfast and the engine was out and he was working on the connections of the [unclear]. I said, ‘What’s the matter?’ He said, ‘Some bloody fool has put oil in the coolant and coolant in the oil’. I said, ‘Oh, has he?’ So I went straight back to the wing commander, I said, ‘I want that (and I got his name you see), I want this bloody idiot’. Shh shut up [addressed to a pet in the room?]. ‘I want this idiot. (I called him a bloody idiot.) Charge him’. I said, ‘He could have killed us’. He said, ‘He what?’ I said, ‘He filled up the [unclear] one engine. He put oil in the coolant and coolant in the oil.’ And yet on their lids they’ve got [unclear] of that size and right across it was these letters OIL or coolant CLT. So how [unclear] I wouldn’t know, lack of brain. So he says to me, ‘He’s been suitably dealt with’ and then the wing commander started to celebrate. He wanted to try out a new scheme of what they called formation flying. So, he chose our pilot, my pilot, to fly in the out of position, right on the edge of starboard so, naturally, when you went round right you had to run but when you went to the left you had to put your brake on. Anyway, we were flying out one day over the Wash and another Lancaster, obviously a trainee, a trainee crowd, ‘cause you could tell by the markings was a trainee crew and he circled in closer than what we were to the one [unlear]. We tried to shoo him away but there was no such thing as radio ‘cause we were on a different wave band, see, we had our own special wave band, and all they did was just smile and wave. ‘Go away’ [emphasis]. And suddenly we were flying off and the wing commander said, ‘Start to turn right’ [laughs]. I looked at the pilot and he did nothing. I think he was oblivious to the thing. He hadn’t realised this aircraft was as close as it was but we ‒, I pressed my button, I said ‘Straight ahead please’. The wing commander came back on , he says, ‘Would the person who cancelled my order give his name, his crew, his pilot’s name and aircraft number and the reason why he cancelled my order’. So I briefly explained. He said, ‘I’ll see you in my office afterwards’. Well, of course he finished off his training. He decided not to do any more formation flying and it was the idea of the Americans. You formed a formation from the front and the rest trailed behind. So it gave greater safety. But anyway I went to his office afterwards, ‘The information you gave me was enough to locate who the idiot was.’ He said, ‘You’ll be pleased to know he will not fly another aircraft. He’s been taken off’. He was completely irresponsible so what good was he as a pilot if he was irresponsible. But he circled in that close if we’d moved a foot or two we’d be within an inch of him ‘cause he didn’t know we were going to turn unless I ‒. We couldn’t tell him. But they said afterwards ‘Thank God you were sitting on top fully alert’. I said ‘Somebody has to be’ [laughs]. But I think that’s why we survived, all of us was of the same category of mind. You train to the extent we were still training when we finished and I still say that’s why so many went down. They thought it was a holiday.
PL: Is there anything else that you want to tell me?
RC: I can’t think of anything else.
PL: Just very briefly then tell me about what happened after the war?
RC: After the war?
PL: So the war ended and then what did you do?
RC: Yes, The war ended so when we ‒, when we finished flying we were sent on demob leave. Then when we were on demob leave Germany had had enough, finished. I got letter ‘cause up ‘til then we had seven days indefinite leave, seven days indefinite leave, and every week that was renewed. So I had a month’s holiday at the end of when we were flying and we ‒, then after four weeks, I had a notice to go to um ‒ I went then up in Scotland, just where the RAF regiment is now, funnily enough, it was there. Anyway, he said, ‘We’ve posted you to Grantham for a commissioning course. We’ve accepted your commission. This is your commission. Go!’ He said, ‘If you’d signed when you were on the flying side, all you had to do was sign a sheet and you’d get a uniform. Now you’ve got to prove you’re good enough.’ I said, ‘Good show, I’m another three months in England’. Anyway, I did my training, became a flying officer, no pilot officer, pilot officer. I was posted to Iraq, the Middle East. Iraq in the Iraq levies. I got out there. We had to see the colonel first. We had an army colonel in charge, Colonel Loose [?] and he said ‘I’m putting you with the transport. You can help out on the transport to start with but you may have another ‒, another drop’. Anyway I went to this transport office. There was about thirty or forty lorries or cars and, er, we were sitting one day in the office. This flight lieutenant in charge, he was taking a charge sheet of one of his drivers for some misdemeanour and the phone bell went and all he kept saying was, ‘Yes Sir, I’ll tell him Sir. Yes Sir, he will be Sir’. When he finished he said, ‘The Colonel wants to see you in his office after breakfast’. This was at six o’clock in the morning. He said after breakfast, which was half past seven. Anyway, I went to the office as per appointed and he said, ‘You are the Adjutant as from next week, of No. 1 Squadron’, number one wing, the first top wing, and yet I knew the adjutant of the number two and thought he was a much better chap at the job than me. But anyway he said, ‘I think you’ll be alright’ and four or five weeks after I’d been in the office he was walking up under this shade of the building, and he stopped outside the door, you know, this insect door. He flung that open. He said, ‘I knew I hadn’t made a mistake. You’re doing very well’ and walked on. I didn’t even have a chance to say, ‘Thank you.’ Anyway, things progressed and as I said the other adjutant was better than me. He said, ‘Well, he was here before you. If he’d been my adjutant I would have sacked him a fortnight after he’d started.’ He says, ‘I’m keeping you for months’ [laughs]. So I says, ‘That’s nice to know’ I says, ‘Why?’ He says, ‘You fit in. You get on with your job’ and I progressed very well.
Pl: So did you stay and make a career in the Air Force after the war?
RC: They wanted me to. They offered me extended service for seven years and give me nine thousand pounds at the end. I said, ‘Like hell! I’m not prepared to’. And they thought I was foolish so I often said to Jean I never knew what I would have been if I’d stayed flying with the wing commander or staying on the ground in the ground staff job. It could have been a complete change of life for me but I’ve never regretted it, ‘cause I couldn’t stand the petty indifference and intelligence of the generations of officers coming along. They were petty. They fiddled. They, er, mesmerized you. They didn’t give you a straightforward answer or anything. Yet I’d had to deal with them when I knew nothing. I mean, the person who followed me on had only been sent on a three months course on how to be one, I had one hour. But I fitted in just like that and yet it was absolutely new to me. But I’d see a stack of paper that high every morning but it was mostly, you know, discipline and what not. I had one funny case where there’d been a sergeant shot in the leg and a corporal was up on the charge of shooting him and after I had all the interviews, they’d all ‒, all the people had been sent to the Air Force Ministry in London, came back, no good whatever, please retake, all the questions, you know, all the examinations. So I did it myself and this corporal I says, ‘You’re a fool taking the blame and everybody’s blaming you. You did nothing wrong. It’s the others, the more senior officers, native [?] officers.’ They were commissioned by the CO Middle East. But it rounded off. In the end he got away. Oh yes, ‘cause of course the papers I sent in, they said charge him with about six charges and I looked through the legal book and I found another six, so I put twelve charges on his sheet, went across to his room where he was being held and said, ‘I still say you’ve a fool and you’re being charged with so-and-so and so-and-so so’. I said, ‘You’ll be here for years if you’ve not careful’. Anyway, then I got a phone call, ‘He wants to see you back again’ and the chief native [?] officer, who was a Russian by birth, who had been in the Russian Tsar’s army as a major, he was our senior native [?] officer, said to me, ‘He wants you in the cell again’. So I went to the cell. I said, ‘What do you want?’ He said, ‘I want ‒ ‘. I put a hand on his mouth. I said, ‘Shut up. You’re not going to say a word. You’re not going to blub out what you want to say now. You’ll do it officially.’ I put my hand on his mouth and shut him up. I couldn’t catch a word he said. He wanted to confess what had happened and in the end the AOC Middle East came in and saw the Colonel. The next thing I know the corporal was released. The officer who I thought had been the cause of the trouble had been quietly dismissed. No show, no nothing, political, it was all mixed up with politics, politics from the Iraq people and joining in with the British. The Embassy was hopeless. I’d always got on well with the Embassy but they faded away when that came up. They didn’t want to know. But anyway ‒
PL: Talking about politics then, something I need to ask you, your feelings about how Bomber Command has been treated over the years. Do you have a view on that?
RC: Shockingly. I still say the ‒, what you call it, the clasp [?] it’s a bit of tin painted in gold paint. I say after seventy years it’s disgusting, totally disgusting. As the bomb aimer used to say, ‘They give the pilot the big medal. Why can’t they make a miniature one for each of us? We’re all together in the same crew’. No, just the pilot had to have a big, big, medal thing. We got nothing. And that was the attitude. We were all just the workers, get on with it, and yet he couldn’t do it without us, any of us. We used to say the mid upper and the rear gunner were probably more important than we were. Who could have navigated, dead reckoning navigation over a cloud filled sky all the way to the bottom of Poland and back, and back? And he finished up on the same stretch, when we looked out and saw the state of the coastline and we were going over it. I says, ‘That’s where I’d pointed out, isn’t it?’ He says, ‘Yes, you were spot on within two miles.’ He said, ‘And that was only a dream’. I said, ‘Yes, but we did live, didn’t we?’ I said, ‘Tommy said we’d not, we’d not make it from the trip but we did make it’. And they were the factors that kept you going. Much obliged. I’m going to finish, sorry.
PL: Well, can I say thank you so much. That was a fascinating interview.
RC: I hope that was as good as you want.
PL: Thank you very much for being so generous with your time. So, recommencing with Ray Charlton. So we’ve just been talking about a fascinating story about Wesel ‒ . Would you like to share that with us Ray?
RC: Yes, I just recalled the trip to Wesel, which was on the edge of the river and Montgomery had moved his troops back three thousand yards. And I said to our CO, ‘Tell him as an insult to go back three thousand yards that’s allowing us to make all that much mistake.’ Anyway we were flying over about twelve thousand feet and the flak in front of us was quite heavy. Anyway we pressed on. And suddenly underneath us we heard a rush of noise, a heavy wind noise, and we were looking out watching and we could see anti-aircraft guns being shot out of action. They’d been firing one minute and nothing the next and that’s what had happened. Every time one fired the artillery boys pinpointed the site and aimed [?] it out. Well on one of my initial visits to Salisbury [other], Salisbury, we’d got a packed lunch with us, and we saw Philip ‒, Prince Philips’ regiment. Well I said, ‘We ought to go in here’ (‘course it’s not the present Prince Philip. It’s the previous one). And we had ‒, we were enjoying our lunch on the lawn, and obviously one of their men came and joined us, ‘Were you in the regiment?’ I said, ‘No, no, no, only the RAF regiment’. ‘Oh, I don’t know about those’. I said, ‘We’re all aircrew’, He said, ‘I don’t know much about them’. I said ‘Well, we did bomb Wesel. ‘Did you? You must meet our sergeant’. I said ‒. He went to find the sergeant but he couldn’t leave his post, he was on the door. Oh, he asked us to go to him and when I went to approach him he grabbed my hand and shook it so hard it hurt. I said, ‘What’s this for?’ He said we were told about you boys coming to raid it to help us. We were told to expect to lose two thousand men in crossing the river. He says, ‘And I was to lead the men over and establish and put the machine guns out of action’. He said, ‘When we got there not a single shot was fired at us. We never saw a single German, only dead ones, and he says, ‘How on earth did you do it?’ I says, ‘Just bombed’. ‘How did you get through all that flak?’ I said, ‘You ignore it’. I said to the sergeant, ‘We ignored it. Had to do. It was heavy to start with but it dwindled off to nothing. It was just one gun firing in one spot positon and that kept firing. He must have had a load in and we just thought nothing of it. To us we’d done a job.’ He said, ‘Well I shall never forget it. You saved two thousand men from this company, this regiment.’ He says, ‘That’s something to do’.
Pl: Wonderful.
RC: But he said, ‘And we achieved our objective. We never saw anything. They must have cleared all out, they must have moved out. ‘Cause they expected you’d have to go through every house and route out snipers but there wasn’t one to be found anywhere. The survivors said the bombing was so accurate and so intense that nobody could live through it, so we were quite happy. We did an easy job and that was it.’ And there we are.
Pl. Thank you Ray.
PL: This is Pam Locker and I’m in the house of Mrs Jean Mary Charlton, who was also ‒. Her first husband was called Robert Mott and her maiden name was Gilliatt [?]. And this forms a complement to another interview, with Mr Ray Charlton, about his experiences in Bomber Command. So, Jean, would you like to stat by telling us a little bit about what you were doing at the start of the war perhaps?
JC: I was in training for Nottingham City Hospital. D Day I was at training school [unclear]. Very little idea about what we were going to face. We saw the most horrific things, soldiers coming in still in uniform, covered in blood, just bound up, legless, armless. It was a horrible thing to have to remember really. But on the Saturday at the Goose Fair in Nottingham we decided we’d all go to the Goose Fair, so four of us went together. Four airmen came up and said ‘Come on girls, come and have a ride’. Of course, I was left with the old man, wasn’t I? Which was Bob. That was 1954, as far as I can remember. I think that’s right.
[Other]: ’44.
RC: No, ’45.
JC: ’45, sorry, I had it the wrong way round. We did a tour of Nottingham Castle and left and [unclear] ‘Will we see you next weekend?’ Then when they turned up there was Bob. We married a year later, came to Southampton to live, ‘cause I brought up seven children, that’s the youngest, and I decided to go back to nursing, went to the local children’s hospital and fourteen years in the district [unclear]. In the meantime Ray came down to Southampton and said, ‘Oh, I know someone who lives here and in that road ’ as he passed it, ‘I’ll go and look him up’, knocked on the door, ‘cause I was at work [unclear] and then he opened it, ‘Who are you then?’ He said ‘I’m Ray Charlton, the Flight Engineer’. Anyway, he stayed the night and went off again. A month later we were celebrating Christmas, my eldest daughter was home from Saudi Arabia, and we were going to have a special weekend, and Bob suddenly became ill and he died twenty-four hours later, a heart problem. And so I phoned Ray [unclear] and then, of course, I went on and moved into a flat, didn’t I, on my own? ‘Cause we gave up our house [unclear].
PL: So you moved house?
JL: I went to a flat. I was working for the district, it was this side of town, you see, and I kept in touch with Ray, wrote Christmas cards and things, and my granddaughter, she was at college, I was house-sitting for my son and Ray phoned up, could he pop in and see us, as he was at an RAF meeting in Bournemouth? And he came in, drove round Southampton, and from then on he started phoning me, to go to Leicester for the weekend, and they used to say, ‘We never know where you ae mum’ [laugh], and then we married, it took about ten years to make our minds up, didn’t it? To marry. We’ve been married twenty-three years. So we moved, now, as I say, he married me for my pension fund [laugh]. But we’ve been up to Lincolnshire, to East Kirkby, every year, haven’t we?
RC: Yes, every year.
JC: I used to drive up but in recent years the family would take us. We would miss it, wouldn’t we?
PL: It’s a very romantic story. So, just to be clear for the tape, one of the most extraordinary things about this story is that you were married to two men from the same crew.
JC: Yes, the first one was with me since I was eighteen.
RC: Do you remember when I Bob says to me, ‘Who are you?’
JC: Yes, I mentioned that. I think that’s me finished.
PL: Do you want to add any stories ‒. Have you got any memories that Bob shared with you about his experiences in the war?
JC: Well, not a lot, because he used to say, ‘We never had any problems’. They were all such a good crew together. Had little jokes between them but nothing that was [unclear]. Sorry, my voice isn’t clear.
RC: I think that was the trouble, there was never any ‒
JC: Friction between you, was there?
RC: No friction and no crystal to shine. We just ‒, just went smoothly on.
[Other]: Two crews.
JC: Yes, Bob flew with two crews. The first crew he was going for the aircraft and his knee gave way, so he had to go and have a cartilage operation.
PL: Right.
JC: And that’s how he came to join Ray’s crew, when he came back. We did meet one member of the crew at East Kirkby didn’t we? And I think we were chatting all day long to him [unclear].
[Other]: He thought dad had died. He thought dad had died.
RC: Well, that’s how we feel about the Pantons, isn’t it?
JC: Yes
RC: At East Kirkby. I’ve had some lovely letters from both of them and their wives.
JC: Yes. I miss Sharon [unclear].
PL: So Jean, is there anything else that you want to ‒.recorded for either Bob or Ray you would like included?
JL: I can’t think of anything.
[Other]: He used to say how tired he was mum, how he used to fall asleep standing up on the train.
JC: On the train. He used to come down to Southampton and, of course, he could never get a seat, and he would be stood there sound asleep. You’ve said the same thing about being on the, um, trains coming home and being asleep.
RC: When the parson and four of his parishioners, they wanted me to give up my seat, and he said, ’You leave him where he is’, and he says, ‘Every time you wake up your eyes span the whole window’. So he says, ‘Open your overcoat’ and I did, you see, he said, I knew you were aircrew’, he says, ‘As soon as you open your eyes that window’s searched.’ He said, ‘You do it automatically’. I said, ‘That’s how we lived’, but these women, they were with him, his parishioners, thought I was terribly rude not offering my seat up.
[Other]: What about getting the bacon mum? They used to go into the mess of the sergeants and pinch what was left of the breakfast.
JC: Yes.
{Other}: Do you want to tell that one?
JC: You can tell it.
PL: So, the next person to speak is Vanessa ‒
[Other]: Standley [?]
PL: Standley, who is Jean’s youngest daughter.
VS: Dad used to have supper in the evenings and the one thing that always made us laugh was dad liked everything with brown sauce and he loved cheese. We went to a reunion at East Kirkby a few years ago and bumped into someone who remembered dad from flying at East Kirkby and started to tell us some stories and one of them was that dad and someone else, I don’t know the name, used to sneak into ‒ I think it was the sergeants’ quarters when it was empty in the evening, and if there was some cheese left, ‘cause obviously they were on rations, they used to toast the bits of bread on the electric fire and put cheese on and brown sauce and they’d sneak back, you know, it was their secret. And I thought that was great ‘cause all through my childhood the one thing my dad always had was bread, cheese and everything came with brown sauce.
PL: So, is there anything else anybody would like to add for the record before we close?
JL: No.
PL: Well, thank you all very much. Your family has an extraordinary story with extraordinary connections, so thank you very much for sharing it with us.
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
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ACharltonR160720
PCharltonR1602
PCharltonR1603
Title
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Interview with Ray Charlton
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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01:19:22 audio recording
Creator
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Pam Locker
Date
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2016-07-20
Description
An account of the resource
Ray wanted to join Bomber Command but after going to RAF Paignton, he was re-mustered and went to RAF Eastchurch on the Isle of Sheppey where he decided to train as a flight engineer. He was posted to Bridlington and this was followed by a six-month course at RAF St Athan. He explains why he refused commissions at various times.
Ray was posted to Bomber Command, initially on Stirlings at RAF Swinderby and then RAF East Kirkby. He crewed up with four Australians and two other English men. He mentions the difficult conditions and crews who did not return. The mid-upper gunner faced several issues before being replaced due to injury.
Ray does describe some of the events on his tour: going round Mont Blanc; an encounter with a German fighter plane; instrument failure, going to the oil fields in Poland; insufficient petrol; the ground crew mixing up oil and coolant when diverted to RAF Tarrant Rushton; almost being hit by a trainer Lancaster crew when trying formation flying. He did, however, later find out that they had saved the lives of 2,000 troops crossing the river at Wesel.
When Germany surrendered, Ray was sent on leave, and then Scotland and Grantham for a commissioning course. He became a pilot officer and was posted to Iraq where he was made adjutant of 1 Squadron.
Ray explains how he felt about the treatment of Bomber Command.
Before his death, Ray’s wife, Jean, was married to another crew member, whom she met while training as a nurse.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
Wales
England--Lincolnshire
Wales--Vale of Glamorgan
Germany
Poland
Europe--Mont Blanc
Germany--Wesel (North Rhine-Westphalia)
Iraq
Contributor
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Christine Kavanagh
Sally Coulter
57 Squadron
630 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
crewing up
flight engineer
love and romance
military living conditions
military service conditions
Nissen hut
RAF East Kirkby
RAF Eastchurch
RAF St Athan
RAF Tarrant Rushton
superstition
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/88/1932/PYoungJ1728.2.jpg
ca14344a1eccb212189a907b8ef15c9d
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/88/1932/AYoungJ170630.1.mp3
313a939331ccee9e37b4e29ffc166265
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Young, John
J Young
Description
An account of the resource
13 items. The collection consists of an oral history interview with Sergeant John Young (1569980, Royal Canadian Air Force), his logbook and 11 photographs of aircrew groups and Halifax aircraft. John Young was a flight engineer on 432 Squadron based at RAF East Moor, part of 6 Group. The collection shows a number of aircrew groups which include him as well as ground and air shots of his Halifax Mk 3 with Ferdinand II nose art.
The collection was donated by John Young and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-10-02
Identifier
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Young, J
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
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Transcription
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JS: Ok. This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Jim Sheach. The interviewee is John Young. The interview is taking place at Mr Young’s home in North Berwick, East Lothian on the 30th of June 2017. John, could you tell me a little about your life before you joined the RAF?
JY: Yes. Well, before I joined the RAF I was, I was working on the railway as a, as a locomotive fireman. That’s in the days of the steam trains. And before that I was at school. And, well, all through the business of the war I was a schoolboy [pause] But do you want to go further back or is there no point?
JS: No. That’s fine. So where did you live then?
JY: Well I lived here in North Berwick. In — I lived up in the other end of town in North Berwick. In the council houses. And I left, I left school when I was sixteen and I went [pause] I went to work for the local electrician. A builder — electrician. Well that was until all his men were called up. So, that left the big boss, myself and the typist [laughs] So, that being not very good I decided to have a go at the railway. So, I went and I joined the railway and went as a cleaner. Just wiping with things which, in those days, it wasn’t very much. And from a cleaner you automatically were graduated to a fireman and from fireman to driver. Those were the steps you made and I stayed in the force, in the railway doing a bit of cleaning and a large amount of firing until my, until I volunteered for the air force at seventeen and a quarter. And then they shoved me off. Said, ‘Well go home. We’ll call you.’ And so, at eighteen and a quarter I got the first, first notification — ‘Please report to St John’s Wood.’ So, that’s when I went. I was there for about four weeks. Four weeks or six weeks. I can’t remember. And then I was posted down to Newquay, Cornwall. This was in April ’43. April ’43. And I was down in Newquay for three months. And then I was posted to the Isle of Sheppey in Eastchurch — no. Is it Sheppey? The Isle of Sheppey in the Thames Estuary? Yes.
JS: Yeah.
JY: Off Kent coast. And I was there for about a month just doing jack all really. I was waiting for a posting which was then given to me and I went up to a bomb dump in [pause] oh, in Lincolnshire. And I was there for about, oh, a month or two. And — and from there I was posted back to Eastchurch and I was asked what — what I wanted to do. So I said I’d prefer to be a flight engineer or a wireless op. So they said, ‘Fine.’ So, they, they sent me to — I was next posted to an ITW in Durham county. I forget the name of the place. And I was there for six weeks and then I was posted down to St Athan’s in South Wales where I was six months there learning the ins and outs of various aircraft. But, in point of view, we would, we were told that we would be either flying in Lancasters or Halifaxes and make your now choice now. Make your choice anyway. So, I preferred Halifaxes. So, on, on our now graduation we were, we were assigned to our different groups which required engineers. Now, the thing is the Canadian Air Force were not training engineers as such. They had a few but there wasn’t many. Now, we all got separated off and I was posted up to Dishforth which was a Heavy Conversion Unit and it was there I was, I was put in a hall. I was put in a, well a big — big hall like place and there were, were as many pilots as there were, as there were engineers. And the officer said, ‘Well there you are. Get mixed up. Take who you fancy as your pilot.’ [laughs] And then they comes and they were given the same chance. So, he says, ‘No one’s going to help you.’ So, he said, ‘Goodbye.’ [unclear] So, we flooded around and we met and ultimately, I picked this little sergeant. Well, little — he was the same height as me but he was fair haired and his name was Leslie Steadman. And I said — he said, as I remember right, he came up to me. He said, ‘Are you being crewed up with anyone?’ I said, ‘No. As a matter of fact I haven’t started.’ He said, ‘Well. I’m Les Steadman.’ He said, ‘I kind of likes the looks of you,’ [laughs] — looks. Anyway, he said, ‘Anyway,’ he says, ‘How are you on hydraulics?’ I said, ‘Not bad.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘Thank God for that because I don’t know the first thing about them.’ And he said — there was something else. But anyway, he said, ‘The rest of my crew,’ he said, ‘Are – well they are skulking around somewhere but,’ he said, ‘I’ll get them and I’ll introduce you to them.’ And I said, ‘Well, before you do,’ I said, ‘Where have you come from? I mean air force wise.’ ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘Up in the Moray Firth,’ he said. ‘Flying Whitleys.’ ‘Oh God’ [laughs] I says, ‘You’ll be glad to get off them.’ [laughs]. So, he said, ultimately, we came to — we, we talked about the technicalities of the air frames and that and he says, ‘Well it seems to me you’re going to be a blessing in disguise,’ he says. So, he says, ‘I’ll tell you what. After tea I’ll get the crew.’ And we [rattling of packet] we [pause] that’s them. Well, there’s a bigger one. Aye. There’s Flying Officer Fox. He’s the bomb aimer. He’s the first one. And there’s flying officer, oh no, he’s the, Gates is the navigator. Flying Officer Fox is the bomb aimer. And Warrant Officer Hartley is the wireless operator and Sergeant Campbell is the mid upper gunner and Sergeant Busby is the rear gunner. And there’s myself. So, so that was my introduction. So, we all had our photograph taken by the company, the squadron photographer. And what’s [pause] right, well Sergeant Steadman, Flying Officer Gates, Flying Officer Fox were all from Ontario. Warrant Officer Hartley, he was from British Columbia and he was from, he comes from the back woods literally. But he was English. He was taken out to Canada when he was two years old. Sergeant Campbell. He was, he was the oldest one and he was, he was Southern Irish and was — had gone out as a young man to Canada. And Busby — he was, oh, he was a farmer from Saskatchewan. And Young me was a locomotive fireman. So, so that was that. So we, we all got our [unclear]. Gradually, we, we sort of knit together. Well I was, I knitted in to the rest of them because the rest of them were a crew. And then — well there was a series of— by the, the squadron [pause] damn it. [pause] The pilot and myself — we were taken to our — an aircraft. A spare aircraft. And the OC, the flight and the screen engineer who was a fellow who had done a tour of ops and was experienced would come with us. So, the pair of us would go with experienced people and we would go down in an aircraft and the logbook tells me we went. We had a wing commander and a squadron leader, a flight lieutenant and one or two POs were taking turns. And gradually the screened engineer showed me what I was supposed to do. And one of the things was you were supposed to get the engines started. You and the pilot. And behind the pilot was a little cubbyhole with a mass of instruments. They were all engine, engine-type instruments. You know, oil pressure, fuel pressure. Air pressure. Oxygen. Cylinder head temperature. Things like that. And you were given a log sheet and you had to fill this out every twenty minutes of flying time and — it was either twenty minutes or half an hour. And gradually we, well, we, we satisfied him, the screened fellas that we knew enough that we were sure that we were, we were prepared to be loosed off on our own. And, well, it — after that it was a case of bombing exercises, fighter affiliation exercises with a Spitfire diving on the camera guns for the gunners. And, well, this we had. And my circuits and landings, circuits and landings and circuits until you were bloody well fed up with them [laughs] but that made the pilot, he got it. And the engineer — he kept it, he got it. Well, towards the end of our Conversion Unit they said we’ll go on a couple of ops and see what it is. So, he said, ‘But it will be safe for you. You leave the airfield and you’ll fly out over the North Sea and you’ll go towards Holland and at a point twenty miles off the coast you’ll turn and come back.’ He said, ‘Just get the learning.’
JS: Yeah.
JY: So, we had a couple of those. A couple of those are things we did and then we got posted. No. [pause] Then we got posted to the squadron. Yes. And we got posted to the squadron and we were — that was —the picture there was taken at the squadron. That was there. And we were — went through the same [presence?] again of having a screened pilot and engineer go up with two of us. And they said well you’re good. We were sent on various test runs. Tests. Mostly circling the whole island, you know. The whole. That was cross country’s. And then we got the first operation and the first operation was, I think [pause] a radar bullseye. That’s what they called this photographic. Oh yeah. Le Havre. Le Havre we went to twice. Dortmund [unclear] Osnabruck. These are all Ruhr targets. And Kiel was our first, first night fighter, night flight and I’m telling you they flung everything at us that they had. It just seemed we were going through flak and then there was, as we were going to come on it he said, ‘Watch it Les, ‘he said, ‘A night fighter. Prepare to corkscrew port.’ And he said, ‘Corkscrew port. Corkscrew port. Go.’ And a corkscrew [unclear] was when they were fling it around and fling it down, the aeroplane and it rolls at the bottom and comes up on the other side. Well that’s a corkscrew. And Christ [laughs] I thought, Oh Jesus. And we, we flew over the target area, dropped the bombs and out in to the other side and then you’d have more fighters come for you. Course the fighters wouldn’t come where the flak was. They cut you before and after. And, anyway, we, and that was, that was the point there, the point when we started the flight they said you travel at one thousand feet over the, over the sea until you get to the Danish coast and then climb to get to your bombing height over here. Well, he said. Well he said, the idea about this was so that the German radar can’t dip down below a thousand feet. So ,there’s only one thing about it. The pilots get a bit twitchy about that ‘cause if an engine cuts on you you’re down in the sea before you can say Jack Robinson and anyway that’s how it started off. The Danish coast — climbed up. We got attacked by this night fighter and luckily he didn’t — he waited too long to press the button but allowing the gunner — gave him the correction and we made the bombing height, came around and down and I thought phew and come along, come back over the North Sea and the [fighter?], what I saw of it, I thought the first time, the first time I go on a night sweep I’m going to get up outside and I’m going go out on the first bus that comes for North Berwick [laughs] So, but anyway we we had several targets at Calais for ops. For [turning pages] Yes. Yes, we had, we had [pause] what do you call them? Buzz bomb sites and they was [pause — pages turning] There was, the next thing there was Duisburg. And Duisburg — that’s another Ruhr target. And Essen. Homburg. Cologne. Hanover. Cologne again. That’s a series of targets. Oberhausen. Duseldorf. Bochum. Gelsenkirchen. Hurlach. Munster and Opladen. Tresdorf. Cologne, Duisburg. Hanover, Magdeburg. And that completes our thirty. Thirty trips. And that’s before we go up in the [pause]
JS: That’s great. How did you — you said you fitted in with the rest of your crew?
JY: Yeah. Yeah.
JS: Because they were already a crew together.
JY: Yeah.
JS: How were they as a crew?
JY: Oh. Well these two stuck together more or less, you know. Being officers. And the sergeant and the warrant officer and the rest of us were [pause]] I forget who [pause] — I was, I was billeted in a room with four guys. There was a Jewish gunner on the far end of the room and another fella. I don’t know who he was. He was in another crew. So was the Jewish chap. And there was myself and the wireless op with the other two. And the two gunners were in another room. And the sergeant — I don’t know where he was. I don’t know. I don’t know. And of course, they were in the officer’s mess, you know. So, I found it — they were very easy to get along with, you know. And I don’t know with the officers. I — incidentally, I said, after I came out of the air force I went back to the railway. I stuck it for about ten months and then I said, ‘I don’t like this. My hands are getting dirty,’ [laughs] so, I signed up for another five years. So I signed. This time I chose the signals and I I I was [pause] I passed that alright but anyway they had all goofed off to Canada, you see, by that time. And the wireless op and myself — we corresponded. Well, now and again. And the at the end of my five years I came out and I worked for the [paused] oh I worked for the radar. For the [pause] radar. Oh Jesus. Well, it was a little, it was a little and I was working on this. Anyway, the four of us worked on this mobile radar at various army units and we used to — and we had a civilian driver. We were civvies then and we’d go around and we’d pick the things up and hoist the balloon and track it. Until one day Jimmy Oliver, one of the blokes, he says, ‘Here,’ he says, ‘Look at this Jock.’ And I said, ‘What is it?’ He says, ‘They want blokes to build a dam out in BC.’ A dam. ‘Yes. Look at the money they’re getting.’ I said, ‘What do you say we try for it?’ ‘Right. You’re on.’ So, it took us about six months to get, to get permission to land and we went across in, on an old Greek tub. Or a boat. And it was, it was, it landed at — oh what’s the name of the place? In Quebec. Oh yeah — Quebec City. And from there we we were just shunted off and the immigration people took our particulars and what trades we were and, by the way, said, ‘How much money do you have?’ ‘Two hundred dollars.’ He said, ‘That’s not going to last you for very long.’ [laughs] So, we split up and Jim and I we went to Montreal. This would be 1954 and we were six weeks. Six weeks. No. Not exactly. What would that be? It was four weeks before we and we were living in a rooming house in Montreal and there was about ten blokes in it. And there was a couple of Swiss guys, and a French guy and two or three Brits. And anyway, we were [pause] Jesus — oh God. [pause] Anyway, we went around the rounds of the RCA, Canadian Marconi and GE. GE and places like that. And, ‘Don’t call us. We’ll call you.’ Fair enough. So we — and suddenly there was a phone call. [unclear] We went to this place not far from our digs. A great big factory. And it was Northern Electric. So, we thought, Northern Electric, it sounds all right. And we went around and we were real, we were real upbeat you know, you don’t have any [unclear] get us down. [unclear] the guy says, ‘It depends what you do,’ he says, ‘What do you do?’ I says, ‘Well we’re radar. Radar and radio.’ ‘Well,’ he says, ‘That sounds interesting,’ he says, ‘But just a minute,’ he says, ‘I’m only a personnel,’ he says, ‘I wouldn’t know what you’re talking about.’ He says, ‘I’ll get Mr Young [laughs] down from the sixth floor and he’ll —’ So Mr Young came down along with another chaps and he was a fistful of pencils and a bundle of paper. ‘Right.’ He says, ‘Jim. You go with that fella to that room and you, you — my namesake,’ he says, ‘Come into this room.’ He says, ‘Alright. He says, what’s [Holmes?] law?’ [laughs] I couldn’t tell him. I was floored. I was [laughs] ‘Alright,’ he says, ‘Forget it.’ He says, ‘Draw me a one valve amplifier.’ Oh [chchchch] Right. Now, he says, ‘Draw me a forward part of a super head receiver. ‘ So, I did that. I said, ‘Alright?’ He says, well various other things. ‘Well’ he says, ‘I find you alright,’ he says, ‘When can you start work?’ ‘Tomorrow?’ [laughs] He says, ‘No. Monday. Monday,’ he says. Monday. So, we were there about oh I don’t know about four or five months and we got taken into the bowling team. You know this pin. Bowling pin. Oh, they were good to us, you know. And anyway another phone call comes from Canadian Marconi. So, he said, ‘Are you guys still interested in us?’ ‘Well, that depends what you pay.’ You know. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘Well how much are you earning just now?’ We said, ‘Fifty five dollars a week.’ ‘Oh God,’ he says, ‘We can pay more than that,’ he says. So, he says, ‘Get yourselves up,’ to some district of Montreal, he says, ‘And bring your buddy.’ So, we said, ‘Right,’ so the pair of us scoot up there and well, to cut it short, he says, ‘Do you have briefcase by the way?’ ‘Briefcase?’ [laughs] ‘No. I’ve never had a briefcase in my life.’ And he says, ‘Well take my tip. Invest in one.’ He says, ‘Here’s two hundred dollars,’ he says, ‘That should get you a briefcase and the price of a flying ticket from Montreal to St John’s Newfoundland.’ Newfoundland. Oh Jeez. And he says, ‘That’s where one of our sites is.’ He says we will have, once you have a three months course at St Johns, at the company buildings, you know and he says then you’ll be posted off to various parts, you see. And in the meantime, we met up with this other bloke. He was a Londoner. So that was, that was a Londoner, a Geordie — that was Jim Oliver, the guy that came out with me and myself. And, well the Londoner went to — where was it he went? He went to Goose Bay up in Labrador and I went to the other end of the island at Stephenville and Jim went to North Bay. Went to North Bay. And that was still on the island. I forgot the name of the place. Ans anyway, we were all split up and we were, while we was there I was, when I was on this course at St Marie de Beauce in Quebec and I got into — we used to, when dinner time came the three of us would plump ourselves at a table and the waitress would come up. The waitress. We were billeted in the officer’s mess you see. So we were — ‘Letter for you,’ there, ‘letter for you’ there from the mail. So we were reading our letters and finally three women came up to the table and says to us, ‘You know, we’re getting a bit sick and tired of you guys.’ Yeah. ‘You’ve not come and introduced yourselves so we’re coming to introduce ourselves.’ Well one was a schoolteacher. One was an ASO [unclear] which was an adjutant of this radar, this small radar establishment and one was a nursing sister. And — well we all got talking together and gradually the school teacher and I became very very [pause] close. And eventually we married, you know after I was [unclear] I was married — I married her and we’ve got — then I was she was, she was posted. Well, she was at this station and that’s where she taught and I was sent down to Stephenville. And there come a time when I went over. I went over and [pause] Rhoda. Rhoda was her name. Rhoda Stewart. ‘How about coming down to see my parents?’ So, ‘Ok. Sure.’ So the upshot was we went to Halifax because they were down in lower Nova Scotia and we went up to Halifax and I bought her a ring there for her finger. So, this was after months, you know. And so, we was, we were married eventually and then we split again and when Easter time she came over to Newfoundland to be beside me. And we had a big trailer parked in a trailer park and there we started our married life. And we, we started our married life. And in the meantime I had written away to Atomic Energy in Ontario and because Newfoundland was a nice place but, you know, it’s kind of rough and ready. And so I wrote and after six months I got a letter saying, in effect — come on. You’re hired. You know. After that. That was after they sent [pause] oh no they sent a message to Liverpool CID and the CID sent a searcher up to North Berwick and the guys who, and Ben Miller, who was Jan’s first husband, he was a post office engineer and it was a time of the [golf at Govan?] and that’s where — he was up a pole, you know, screwing things around and this guy in civvies and a trilby hat says, ‘Are you Mr Miller. He said, ‘Aye. Who wants to know?’ You know. He says, ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘I’ll introduce myself. I’m Detective Constable [unclear]. Do you know a Jim Young?’ and he said, ‘Christ’ — what have I done now? ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘Just a minute. I’m coming down.’ And he says, ‘Aye I know him.’ ‘Well what’s he like?’ He said, so, he explained who he was. He was from the Liverpool CID who had a message from the RCMP who were, who were checking up on me. He says, ‘He’s applied for a job with Canadian Atomic Energy.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘Jeez,’ he says, ‘That’s interesting,’ he says, ‘Well,’ he says, ‘I know him very well. He was best man at my wedding.’ And he said they jawed about a bit. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘Fine, fine. Alright. So long as you’re satisfied with him that’s alright. Fair enough.’ Shake hands. And I got, it was after that I got ok’d. So, we packed all our gear in a train and chugged off. Away to Montreal from Nova Scotia and then swapped trains and got on the Trans Pacific one to get to a place called Deep River Ontario. That’s where they had the town site for the staff to live in and they said there’ll be a house ready for you. Well a house. It was actually, it was a shack. Well it was wooden, you know. It was two bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen and a living room. So, and anyway Rhoda came with a dog. A dog. I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you. He was a poodle. A poodle. A French poodle. Anyway, it was a medium sized one and he was, he was a good dog. But [pause] so, I spent about twenty eight years of my life with Atomic Energy and then I retired from there and stayed in Deep River. And by this time my wife had gone into hospital with a complaint which I didn’t know at the time but it was multiple sclerosis and she — it wasn’t long before I knew about it and gradually it forced her into a wheelchair. And as it was her brain remained absolutely spot on and she could speak but the rest of herself she was absolutely immobile. And she was like that in a hospital in Toronto for, let me see, eight years. And I got a transfer from the research establishment up in Deep River, up in the pines down to Toronto which was their, well it was a [unclear] it’s a stuff where they build. Build machines. Refuelling machines for reactors.
JS: Yeah.
JY: And they had three up on the shores of Lake Huron which we used to go up to. But anyway, but anyway, Rhoda eventually died in ‘83 and after that I wasn’t interested in Toronto as such so I applied to my former branch head, you know. So I said, ‘Any chance you can get me back to it?’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ’No.’ he says, but,’ he says, ‘I know another branch head who is willing to take you.’ So, I said ok. So, I got all my stuff bundled into my car and drove up to the, to the [pause] Christ. I can’t. Drove up to the point see. And I got in no problem. Turns up and I got a house. I got a three bedroomed house [laughs] just myself. And shower, so and so, kitchen, bathroom, living room and in the town area and it was, it was just a residential hacked out of the bush and I stuck it there until ‘94. ‘95. No ‘93. And I came, my father was getting on so I came across here and I fell in with Jan and we were married and [pause] where was I? My mum and dad, they — dad died in 1988. I had to come across to go to his funeral. So I went back and I went. While I was across at [pause] I forget — for Jan. And she was moving house and by this time her husband was dead. In ‘91. ‘91. And he was, well he was ‘91 and he was, he was sixty five and shortly thereafter we were married and we were, we had a house down there. Down the Forth Street. And then we came up and we got this one and I’ve been here since ‘2004.
JY: Yeah.
JY: 2004.
JS: Yeah. That’s great. Can I, can I just take you back a wee bit to something interesting you said earlier? You said that when you were in the air force you got the choice what would like to fly in? Would you like to fly in Lancasters or Halifax.
JY: Yeah.
JS: Why did you choose the Halifax? Was it — it was the choice you had.
JY: Yes. It was a choice. We had to. They split us. The course was — basically it wasn’t, it was before that as I remember it because each aircraft was totally different so you either went the Lanc route or the Halifax route. So, I chose the Halifax. Because we went [laughs] we went, they dressed us up in full flying gear and stuffed in a Lanc. Outside. And it was a sunny day and it was beaming. Christ. And I had a look. I said, ‘By Jeez,’ I said, ‘If I have to get out of this thing in a full suit and in a hurry there’s no way I’m going to get to a forward escape hatch packed in the back. Oh no. And the Halifax was different. You go straight up above and you had to deek around the mid upper turret but the rest of the fact was a straight run and up to the escape hatch. There’ s a door and — or you could go in the pilot’s get out, [laughs] put your foot on the pilots knee [laughs] and get out if he hadn’t already gone. And the bomb aimers they had a hatch in the floor. That was for three guys. Well, that’s why we had to choose the different — ‘cause the fuel systems, the hydraulics and all these wiring systems — they were all different. Just totally different. And you had to. Is there anything else.
JS: No. As a Bomber Command veteran how do you think you were treated after the war?
JY: It’s hard to say. I was, as far as the war was, I was thankful to get through a tour of ops, you know. And I think we were just, we were just so damned glad to get out of the air force, you know and shove it behind us. Come to think of it they didn’t do to much for us except giving you some money at the end. Demob money. And the rest of it — you were, ‘Alright. Get outside and get yourself a job.’ You know. Aye. No, I didn’t think too much about it because I already had a job to go to and I floated from one job to another.
JS: Yeah.
JY: But some of the others I’ve since read about, you know, over the years they had a hard time. A real hard time. And I’m fortunate. I never went the alcy way, you know. I never was much of a drinker. So. Yeah [pause] No.
JS: That’s great. That’s been really brilliant.
JY: What?
JS: That’s been really, really good. Thank you very much.
JY: You’re welcome.
JS: I’ll just stop this.
JY: Yeah.
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 Young
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-06-30
Format
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01:04:49 audio recording
Language
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eng
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AYoungJ170630, PYoungJ1728
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
After John volunteered for the Royal Air Force, he reported to St John’s Wood before being posted to Newquay in April 1943. He was sent to RAF Eastchurch on the Isle of Sheppey with a short time in Lincolnshire. He chose to be a flight engineer or wireless operator. John was posted to an Initial Training Wing in Durham, followed by RAF St Athan, learning about different aircraft. He chose Halifaxes over Lancasters. John was posted to the Heavy Conversion Unit, RAF Dishforth, where he crewed up and learned his role as a flight engineer. He was posted to 432 Squadron where they did various test runs before completing 30 operations, many of which were to the Ruhr Valley.
John returned briefly to his former job before signing up for another five years in Signals. He then emigrated to Canada before eventually returning to Scotland.
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Kent
England--Newquay
England--Yorkshire
Wales--Vale of Glamorgan
Germany
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Sally Coulter
Creator
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James Sheach
432 Squadron
aircrew
bombing
crewing up
flight engineer
Halifax
Heavy Conversion Unit
RAF Dishforth
RAF East Moor
RAF Eastchurch
RAF St Athan
training
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Redgrave, Henry Cecil
H C Redgrave
Description
An account of the resource
187 items. The collection concerns Henry Cecil Redgrave (743047, Royal Air Force) and contains his decorations, letters and photographs. He flew operations as a bomb aimer with 207 Squadron from RAF Waddington. He was killed 13/14 March 1941. <br /><br />The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Pam Isaac and catalogued by Barry Hunter.<br /><br /><span>Additional information on Henry Cecil Redgrave is available via the </span><a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/119457/">IBCC Losses Database</a><span>.</span>
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
2015-10-02
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.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Redgrave, HC
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
Mrs H. C. Redgrave,
155 Fletton Avenue,
Peterboro’,
Northants.
[page break]
[R.A.F Crest]
Sgts Mess
Finningley
27-9-40
My dear Jessie,
Thanks for your letter today and now you are away I look forward to every other morning for your chatty little notes. It was rather late Tuesday to write you much so I will try and make up for it tonight.
When I arrived here on Monday tea-time I met a W.O.A.G. who came here a week before and he offered to go with me to Doncaster to fetch my kit so off we went and after unsuccessfully searching for the kit-bags we had a stroll round the town. There are bags of cinemas and seems
[page break]
2
to be quite a spot of night life about in the town. I should think it is a [deleted] but [/deleted] bit bigger than Peterboro [sic] but is more or less just another provincial town. As Frank had to be back for night flying we left on the 8.45 bus. Its only 10d return and there are buses every thirty minutes. On Tuesday we reported to accounts and various other people and in the afternoon to the Flight Commander of 106 Squadron. As there was nothing for us to do that day we got off sharply at five o’clock and went into town to see Spencer Tracy in “North West Passage” which I thoroughly enjoyed. Its an all colour film of the war in Canada between the French and ourselves each side being aided by various Indian tribes. If it comes your way you
[page break]
3
[R.A.F Crest}
should try and see it. The next morning saw us in the crew room at 0830 and after sitting around all day I was suddenly detailed for some practice bombing. In the Hampden they use the automatic bombsight about which I know nothing so I had to scurry around and collect some gen before I could start. The target is in the shape, and of the size of a submarine and I was surprised to learn that seven out of my eight bombs would have sunk it. Pretty good eh. In the evening I started to take my byke [sic] engine down preparoty [sic] to fitting new rings and after supper went to bed. This morning I was supposed to be going to a lecture on this automatic b.sight but just as I got to the Armoury I was sent for to
[page break]
4
navigate a machine down to Hendon. Gee was I in a flat spin. I’d never done any work in aHampden and I was being sent down to London with all those hundreds of balloons and fighter boys Visibility was very poor but I got the plane there O.K. although we were several times challenged by fighters and on arrival found that we were there to show the Observer Corp what a Hampden looked like from the ground and the air. The night before the aerodrome had been bombed up with dozens of incendiary bombs and the Franco sign works on the North Circular Road had been demolished and also a Tube Station near by. There were two warnings while we were there but nothing happened. Incidentally was I proud
[page break]
5
[R.A.F Crest]
of myself when all these civvie chaps came around asking me about my machine. They are fine jobs for navigation and have bags of guns for defence. I feel very happy about my chances in them and prefer them to any machine I have been in. At Hendon I ran into a Southend lad who I met a Prestwick and he was there demonstrating a Battle oh boy did he envy me. I found he was stationed Binbrook which is not far from here and that they had come from Eastchurch in the Thames Estuary from where they had been bombed out. Withal the weather was bad we made the journey back without incident and on landing the pilot said ”simply wizard navigation”; did my chest swell.
I’m glad you sent off Millys [sic] and
[page break]
Patty’s birthday cards. You will have to decide yourself about Mansfield as [inserted] it [/inserted] seems unlikely I shall even get a day off here to see you where ever you are. Were Gwen & Agnes keeping well? Send me one of the photos of you and Pam as soon as they are ready. Darling, don’t you ever think for one moment that you are a nuisance as having you near makes all the difference to this war, and I am looking forward to when you are near again.
Give my best wishes to Mr & Mrs Gorton and always remember that you and Pam are always in the thoughts of
Your devoted husband
Harry xxxxx
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
Letter to Mrs H Redgrave from Harry
Description
An account of the resource
Harry writes to Jessie telling her of elements of his service life & duties including navigating a Hampden from Finningley to Hendon, and his input to their domestic life.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Harry Redgrave
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1940-09-27
Format
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Envelope and six handwritten sheets
Language
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eng
Type
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Text
Text. Correspondence
Identifier
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ERedgraveHCRedgraveJM400927-0001,
ERedgraveHCRedgraveJM400927-0002,
ERedgraveHCRedgraveJM400927-0003,
ERedgraveHCRedgraveJM400927-0004,
ERedgraveHCRedgraveJM400927-0005,
ERedgraveHCRedgraveJM400927-0006,
ERedgraveHCRedgraveJM400927-0007
Coverage
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Civilian
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Kent
England--Yorkshire
England--London
England--Peterborough
England--Doncaster
England--Southend-on-Sea
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Essex
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Contributor
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Steve Christian
David Bloomfield
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940-09-27
106 Squadron
aircrew
Battle
entertainment
Hampden
navigator
observer
RAF Eastchurch
RAF Finningley
RAF Hendon
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1288/17230/AHarrisDR190508.1.mp3
6a11b42596b674bae0164350fdeba8e7
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Harris, Donald Raymond
D R Harris
Description
An account of the resource
Three items. An oral history interview with Flight Sergeant Donald Harris (B. 1925, 1877136 Royal Air Force) and two photographs. He served as an air gunner on 625 Squadron Lancaster at the end of the war when he flew on Operation Manna.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Donald Harris 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
2019-05-08
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Harris, DR
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
HB: Right. This is an interview for the International Bomber Command Centre Digital Archive on the 8th of May 2019 between Harry Bartlett, volunteer with the Digital Archive and Mr Donald Raymond Harris who served in Bomber Command during the Second World War. Well, thank you for agreeing to the interview Don. The interview is taking place at Earls Barton in Northamptonshire, where Mr Harris lives. Right. Don, well like all good stories we start at the beginning so where were you born?
DH: Acton, London.
HB: Right. Oh right, and did you, you went to school there did you? Yeah.
DH: Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
DH: A Common School. A Common School.
HB: A Common School. Oh right. So, you were at that school until what sort of age?
DH: Fourteen.
HB: Fourteen. Right. And so that would be, yeah we would be talking about the year war was breaking out.
DH: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. So, as you came to fourteen did you, did you leave school and go to work straightaway?
DH: Yeah. Yeah.
HB: At fourteen.
DH: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. And what sort of things did you do, Don?
DH: What? Work?
HB: Yeah.
DH: Teaboy.
HB: Right.
DH: Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Well. That’s, that’s what the official title was. I was the teaboy.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And I had to travel from Acton in London to Slough to go to work. I had to catch a lorry that took me down there with all the men.
HB: Right.
DH: Digging the road up, laying gas mains.
HB: Right.
DH: That’s what my Reserved Occupation was because gas mains were being bombed. Broken. All kinds of things. So we had to go out and repair them. And there had to be a teaboy because you could not allow the men to walk off to get cigarettes or tobacco or whatever else.
HB: Oh.
DH: I had to do it. I had to go and get the men’s, whatever they wanted. They weren’t allowed to leave the job.
HB: Right.
DH: So that was the original.
HB: Yeah.
DH: It was rather amusing in as much that being totally ignorant and fourteen years old I also had to tidy up round the office. There was an office for the ganger and I had to tidy up coke because it spread you know. That kind of thing. And I found a little package about that big. Didn’t know what it was so I took it in to the boss’s office and I opened it and it was all the men’s wages. The stupid agent had hidden it amongst the coke.
HB: Oh dear.
DH: So, I locked the office, went up to see the ganger. What was his name? Dave. No. No. Anyway, the ganger. I went up to him. I just took him to one side. I said, ‘I found a package.’ He said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘I found a package,’ I said, ‘And it’s got all the men’s wages.’ ‘Come with me.’
HB: Right. Yeah.
DH: So, he went there and he counted how many wages there were which was right. He said, ‘Ok.’ He wanted to make sure —
HB: Yeah.
DH: I hadn’t put one aside. But that was some of the interesting things as a very young boy.
HB: Yeah.
DH: At fourteen years old.
HB: Yeah. Who, who were you actually working for?
DH: At that time it was a company called O C Summers.
HB: Right. Right.
DH: That was the name of the company.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Eventually, I mean I got rather well known and when that job finished I came back to London, worked with another ganger in [pause] it was in Shepherd’s Bush. Which is near, well not near but reasonably near home. I could go there by bus. So that was the second one. Then [pause] when that work finished, you know we’d go to another job. And it was then that my brother was reported missing in Burma.
HB: Oh right.
DH: I did get a lot of information because a friend of mine daughter went up to London and got a lot more information about them. He was the 3rd Carabiniers, which was tanks and they did a silly thing. They drove their tank up and they saw a tank, a Japanese tank on its own. And as far as they can learn all the people, there were five, four members of that tank that were captured by the Japs. They don’t know what happened to them. Never found any remains or anything like that.
HB: So, what year would that be Don?
DH: Oh, fairly early in the war.
HB: Yeah.
DH: When they first got to Burma.
HB: Right. Right. Yeah.
DH: That’s when it was. But she got a lot of information. Although they couldn’t find the graves or anything like that they itemised the four people that were missing because that’s, they had to report them missing.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
DH: They put up a memorial then. I think it was Calcutta. With their names on it.
HB: Right. Yeah.
DH: But that’s all.
HB: Right.
DH: I got to sixteen so it must have ‘39 or ‘40/41 time.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
DH: Then I decided then that I would want to go in to the Service and the eldest brother was in the Royal Corps of Signals.
HB: Right. Yeah.
DH: He was the eldest.
HB: So, let me just stop you there, Don. So, there’s you, two brothers.
DH: Yeah.
HB: Mum. Dad. Any other family in there? There? Sisters?
DH: No. My sister died before the war.
HB: Oh right. Right.
DH: She was twenty five.
HB: Oh dear.
DH: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. So, yeah. Sorry. So, yeah. You decided that you were going to join.
DH: Yeah.
HB: The Services.
DH: I wanted to join it. Now, there was a unit in Acton, in the school there which, what the devil was the name of the people training for the Air Force?
HB: Air Training Corps.
DH: Yeah. It was. And that was in a big school. High school. Up in there. And I went there once a week. Only to once a week and it was quite interesting because we went through lots of things. Not guns. Not guns.
HB: No.
DH: But radio. Morse Code. All that lot. You know.
HB: Yeah.
DH: So that was interesting. Then I got a letter to report to a place up where the balloons flew from. I can’t get it yet because I do forget.
HB: Yeah.
DH: But anyway —
HB: Oh, well, that’s understandable. Yeah.
DH: Where the in the balloons. We went there and we went through several tests and it came out that I’d remembered some of the Morse Code [laughs]
HB: Oh right. Right.
DH: Anyway, it was a little while later on when I got a letter to report to St John’s Wood.
HB: Right. Yeah. Yeah.
DH: Yeah. Report there. And they entered me as a wireless operator air gunner.
HB: Oh, w/op. Yeah.
DH: And once I got used to being in London the next place I moved to was Bridlington.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Just to make sure I wasn’t near home like.
HB: Yeah.
DH: But I had a sergeant. Brilliant. Blakey. Sergeant Blakey. He was absolutely brilliant. And our particular unit we got the highest recommendations. He was brilliant. Absolutely. Only a small fella but a sergeant and he really was good.
HB: So, was it, was this your, like doing your basic training —
DH: Yeah.
HB: Don.
DH: Oh yeah.
HB: Right. So, so we’d be talking what now? We’d be talking, coming up 1943/44.
DH: Yeah.
HB: That sort of the time.
DH: Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And we had twelve bore guns shooting out to sea.
HB: Oh right. Yeah.
DH: It was great. And this was the first time in my life I’d ever run six miles. Run. And I had to run from the coast back to my camp. And I thought oh. I laid down on a bed when I got back and I was puffing and at my age I should have been fit. Anyway, that was that. Then I got sent to [pause] oh Christ. A wireless school was at [pause] isn’t it funny? I can’t remember. Big city. Big city and, you know Hartleys Jam and things.
HB: Yeah.
DH: They owned the land that we were on.
HB: Right.
DH: And they said if ever you want to work come and work in the fields with all the fruit —
HB: Lovely.
DH: Got paid.
HB: So that, so that would be [pause] was that north? Did you go north?
DH: No. Never.
HB: Or, I’m just trying to place because there were one or two wireless schools.
DH: Yeah.
HB: Knocking about.
DH: Yeah. No, that was [pause] Hereford.
HB: Hereford. Right. Yes. Yeah.
DH: Hereford.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And while I was there I got ill and of course the sick quarters was well, kind of a hospital. Kind of. But the girls who were nurses only went for the officers. And then they sent me to a hospital. Credenhill Hospital. I’ve remembered that right down to the last word. The nurses there were like lady so and so.
HB: Oh.
DH: Oh yeah. And they were really good. They were good. And I met another bloke named Don and we both could play darts.
HB: Oh, right. Yeah.
DH: And we used to go in to town, go in to a pub. That was our first shall we say attempt of them getting their beer for nothing but instead of that we both could play darts.
HB: Right.
DH: And so we didn’t buy a pint. They did. Yeah. No, this is all reacting because I was ill. I really was. How I got to the hospital I don’t know. I was out.
HB: What did you have? Did you have some sort of pleurisy? Or —
DH: Cold and chill and something else.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
DH: It was all luck. And that, then I went back to the school. You know the —
HB: Yeah. The wireless school.
DH: Went to see the officer in charge and I said, ‘We’re not getting anywhere.’ I said, ‘Nobody is wanting wireless operators. There’s plenty of them.’ There was. I said, ‘I want to remuster. Air gunner.’ He said, ‘Yeah. If you wish to do that we could do it.’ So I remustered as an air gunner. And do you know what they stamped on my docs? Lack of moral fibre. Yeah. If you found my documents you’d find it’s got, “Lack of Moral Fibre,” on them because I remustered. I remustered to a more dangerous bloody job.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Anyway, I wanted that and they sent me to the island at the beginning of the Thames.
HB: Sheppey.
DH: Sheppey. Which was a Fighter Command. They sent me there. They were Typhoons, Tempests. That’s what they were and they used to start them with a long cartridge. They’d be turning it over with the battery and then he’d fire it which would kick the engine over and start.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Well, the engine was a Napier. Made by Napier’s anyway and oh they were powerful things. God, they were powerful. It only took a very short distance to take off.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
DH: And it was really, talk about noisy. Christ. Totally different to the Spitfire.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
DH: Totally different, but it was good. So, from there I was sent to Bridgnorth.
HB: Were you? Yeah.
DH: Bridgnorth was a Gunnery School and there we did all the necessary flashlights and bit of this and bits of that and stripped the gun down and put it back. But it was just right. I liked it. I really did. And anybody that didn’t read the Morse Code with the lamp didn’t get in.
HB: Right.
DH: I did. I could read it easy. It didn’t make any difference. So, I finished there and sent me home. Home.
HB: Right.
DH: Until I got a summons to go to Aylesbury.
HB: Yeah.
DH: There was a main aerodrome and a sub. A little one.
HB: Yeah. Little satellite. Yeah. Yeah.
DH: Yeah. And we were in Wellingtons. Lovely aircraft but a bugger to fly and even at one time the skipper, who was, who was New Zealand, he called me up from the turret, ‘Come up and help me.’ So of course, I went up there and said, ‘What’s the matter, skip?’ He says, ‘Help me push this bloody thing down.’ [laughs] Because Aylesbury is all hilly.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
DH: And the draught coming up was coming up and lifting us instead of going down.
HB: Oh dear.
DH: So I got in to the co-pilot’s seat and shoved it and we got down.
HB: Was this, so this was an Operational Training Unit.
DH: Oh yeah.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
DH: Yeah. Well, we used to have to turn the engines over by hand.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. How did, how did you get in to a crew there? Did it —
DH: When we went to the main aerodrome.
HB: Yeah.
DH: There. We got all the crew sorted out. We didn’t do it.
HB: Oh right.
DH: They did it.
HB: Right.
DH: So, the pilot was New Zealander. The bomb aimer was New Zealander. The wireless operator was Irish. Irish. Not Northern Ireland. Irish. Our mid-upper gunner was Scotch. Bob. I even remember where he lived. Edinburgh. The main road. That’s where he lived. And me. So that’s six of us. We hadn’t got the engineer.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And we went oh several times. We went over, we had to fly over London to let the air people shoot at us. But they were told to shoot low [laughs] and also the searchlight.
HB: Oh right. Yeah.
DH: Because the searchlights taught them and us.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
DH: And then we flew back to Aylesbury. That’s where we were going. So we landed at the auxiliary aircraft because the other place was busy. We landed and we, you know that type of aircraft the Wellington was kind of a big aircraft. But it’s also marvellous for keeping flying even if it had got a hole in the side, you know.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And all of a sudden we got a warning and all the lights went on. Americans landed because they couldn’t land at their aerodrome so they could land at ours and of course they’d got all these big fur coats and Christ knows what else on. Oh, and they were, got their big aircraft with four engines, you know. All this. A couple of the English blokes there said, ‘Yeah. You go underneath our wings, don’t you?’ Almost caused a fight but never mind. From there we went to just north of Stamford. There was an aerodrome on the farm land that done it and they had Stirlings. Bloody great things. Seventeen foot to the bottom of the aircraft. We weren’t interested in that. We transferred from there to Lancasters and we were trained on the Lancasters. Now —
HB: Can you can you remember what that airfield was? Was it Woolfox? No.
DH: It was about three miles outside Stamford.
HB: Right. Yeah.
DH: On the main road by the way. A1.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And the airfield was on the right, and we had interlopers follow our aircraft in and they bombed the bloody girl’s place. WAAFs. Killed a lot of them.
HB: Oh dear.
DH: But anyway, that’s good. We did further training and for the skipper’s point of view nobody else. Him and me. And we practiced corkscrewing.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Do you know what that is?
HB: Yeah. Well, you. You tell me what it is.
DH: Well —
HB: I presume you were a rear gunner.
DH: Oh yeah.
HB: Yeah.
DH: We took off. Got up to a height and then we were looking for fighter. And it was there was the fighter. The skipper said, ‘Can you see what it is?’ I said, ‘Yeah. A Spitfire.’ [laughs] So, he said, ‘Right,’ he said, ‘So, is he within range?’ I said, ‘No. Miles away.’ It was amazing I could recognise it. Anyway, all of a sudden I saw this Spitfire getting closer and closer and when it got to about six hundred feet I said, ‘Corkscrew port go.’ And of course, where does the tail go? Voom.
HB: Straight up in the air.
DH: Straight up [laughs]. And I had a camera.
HB: Yeah.
DH: On the guns and I followed it to the word. Down, port, up starboard oh. Got a complete film. Complete film. So the Spitfire broke away. Waggled to say good. And that was it as far as I was concerned. And then we got back, landed and that afternoon of course the cameras went in to the photography department and they, we got a call over a tannoy, ‘Warrant Officer Mitchell and crew attend the Photography Unit.’ I thought oh, I must have made a mistake. Instead of that the bloke that did it, it was an officer and he said, ‘Watch it.’ He said. It only goes for a short while because you’re down. Up. Up. Up. You know. So we did. The film was absolutely perfect.
HB: Oh right.
DH: And this officer turned around and he said, ‘You’ve got one of the best gunners that I’ve tested.’ He said, ‘That pilot was dead from the first shot.’
HB: Really?
DH: Yeah. I thought well that’s —
HB: Yeah.
DH: And then we had the other test to show that we were fit for action. It was, you know, the usual things. Aircraft recognition.
HB: Yeah.
DH: How to load your guns and all that kind of thing. And then we all had to attend a meeting with the people who were in charge of all of that and he said, ‘We’ve got some good results.’ What was he? A squadron leader, I think. And he said, ‘We’ve got some exceptionally good people.’ So, he said, ‘136.’ I said, ‘Yes.’ ‘You’ve got nineteen and a half points.’ I said, ‘Out of how many?’ ‘Twenty.’ Nineteen and a half out of twenty. And the one thing I forgot. Where [pause] you know how the bullets go down a tray.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Into the turret. Up into the guns. Right. Now, when you stop these continue to run.
HB: Yeah.
DH: So something has got to stop them. At the bottom of the tray here there’s a hole like that which just fits the bullet. So it goes into that hole and it stops running.
HB: Right.
DH: And that’s what I missed.
HB: Oh.
DH: And my mid-upper gunner got nineteen. Just shows you doesn’t it?
HB: That’s, it’s still pretty good.
DH: To me it was of interest because I wanted to be perfect as a —
HB: Yeah.
DH: It’s a, I’m a defender.
HB: Yeah.
DH: You know. So, we did. It was good.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And then from there I went to oh I can’t remember the name. I did tell you.
HB: Was this being posted to a squadron?
DH: Yeah. 625.
HB: 625, yeah.
DH: Which was, come on. It’s six miles outside. North of Lincoln. It’s a permanent station.
HB: At Scampton.
DH: Scampton.
HB: I wasn’t supposed to help you there but —
DH: No.
HB: I thought I would.
DH: Yeah.
HB: Being as you got nineteen and a half for your gunnery I thought I’ll let you have that.
DH: Yeah. Yeah. We were Scampton. We did. We did. I’ll tell you what I liked about what we did. I’m not talking about killing people I’m talking about what I liked. We flew to Holland. Instead of bombs we had sacks of food.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Marvellous. I was so pleased to see that.
HB: Do you remember what that operation was called?
DH: Yeah. Because we had to follow the sign on the, painted on the roof of the hospital. And it was two fields beyond and we had to drop the food there. One silly pilot flew underneath another one and when [laughs] it went straight through the cockpit.
HB: Blimey. Yeah.
DH: Flew. Flour everywhere. Daft.
HB: Did you know that was called Operation Manna?
DH: No.
HB: Manna from heaven.
DH: No.
HB: Yeah.
DH: I know I liked it. We were only a hundred feet high.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And as we flew along, I mean the roads and everything else I got a clear view because as you know there was no back in the turret.
HB: Yeah.
DH: I was amazed to see this German and a machine gun but he wasn’t anywhere near it. He stood well back.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And when I looked at him I thought Christ he could only be fifteen. Fourteen. Fifteen. And we were told not to get near the guns. Good job because I mean we were all loaded.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
DH: And we flew back over the sea at a hundred feet. I didn’t like that.
HB: No. I can imagine.
DH: No. Not really.
HB: Yeah.
DH: It was alright but I mean we trusted the skipper obviously but I just didn’t like it. It was too near the sea.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Which is going to, but no. They said we mustn’t fly.
HB: Had you actually flown any night operations before that, Don?
DH: We were on the battle order two or three times.
HB: Yeah.
DH: But we didn’t go. We went out to the aircraft. Went to the nice little café in the middle of the airfield. You know where I mean?
HB: Yeah.
DH: And it was nice because we got eggs and bacon and a few —
HB: Who was running that café? Was that —
DH: Yeah. Lovely.
HB: Was that the WAAFs running that or —
DH: No.
HB: No.
DH: No. The Air Force.
HB: Yeah.
DH: They ran that.
HB: Yeah.
DH: It was really nice. It really was. We thought we would get a call in a minute which you were liable to do. If you get one of the others calling with the breakdown of engine or whatever else then we would have gone.
HB: Yeah.
DH: But I think we, four, four times. Yeah. And that was at Scampton.
HB: Right. Right. So you were, you were like the reserve group.
DH: Yeah.
HB: Ready to fill in.
DH: We were the first reserve. Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
DH: But that’s what they said when you said you were on the Battle Order. You are. You’ve got to obey whatever. Another thing we did there was when the, when the troops were advancing over in Germany and France and Belgium directly they got to this Air Force place. Well, it became an Air Force place. It was Belgian place. We were told to go there, land, switch off your engines. Switch off.
HB: Right.
DH: Yeah. Because there were still some bomb holes in the [laughs]and they were filling them in quick.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And we were bringing in prisoners of war home. And we brought them to England.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Buckinghamshire, I think somewhere. And then we flew home.
HB: Right.
DH: And we did that twice.
HB: So you, so you flew from Scampton.
DH: Yeah.
HB: You flew over to Belgium.
DH: Yeah.
HB: Parked up if you want to call it that.
DH: Yeah.
HB: And then how would the prisoners of war arrive?
DH: Oh, they were there in, this was the stupid part. They were there and they had fed them. Fed.
HB: Oh.
DH: Yeah. You can imagine. They fed them beautiful meals and when we got them on board. Oh —
HB: Yeah.
DH: It was a bit rough. But anyway, we got them home. Directly we landed in Buckinghamshire somewhere and unloaded them. Then we flew back. And then they had the job of cleaning the aircraft.
HB: Who? Who cleaned the aircraft?
DH: Ground crew. Yeah. They had power hoses and everything.
HB: Yeah.
DH: But there again at least we got some of them back home.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
DH: We then got orders to move to [pause] I can never remember the name. I wasn’t there long. Where the bombers are? Where you went.
Other: Coningsby.
HB: Coningsby.
DH: Coningsby. We got there. We were just getting settled in and what’s the squadron? 97? [pause] And about three days later we were called into operations room. We had to fly to Italy.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And we went. There’s two areas which we could have gone to. But the one we chose was at the foot of Vesuvius. Right at the foot. We landed at Naples Airport but we couldn’t take off because the runways weren’t long enough with a load of people on board.
HB: Oh.
DH: We were —
HB: So this was all still part of Operation Exodus.
DH: Oh yeah.
HB: Bringing the prisoner of war home.
DH: Yeah.
HB: Right.
DH: But those there were mainly officers.
HB: Yeah.
DH: What was it called? Lamy? Lamy camp?
HB: Could be. Yeah. Yeah.
DH: Yeah. I think it was.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And they were nearly all officers. So —
HB: This is, this is still in Lancasters.
DH: Oh yeah.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
DH: Oh yeah.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
DH: The dodgy bit was with a load of people on board. As the gunner it would have been my job to dash about with an oxygen mask for each one to have a puff. But I never made it. I was ill.
HB: Right.
DH: Yeah. I went into this hospital in [pause] just south of Naples. It’s a little place. And I was in there for two or three weeks. When I came out I went and saw the sergeant that was in charge of getting people home and I said, ‘Right. When can you get me home?’ I said, ‘My skipper’s gone.’ I said, ‘He’s already taken off.’ Because the Yanks came and right at the end of the runway was trees.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And I’m afraid their big load of stuff took off and they had all the trees [bulbed] out and the runway lengthened.
HB: Oh right.
DH: So that they could get off.
HB: Yeah.
DH: It’s purely luck. Not anything else. It was warm.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Naples.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Warm. Christmas time. And we had our Christmas dinner in the palace at Naples.
HB: Oh right. Yeah.
DH: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. What rank were you at this stage?
DH: Flight sergeant.
HB: You were a flight sergeant. Right. Yeah.
DH: Nice. Everything. Then they said, ‘You’ve got to fly.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘Good.’ So, I said, ‘What do you want me to do?’
HB: ‘Act as a rear gunner.’
DH: I said, ‘Well, I won’t act at it,’ I said, ‘I am one.’ So, he said, ‘Oh. Alright.’ So, he said, ‘Well, you’ve got to look after the men on board.’ Twenty. Twenty men. Apart from the crew, you know.
HB: Yeah.
DH: We couldn’t take more than that because we had to go over the Alps.
HB: Oh yeah. Yeah.
DH: The air is different.
HB: Yeah.
DH: So, we did go over the Alps. And it was a bit of job to go amongst all the people so I got the mid-upper gunner to do the same for the other ten. So I did ten and he did ten.
HB: Right. This was with the oxygen.
DH: Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Well, up there over the Alps there is no oxygen, virtually.
HB: Yeah.
DH: So —
HB: So, did they give you extra oxygen bottles for them? Or —
DH: Oh yeah. Portable ones.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
DH: Or you could plug it in where ever you had it.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Where the hospital bed was, you know.
HB: Yeah.
DH: There was one there.
HB: That’s up, so that’s up by the main spar.
DH: Yeah.
HB: Going through. Yeah.
DH: So, you’d got all kinds of things that you could use. But we did. We got over the other side of the Alps and we came down to a nice level. Twenty thousand was nice. And we suddenly got a broadcast. The skipper, we still had plug in and this skipper whoever he was, and I’ve still no idea who he was said, ‘We’re not going home.’ I said, ‘What?’ ‘No.’ He said, ‘Fog in England. Covered in fog.’ So we couldn’t land. I knew we could if we’d have gone on FIDO.
HB: What, what was FIDO?
DH: Fog dispersal. They had the runway covered in a pipe with loads of holes and big huge tanks of petrol and they pumped it through and lit it and that just lifted the fog. Very dangerous if the skipper wasn’t alert because the heat from the [pause] would lift it.
HB: Lift the aircraft. Yeah.
DH: Anyway, that, we didn’t go. So we had to land in southern France. Now that was not popular. We landed. We were told to switch off the engines and sit in the aircraft. Not leave it. That was the Frenchmen. Well, didn’t like that.
HB: Yeah.
DH: We were fighting for them as well. Anyway, we sat there and it must have been about midnight I think because we took off at 9 o’clock in Italy.
HB: Yeah.
DH: When we got down in France as I said we sat there and then we got clearance from England.
HB: Yeah.
DH: So, the engineer went out, primed the engines, started them and we took off and we landed somewhere near the Wash. Well, that’s where FIDO is.
HB: Oh right.
DH: Yeah. I mean it was quite interesting actually to know that we couldn’t use FIDO. Mind you it would have used a hell of a lot of fuel.
HB: Yeah.
DH: It gets pumped through at a hell of rate.
HB: Yeah.
DH: But we knew all about it because we were told about it. We couldn’t train on it but we were told about it and it was quite interesting but then I wasn’t at my aerodrome.
HB: No. Of course not. No.
DH: The people there were looking at it. How can I get home? And suddenly this officer came and he said, ‘I’ve just been brought down here by a vehicle. He’s going to go back. Not quite to your aerodrome but he will take you there.’ I thought oh thank God for that. You know.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And we went up through Boston. Lovely.
HB: Yeah.
DH: What was that? Bloody hell. What was that station? Dogdyke.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
DH: What a name for a station. Dogdyke.
HB: Yeah.
DH: That’s the station’s name. So, we went back there. I said, well I’ll need a bed.
HB: Just bear with me a second, Don. I’ll just pause this a second just while the tea —
[recording paused]
HB: Right. We just turned the tape back on after we’ve been provided with tea and biscuits. So, we’ve got these officers from Italy. We’ve come back and we’ve landed.
DH: The van.
HB: At Dogdyke.
DH: It was a van.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Took me right back.
HB: Took you all the way up to Dogdyke.
DH: Yeah. They took me to the entrance.
HB: Right.
DH: Yeah. Yeah. I walked in. Well, I didn’t walk in. They, I got stopped at the gate but when I said who I was and what I was. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Yeah. The adjutant wants to see you.’ So, I thought how did he know I was. I thought to myself they must have told him in Italy. Anyway, I said, ‘Well, it’s a bit late now. I doubt very much if he’s there.’ So, I said, ‘Is he still there?’ ‘No.’ I said, ‘Well, I’ll need a bed for tonight.’ The bloke said. ‘We’ve allocated you one already.’ So I went there and evidently it was a new crew that had just, there was a spare bed.
HB: So, I bet you were popular.
DH: Well no. There was a spare bed. I don’t know why. But anyway. I went to bed and I did sleep. I really did sleep. I didn’t know what was going on. The next bed to me the bloke said, ‘You were dreaming.’ I said, ‘Was I?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘And it sounded pretty bloody awful.’ ‘Oh.’ I felt alright you know.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
DH: Anyway, I got up. Got dressed. Went to see the adjutant. What’s going on. I didn’t know then so I said, ‘You wanted to see me sir.’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Alright. What’s going to happen because my crew’s not here.’ He said, ‘No. They’re on your way to New Zealand.’ I said, ‘What?’ ‘Yeah. Two have gone to New Zealand, one’s gone to Edinburgh, one’s gone to Ireland, the other one to London.’ I thought, ‘Oh.’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘And you are on your way to Uxbridge. Do you know where it is?’ I said, ‘Oh, yeah [laughs] Do I know where it is?’ So, I said, ‘Why am I going now for?’ ‘Demob.’ ‘Oh.’ ‘You sound surprised.’ I said, ‘Well, I am. I like the Air Force.’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘You can’t.’ Just like that. He said, ‘You’re going. In front of me are all your train passes. All your leave passes. And you will be going to Dogdyke Station.’ That’s why I remembered it.
HB: Right.
DH: So that I had to go from there to Boston. Train to London. Get another train from there to Uxbridge. You get out at Uxbridge and there would be a vehicle waiting for you. It was well organised. It really was well organised. I mean that. Everything was like he said. Got to Uxbridge. Looked. There was a vehicle. I said, ‘Where are we going now?’ ‘Oh, Wembley.’ ‘What for?’ He said, ‘Demob.’ I thought, Christ. They’ve done that all in the time that the phone message going from Italy. Now, that is some organisation.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Bloody well is. Really is.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And of course, when I got to Wembley they were ready for me. Gave them my paper. I got my shoes [laughs] blue suit, shirt, tie. All complete. Everything was there.
HB: What did you have? Did you have a cap or a trilby hat?
DH: Trilby.
HB: I thought. Yeah. Trilby.
DH: And that was it.
HB: Yeah. After those years that you’d spent just finished.
DH: Yeah. No, they, once he said, ‘You’re going back,’ I knew what he meant because obviously the amount of damage created by the bombs was tremendous in London and that’s where we worked.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Oh Christ. We even laid a main on top of the pavement. On top of it. To pump water because water mains down below were broke.
HB: So how quick did you go back to doing your job from being demobbed?
DH: Straightaway.
HB: You didn’t have any leave or anything or —
DH: Oh no.
HB: No.
DH: No.
HB: Right.
DH: Straightaway.
HB: And did you go back to, was it OC Summers, was it?
DH: Yeah.
HB: You went straight back to them.
DH: Yeah.
HB: And they, had they kept your job for you?
DH: Oh yeah.
HB: Yeah.
DH: They had to.
HB: Yeah.
DH: So then —
HB: So, what job did you go back to, Don?
DH: As a joint maker.
HB: Right.
DH: A joint maker. It’s one that the sockets and spigots enter one another and then you put yarn in and then you run hot lead in. And then you set it up.
HB: Yeah. Ok.
DH: Good. It was very very complicated. I used to go with a ganger and then they’d come and get me to take me to another ganger to run his joints for him.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And then go back to it.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Like that.
HB: So, what, what year would this be then, Don?
DH: The end of the war.
HB: ‘45/46.
DH: Yeah ’46.
HB: ’46. Yeah.
DH: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. Can I just take you back a little bit, Don?
DH: Yes. Yes. Yes.
HB: You know, before you joined you were in Acton. You would have gone through the Blitz.
DH: Oh yes.
HB: And your family. You had bombing around Acton.
DH: Yeah. We had a bomb in the bottom of the garden [laughs].
HB: In the bottom of the garden.
DH: Well, I had a big garden.
HB: Oh right. Well, yeah.
DH: We had a long garden.
HB: Yeah.
DH: It must have been about a hundred feet long. Something like that.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And the bomb was at the bottom. It did kill a boy. Sixteen year old in the house opposite [unclear]
HB: Yeah.
DH: He got caught, you know.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Terrible. Yeah. I was there when the fires were roaring like hell. A big red glow in the docks.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
DH: Yeah.
HB: And so, so obviously you’ve come through that. Did you actually ever fly a live, I’ll call it a live operation to actually drop bombs?
DH: No.
HB: Right. Right. So, you come towards the end of the war. You’re what by now? You’re nineteenish. Twentyish. What about girlfriends?
DH: No.
HB: Social life.
DH: Not interested.
HB: Did you not have a social life in the RAF?
DH: No. The only social life was in a pub in Lincoln.
HB: Right. Right. Right. Yeah.
DH: And it was in the cattle market. There used to be a cattle market.
HB: Yeah.
DH: There was a cattle market in Lincoln and there was a pub in the cattle market.
HB: So, yeah, so you come to the end of the war. You’ve gone back to OC Summers and you’re now doing a jointer, a jointer’s job and did you, did you just carry on with them then?
DH: Them. Yeah. For forty years.
HB: Forty years.
DH: Yeah. Because they count service as working for them.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
DH: That was, oh before, before the forty years I was made a ganger and I went in to a gas works which I never expected.
HB: Oh right.
DH: Because that was a vastly different type of job. You do all kinds of heavy lifting. Crane work and everything else.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Now, I was the ganger there. The original ganger was ill and died and I took over.
HB: Right.
DH: Directly I took over they started to do big work. I ended up with, you know twenty five men doing different jobs.
HB: Yeah.
DH: I couldn’t cope because I couldn’t be everywhere at once.
HB: No. No.
DH: So, I asked the governor who I knew personally, I asked him if he could get me some men with knowledge. And one of the men he sent in was a ganger that I worked for.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And he came, he came in and he says, ‘Hello Don.’ I said, ‘Hello,’ I said, ‘Christ, I haven’t seen you — ’ because he was very experienced. And he said, ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘Don’t let it worry you.’ He said, ‘You’ve got the responsibility. Not me.’
HB: Yes.
DH: See. And he was a very nice bloke.
HB: Yeah.
DH: He really was.
HB: Yeah.
DH: I mean, we used to go fishing together. We went, particularly when we worked night work I drove him home in the morning and then we’d drive out. —
HB: Oh right.
DH: And go fishing.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Anyway, Sammy Jefferies his name was. A really, a nice bloke. And he was [pause] amazed at the work I was doing. We had a forty eight inch main, gas main which gathered all the gas out the tanks into pumps, in to a main and so forth. And I had to cut a bit out of the gas main. We used to cut. Put a collar on and then put another bit of pipe in and draw the cord up. And that’s the first forty eight inch joint I’d run.
HB: Right.
DH: And what we had to do was we had a twelve inch ladle. Twelve inch. Quite deep. We filled that up first and then one bloke stood there, one bloke stood there with another nine inch ladle to top me up if I said so. Because if I couldn’t see that we were going to run it we could run out of lead so we pulled it in to my ladle and then I ran it.
HB: Yeah.
DH: So we did it. And the senior engineer in the gas works he had done a bit of district work, what we called district work and he stood there the whole time that I got it apart. Because we put gas bags up the main.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
DH: To stop gas coming through. Well, we shut the valves but I mean —
HB: Yeah.
DH: If they leaked.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And that was me. I came. They took me out of the works, Summers and put me in charge of a gang that’s going on holiday. A gang of men. So, I did that. Then they sent me to another one by St Pancras Station where there was a T-junction. And the lid was around but it was leaking bad. So the main there was eighteen. Eighteen. Eighteen inch. What I had to do was shut it off. So I ordered twenty four inch bags to put in there so that a twenty four inch bag would fill it.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
DH: Up.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Take the lid off. Re-drill it. Put new bolts in. Whip it out. And put it in. You’d be surprised. It’s really quite a technical job.
HB: I wouldn’t be surprised. I’d be terrified.
DH: Bloody hell. But after I’d been there for forty years John Laing —
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
DH: Bought Summers because we were making money. So, they bought OC Summers. I lost [pause] well, twenty one years pension because Summer’s pension wasn’t as active to buy me equipment.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. I see what you mean. Yeah.
DH: So this posh speaking man from Laing came down to one of Summer’s depots which I was then responsible for all depots and he came down and he said, ‘Well, I’m afraid this is what is going to be.’ I said, ‘No. It isn’t.’ I said, ‘You’ve knocked twenty one years off my pension,’ I said. ‘And that’s not on,’ I said, ‘And I’ve got with me several agents who have got over twenty years on sites and I want twenty years pension.’ He said, ‘Are they the agents that’s running the area?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ And he said, ‘Oh, I’ll have to see what I can do.’ And if they all packed up the jobs would stop.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
DH: And eventually he came back and he said, ‘We’ve made arrangements that when you do get to retirement we will give you a gift of money to go in to your pension. Not to you. To the pension.’
HB: Right.
DH: No.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Actually, they did. I did do well in a way. The firm because the old managing director came with the job, got six thousand pound.
HB: Right. Right.
DH: When you put it in the figures to get six thousand pound like that meant a little bit each month. Only a little bit.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
DH: But there you go.
HB: Yeah. So, so you’ve, we’ve gone up to retirement. But you must have got married at some stage.
DH: Oh yes. I did. Oh yes. She was a typist in the gas works.
HB: So that would be, what? Nineteen —
DH: Oh God.
HB: Fifty something.
DH: A bit later than that I think. Well, you can work it out if you like. I didn’t get married until I was thirty eight.
HB: Oh right. Right. So you were thirty eight. Right. Well, yeah. Yeah. That’s, yeah, yeah so you —
DH: My wife.
HB: You were well on. Yeah.
DH: Yeah. And because I’d lived in a house all my life I could not live a flat.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And she had three boys.
HB: Oh right. Right.
DH: Eighteen, sixteen and fifteen. And I said to her, I said, ‘I can’t live in a flat.’ She said, ‘What are we going to do?’ I said, ‘We’re going to buy a house.’ She said, ‘We haven’t got any money.’ I said, ‘I know we haven’t.’ I said, ‘But I know what I’m doing. We’ll go and find a house first. Then we’ll go to Lambeth Borough Council and because this is a flat owned by Lambeth Borough Council they’ll willingly give us the money so that we get out.’
HB: Right. Yeah. Yeah.
DH: It’s true. That is what they did.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And then the first house we bought was in Mitcham, Surrey and it was six thousand pound [laugh] And don’t laugh but that six thousand pound.
HB: Yeah.
DH: But that was a hell of a drain on the money.
HB: Oh, it would have been yeah in those days. Yeah. Yeah.
DH: So, yeah and then the firm decided to make me the depot manager of Watford.
HB: At Watford. Right.
DH: Yeah. But on condition I moved.
HB: Right.
DH: Because I had to be near it because we were on duty day and night. Still mending gas mains.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
DH: So, the pleasant surprise was that it was the firm’s solicitor that dealt with the sale. That means that they paid.
HB: That saved you a few pounds that way. Yeah.
DH: Oh yes. Yes.
HB: Right.
DH: So, we lived in Bushey Mill Lane, Bushey. We lived in there for quite a long time.
HB: Right.
DH: I don’t know how long. Graham would probably tell you.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And we bought a house in Slip End which is near Luton.
HB: Right.
DH: Lovely house. Beautiful house. It was ideal. The first job we did was have double glazing.
HB: Because of the airfield. The airport. Yeah.
DH: Yeah. That was the first job. And unfortunately, she didn’t like it.
HB: Oh dear.
DH: It was a lovely house. You remember it. You liked it didn’t you?
Other: What I remember of it. Yeah.
DH: It was a really nice house. Four bedrooms. About two garages. Lovely. Anyway, she didn’t like it. Move. So we had to find somewhere to move to. So we moved to Sawbridgeworth.
HB: Yeah.
DH: So that is three miles north of [pause] Oh God. Shopped there long enough. Harlow.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Yeah. So, it wasn’t far from Harlow. Three miles. But it was a lovely little village.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Beautiful little village. And it had a direct train line to London.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Which of course is a benefit.
HB: Absolutely. Yeah.
DH: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. So you, so we’ve got we’re sort of coming to the end of that part. Just take you right back. Right back. Just something that’s sitting in my mind. When you went, when you did your training and you ended up at the Radio School at Hereford.
DH: Yeah.
HB: You, you were actually doing wireless operator training.
DH: Yeah.
HB: Operator training.
DH: Yeah.
HB: Did you do any air gun training at all there?
DH: No.
HB: No. So you were doing your wireless operator with a view eventually like a lot of them did you would go wireless operator and then you’d do an air gunner course and then you’d be wireless operator air gunner. Right. So I’m about right thinking like that. When they, when you said it’s not, you know it’s not working for me. I’m, you know I’m not happy with it. Did they ever give you a reason why they put it down as lack of moral fibre?
DH: No.
HB: They never gave you a reason.
DH: Never. I didn’t know they did it.
HB: Right.
DH: Until somebody found out for me.
HB: Right. Because were you keeping a logbook or a diary at the time?
DH: No.
HB: No? How strange.
DH: Yeah.
HB: How strange.
DH: No. It’s, it’s stamped across my documents. Where every they are or whatever they are.
HB: Right. That’s [pause] yeah I’ve, it’s just it suddenly, suddenly came to me. I’ve just never heard of that before. Ever. But then to become a rear gunner on a Lancaster. It’s a little bit contradictive to some extent.
HB: Yeah.
DH: Well, look I think we’ve come to a sort of a, bit of a natural conclusion, Don and thanks ever so much for tell me that to consider, considering that before we turned the tape recorder you said you thought that you wouldn’t be able to remember anything I think you’ve done really well. I really do. I think you’ve done well. And it’s, and it’s interesting that you’ve done Operation Manna feeding the Dutch, you’ve done Operation Exodus bringing the prisoners of war back because people only ever think of the Lancasters steaming off in to the night dropping bombs and like you say they were the humanitarian side of it.
DH: Yeah.
HB: As well. Yeah.
DH: I think that’s important.
HB: It is. It’s very important.
DH: And when you look at it the ones we picked up in Belgium some of them were ex-RAF.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
DH: It’s inevitable isn’t it really when you think about it because the planes came down.
HB: Yeah.
DH: And they were put in the prison camps.
HB: Yeah. You were bringing your own home. Well, Don thank you ever so much and we are going to stop the recording because it is nine minutes past four and I think you’ve done an exceptional job, Don and thank you very much. Very useful.
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 Raymond Harris
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Harry Bartlett
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
2019-05-08
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AHarrisDR190508
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
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01:20:56 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
Donald was born in Acton, London. He stayed at school until he was fourteen and then worked as a tea boy/general help for O. C. Summers, a firm that laid gas mains in Slough. When that job ended, he worked for another ganger in Shepherds Bush. Soon after he heard that one of his brothers was missing in Burma.
When Donald was sixteen, he joined the local Air Training Corps and later went to St. John’s Wood, where he was entered as a wireless operator / air gunner. He did his basic training at RAF Bridlington and was then posted to a wireless school in Hereford. While there he was taken ill and sent to hospital. On his recovery he asked to be re-mustered as an air gunner and was sent to the Isle of Sheppey to be trained on a Napier. He was then posted to RAF Bridgnorth gunnery school. After finishing the course, he was sent home until he was summoned to form a crew. The crew was posted to RAF Halton where they flew on Wellingtons. Their next posting was to RAF Wittering where they transferred to Lancasters. Donald was then posted to 625 Squadron at RAF Scampton. The squadron flew to Belgium and later to Italy to bring prisoners of war home. They also took part in Operation Manna over Holland. On returning to England the crew were split and Donald was posted to RAF Uxbridge and then demobbed. He went back to work at O. C. Summers until his retirement. At the age of 38 Donald married a typist who also worked for O. C. Summers.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
Belgium
Italy
England--Buckinghamshire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Shropshire
England--Yorkshire
England--London
Netherlands
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Northamptonshire
England--London
England--Kent
England--Kent
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Sue Smith
Julie Williams
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
1944
1945
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
625 Squadron
97 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
crewing up
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
RAF Bridgnorth
RAF Bridlington
RAF Eastchurch
RAF Halton
RAF Scampton
training
Wellington
wireless operator / air gunner
-
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
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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/934/36536/MLovattP1821369-190903-75.2.pdf
51c3fbced3b1e3bd9c7237f2cb79c94a
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Lovatt, Peter
Dr Peter Lovatt
P Lovatt
Description
An account of the resource
117 items. An oral history interview with Peter Lovatt (b.1924, 1821369 Royal Air Force), his log book, documents, and photographs. The collection also contains two photograph albums. He flew 42 operations as an air gunner on 223 Squadron flying B-24s. <br /><br /><a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/1338">Album One</a><br /><a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2135">Album Two</a><br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Nina and Peter Lovatt and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-09-27
2019-09-03
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lovatt, P
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
A Reminiscence of the Flying Characteristics of Many Old Type Aircraft
Description
An account of the resource
A detailed analysis of very early aircraft and their flying characteristics.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Air Marshall Sir Ralph Sorley
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Felixstowe
England--Eastbourne (East Sussex)
England--Calshot
England--Bembridge
Atlantic Ocean--Spithead Channel
England--Cowes
England--Stroud
Scotland--Montrose
England--Sunbury
England--London
Monaco
Egypt--Cairo
Iraq--Baghdad
England--Felixstowe
England--Aldeburgh
Iraq
Middle East--Kurdistan
Middle East--Palestine
Jordan
Iran
Middle East--Euphrates River
Syria
Yemen (Republic)--Aden
Singapore
Australia
Borneo
China--Hong Kong
England--Kent
United States
New York (State)--New York
France--Paris
Nigeria
South Africa--Cape Town
Yugoslavia
Norway
Portugal
Spain
Denmark
Japan
Belgium
Argentina
Austria
Brazil
Canada
Chile
Greece
China
Lithuania
Estonia
England--Weybridge
Scotland--Island of Arran
England--Kingston upon Thames
France--Dunkerque
England--Hatfield (Hertfordshire)
Newfoundland and Labrador
New Brunswick
Maine
Maine--Presque Isle
Washington (D.C.)
Massachusetts--Boston
Pennsylvania--Philadelphia
Maryland--Baltimore
Washington (D.C.)--Anacostia
Tennessee--Nashville
Arkansas--Little Rock
Texas--Dallas
Texas--Fort Worth
Texas--Midland
Arizona--Tucson
California--Burbank (Los Angeles County)
California--Palm Springs
California--Los Angeles
California--Beverly Hills
California--San Diego
Arizona--Winslow
New Mexico--Albuquerque
Kansas--Wichita
Missouri--Saint Louis
Ohio--Dayton
New York (State)--Buffalo
Ontario--Toronto
Québec--Montréal
Newfoundland and Labrador--Gander
Netherlands--Eindhoven
Germany--Rheine
Germany--Osnabrück
India
Switzerland--Zurich
Lebanon--Beirut
Pakistan--Karachi
India--Kolkata
Singapore
Indonesia--Jakarta
Australia
Northern Territory--Darwin
New South Wales--Sydney
South Australia--Woomera
South Australia--Adelaide
Victoria--Melbourne
Sri Lanka--Colombo
Spain--Madrid
South Africa--Johannesburg
Kenya--Nairobi
Sudan--Khartoum
Greece--Athens
Italy--Rome
Zambia--Lusaka
Zambia--Ndola
Zambia--Mbala
Heathrow Airport (London, England)
Turkey--Istanbul
France--Nice
Utah--Salt Lake City
Italy--Genoa
Atlantic Ocean--Firth of Clyde
Italy
France
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Kansas
Maryland
Massachusetts
Missouri
New Mexico
New York (State)
Ohio
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
New South Wales
South Australia
Victoria
Northern Territory
Egypt
Sudan
North Africa
Ontario
Québec
Germany
Indonesia
Iraq
Kenya
Lebanon
Netherlands
South Africa
Switzerland
Pakistan
Sri Lanka
Turkey
Yemen (Republic)
Czech Republic
Slovakia
England--Gloucestershire
England--Hampshire
England--Herefordshire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Suffolk
England--Surrey
England--Sussex
England--Great Yarmouth
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Navy
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Memoir
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
82 typewritten sheets
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1971-08-16
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
MLovattP1821369-190903-75
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending text-based transcription
aircrew
Anson
B-17
B-24
Battle
Blenheim
C-47
Chadwick, Roy (1893-1947)
Defiant
Dominie
Fw 190
ground crew
Halifax
Harvard
Hudson
Hurricane
Lancaster
Lincoln
Lysander
Magister
Manchester
Me 109
Mosquito
Oxford
Photographic Reconnaissance Unit
pilot
Proctor
RAF Boscombe Down
RAF Eastchurch
RAF Hendon
RAF Henlow
RAF Martlesham Heath
RAF North Killingholme
RAF Pembrey
RAF Prestwick
RAF West Freugh
Spitfire
Stirling
Swordfish
Tiger Moth
training
Wallis, Barnes Neville (1887-1979)
York