1
25
10
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1875/46443/SHarriganD[Ser -DoB]v120002.mp3
7b29be586234127b0dd260fdc8883d68
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
Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire
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
2017-06-19
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
Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire
Description
An account of the resource
34 items. Interviews with veterans recorded by Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire.<br /><br />Interview with Bertie Salvage <br />Three part interview with Dougie Marsh <br />Interview with Terry Hodson <br />Interview with Stan Waite Interview with John Langston<br />Interview with Nelson Nix <br />Two part interview with Bob Panton <br />Interview with Basil Fish <br />Interview with Ernest Groeger <br />Interview with Wilf Keyte <br />Interview with Reginald John Herring <br />Interview with Kathleen Reid <br />Interview with Allan Holmes <br />Interview with John Tomlinson <br />Interview with Cliff Thorpe and Roy Smith <br />Interview with Peter Scoley <br />Interview with Kenneth Ivan Duddell <br />Interview with Christopher Francis Allison <br />Interview with Bernard Bell <br />Interview with George Arthur Bell <br />Interview with George William Taplin <br />Interview with Richard Moore <br />Interview with Kenneth Edgar Neve <br />Interview with Annie Mary Blood <br />Interview with Dennis Brader <br />Interview with Les Stedman <br />Interview with Anthony Edward Mason <br />Interview with Anne Morgan Rose Harcombe<br />
<p>The following interviews have been moved to the relevant collections.<br /><span>Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46454">Kathleen Reid</a></span><br />Interview with Wing Commander <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46467">Kenneth Cook DFC</a><br />Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46456">Colin Cole</a><br />Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/46464">Charles Avey</a><br />Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46470">John Bell</a><br />Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46459">Les Rutherford</a><br />Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46460">James Douglas Hudson</a></p>
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
Interviewer: It’s the 12th of May. I’m here with Bernard Bell. I’m here to talk about Kirton in Lindsey and North Lincolnshire during the war. Ok.
BB: Yes. I was born in Gainsborough and lived in Scunthorpe down East Common Lane during the war years. When the war started in 1939 I can remember exactly where I was as a five year old child. During those years my memories go back seeing a lot of action of the bombers going over our part of Lincolnshire, North Lincolnshire in raids of a thousand bombers at a time to Germany. They came from Yorkshire, Norfolk and Lincolnshire to go out to sea. During those early years I remember a plane crashing just off Warley Road and it was a Wellington bomber. I think the crew was seven and all seven were killed unfortunately. Later in nineteen, I think it was probably in 1944 when a Lancaster bomber crashed at Ashby Ville on the road going out towards Brigg and that was on a Saturday lunchtime where again apart from one of the crew they were all killed. These are memories of mine from way back. And later on after the war I obviously had been amongst the RAF during the war, joined the RAF for a four year period in 1952 and stayed in the RAF for four years. My service was at Kirton in Lindsey which was a surprise to me as I had a home posting and was able to go home every night on a pass and back the next morning for two and a half years. Somebody must have found out at Air Ministry and had me reposted to Iraq and I stayed in Iraq for the remainder of my service which was roughly eighteen months. So that takes you back over a long period of my history here in Lincolnshire. I was born in Lincolnshire and brought up in Lincolnshire and later after I came out of service I went to live in Nottinghamshire where I still live.
Interviewer: Can you say a bit about your role when you were at Kirton in Lindsey? What did you do?
BB: About —?
Interviewer: About your daily duties when you were in RAF Kirton in Lindsey.
BB: Yes. When I was at Kirton in Lindsey I was a store, a technical storeman. Funny. Rather funny because in Civvy Street I worked at HB Toombs in High Street, Scunthorpe as a tailor and was in the, in the clothing trade and trained in tailoring. I said somehow they thought I’d be better fitted to technical which rather surprised me. I was in the technical stores at Kirton in Lindsey for those two and a half years and Flight Lieutenant Paine, Pilot Officer Eaton and Flight Sergeant Adams were in charge of the stores. As I say I stayed for that period of time.
Interviewer: Also, we’ve got here in our notes that you played piano in a dance band during wartime. How was, what was that like?
BB: Oh. My uncle had a dance orchestra and played at Kirton in Lindsey in the Town Hall in Kirton over the war year period and the dance orchestra was called the Romany Dance Band. I remember a chap they called Skelton was the drummer, my uncle was the pianist, I don’t remember much of the others. I played the ukelele for a short time as an accompaniment [laughs] Probably that’s why they got sacked [laughs] But that went on through the war and they had a lot of sessions at the Town Hall in Kirton which was quite interesting. I don’t know what happened after that. They stayed on I think until about nineteen, probably 1948 and my uncle, who lived in Kirton, in Church Street had an insurance business and he, a lot of insurances were done on the camps of Kirton and Hemswell. So he had a lot of customers over there. So my family go back over many years in this period in this area.
Interviewer: You mentioned earlier your family have got connections with World War One manufacturing. Could you tell me a bit about that?
BB: Yes. In World War One my family which was Marris and Beverley owned a foundry in Kirton in Lindsey just off Church Street opposite the church and they made equipment for the Army during the First World War. They were virtually my grandfather was a blacksmith and in the Second World War he was making or repairing kettles and things which were in short supply. If anybody had a kettle which had a hole in it he would put it right. He was doing this during the war years.
Interviewer: What were relations like between the town and the airfield? Did the airmen —
BB: Very good. Kirton in Lindsey was always acceptable to the RAF. I think Lincolnshire was known as an RAF county. It’s known as Bomber County and its always been well respected and well looked after and always been very welcome as we are still when we have our reunions. We are made very welcome here at Hibaldstow as you can see. As you hear this morning you know they make us very welcome. Very welcome. Which is very nice indeed, you know. Unfortunately, Kirton is now I believe, I’m told is about to close. I haven’t got confirmation of this but I think it is about to close and sold to a civilian company. Which is rather sad because I think it’s been there since 1916, I think it opened. It’s a long long time.
Interviewer: Are there any memories of the airfield that are particularly kind of dear to you?
BB: The —?
Interviewer: Are there any memories that you, you know of the airfield that are particularly dear to you? That stand out?
BB: No. I think the thing what stand out is the bombing. The bombing raids and the number of planes what went over our house. My, my children didn’t believe me for a long time until they saw a video with these planes on. Just didn’t believe that there would be a thousand planes going over the top. It was black. The sky was almost black with Lancaster bombers and you did wonder because a lot of them got killed that didn’t come back. It’s rather sad. War is sad anyway you know. There’s no winners in wars. There’s only losers. We all lose really at the end of the day you know and so many of them got killed. You know, pilots often after the first flight over Germany they were killed you know. Which is, it has to be remembered because through them we’re here today and have our freedom what we’ve got.
Interviewer: Absolutely.
BB: So we have a lot to be thankful for.
Interviewer: Well, thank you very much for sharing. Is there anything else that you would like to say or —
BB: I think that’s about it. If any of my schoolfriends are still about in Scunthorpe [laughs] I’m still about.
Interviewer: Well, thank you very much.
BB: I went to Brumby Wood, Brumby School in Cemetery Road. Mr Sumpter was the headmaster in my day and I remember some of my schoolfriends were Peter Wainwright and [Cush] Cowling and one or two more. If they are still about I would like to get in touch.
Interviewer: Brilliant.
BB: Right.
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 Bernard Bell
1005-Bell, Bernard-N Lincolnshire Disc 1
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
SHarriganD[Ser#-DoB]v12
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Scunthorpe
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Format
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00:07:15 audio recording
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending revision of OH transcription
Pending OH summary. Allocated C Campbell
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Dawn Oakley
This Interview was recorded by Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Description
An account of the resource
Bernard Bell was a child in Scunthorpe during the war.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
bombing
childhood in wartime
crash
entertainment
RAF Kirton in Lindsey
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1875/46437/SHarriganD[Ser -DoB]v060002.mp3
95a3efd792af504735b87718d6ad5bbf
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
Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire
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
2017-06-19
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
Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire
Description
An account of the resource
34 items. Interviews with veterans recorded by Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire.<br /><br />Interview with Bertie Salvage <br />Three part interview with Dougie Marsh <br />Interview with Terry Hodson <br />Interview with Stan Waite Interview with John Langston<br />Interview with Nelson Nix <br />Two part interview with Bob Panton <br />Interview with Basil Fish <br />Interview with Ernest Groeger <br />Interview with Wilf Keyte <br />Interview with Reginald John Herring <br />Interview with Kathleen Reid <br />Interview with Allan Holmes <br />Interview with John Tomlinson <br />Interview with Cliff Thorpe and Roy Smith <br />Interview with Peter Scoley <br />Interview with Kenneth Ivan Duddell <br />Interview with Christopher Francis Allison <br />Interview with Bernard Bell <br />Interview with George Arthur Bell <br />Interview with George William Taplin <br />Interview with Richard Moore <br />Interview with Kenneth Edgar Neve <br />Interview with Annie Mary Blood <br />Interview with Dennis Brader <br />Interview with Les Stedman <br />Interview with Anthony Edward Mason <br />Interview with Anne Morgan Rose Harcombe<br />
<p>The following interviews have been moved to the relevant collections.<br /><span>Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46454">Kathleen Reid</a></span><br />Interview with Wing Commander <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46467">Kenneth Cook DFC</a><br />Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46456">Colin Cole</a><br />Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/46464">Charles Avey</a><br />Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46470">John Bell</a><br />Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46459">Les Rutherford</a><br />Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46460">James Douglas Hudson</a></p>
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
Interviewer: Today is the 12th of May. I’m talking to Mary Blood about RAF Kirton Lindsey. Hello Mary.
AB: Hello love.
Interviewer: Could I start off by asking what time, what date you were at Kirton in Lindsey and what was your role there?
AB: Well, it was between either the end of ’42 or the beginning of 1943 and I was a junior NCO in charge of the airmen’s Mess. Running rotas, fixing the mealtimes and making sure the place was clean before mealtimes and the normal —
Interviewer: And you were a member of permanent staff there weren’t you?
AB: Yes.
Interviewer: You weren’t associated with a squadron or Group.
AB: Oh yes. It was 12 Group. Yeah. 12 Group RAF.
Interviewer: Oh right. Brilliant.
AB: Which came across the middle of the country as you know that the RAF is divided into Commands and what not and then you come in Groups. Of course, you get to stations and so on.
Interviewer: [coughs] Excuse me. So we’ve got here in your notes that you were at Number 53 OTU arriving at Kirton.
AB: Oh yes. Before that it was, it had been an operational fighter station and the squadrons used to come from RAF Coltishall which is only eight miles from the coast and the first line of defence. And then the squadrons used to come after six weeks and Kirton was the second line. So they were supposed to get a rest here.
Interviewer: Right.
AB: But then they went back again. They went back you see. So that was before. Towards the end of the war of course it became a training station in which case 53 OTU and finally other types of training. The flight sergeant in the Mess took a field kitchen course and the RAF Regiment came and trained at Kirton so that’s what it became towards the end.
Interviewer: What were your main memories of Kirton during wartime?
AB: Well, it’s very difficult. I mean there’s so, I mean we didn’t get a great deal of bombing at Kirton. We had had at Coltishall but at Kirton no. So it was just a normal sort of job. You got forty eight hours leave. I came home to Lincoln because that’s where my family were and we obviously any dancing and dancing was the main thing we did in our spare time. We had [unclear] in the morning. We went and had the same features twice a week. They changed the projection on a, from Monday to Wednesday and again changed on Thursday morning. You had Thursday, Friday Saturday another film. And then you had of course the various ENSA ones and various visiting. Then we had our own camp dances. We had our own camp orchestra and our own camp people who were in amateur dramatics. Had their own concert party and so you made your own entertainment because basically the stations were stuck in the middle of nowhere sort of thing. So it was really by then and then of course it came on Group notes that we could, the WAAFs could now apply to go overseas. Well, I was quite comfortable here but I thought it sounded a bit of change with being overseas and such like so I then had to have an interview with a group officer who came and she said, ‘Well, we can’t send anybody. You know you will be an ambassador for the country.’ The only time I’d ever been told that in my life. But and then I, after Christmas I got my things and I went to [pause] I was posted on seven days embarkation leave and I was posted eventually to Brussels and then to Bückeburg in Northern Germany.
Interviewer: What did you do when you were in Brussels?
AB: Pardon?
Interviewer: What did you do when you were in Brussels?
AB: Well, in Brussels before, when after D-Day when everybody had moved everything that anybody wanted on the continent had to be flown which became an impossible thing to do. So once they’d cleared Amsterdam and were able to clear the harbour we could get boats in and then you could. So we were opened as what they called an Air Published Ocean Distribution Unit and we were part of the 2nd Tactical, called the 2nd Tactical Air Force and we then were able to issue all the forms and oversee to everybody in Northern Europe which of course made life easier. And also, in 1945 when they, we had the election, the first election everybody, anybody had had for years and we were either given, or were able to give somebody a proxy vote or you could have a postal vote. And we sent out all the voting papers and everything to all the RAF personnel in Northern Europe.
Interviewer: That must have been a big job.
AB: Oh well, I mean sometimes you’d work late. Sometimes, and of course Brussels was a leave centre so we had, that could be quite fun. So I mean after all it was only eighteens to twenty threes so you did what teen, except of course you didn’t get drunk like they do now otherwise you’d have been on a charge but never mind. So we just, you played. You definitely played hard. You worked hard. And you saw the best of people and you saw the worst of people so, so —
Interviewer: How long did you spend in Europe?
AB: I was there from February and then I was demobbed in October.
Interviewer: Oh right.
AB: And while I was there I met my future husband.
Interviewer: Oh [laughs]
AB: I was working late and I went to the tram stop at the end and he’d just arrived in Brussels. He’d come up through [unclear] and across into [Portugal] and he had, he went to a dance and there was not many ladies there and his mates hadn’t gone with him so he, and he had to change at my transfer and he said afterwards he wondered if that WAAF speaks English and the rest is history.
Interviewer: What was he? Was he an airman or –
AB: He was in the 8th Army.
Interviewer: Oh right.
AB: Yeah. He was in the Royal Army Service Corps but he had been attached to the Desert Rats. The 7th Army Division.
Interviewer: And what did you do when you came back home?
AB: Well, basically we got married [laughs]
Interviewer: Lovely.
AB: So we came. Came home and we arranged the wedding and got houses and tried to furnish like everybody else.
Interviewer: Was the, after the war was the country quite different, you know? Different?
AB: Oh yes.
Interviewer: Was there lots to recover?
AB: Well, I think we were different. You see Churchill lost heavily but he lost heavily partly through the Service vote but because he said, ‘Oh, he’ll put the country back to what it was.’ Well, of course we’d changed. We didn’t want the country back to what it was. You see, before the war people of my age you went in service and that was it. Well, we were determined if anybody was going to ring a bell we were gong to be the one that rang it. We didn’t answer it. We were, I’m afraid we all came out of it a bit bolshy you know.
Interviewer: Well, it would have changed you wouldn’t it as an experience.
AB: Well, I mean you’d, you’d met people from the highest to the lowest and you realised that nobody, that they were no different to you. What they could do you’d done and in many many places during the war you’d taken on quite a lot of responsibility even though you were quite young. I mean on one occasion I, and I mean I flew during the war. I flew in the old Dakotas from Croydon to [unclear] which was Brussels. And I came home with forty eight hour leaves and I’d gone to pick up some papers which were basically the railway warrants, ration cards which would have, you’d have made a bomb on the Black Market. I had to stay overnight before I could catch a plane back and I went in and said could I leave some official papers and he said, ‘Good God, what are you doing with that lot?’ Which I showed the authorisation but I mean I was only twenty two and I had fifty thousand railway warrants and fifty thousand of which I was responsible for. You see so you did some odd things in, in your time but I mean we all, we always, they always say well we struggle through don’t we? You know I mean there was nothing really well organised. Some parts were a shambles like they still are. Yeah.
Interviewer: Great. Well, thank you very much for talking to me. Thank you for sharing your memories.
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 Annie Mary Blood
1003-Blood, Annie Mary-N Lincolnshire Disc 1
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
SHarriganD[Ser#-DoB]v060002
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Belgium
Germany
Great Britain
Belgium--Brussels
England--Lincolnshire
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
Sound
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:11:47 audio recording
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending revision of OH transcription
Pending OH summary. Allocated C Campbell
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Dawn Oakley
This Interview was recorded by Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Description
An account of the resource
Anne Blood served as a WAAF at RAF Kirton in Lindsey and in Europe post war.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
ground personnel
RAF Kirton in Lindsey
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1921/41091/PHenningtonAJM17060004.2.jpg
ed84b5f20f63ff75e718c611911c1246
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1921/41091/PHenningtonAJM17060005.2.jpg
7d481b8e232bd6495cbf22b35a68bb75
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
Henington, A J M
Henington, Albert John Maurice
Bertie Henington
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
2017-08-10
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
Henington, AJM
Description
An account of the resource
32 items. The collection concerns Flight Lieutenant Albert John Maurice Henington (1604946, 154960 Royal Air Force) and contains his log book, diary, photographs and documents. He flew operations as a navigator with 106 Squadron.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by John Tim Henington MBE 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
Relief Map of Lincolnshire's Bomber Airfields
Description
An account of the resource
A relief map with bomber command airfields marked with their elevations. There are two copies.
This item was sent to the IBCC Digital Archive already in digital form. No better quality copies are available.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Map
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Two copies of a coloured relief map
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PHenningtonAJM17060004, PHenningtonAJM17060005
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
RAF Balderton
RAF Bardney
RAF Barkstone Heath
RAF Bottesford
RAF Coningsby
RAF Cottesmore
RAF Cranwell
RAF Digby
RAF Dunholme Lodge
RAF East Kirkby
RAF East Retford
RAF Finningley
RAF Fiskerton
RAF Grantham
RAF Harlaxton
RAF Hemswell
RAF Kirton in Lindsey
RAF Langar
RAF Lindholme
RAF Manby
RAF Metheringham
RAF Newton
RAF North Coates
RAF North Luffenham
RAF Peterborough
RAF Saltby
RAF Scampton
RAF Skellingthorpe
RAF Spilsby
RAF Strubby
RAF Swinderby
RAF Syerston
RAF Waddington
RAF Wigsley
RAF Winthorpe
RAF Wittering
RAF Woodhall Spa
RAF Woolfox Lodge
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2222/39868/PAlboneJM2201.2.jpg
61544c80dfefd3838ae77117eccf71b9
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2222/39868/AAlboneJM220922.2.mp3
dd0b6a60a633b2562eb786b56f3ed0ee
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
Albone, Jan
Janet Margaret Albone
J M Albone
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Jan Albone (b. 1930). She grew up on a farm in Lincolnshire.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2022-09-22
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
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Albone, JM
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DE: So this is an interview by Dan Ellin with Jan Albone. I’m at her house in Scawby in Lincolnshire. It’s the 22nd of September 2022 and also present in the room is her son Alex Albone. So, Jan could you start by telling us a little bit about your early life and where you grew up?
JA: I was born at Redmond Grange which is only five miles from where I now live and I lived on the farm there with my parents and sister. Went to school in Brigg which is only up the road. So I’ve always lived in this district all my life except for ten years when I lived at Binbrook. So I know a bit about the local area.
DE: And what was, what was your early life like? What was school like? Your home life.
JA: Oh, my school. Early life was a bit grim actually because I was born on a a very sort of isolated farm in those days. It was still two miles from the nearest village but it was a long way from there. So I was born and brought up and I was very cherished. And I think my first memory was the fact that somebody when I was three, I’d been very protected and loved by everybody on the farm and then suddenly somebody came and took me upstairs and said, ‘You have a little sister.’ And I can remember seeing this thing. That’s one of my earliest memories. This thing in this cot and it was my sister so I was going to have to share things. I didn’t like that much at all. And my mother had been a schoolteacher and so she taught me at her school and I could read and write very early in life. And then it was decided that I would go to school. Well, it was a bit difficult to go to school in those days from there where, and so it was decided that I would go and live with my aunt and grandmother in Scunthorpe and my aunt was the headmistress of a school in Scunthorpe and I would go to school there and go as a weekly boarder with my parents. I hated it. I absolutely hated it because I loved the farm. I loved being outdoors and to go into a big school where your aunt was the headmistress and all the people in the school were children from, well it was a backstreet school in those days. Henderson Avenue. And it was, I just was so lost. I wanted to make friends but I couldn’t because I was the headmistress’s daughter. Anyway, it was then decided after that that I think they could realise that I was unhappy and so I came home and then was sent up to the nearest school, primary school which was at Kirton Lindsey which was two and a half miles away. It wasn’t a lot better I have to say because I was the only farmer’s daughter at the school. The rest of the people at that time were farm labourer’s children. Extremely nice children and I again I wanted to make friends but it was not the children it was the parents saying of course, ‘She comes from the, farmer’s daughter.’ So therefore, then my sister was ready to go to school by then. She was five and I was eight and so we then went to Brigg. To the prep school at Brigg and it was heaven. Absolute heaven then. But we went by bus to Brigg and I had to look after my little sister which I didn’t like much. But anyway, it got better. But I’ve always loved being at home and I can remember so many times going back to school at the beginning of term hating going into school because I wanted to be at home. And it wasn’t home. It wasn’t parents. It was being outside. It was being mainly with the horses. Loved, loved horses.
DE: Did you have many on the farm then?
JA: Well, of course the only work when I was a child there were no tractors. There wasn’t such a thing. Well, there was but we didn’t have tractors ever. All the work on the farm was done by horses and my father grew fifty acres of potatoes and all the work was done by horses and man power. So, but I always loved them you see. I mean I, and I could do things with them that other people, even when I was very small I could go and feed a difficult one when one of the men wouldn’t like doing it because I was quite relaxed of course. So anyway, that was how I started.
DE: Okay. And then, and so and then what happened?
JA: Then I got my eleven-plus and went to the local high school which was a grammar school in those days and that was fine. You know. I was reasonably clever. I loved history, loved reading and writing and everything else. But then I left school at sixteen because you see the war was over. The war finished in 1945 and it was so wonderful to be free and I didn’t want to be at school. I didn’t want to be restricted and of course afterwards I think my parents should have insisted I stayed and did A levels but never mind. I didn’t so that’s that. So it was an interesting life living at Redmond Grange where I was during the war.
DE: So what was that like?
JA: Interesting. In fact, that we, Kirton Lindsey aerodrome was only three miles away and Kirton Lindsey aerodrome was a fighter ‘drome in those days and it was the fighters were, it was mainly a rest home for people that came from the Battle of Britain. And they would come to Kirton Lindsey to rest. And we had father there. We always knew he was there when he came because he would take his plane up on a Sunday night and do all sorts of performances. And my father really got on well with the CO there and it was funny around my father really in many ways but he got on with the CO and he decided, he and the CO whether it was the CO‘s idea or not I don’t know that the men that were coming from, to rest from Battle of Britain they were traumatised. Extraordinarily traumatised, and so father said the worst thing they can do is to sit and mope and of course on the farm we were desperately short of labour. We desperately needed food in those days. And so they used to come down. I don’t know how they got there. It wasn’t so very far away. I can’t remember any vehicle bringing them but something must have brought them and they came and they helped him with the harvest. And they worked on the land and a lot of them hadn’t got a clue about well land work but they soon learned and my mother cooked enormous great meals every day and so in this kitchen there was a huge kitchen table and all these men would be. There would be six or seven and they would change. I remember one particular one. He was so young. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen. He probably was but he was so young and he was so frightened but I could see even as a child. I was, you know I was only eleven, twelve I could see that hard work, it was a hot summer, the hard work kept, made him sane because he went home and he slept.
DE: Right. Yeah.
JA: But it was, it was terrible with those young men because we never knew them anymore. They became quite friends but then they went. Did they die? I don’t know.
DE: So did that happen just just the one year or was that the —
JA: That was really only the one year of the Battle of Britain but it’s very significant that was for me because all these, I’d never seen young men. I didn’t know what they were like. And I mean I was only [pause] but and they also treated my sister and I a bit like mascots. You see, we knew about the horses and and they didn’t but it I’m I’m sure it saved the sanity of quite a lot of young men.
DE: Excellent.
JA: It was nice. It was good.
DE: Okay. Anything else you’d like to tell me about that, that time?
JA: I think the funniest thing it always makes me laugh now but at the beginning of the war my father, it was the old DV in those days. It was before Home Guard and he decided of course we had again another hot summer that first year of the war and Hitler was going to invade. And I understand later on that Hitler’s soothsayer said it wasn’t appropriate for him to invade but if he was my father was quite convinced if he invaded he was going to land at Skegness on that east coast and actually could have done. Walked across. So my father was in the LDV and he used to go and stand on the top of Waddingham Church which is only two miles away. My father had a twelve bore gun and he always took one of the farm men with him but the farm man only had a pitchfork. My father [laughs] I mean it was terribly serious at the time I mean it was. I can remember being so frightened and father took it so seriously. But in hindsight there was my father with a twelve bore shotgun and a man with a with a pitchfork. They were going to defend the nation. But I was frightened. I was terrified and of course you see in 1939 I was nine when war broke out. I was ten when this all happened and I was so aware then. I was quite grown up for my age actually and I kept, I said to my mother, ‘What is going to happen to me? What will happen?’ Because as a child you only think about what’s going to happen to you don’t you? ‘What’s going to happen to me?’ So my mother said, ‘If the Germans come you’ll be absolutely fine, dear,’ she said, because at that time I was very very fair and I had long long plaits and I could sit on them. It was long and thick as that. ‘You’ll be absolutely fine. The Germans will take you and they will look after you and they will put you on a breeding farm.’ Well, I knew about breeding because I mean I would breed these horses if I had a breeding farm. ‘And then you will breed wonderful fair haired Aryan children.’ I should actually to be honest. You know. At that time she was quite right. But that comforted me. I was going to live.
DE: Crikey. Did, you said you were, you were frightened and needed that reassurance.
JA: It was reassuring actually.
DE: Where did you get your information from? Did you listen to the radio or read the papers or —
JA: Oh yes. The radio was always on you know. And of course, my mother had been a school teacher and father was very sort of articulate and we, we had got contact. We had aeroplanes flying over us all the time and we were all very conscious of the Lancasters at the, you know only down the road there’s Scampton and we knew that a lot of the fighter planes were here to defend them. So we knew what was going, we knew what was going on.
DE: So, I mean yeah you —
JA: I had to take my gas mask to school in its cardboard container.
DE: Did you have anything to do with any evacuees?
JA: Yes, we did. But I can’t really remember very much. I know they were fairly awful. They were two girls and they came from Sheffield and they didn’t stay very long. They were not happy. They were town children landed on an isolated farm. They didn’t like the food. They didn’t really like anything and their mother came and took them home. I don’t think they were, they came to school with us but I don’t think they stayed for more than about three months. But it was, it was interesting. It was the fact that that work on the farm was so hard in those days.
DE: And you, you helped with the horses. Yeah.
JA: Oh, all the time. Yes. I remember sitting when I was twelve sitting at the back of the school, at the back of the class in school in a maths lesson. I hated maths. And early in the morning, it was a September morning when, you know I was at school and they were picking potatoes at home and I wanted to be there with, with the horses.
DE: I see.
JA: I wanted to help.
DE: So you listened to the, to the radio. Did you ever hear what’s his name? Haw Haw.
JA: Oh yes. Oh yes. Oh yes. We had to listen to him. It was always because father always made, we got to listen to him because it was a joke. Father always said it was. I mean, we had to be amused by him.
DE: I see. Right. What about the, what about the newspapers?
JA: Newspapers. I don’t really remember much about newspapers. I think it was mainly the radio you know. It was the wireless was, wireless in those days of course and of course, father would listen to the news. I was always, I always remember later on when war ended and all the news came out about Auschwitz and you know the camps I always remember my father being so horrified by it and unbelieving to begin with. He could not believe that anything could have happened. There were a lot of people like that. It was quite quite horrendous that, well he didn’t. Well, I didn’t. We did not know anything about prisoner of war camps. Well, the Jews being in camps like that.
DE: Were there any prisoners of war camps around here? I know there was some Italians in Lincolnshire.
JA: Yes, we had. Yes, we had the Germans to start with. Big Hans and Little Hans. They came to work on the farm. They came from Pingley which was the other side of Brigg. A big, big camp there and it was mainly Germans and these two Big Hans and Little Hans they were very poor. A little man. I should imagine they were homosexuals or whatever. They came and they worked for us and they were, they were little farmers in Germany and we got very fond of them because they were just ordinary men like ours.
DE: Yeah. How long did they work on the farm for?
JA: I should think they worked for us for a good year. They were dropped off. Pingley used to take them and drop them off and we were very grateful to have them because we were desperate you see. You know, today on a farm you only have one man. In those days we needed ten because everything was done by hand.
DE: But they were never there at the same time as these British pilots.
JA: Oh no. No. This was towards the end of the war.
DE: Yeah.
JA: No. No. No. No. No. British pilots it was definitely, that was 1939 1940. When we had the prisoners of war was ’45.
DE: Right.
JA: ’50.
DE: Okay.
JA: Yes.
DE: Yeah.
JA: I remember my husband because he lived at Spridlington and they had Italian prisoners of war and he always remembered that they had one officer, well that he said. His boots were always immaculate all the time and he helped him break in a horse and he said he knew how to ride. He definitely was from, you know. It worked.
DE: Yeah. And you got on fine with them.
JA: Yes.
DE: Yeah.
JA: Oh, well yes. Yeah. We were pleased to have them and they were pleased to work.
DE: Did they, did they get their meals around the table?
JA: No. No.
DE: No.
JA: No. No. No. No. It was only the —
DE: Okay. So you said you know you had lots of aircraft flying around because there was, you know Lincolnshire known as Bomber County.
JA: Oh and of course —
DE: There was Hemswell before.
JA: Well there was either a landing ground or or a airport every few miles.
DE: Yeah. Yeah. I mean you’ve mentioned Scampton but in between Scampton there’s —
JA: There’s Hemswell. Yes.
DE: Hemswell and Ingham.
JA: Yes, yes, exactly. And they were mainly sort of landing grounds in case main the main airport had been bombed.
DE: So did you get to recognise the different aircraft flying over?
JA: Yes. I mean we knew the difference between a Spitfire and a Hurricane and a Lancaster and a, and a cargo thing. Yes. I wasn’t particularly interested but but my father was of course.
DE: Did you know of any, any of the Luftwaffe aircraft flying over?
JA: No. We didn’t. I don’t think they, as far as we were concerned I don’t think they ever came. They came to Hull of course because they bombed Hull. But that didn’t mean they came over here.
DE: No.
JA: No.
DE: Were you, were you aware of Hull being bombed?
JA: Oh yes. Yes. Yes. If we stood on the, you know on the farm we could actually see the, you know, what was happening. Very much aware of that. But then you see for when you lived here and you only had horses and you did have a car and a bicycle whatever Hull was a long way off. You know, it seemed, and it was the other side of the river. Yeah. Still in a way it is.
DE: Yes. Yes.
JA: In those days the only way to get to Hull was on a ferry.
DE: Yeah. Or the long way around. I know that —
JA: Yeah. Well, when you went then you always went across on a ferry.
DE: Yeah.
JA: But you did. You had to choose the time of day to go or else you got stuck on a sandbank.
DE: Of course. Yeah. I know the, the Auxiliary Fire Service from Welton.
JA: Yes.
DE: Went to Hull during the Blitz.
JA: Oh, did they? I didn’t know that.
DE: Yeah. I mean it must have taken quite a while to get there.
JA: Yeah. Yes. Well, I think you know because the fires were very very bad you know. We could see that.
DE: Yeah.
JA: Yes.
DE: How did it make you feel seeing the fires?
JA: Well, it just was there. You know when you’re a child, you must remember I was a child as long as you were safe with your mummy and daddy and you were in your own home it was [pause] it was a bit, in a way it was a bit like a film I suppose to us.
DE: Yeah.
JA: You know it wasn’t, it wasn’t reality really. It was very sheltered.
DE: So, what did, what did you do for entertainment then?
JA: Not a lot. I was thinking about it this morning because I thought this was one you were going to ask me. Where? Entertainment. You went, you went to school. I mean we had to leave because we had to catch, we had to leave the house at ten to eight in the morning and we walked for half a mile on the main road to catch a bus. Then we didn’t get home until ten to five at night. And then we ate and did our homework. In the wintertime it was a matter of keeping warm. And the days went by. In the holidays I was outside all the time. We didn’t actually think of entertainment actually.
DE: What about when you got older?
JA: Well, I was fifteen when war ended but that was wonderful you know because we could then, I could then be a member of the Young Farmers’ Club and I was allowed to to go. I had an autocycle. My father bought me an autocycle. That was a bicycle with a thing and I used to come in to Brigg. I was allowed to come to Brigg in the dark, it was safe in those days, to Young Farmers’ Club meetings which were absolute bliss after being caged as we were. But we didn’t know anything else. So it was lovely to be there.
DE: So what happened at these? These Young Farmers’ meetings then.
JA: Oh, that was fun. I mean we used to go to the local pub and I mean we had talks and we had [pause] I can’t remember a lot about the talks but we had competitions and of course we were allowed to go to other farms with with our friends judging cattle. It was so exciting actually, you know when you think of the young people today but it was so exciting having had nothing to have this. That’s how I met my husband.
DE: And do you want to talk a bit about that?
JA: Well, if you like. I mean he, it was exciting because he lived at Spridlington which was on the road to, you know where Spridlington is?
DE: Yeah.
JA: On the road here and all our courtship right up to us being married to come and see me he had to have a chain in the back of the car and the chain was to bring the chain from his father to my father or, and when, when going home it was to take the chain back from my father because you were not allowed to travel with petrol at the end of the war you see. You had to have a reason for using petrol.
DE: Oh, I see. Right.
JA: So to come and to come and see me he had to have a genuine farming reason to come and see me.
DE: Oh, I see. Oh, that’s clever.
JA: So this chain would have lived in the back of the car if any police stopped him he was taking the chain from his father to mine.
DE: I see.
JA: Backwards and forwards.
DE: Right. Yeah.
JA: And then he could pick me up and we could go to the Young Farmers’ Club and then there were dances then. But you see I always think people are not wise enough. When I went into the nursing home to have my first baby who is seventy next birthday I took my ration book with me. Times were so much worse after the war.
DE: Right.
JA: I don’t think people realise that.
DE: Yeah.
JA: How we had to pay back and we were very hungry and rationing was very strict after the war.
DE: And there was, that was worse after the war.
JA: It was. Yes. It was. Everybody was happy and glad to be able to do it but food was so important.
DE: So in one way you had this freedom that you were, you know —
JA: I had the freedom to go. Well, a certain freedom. It felt like wonderful freedom but it was still restricted to the fact that it had to be rural. It had to be, you know it had to be sort of [pause] and then then it became and then you see I was fifteen when war ended. Sixteen I started at the Young Farmers’ Club. By the time I was eighteen then we could have dances and we could go out and be much more social. And tennis parties. And my husband went away. He was older than me. He went away to agricultural college and I was going to go but of course I went but when it was picked that I was to go I couldn’t I couldn’t because all the ex-servicemen coming back from the war they all had priority.
DE: Sure. Yeah. Of course.
JA: And we met some and my husband was there at the Agriculture College at Sutton Bonington with a lot of the people, men who were ex-soldiers. He was a lot younger than most of them because he’d started and they came back and we had some wonderful friends actually who had been in the war. A lot of tragedies.
DE: So your husband was a little bit older than you.
JA: Yes.
DE: What —
JA: He was two years older than me.
DE: What did he do during the war? What were his —
JA: Well, he was a farmer you see. He was a farmer and he was working. He was working on the land to produce food. It was. It was work and sleep.
DE: Right.
JA: And, and that’s what [pause] that’s all we, if you don’t know anything else you accept it.
DE: Yeah. So I’ve mentioned it before we started recording but I believe you had a couple of links to RAF stations in Lincolnshire.
JA: He had a lot more links because he, living at Spridlington they were more or less in the flight path from Scampton and he and his father used to stand and count Lancasters going out at night and then they would count them coming back in the morning. And you know he always said how dreadfully tragic it was.
DE: And I understand your sister in law was in, in the WAAF.
JA: No.
DE: No.
JA: No. No. I haven’t got a sister in law.
DE: Oh, it’s [pause] was there somebody who was a driver?
JA: No, I don’t know where you got this from.
DE: No. Okay. Never mind.
JA: No. No. No.
AA: Guy Gibson’s driver. That’s Fred Albones.
JA: Oh, yeah. That is a relative of my husband’s.
DE: Oh I see. Right.
JA: Yes. Yes. Yes. Which was over there. But it was, it was a strange upbringing but the whole point I’d like to emphasise is the fact that because we knew nothing else it was acceptable and what was so wonderful and we appreciated it so much was the freedom afterwards. When by today people have freedom from the day they’re born we, I now look back and I still think we had some wonderful times when I was seventeen and eighteen which today the youngsters would just think was stupid. But we hadn’t had anything else.
DE: Yeah.
JA: And then of course which was the most exciting I left school and my father decided that because he had no son that would I like to be a farmer you see and take over the farm. So that’s why I really began to work on the farm and so then when I was seventeen, I’d be nearly eighteen he bought a tractor.
DE: Wow.
JA: And I had the tractor and it was a little grey Fergie but it didn’t have a cab but I could go plough where I’d been actually ploughing with horses and I mean ploughing. Not many women of ninety two can say they’ve ploughed a lot of land with two horses. And then I had a tractor to come plough with.
DE: Okay. So I mean you said that you really loved working with horses, you know.
JA: Yes, I did.
DE: What was it like swapping over to having a tractor then?
JA: Well, it was you were just sat on a seat. You weren’t walking behind.
DE: Oh right. So it was —
JA: But it was always cold. No, but I still I love the horses as horses but I realise that I could do a lot more work in a day with a tractor than I could with two horses.
DE: So how, how long did it take before the the horses had gone and —
JA: Well, I don’t know. Gradually tractors, things began to go so quickly when war ended you know because tanks had been in the war and tractors soon were invented. You know from the little grey Fergie we got another tractor, another tractor and within a couple of years it was amazing how quickly —
DE: And I suppose they just kept getting bigger and more powerful and —
JA: Exactly.
DE: Yeah.
JA: And less labour was necessary.
DE: How many acres did you have?
JA: My father had, it was interesting he had three hundred and forty acres and he also had another rented another forty acres of pure grassland which was in those days was a very good living for a farmer. You would need three, four times as much today to get the same benefits.
DE: So, so it was mostly potatoes was it?
JA: It was. It was arable.
DE: Right.
JA: And then we did have cows which were bought for me because I wanted, I liked animals so we had a bit, we had a small dairy herd which was mine which was very nice. I thoroughly enjoyed them but the trouble is I soon found out that cows don’t differentiate between Fridays and Saturdays or Christmas Day and Boxing Day.
DE: Yeah.
JA: And I found it rather tiresome but I had to do it because this was what was decided because when everybody else was going out on a Saturday afternoon I had to milk the cows.
DE: Sure. Yeah.
JA: Good discipline.
DE: So what happened when you, when you were married then?
JA: When I married. Oh, it was wonderful. Absolutely wonderful to be married. I mean I loved my husband but it was so wonderful to get away. I was free. I was free to make my own decisions. Free to decide what we were going to have to eat. Free to decide when I was going to go shopping. It was marvellous. It was a good job I married him because I really needed to get away.
DE: So what happened to the farm?
JA: Oh, the farm. Father carried on of course. I had a sister came in then. A younger sister.
DE: Right.
JA: Whom had got a boyfriend who hadn’t got any land and he came and sort of took over. Took charge. But I was so pleased to get away. It was wonderful.
DE: So where did you live?
JA: I lived at Hackthorn. In the rectory. I don’t know whether you know Hackthorn. We lived in the rectory for a time and God it was cold. There wasn’t such a thing as central heating. But we stayed there and then we went to live up at Binbrook. By then I’d had a baby of course and life moved on.
DE: So, can you tell me a bit more about, you know your life after the war?
JA: Oh, well as I said after the war I got married in in 1952 and then we moved. My husband was a farmer. We lived up at Binbrook. I had another baby. Then then another one and then he came along. That was it. It was hard work but but then I I’d been used to living in the country. I’d been used to being on my own. I’d been used to discipline. So it was great.
DE: Did he ever, did he ever travel?
JA: Oh yes. All the time. As we got, as we got older we got freer when the children were grown up and we came to live down here. We travelled a lot. All the time. And we made the most of it and we still do actually. It was because my husband he got leukaemia. He started when he was only fifty seven and he died at sixty five and so we made the most of those years because he’d only been given three years to live and he actually managed to live nearly ten.
DE: Wow. Okay.
JA: Crossing our fingers. Very good. And so we made the most of it you know. It was each year, ‘Come on. We’re going to go.’
DE: Explored.
JA: Make the most of it. And I don’t regret a single thing.
DE: No. Where did you go?
JA: Oh, we travelled all over. We went, we went to and travelled to and all over been to Australia. We travelled around New Zealand. We went to Europe. We went to America. I went later to the Galapagos. He didn’t go to the Galapagos with me but we did. And we had a wonderful doctor and when we wanted to go to New Zealand he said, ‘Oh, that’s alright.’ We had to see the consultant said, ‘I’ve got a colleague in the Auckland. If you turn ill you can ring him in Auckland.’ So we had a camper van and and travelled all the way around the New Zealand for the month.
DE: Wow. Okay.
JA: Making the most of it.
DE: Yeah.
JA: If you know that the end is near you. So, I’m still travelling.
DE: But you know you didn’t fancy ever settling down anywhere else that you —
JA: Actually, when we went to New Zealand my husband loved it so much the first time we went if he hadn’t, he was an only child and if he hadn’t had elderly parents who were still alive it was like that. I think it wouldn’t have needed much for us to to emigrate because he loved New Zealand. Thought it was the ideal place but there it is. Times change.
DE: So how, how much do you think Lincolnshire has changed?
JA: Oh, well it’s unbelievable how it’s changed. I mean it’s still an arable county and even when I was a child there were, there were cattle but it was beef cattle. Sort of single herds but nowadays it’s now all well of course with the war all the grass had to be ploughed up to produce food for people and so it was never laid down back again and so it is much more an arable county and of course the tracks are just huge. The machine. But the machinery is, it’s enormous. I mean progress. I mean even in this last, even since my husband died I mean the the mere fact of the television and the iPads and all those sort of things I mean he would have a fit if he came back [pause] So life moves on but it always does.
DE: Yes. Yeah.
JA: But and I think every generation has said we’ve seen the best of it. But I don’t know. I’m just in a way I’m just sad that I’m getting old because I want to know what’s going to happen in another ten years. You’ll see it. I shan’t.
DE: I don’t know.
JA: That’s what, I don’t think I want to live to be a hundred and two.
DE: I’ve interviewed someone who was a hundred and two.
JA: Have you?
DE: Last year. Yeah.
JA: Oh, come again in when I’m hundred and two and see what I’ve done in the last eight years!
DE: I just, you know I’m just wondering if you have any other stories that you’d you’d like to tell me that you might have thought about when you heard I was going to come and meet you.
JA: No. Life, I think life has been, it sounds a bit monotonous as though you know I’ve not been almost killed in an air raid or anything like that but I can’t. I can’t think of anything that there are so many bits aren’t there in life. I think the most important thing is to make the most of everything and not to be too critical. [dog growling] That’ll be the post coming. No. I, of course when you’ve gone I’ll think of all sorts of things.
DE: Oh, yeah. But if I switch the machine off you’ll think of something.
JA: That’s sods, that’s sod’s law. I mean I do regret not getting [pause] The only thing I think that I wish that my parents had insisted that I carried on with further education. It’s alright that I loved the horses and I loved the land but I had a good brain and I should have used it. But then my life wouldn’t have been the same as it is today.
DE: And then you couldn’t go to agricultural college because there wasn’t —
JA: I missed out on that.
DE: Yeah.
JA: Mind you I didn’t really mind because by then I I was realising that I was in love with my husband and that we would get married and you did get married in those days you know. You didn’t live together and that sort of thing. You got married and I mean literally I had a baby nine months after I was married.
DE: Right.
JA: And, and that was the way my life went. But I do regret whenever like I said I try to do it occasionally, you know. I loved to read. I love history. I’m interested in in everything that goes on. I wish I’d had more of a trained brain. But [pause] but it’s no good. It’s no good regretting because it’s happened.
DE: Yeah. Yeah. And I dare say you’ve educated yourself.
JA: Yes.
DE: By the things you were reading.
JA: Yes. Yes.
DE: And the places you’ve been and things so —
JA: The places I’ve been and I’ve always been a great embroideress and a great sewer and I’ve done things around the Pony Club for twenty years. I’ve always done things but but not for money if you like.
DE: Yeah.
JA: Otherwise, I’d, and I was also a marriage guidance counsellor for forty years which was interesting.
DE: Wow. Okay. Can you tell me about about those things and the Pony Club? And working in marriage guidance.
JA: Yes, if you like.
DE: That sounds fascinating.
JA: Oh yes. Well, Pony Club I loved because I, I love kids. I don’t like, I don’t like small children very much but I do like teenagers. There aren’t many people that actively like teenagers [laughs] and I used to love running the Pony Club. It was, it was great. Well you know there were kids and ponies and again it was the horses wasn’t it? And when I look back when I I see the rules and regulations now that there are about having children in groups and I mean we used to have Pony Club Camp and I would quite happily have twelve, have thirty twelve and unders sleeping in farm buildings with their ponies and I would be the only one sleeping the night with them but I never thought anything about it but if something had happened. But it didn’t, did it?
DE: No.
JA: So, I loved running that. That was okay. But so many, and even today somebody in the supermarket only last week you know came up to me. She said, ‘I think I know who you are.’ So I said, ‘Oh yes?’ she said, ‘You’re Mrs Albone aren’t you?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ She said, ‘I was one of your Pony Club girls.’ So I said, ‘Yes.’ She said, ‘I’m fifty next week. Do you remember me?’ Well, I had to talk myself through it but she was slightly different at fifty than she was when she was seventeen.
DE: Of course. Yeah.
JA: And as for marriage guidance well I just, I like people you see and I like people. I like to be able to listen and help people. I mean it worked for me. And you see my generation in those days because I hadn’t got a career in inverted commas so many of my friends if you like didn’t either. They came home from school to help mother or came into their own farm home. So they either sort of played a lot of golf, or a lot of us did a lot of social work and, you know we ran the Pony Club or we did other things for other people because we had to do something that was away from the farm and it’s sad nowadays because but everybody now has a career and they earn money. So that is why I think a lot of social things they find it difficult to get volunteers. So this is why I went in to doing my marriage counselling. Then it became Relate and then I became a sex therapist which was great fun I have to say. It was because there was, no it wasn’t fun. It wasn’t because so many people had so many sadnesses and if you could help them through that it was fantastic. But —
DE: No. But I suppose you had to keep a bit of an open mind and I suppose a sort of farming background would help a bit with that would it?
JA: Well. Yes, well it was just the fact that I mean I had a lot of experience in the fact that I had been, you know I’d been alive. I’d had a family. I’d had parents. I’d had you know. I’d lived in many ways.
DE: So it’s a sort of passing down your experience.
JA: Yes, and actually you know when all is said and done with all counselling work it isn’t what you say it’s, it’s being able to listen. It’s what they say to you is what, you know, or they sound off against you.
DE: Yeah.
JA: Which I found very interesting. Quite traumatic at times but good and my husband was always cooperative. He didn’t want to do it but he was very happy for me to do it. I mean he was busy farming wasn’t he?
DE: Sure.
JA: And fishing.
DE: Fishing.
JA: Yes.
DE: Okay.
JA: Farming and fishing.
DE: So did he, did he not get involved with the Pony Club then either you were saying?
JA: No. No. He didn’t like horses.
DE: Right.
JA: Didn’t like anything to do with horses.
DE: Right.
JA: But —
DE: It was tractors and machinery.
JA: Tractors, machinery and going fishing.
DE: Right.
JA: But no but you see he was fishing and shooting and I was riding horses and hunting and so but we knew the same sort of people so we always used to say on a Saturday night we had an awful lot to talk about because we came from different angles.
DE: Yeah.
JA: I don’t know what you’re going to do with all this.
DE: Well, you know we will if you sign the form saying you’re happy for us to use it we’ll, we’ll put it as part of the archive.
JA: You want to say something Alex.
AA: Well, I was, I was just thinking that you could, you could enlighten a little bit more about, about father’s experience of being in the Home Guard and shooting rabbits during the Second World War and raising enough money to —
JA: Oh yes he did. That’s how we got married.
AA: That, that’s the story you should talk about. I think you could also could talk about having chickens in the, in the drawing room at Hackthorn when you first got married.
JA: Yes.
AA: In order that you had enough money and I think you could expand upon that.
JA: Yes, I certainly, yes.
AA: And also expand a little bit on, a little bit about what community was like during the war years. I think you’ve mentioned it but I don’t think you’ve really talked about how you actually entertained yourself just after the war. How, rural life was up to and around.
JA: Funny boy.
AA: Wartime.
JA: Okay. I, I liked about my husband he had a wonderful dog and he would shoot rabbits and he would take rabbits to market to sell and we actually got married on his rabbit money savings.
DE: Right. Okay.
JA: Yes. We went to local sales and bought furniture. The bed cost ten pounds I remember. But it was, it was a very comfy bed and, but, that’s, that’s how it moved because he had to work. So, you know. Well —
DE: So, what was the going price for a brace of rabbit?
JA: Oh, for goodness sake [laughs] I don’t, not a lot but there again well oh yes one thing is when I first got married I was you see when I, yeah that was interesting. When I, when I did get married I had in my bank account I had thirty two pounds because all my father ever paid me was four pounds a week even when I had the cows and driving tractors. Mind you I did get all my food and everything else. And I’d thirty two pounds in the bank and when I got married my housekeeping allowance was five pounds a week and five pounds a week in 1952. And out of that my husband always paid for the meat. Farmers in those days always paid the butcher’s bill and, but I managed to dress myself and feed a baby on five pounds a week.
DE: That’s inflation for you then eh. Yeah.
JA: That’s inflation.
DE: So, chickens.
JA: Oh, chickens. When we first got married we were desperately hard up and we had this enormous rectory which had a drawing room, a dining room, a sitting room, a kitchen, you know. So we thought what were, what were we going to do with the dining room? So we had, we put an incubator in and we had baby chickens. And then and then put them in the walled garden and produced eggs to help with our income. It was quite interesting when people came to the door when they’d hear the chickens in the dining room but still never mind.
DE: And Alex said something. A bit more about the sort of community life.
JA: Yes, I think the community life as far as we was concerned were dances once a week when there was, you know freedom. Tennis parties in the summertime. Grass courts when we had to cut the grass. You know, lined. No hard courts. We had to line, you know. Do it all ourselves. And that’s how we met our friends. And we did. And of course, the Young Farmers’ dances and then it got to be people’s twenty firsts and in those days it was so funny. I mean we went the ballroom at Brigg we always used to invite [laughs] for your twenty first you always invited the young people but you always invited their parents as well. So the parents would sit around the outside of the room watching the young people dancing you see. We were, we were accustomed to it. That was the way it was but looking back on it you know you couldn’t be a bit naughty or anything else because somebody was going to see. But it was the way it was and what I’m trying to say is you accepted the way it was. And that was it. Where today you know everybody has so much freedom. It’s fine. But that’s today, isn’t it? [pause] I don’t know what else to tell you, you know.
DE: So you’ve sort of painted a picture of of what, what happened in, in the summers. It was tennis and dancing.
JA: Dancing in the winter of course.
DE: Oh, there was dancing in the winter.
JA: We went dancing in the winter. Yes.
DE: Right.
JA: Yes, there were dancing in the winter. There was usually a dance every Friday night, you know. And yes, yes that’s reminded me. And I had a particular way of my mother made me, she was a most wonderful seamstress and she made me some wonderful clothes to wear to these dances because it was very important we had something new all the time. And when the New Look came in I had a New Look outfit which was extremely smart but when it was a dance a lot of the, they were ballgowns you see. Off the shoulder and I had a small pin had been given to me. A small pin of a fly and in the first place Sellotape. I used to manage to get this fly pinned on to my skin with Sellotape so I was always known as the woman with the fly. That was my —
DE: Well —
JA: Different to anybody else.
DE: What an odd thing.
JA: It was.
DE: Yeah.
JA: It was very interesting. Yes. But you had to have, you had to look different. You had to look special.
DE: Right and it obviously worked because —
JA: Oh yes, obviously it worked. Oh yes.
DE: You met your husband. Yeah.
JA: Yes, it worked.
DE: So, I mean you said it was a bit hard when you first got married and you had to have the chickens in in one room.
JA: Oh it was hard but then I was used to hard. Are you with me? I mean we we we were all of us used to hard work but we, we had each other. We had privacy. We were away from our families. And then of course I had a baby and it was a natural process but it was, it was good. It was really good.
DE: Okey dokey. Thank you.
JA: And then my husband got the opportunity of having a farm up at, up at Binbrook and so we moved up there and I always remember he was, whether this is applicable but he was, he was a lovely man my husband and he was very much liked by a lot of people and the local auctioneer who had no sons took him under his wing and I always remember him coming and said, ‘We’re going to get you a farm, Ted.’ And he did. He got this. He got this farm for him and we accepted it. And he said, ‘But you must remember,’ I’ve always remembered this, ‘Always remember you’re going to be successful but you will lose friends.’
DE: Right.
JA: And we laughed about it. Ted laughed about it. He was right. We did. Some of his school friends never spoke to him anymore.
DE: Because he’d—
JA: Because he’d suddenly become successful.
DE: Right.
JA: That was quite a powerful feeling actually in those days because when you’re young you like to be liked don’t you?
DE: So what did success mean then?
JA: Well, success meant that we moved. We moved into a bungalow that was built for us. We had another child by then. Success didn’t necessarily mean a lot more money. I mean we were still always hard up. But it meant that we were, well equity had increased. There was more opportunities. We were making a lot more friends up on the Wolds there. Completely new people. But we were still always hard up. We always seemed to be hard up actually.
DE: Well, I suppose that part of that’s, you know needing the next new tractor or bit of machinery or whatever.
JA: Well, yes. In farming one, one has stuff but you don’t have cash. I think it might apply today in many people.
DE: Yes.
JA: You have things but no —
DE: Yeah. So it’s investments. Yeah.
JA: You have land and it’s worth an enormous amount of money but it’s not much good having fifty acres of land that’s worth ten thousand pounds an acre if you haven’t got enough money to buy lunch is it?
DE: No, I suppose not.
JA: So that’s why I learned to sew and make things. Make things for my home and make things and I’ve sewed ever since. Oh and yes probably the main thing is which is not many people when I was eighty I had an exhibition of all my handiwork in the local village, in the local church because I had a friend, I always said that when I died I didn’t want a particular funeral. I would like to have an exhibition because I’ve always sewed and made things. Cushions. Everything in this house I’ve made. And so she said, ‘Don’t be silly. Do it now when you’re eighty.’ And I did and I had eighty eight pieces of from curtains to wedding dresses to embroidery to whatever that I have done all my life. I’ve collected it and never sold anything in my life but and made things for family and friends and everything else. Collected it all up and had an exhibition. It was fantastic. Raised a lot of money.
DE: Really?
JA: Yes.
DE: What charity did you choose?
JA: I gave it half to the church and the other half to, to Leukaemia Research because my husband died of leukaemia.
DE: Yes. Of course. Yeah.
JA: But he was I was glad I did it because you know, if I’d been dead I should never have enjoyed it should I?
DE: No. No. Were there many people came?
JA: Oh yes. Well, you see all my friends knew it was my eightieth birthday and it was and thanks to Alex he got it publicised in a local magazine and actually so many people have said, it was open for three days have only said to me the other day, ‘Well, let’s do it again?’ I said, ‘No way. Thank you. No way. Thank you.’ There we go.
DE: Smashing. Thank you.
JA: So what, there are lots of bits aren’t there? So what do you, do you put the bits together?
DE: No. We don’t edit anything. Shall I press pause for now.
JA: Yes.
[recording paused]
DE: So just started recording again. Electricity.
JA: Electricity. We, okay even as a child we had only electricity because we had a generator and it had a an engine but it only generated enough electricity for light. It was always going wrong I have to say but we were definitely one up on the local population who only had oil lamps. So electricity would come. I can’t remember when electricity, when we got to be on the electricity but the most important thing was the water because we had our own borehole as children and we dug a borehole. And we had cattle in the, we always had cattle even if we didn’t have cows. But we children kept saying to our parents, ‘This water tastes horrible.’ Because we drank water and those who didn’t drink the orange and this water tastes horrible. We would be eleven twelve. It would be sort of during the war but getting on in the war. Eventually my father decided to have the water tested. Of course, we lived on limestone ground and the cattle in the in the crew yards the water had, the effluent had filtered into the borehole hadn’t it. So we were actually drinking water that should have caused us illness. At that stage father decided right so we had to have water. We had to fetch it from a local bore, a local pipe two miles away with a, with a [pause] and my father and he said, right, we could still bath and everything still in this dirty water but he would never do. So my mother had to carry water from well was boiled in pans on her, the pure water for him to bath in. But we could bath in the dirty water.
DE: Right.
JA: So my father was an odd man. But this how we didn’t get any I do not know because the water was disgraceful. And that is I think both how my sister and I to be honest I wouldn’t like to say but I don’t think we’ve ever had a tummy upset.
DE: Right. It’s sort of inoculated you to everything.
JA: Inoculated us for life. Yeah. We’re both very tough.
DE: Crikey.
JA: And and and I honestly believe that it was because we were sort of —
DE: So when did you get the water better water supply?
JA: Oh, I don’t know, It would be around about, it was towards the end of the war. It would be about in 1943 ’44 when, when we [pause] No. I think we had water right to the end of the war. It would be 1945. Things began to go ever so fast once war was over. When we got mains. Mains water.
DE: What about electricity?
JA: Electricity. About the same time. About the same time we got electricity. But everything seemed to happen together. The war ended and we seemed to suddenly move up into the twenty first, twentieth century. And it was. But we didn’t die did we?
DE: No. And then you had to, you watched the Coronation on a, on your —
JA: Oh yes. A little box set. Yes. And my mother in law had bought it. Terribly expensive at the time I remember. I think about the same price as they are now. It was a lot of money in those days. And so half the village came and sat and watched it. But I was so because I loved clothes and I loved the Queen’s dress and everything else. And then later in life it was only after my husband died my daughter took me to London to see the Queen’s clothes and the Coronation dress was there in this exhibition in the ballroom at Buckingham Palace. I’d never been so absolutely amazed. It was so beautiful because on television it was only black and white and silver but in real life the embroidery on it was all in colour. It was, I’ve never seen anything more exquisite in my life as that dress.
DE: Wow.
JA: A bit disjointed.
DE: No, it’s wonderful. Thank you.
JA: Going from sewerage [laughs] to that dress
DE: Yes. Opposite ends of the spectrum. Yeah. Right. I shall press stop.
JA: Right. I think you’ve had enough.
DE: Thank you.
JA: I think you’ve had enough.
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 Jan Albone
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Dan Ellin
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2022-09-22
Type
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Sound
Format
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00:57:11 Audio Recording
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AAlboneJM220922, PAlboneJM2201
Description
An account of the resource
Jan was born on a farm in North Lincolnshire. She went to school in Brigg. She loved the farm, particularly the horses.
Their farm was close to RAF Kirton in Lindsey which was used as a rest home for men from the Battle of Britain. They worked on the harvest to help them recuperate. Jan was aware of the Lancasters at RAF Scampton. They had two evacuees from Sheffield for a short time. Towards the end of the war, Jan also recalls having two German Prisoners of War from the camp in Pingley, near Brigg, to help on the farm.
When the war ended, Jan enjoyed being a member of the Young Farmers Club and met her husband. There were dances and tennis parties before her husband went to agricultural college and became a farmer. After marrying in 1952, they lived in the rectory at Hackthorn where they incubated chicks in the dining room. They moved to a farm in Binbrook. Jan helped with the Pony Club and was a marriage guidance counsellor for 40 years.
Jan talks about the changes in farming and how change accelerated after the war.
At the age of 80, she put on a three-day handiwork exhibition in the church.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940
1952
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Binbrook
England--Hackthorn
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Sally Coulter
Julie Williams
Carolyn Emery
childhood in wartime
civil defence
evacuation
home front
Home Guard
Lancaster
prisoner of war
RAF Kirton in Lindsey
RAF Scampton
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1185/11757/AWarwickWA180313.2.mp3
14173efa673164b528b2194a74984bf9
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
Warwick, William Albert
W A Warwick
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with William Warwick (b. 1934). He grew up in North Lincolnshire and served in the Royal Observer Corps.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-03-13
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Warwick, WA
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
HD: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Hugh Donnelly and the interviewee is Bill Warwick. The interview is taking place at Mr Warwick’s home at [ buzz] Gainsborough on the 27th of February 2018. Correction on the 13th of March 2018.
WW: I was five years old when Britain declared war with Germany in September 1939 and lived on a farm in North Lincolnshire within striking distance of a dozen airfields. The nearest being Kirton Lindsey home of the American Eagle Squadron. Scampton, the Dambusters with Guy Gibson. Hibaldstow, famous for Margaret Horton and her ride on the Spitfire tail. Blyton with the Polish pilots. Sandtoft and Sturgate. So there was plenty of air activity. This formed the early part of my life. Also within two hundred and fifty yards was an anti-aircraft unit together with searchlights, machine guns and posts etcetera. This was a target for the German bombers. Mainly Dorniers. And they tried to demolish the camp by dropping incendiaries but luckily they missed the camp by a few yards. Most of the bombs were dug out by hand and defused and one stood at the back door of the farmhouse for years as a memento. When the Army lads first arrived they were billeted in farm buildings attached to our cottage. My mother baked pies for them and in return they felled birch trees from the local woods to keep the kitchen fire going. The soldiers also came around in the morning to shave with the hot water. Mugs of water balanced at every point convenient. Vivid memories of the Dorniers in the searchlights shining silver and trying to dodge the beam. Also in quiet moments the soldiers would shine the beam at us when we stood watching from the back door of our house. When I started school the first instruction was to take cover under the desks when I had to do so by the teacher. This was done when an aircraft passed overhead whether it was friend or foe. Bert Carpenter, the headmaster was a member of the Royal Observer Corps but I wasn’t aware of that until much later in my life. The next thing of note was one morning I went out to feed the chickens and the sound of machine guns blazed away. Greeted me. My mother dashed out shouting, ‘Come in. Come in. The Germans are here.’ This proved to be a barrage balloon had broken its moorings at either Hull or Grimsby and the Spitfires from Kirton Lindsey were trying to puncture the balloon so that it would sink to the ground. I have no idea how much shooting was carried out but when I came home from school the balloon was virtually down at Middlemoor Farm near Susworth about a mile away where it had either snagged on a farm implement or had been tied to one. During the war years double summertime was in operation to give the farmers better daylight working hours. As young lads this was to benefit to, to the three of us young lads to play cricket until dusk. This we did with an old oil drum for wickets, a piece of a five bar gate for a bat and a wooden ball from a coconut stall. This carried on until one of the lads bowling missed the catch and it struck his eye splitting it wide open whereupon we held him under the pump to treat the problem. Later he acquired, we acquired a rubber ball. Because we were out at dusk the Lancasters mainly assembled to the north of us. Somewhere in the River Humber Region to fly south and probably the Isle of Wight before dispersing over Germany to their allotted targets. The sight of the engine exhausts glowing in the gathering gloom is another outstanding memory. And later in life I was to trace the history of some of the aircrew for a friend who had lost track of a long gone uncles etcetera. Doodlebugs or V-1s were another intrusion. Mostly they were launched from France to the south of England but when the RAF destroyed their launching positions in France they sent them over to attack Manchester and Sheffield from Holland. One night we heard these V-1s with the motorbike noise and my dad had got out of bed to see what was happening. I said, ‘Get back to bed. It’ll only be the Mosquitoes coming home.’ But he said, ‘They’ve got a fire at the back.’ I heard that, I heard one that crashed on to a pig sty. Otherwise, I don’t know much about them in North Lincolnshire. Because of our proximity to the airfields quite a lot of aircraft crashed in the area and because I didn’t have a bike I had only heard about them. Most were under guard anyway until the RAF rescue vehicles took the remains away. Both human and material. Many aircraft around us were Spitfires, Hurricanes, Lancasters, Halifax, Lysanders, Lockheed Lightnings from Goxhill, Whitleys, Wellingtons, Ansons and later Venoms, Vampires and Meteors. I can’t remember many German aircraft coming over. Only Junkers and Dorniers really. There wasn’t any time like street, there wasn’t anything like street lights or other lighting because it was complete blackout. Car lights were restricted to four candle power to shine no more than ten feet in front of the car with the hood to deflect the light. Even a cycle lamp had to be hooded to shine onto the front wheel. We must mention the Royal Observer Corps without, who played a major part in the outcome of the war. Their volunteer observers provided twenty four hour cover seven days a week. Stood out in the open in all weathers looking and listening under the supervision of Fighter Command. They’d fly, they identified friend or foe err stop that.
[recording paused]
HD: Recording briefly stopped and now started again.
WW: They were identified friend or foe. They crossed, across the British Isles for their work during the early war years in 1940 and they were granted the title Royal. So, I don’t know how that will finish off. That’s the end of it.
HD: That’s great. That’s the end of the recording. Thank you very much, Bill.
WW: Is that ok?
HD: Yeah. That’s brilliant. Thank you.
WW: Good.
[recording paused]
HD: Speak when you’re ready. Right. Bill is going to continue this with a short history of the Royal Observer Corps.
WW: And this is the forward from, just stop it a minute.
[recording paused]
WW: Right. This is the forward from, “Attack Warning Red,” and it was a book written by Derek Wood about the formation and the history of the Royal Observer Corps. So describing the early history of the Royal Observer Corps. So describing the early history of the Royal Observer Corps Derek Wood made the point in this book that the Corps did not fit neatly in to Service or Ministry. In a sense that was true. From the outset the Corps fostered a strong volunteer spirit coupled with a healthy egalitarianism which led in to resistance among its members to the concept of a paid service because it was voluntary. This total commitment to a volunteer ethic set the Royal Observer Corps apart from the formal organisation of peacetime services. Yet once it came under the wing of the Air Ministry in 1929 the community of interest was soon recognised and there sprang up a close and harmonious relationship with the Royal Air Force which continues until this day. In fact, the Royal Air Force Association have now took over the running basically of the Royal Observer Corps. Under a series of wise leaders the Royal Observer Corps expanded during the 1930s along with the Royal Air Force. It was all done on a shoestring and it is revealing now to learn that the sixteens group structure decided in 1935 was to cost no more than ten thousand pounds per year. Never before and I suspect never again could a nation obtain a vital arm of defence so cheaply. But it was when Lord Dowding took over Fighter Command that the Royal Observer Corps really achieved its highest purpose. Fully aware of the limitation of the primitive radars available to him he had a clear understanding of the Corp’s worth as a complement to them and of the vital role it would play in the struggle that lay ahead. Where others were dazzled by the price of new technology he stoutly defended the requirement for visual and audio tracking of enemy aircraft. When Winston Churchill dismissed the techniques of the Royal Observer Corps as stone age Dowding sprang to its defence and of course he was right. Derek Wood recounts fully and entertainingly in this book of the Royal Observer Corps in the Second World War and what a magnificent story it is. During the Battle of Britain and afterwards the Royal Observer Corps provided our only intelligence on aircraft operating below five hundred feet and because its members were well trained and as keen as mustard the Corps were not confined to low level reporting. The operation of the alarm within the alert, notification of bale outs and crashes and a wealth of other intelligence flowed from the Observer Corps posts. As the war ground on the Royal Observer Corps expanded in every direction. Helping home lame ducks. Assisting in air sea rescue. And taking an heroic part in D-Day fleet with its members dressed in hybrid military uniform as temporary Naval petty officers. The list of its activities is endless. It was all made possible by the ideal that, the ideal of selflessness freely given, volunteer service and, “Attack Warning Red,” provides us with a timely reminder of the worth and strength of that ideal. After the war came the anti-climax of stand down from ’45 to ’47. But Fighter Command would, Fighter Command expanded at the time of the Korean War. The Royal Observer Corps once again came to its assistance. Valiant efforts were made to regain lost ground but although it remained effective throughout the 1950s in identifying and plotting low level raids the advent of high speed, high flying jets could neither be seen or heard was to prove an insuperable problem. Thus it was the role of the Corps changed in the early 1960s to that of monitoring nuclear fall-out. As the field force of the UK monitoring organisation the Royal Observer Corps continued to play a vital role in the defence of this country and still maintains the close contact with the RAF which has become so much of its history. To all those who have served in the Royal Observer Corps or ever been associated with it this book was a joy to read. I count it a great honour to have been asked to contribute this forward and I take this opportunity on behalf of the Royal Air Force to salute the Royal Observer Corps and all its members past and present.” And that was Air Chief Marshal Sir Andrew Humphrey. Chief of the Air Staff. Will that do?
HD: Thank you, Bill. That’s lovely. And that concludes the recording.
WW: Yes.
HD: Thank you very much.
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Interview with William Albert Warwick
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Hugh Donnelly
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IBCC Digital Archive
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2018-03-13
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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AWarwickWA180313
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00:12:57 audio recording
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eng
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Civilian
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Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
Description
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William was five years old when war was declared. He lived on a farm in north Lincolnshire not far from RAF Kirton in Lindsey, RAF Scampton, RAF Hibaldstow, RAF Blyton, RAF Sandtoft and RAF Sturgate. An anti-aircraft unit was also nearby. William remembers the aircraft overhead and an unexploded bomb landing near the farmhouse door. Some of the soldiers were billeted in the farmhouse next to their cottage. With there being a number of airfields in the area quite a lot of aircraft crashed in the vicinity. William then gives a short history of the Royal Observer Corps,
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Sue Smith
Julie Williams
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Pending revision of OH transcription
anti-aircraft fire
childhood in wartime
civil defence
crash
home front
military living conditions
RAF Blyton
RAF Kirton in Lindsey
RAF Sandtoft
RAF Scampton
RAF Sturgate
Royal Observer Corps
V-1
V-weapon
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/932/11290/PLongmateMS1601.2.jpg
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/932/11290/ALongmateMS161019.1.mp3
d889ed2d888d5147c9cae51f6ffd27bf
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Title
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Longmate, Margaret Sinclair
M S Longmate
Description
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An oral history interview with Margaret Sinclair Longmate (b. 1925, 2150950, Royal Air Force). She served in Flying Training Command.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-10-19
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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Longmate, MS
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CJ: So, this is Chris Johnson and I’m interviewing Margaret Longmate today for the International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archive. We’re at Margaret’s house in Sandwich and it’s Wednesday the 19th of October 2016. So, thank you for talking to us today Margaret. Could we start the interview perhaps by you explaining your background? Where and when you were born and your family background?
ML: Well, I was born in Edinburgh on the 30th of March 1925. Just very much an Edinburgh girl. I was at school, Girl Guides, Youth Club at St George’s West Church with a marvellous minister there, Dr Black. And, and then after school into the WAAF when I was eighteen. And a large chunk of time, well in the WAAF ‘til 1947. My only connection with the Air Force before that had been my uncle, my mother’s brother, who had been in the Flying Corps, and I believe he had made his age to be older than it was. He was sixteen when he went in, I believe. But anyway, when I was young I used to think that he was quite a hero, Uncle John. But he was in the First War, and he also spent a long time with 603 Squadron in the Second War. But he was a flight sergeant, a chiefy armourer. Anyway, that was the only connection with the RAF when I was a child. And I’m trying very hard to think about things in Edinburgh. I played hockey for the school, and I played for the school FP hockey team. And I always had a love of hockey which went on until I was about fifty when it became golf was [laughs] But I don’t know what else you wanted to know about Edinburgh.
CJ: Well, perhaps you could tell us what you were doing at the start of the war and how that affected you and how later on in the war you, you came to join the WAAFs.
ML: My, my cousin Elma, my mother’s sister’s girl, she was in the WAAF. Joined as an electrician and my, her brother Lawrence volunteered for aircrew. He was, he was very bright career ahead of him as an architect. In fact, he won a scholarship to go and study architecture in Italy for a year. But of course came the war. He volunteered for aircrew and that, that he went in to the, he went into the RAF. And of course now I remember as a schoolgirl I’d been, I’ve got masses of cuttings and I’ve got the names of all the crews in 603 Squadron. The City of Edinburgh Squadron. I’ve still got the books with all the bits about these crews and pilots. And I’ve kept it right up to date to when some of the Memorial Services not very long ago. But I was very interested in them and of course once Lawrence had gone into the RAF. And as a Guide I had two lovely friends who were in the Scouts. One of them went into the RAF and became a bomber pilot, and his brother was a Fleet Air Arm pilot. Sadly both of them went in 1944. One died in a German prisoner of war camp. The bomber one did, and the other one was Fleet Air Arm. He died at an accident or something the same year. So poor Mrs Anderson lost both her sons in the one year. But they were great friends too. I also had a friend of our family called Wilson and oh, family gatherings in those days we all did our own thing. My little sister sang. I always had to recite something by Robert Louis Stevenson, and my cousin Lawrence was a good pianist. A good classical pianist. But he was always being pulled up when he was practicing. His mother would suddenly shout upstairs because there he was playing eight to the bar on the piano. Boogie woogie had just come in so, but he was a very good classical pianist too as well as going to become an architect. So these were all people involved in the Air Force so everything was, everything was interesting. Well, you couldn’t help but be. What they had weeks. I can remember. I can remember a Lancaster bomber being out on Bruntsfield Links, and it was Wings for Victory or something week and everybody was allowed to look at it. And I can remember thinking this huge great plane. But these things struck me but then as I say I went into the WAAF. When it came to eighteen everybody was being called up. Several people had been put on the land and then to munitions and I thought if I’m being called up I would rather go in the RAF because everybody else in the family’s there. So, that’s more or less why I went as a WAAF, and went to Wilmslow in Cheshire. I had never been out of Scotland in my life before then, and things were very limited because you couldn’t, you couldn’t get north of Perth. The whole of the Highlands was shut off to the general public. So I longed to get up to the Hebrides and Skye and these areas that I’d read about in books. But it was many years later before I got up there, in 1948. So, that gave me a hankering to seeing the Highlands again. And so I went to Wilmslow in Cheshire. And it was, well it was an education as I say. I had never been outside Edinburgh. Outside Scotland. And we were a real cross section of, of WAAF from all over the country, and we had this six weeks together. And I met good friends there too. And two of them — one of them went on the same course as me to, to become a wireless mechanic and they were, we were sent to London, to Woolwich. Civilian billets. On the day I arrived in London and went across London in a lorry and then was sent out to this billet. And the family there had an Anderson shelter in the garden and the day I arrived was the first Doodlebug raid. And we used to be in this shelter night after night. It was at Plumstead, and I think the, the family, they were so afraid for their children I think they, they left the house so we had to go to another billet at Eltham. And the week after we went to Eltham our billet was blown up by a Doodlebug, so it was, it was, I don’t know, meant to be. But I used to walk from the top of the Eltham Way right down to the foot of it to get a bus into Woolwich to go to the Woolwich Technical College where we were doing our course. And it was right outside the door of Woolwich Arsenal. And of course, it was the hottest year. One of the hottest years they’d ever had. I wore full WAAF gear. It was trousers and a jacket and a gas mask and a huge bag of books and a tin hat and a collar and tie, and I walked the whole length of Rochester Way they called it down to the bus stop. And I’d never experienced heat like it. I always remember how hot it was. The other thing was that right outside between the Arsenal door and the college was a fruit market and it was usually plums I think and the WAAFs used to go out at lunchtime and buy fruit and we used our tin hats as baskets. We had the plums in our hats. Well, one day the siren went, something went when we were out in the market and a Doodlebug came right down behind the door of Woolwich Arsenal. And I’ve still got a bit of Woolwich Arsenal roof that fell on top of me. And we all dived under the stalls, and when we went back in we were severely admonished by a WAAF officer because we had not had our tin hats on. But they were all full of plums. So that, that was at Woolwich. And also at Woolwich I used to travel up into London. I’ve mentioned this before in some record. I went to what they called the Queensbury Club and they had a concert. It was broadcast on the BBC at night. I think it was Alvar Lidell. But the forces got in free and it was lovely. You sat at little tables. You felt civilised. It wasn’t billets or anything. And they were all different ones coming over from America. Stars at that time. And Bing Crosby was there singing with Anne Shelton. And they come out and said, ‘Before we start this broadcast don’t react to something Bing is going to sing,’ and he said, ‘Because remember this broadcast will be heard all over Europe. There will be other ears listening to this.’ And of course he, he did sing, “I Didn’t Sleep a Wink Last Night.” And of course it was the worst Doodlebug raid of — and he said afterwards it would have given the Germans an idea how bad the raid was if we all sort of maybe roared with laughter or something. But I was impressed with Bing Crosby. He was marvellous. He just came out. He didn’t have a mic. He sat on the edge of the stage and just sang, and his voice was marvellous. I always think ever since then Frank Sinatra didn’t even compare with him [laughs] So, that’s why I like Bing Crosby. Anyway, the raids became so heavy they moved the WAAF out of London to Yatesbury and it was a matter of weeks really there while they decided where on earth to put us for the next bit of the course. But there was a concert at Yatesbury and it was Humphrey Lyttleton and his band, and it was a real jazz concert. And it was on a Sunday. Well, it shows the difference. I phoned home and I said, ‘Mum I’m going to a concert,’ and it was Sunday. And that’s not a thing I used to do back in Edinburgh on a Sunday. But I told them about it because everybody else was going. But that was a huge people, it was a huge camp with all sorts of people in transition really at Yatesbury. Yatesbury to Bolton. In civilian billets there. And that’s when I realised just how bad it was for civilians. I knew it was in Edinburgh with rations. My mum with the ration books and things, but at Bolton it was so cold and so wet and they couldn’t heat the house. The only fire was in the kitchen, and everybody sat around that fire. And there were three WAAFs. One from Yorkshire. Another one from outside Edinburgh and myself. And there was this, a widow and her daughter lived in the house. And you couldn’t, to wash anything, your underwear, you couldn’t get anything dry. There was no means of drying things. I’ve also recorded this before I think. And we had thick lisle stockings. If you washed them you just had to go to the college classes with wet stockings on. And, and at night we used to put our greatcoats and everything we could think of on top of the bed as well because it was so cold. There was no heat in the bedrooms. And if you got a photograph from home if you put it on the wall it had curled up by the morning. I was so cold and wet and these people had to put up with that all the time, with the ration of coal and their food ration. She was very good with the way she looked after us. Was a very strict, real Lancashire lady and but she was, she was very good. They accepted all the WAAFs, and Hazel the other WAAF from Yorkshire, Knaresborough, she was made welcome. But it was very difficult to billet the Londoners. They were, they didn’t want anybody from London. Scots went right away. Yorkshire, yes they were acceptable, but London no, and it was very, very hard for them to billet a Londoner. I don’t know. Anyway, they were, in those days very anti Londoners. But after that spate at Bolton we got to a certain stage when they put us on again to Bishopbriggs in Glasgow. Bishopbriggs was on the outskirts of Glasgow but we were in RAF huts there. But what was so interesting there were the, the airmen who were all Jamaican. All from, from white Irish ancestry with red hair to absolutely what they called hill boys, and they had all volunteered as aircrew. And by the time they came over they weren’t needing the aircrew so much and they put them on wireless mechanic courses, the same as us you see. And I saw then how much the ordinary aircraftmen there resented them and yet they were, they were wonderful. There were lawyers amongst them and others that their people owned a lot of land in Jamaica. They’d all just volunteered to do something for Britain. It was the attitude they were treated in this country. I felt very strongly about it. Even instinctively one of them must have been of Scottish ancestry because his name was Crichton. And I remember getting in touch, writing through to my mum and saying about I could bring him home for a week and mum wasn’t very sure when I said Jamaican. She immediately thought, ‘You shouldn’t be going out with a Jamaican.’ And I said, ‘But mum, he’s not black. He’s not quite white but he’s not — but anyway,’ I said, ‘But he’s a very cultured man.’ But they couldn’t accept that so much in this country, but they all volunteered and came and they were bitterly disappointed about not [pause] they’d volunteered as aircrew. All of them. That was a point I’d forgotten. And then I went from Bishops, Bishopbriggs. I went to Cranwell for the rest of the course. I was at, I was at Cranwell. Cranwell at VE day because there was an all ranks dance. All the dances were all ranks and they were marvellous dances at Cranwell. And they always had a good orchestra, and it was always Glen Miller music they were playing. And they just had the first few bars of, “In the Mood,” and there was a hundred people up on the floor dancing. It was, it was wonderful at Cranwell. And I can remember it was, there was a heatwave there too. Yes. Anyway, I passed out at Cranwell. I got my sparks at Cranwell and became a wireless mechanic, and they posted me from Cranwell to Errol in Perthshire. And they were all Fleet Air Arm pilots. They were all Canadians. And that was — they were charming people. That was the first time I really learned or tried to learn to jive because they all jived, and that was at Errol. And I was only a matter of weeks at Errol when I was posted to Ternhill. And I was there, there quite a while at Ternhill in Shropshire and that’s when I started in the way I liked. I used to, I was out on B Flight most of the time. I was their wireless mechanic. And when the instructors took their planes up beforehand for an air check or a night flying check I would be checking the radio. So I got to know them well and and they were ever so kind. They used to let me land. They were Harvards. We always — and they let me land the Harvard. I always remember landing at ninety miles an hour but, and I used to enjoy going up. I was also wireless mech for Test Flight. There was a Flight Lieutenant Martin there. He was a test pilot and of course he took the planes up after a main plane change or something major. None of the aircrew would go up with him after a main plane change [laughs] Anyway, I would go up with him. So, I would go up and he had a warrant officer on the flight with him who also tested and, and we’d go up and have a dogfight in the clouds with the Harvards, and that was thrilling. I used to enjoy that too. But all these instructors that I went up with on, on night flight training tests, I got them to sign how many hours I’d done. So, I got several hours of landing Harvards. And I’ve got the list of all the, all the pilots that I had. So, that that was very much what I remembered at Ternhill. Also at Ternhill it was my twenty first birthday and with another two WAAFs I cycled, it was about fourteen miles to a place called Calverhall. A lady had a little country tea room and we went there and we had poached egg on toast. We had real eggs, and that was my twenty first birthday celebration because only the aircrew got eggs. We had dried eggs of course, but the fact of finding fresh eggs. So I think that meant more to me than a great big cake that they have nowadays and thousands of pounds worth of party. The three of us just cycled there and had poached egg on toast. That was my twenty first birthday celebration at Ternhill. And then they moved the whole of the 5P AFU they called it from Ternhill to Kirton in Lindsey in Lincolnshire. And there I had a lot of, well at that time, ’46 ’47 a lot of sport. I played a lot of hockey, and there was a Highlander from Islay. Yes. Jock, another wireless mech man. He played shinty of course coming from the Highlands, and they used to have mixed hockey matches. And one day he tackled the ball a la shinty. In hockey you don’t raise it above your shoulders in those days but he swung it right back and caught me between the eyes and I ended up in sick bay. I got knocked out. And my husband to be, my fiancé had been three and a half years in the Far East of course, out in the Cocos Islands and Ceylon, came back on leave and I met him with a black eye as a result of hockey. So, that was, that was Jock MacAuley from the Highlands who did that, but we always played in mixed hockey together. But they had a very good PE sergeant at, at Kirton and he encouraged the hockey and the running and we had a very good — I’ve got the shield still. Our group athletics. We had a little team of four, and we had all the big teams. Scampton. I’m trying to think of all the other ones in Lincolnshire. Had huge big teams of maybe thirty or twenty. And we went, I really honestly can’t remember where it was, whether it was held at Scampton. But we went, our little team we went there and stayed the night and we all went for a little walk round the villages outside. It was nice to see. And all these other big teams were out training. Anyway, the next day when it was the actual group athletics, to cut a long story short our little team of four won. I, I was good on hurdles and running and the four of us were good with the relay. Lynn was excellent on the, the half mile, and the other two did things like throwing the hockey ball and obstacle races and nippy races. They were, we were excellent and all these great big teams from the other camps. So, Lynn and I were picked to go down to Uxbridge again for the Flying Training Command Athletic Team. They had the finals at Uxbridge, and that was, I think early in ‘47. And we ran in that and I can remember running in the relay and I was the last man of our team, and it was such an exciting race. Lynn was always first off. She was an excellent runner. And I kept saying, ‘Don’t drop that baton.’ Anyway, we won our relay and that as a result of that we won the Flying Training Command and they came out with this great big cup and somebody poured champagne in it. And that was the first time in my life I’d tasted champagne. So, that was a very happy memory too. And, of course that’s the memory of going down to Uxbridge for hockey trials for the WAAF team and running with the Flying Training Command Athletic Team. I don’t think I’ve said about that ending up in Piccadilly, at Lyons. Well, we went there for supper on the way back before, before we went back to Kirton Lindsey. And you stayed overnight at the Salvation Army and got the train in the morning. Coming out of Lyons Corner House after our supper, it was winter and of course I had my great coat on and I was buttoning it up and my hat under my arm and just as I came out of the door an RAF military policeman put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Corporal, you’re improperly dressed.’ And it didn’t dawn on me that I hadn’t put my hat on yet. And it was most embarrassing. When I got back to camp I was called before the WAAF officer who asked, ‘What on earth were you doing? I have a report here that you were improperly dressed in Piccadilly after 10 o’clock at night. What were you doing?’ So, I explained and then I was most irate really and I said, ‘Well, it wasn’t, couldn’t possibly have been after 10 o’clock at night because we all had to be signed in at the Salvation Army Hostel by ten, so my signature’s there.’ So, I got off on a technicality. But if I hadn’t remembered that, the Salvation Army, that would have been on my WAAF record which sounded dreadful. And it was because I didn’t have my hat on. So, that was discipline in those days. So that, that was more or less that. And as, as I say we used to go to all the demob parties at the First and Last, which was the pub on the way up from the station to Kirton. Everybody stopped there halfway. Well, if you’d been sitting all the way from London on a kitbag and you were carrying a kit bag up that hill it was very — so people stopped there. So a lot of people have memories of the First and Last. A few, some years ago anyway when, when the landlord was retiring he very kindly gave me this big print that was hanging on the wall there as a memento. So, I’ve still got it hanging here. I had lots of, lots of fun there with all the demob parties where Morag the other wireless mech and I at Kirton used to drink a small glass of cider to last the whole evening while everybody else was getting a bit too merry [laughs] But it was nice to say goodbye to them all then. And that was more or less it. I was demobbed in ’47. My husband didn’t get demobbed ‘til forty — they were kept back out east and of course they were all very bitter about it as you know, they almost mutinied. Lord Mountbatten came out to speak to them and they were all turning their back on him, taking their hats off, doing everything to be put on a charge. He was telling them. They had been out there so long and people who had gone into the RAF with them had been home, demobbed and got jobs. Several of them got jobs in teaching and things like that. They got back and they were still at Wyton and still not demobbed. So they were very, very bitter about it all. These people that had been in Ceylon and the Cocos Islands. They felt very neglected and far from home. And Mountbatten was saying what grand men they were and he was booed. They thought they were going to have a riot on their hands. So, you don’t hear so much of that side. But they were, they were just stuck out there. They’d forgotten about them. But they used to fly. He was a radar mech but their planes flew over Burma and dropped leaflets [laughs] and he used to go with them and heave the leaflets out. But I don’t know. They were out there and they got all these horrible malaria, sprue, all these tropical diseases and they weren’t well. And a lot of them were very unhappy about the fact that the others who had joined with them were demobbed and in jobs back in Britain because they were in the European area. And of course the VE day was one thing but it was VE day. The Japanese war went on a little bit longer. So, that’s what kept them out there. Anyway, that’s all I can think of in that line. And I’ve always kept in touch. I kept in touch with Kirton in Lindsey, with this map group at Kirton Lindsey were very good. They did a lot of research. They’re the ones who told me eventually about the Bomber Command Memorial going up and when I wrote to them about my cousin Lawrence who had been [pause] he had done his initial training in this country. I’ve got all his letters that he wrote me because we were very close in the family, like brother and sister almost, and he always teased me about going into the forces. He was saying, ‘They want real he-men in the forces, not women.’ Joking letters. I’ve still have his fun letters, but he, he loved flying and his first initial training he remembered writing and saying he had flown down the Wye Valley, wasn’t it? What’s the gorge in the Wye? And looking down and thinking how beautiful it was. It was really beautiful from the air. And then I’ve got letters from Canada where he did his further training. And the descriptions there of the heat and the flying and of course by then I think they were in — well I’m trying to remember now. It wasn’t. He started off in a Tiger Moth in this country and then eventually graduated to all the different planes and then eventually to Harvards as everybody does. But America wasn’t in the war then but they went on tour. They got a weeks’ leave and they hitched all the way around America. They got, they got, they were made very welcome and they thoroughly enjoyed it. It was like a geography lesson the letter I got back about that. But he had an exciting time there. And then of course when he came back here they were put, I think to Waddington. The initial one and then sent to Scampton, and Scampton of course had, was having, I don’t know runways laid or something like that and so they moved the squadron over to Dunholme Lodge. And the farm there was made a, and I think it was I’ve got all the history of Dunholme. I’ve got everything about Dunholme Lodge. The farmer there [pause] it’s another long story but anyway Lawrence flew from Dunholme Lodge. And it was his twenty first birthday and he never came back. He flew out to bomb Krefeld in the Ruhr and they never know what happened. It’s no, it was never known. His name’s on the Memorial at Runnymede. And then I heard about the Memorial, the Bomber Command Memorial going up at Canwick. And I got, I was invited to that through being a relation of Lawrence’s and the Andersons and the other. Wilson who used to be at our Christmas parties. He was another one who did three tours of ops and on his very last tour disappeared over the Alps at Italy. He was a navigator so he went too. He was another one I used to remember. So I used to write about a lot of them. So, that was my connection with Bomber Command, but I was in Flying Trainer Command, and of course my husband was in Coastal Command. So, after the Canwick one I heard about Dunholme Lodge. David Gibson whose mother and father were very, belonged to this map group, he’s been one who’s done a lot of research for that and he’s, was very good. Sent me a lot of information which I had about my cousin. But still it was good of him. And he took me down. It took a long time to get up there here, from here, changing trains. It was quite a journey. But anyway he took me out to Dunholme Lodge and I met Mr and Mrs Wicks whose farm it is and it was their father’s farm then and they’re lovely people. And, and the, when I met them I heard, I got a letter later to say that the ’44 Squadron which was the squadron Lawrence was in was having a Memorial Service. They come down and have it on the airfield, what was the airfield, about every two years and would I like to go? So I said, ‘Yes please’, and I got this lovely letter from the farmer and his wife saying would I like to come and stay the weekend with them in their beautiful farmhouse. And they made such a fuss of me. I had a wonderful time. They were lovely people. And this little Memorial is down the end of the farm. I’ve got photographs of it and they’d got little plaques on it with, there are a few, they’d put this little Memorial there. And so I thought well my sister and I thought that we would contribute to have a plaque put on for Lawrence and the crew. And so they got that done just before this Memorial Service. So, I went to see that actually dedicated. So, that was very, very moving but oh I was, I’ve never met such kindly folk. Aye. It was. Anyway, so that wasn’t so very long ago now. About a year ago, but anyway at that time I wasn’t too well and they didn’t realise it but I wasn’t but it was like a holiday. Just being there and made an absolute fuss of. And also they opened the garden of that farm to the National Garden Scheme once a year. They open it, and it was the day, the weekend they were opening for, the day after it was open to the public. And the weather was beautiful. And I went down the night before in the evening after everything had happened and gone. Down to this little Memorial that they’ve got, in the sunset and it was all very moving. And it’s, it’s amazing who’s done it. They’ve got their own VC, 44 Squadron of course. He’s there with his crew on, on that Memorial too. So that was a very moving day and a very lovely memory. I was so glad that at least Lawrence’s name is on that and remembered. I know it’s, I’ve got a photograph of it on, it’s on the little plaque. It’s on the big memorial at Canwick. And but I was so glad I’d been to both but the little one on the farm is special in our family anyway. My sister was very pleased because she couldn’t get down. She’s, she’s permanently in a wheelchair and trouble with her knees and things so I had to write reports to her about it. But that’s more or less up to date [laughs]
CJ: So you were demobbed in 1947.
ML: ’47.
CJ: And your husband.
ML: Was demobbed the beginning of ’48. And we were married in June 1948. And of course his family came from Chiswick. His father and he were members of Kew Cricket Club actually, before they went into the [pause] but so I moved down to live in Chiswick, Gunnersbury Park area really. And our, my daughter Margaret Ann, my elder daughter was born in 1951. Oh I [pause] apart from doing all that I did a lot of Scottish country dancing at Fetter Lane with the Caledonian Society, and of course I joined St Columba’s Church at Knightsbridge. I’m still a member. I must be one of the oldest. I’ve been there since 1948 and I went up every year. Every year for the communion services. And it’s been a real, I don’t know, a haven for me. St Columba’s up in Knightsbridge over the years. And my, both the girls were christened there. Rosemary was born in ’58. She was seven years after Margaret Ann, and she was christened in the London Scottish Chapel which is in St Columba’s and Margaret Ann was, well she thought the world of the minister there. He was another one who was a padre. Decorated. Dropped with the troops and dropped with them and she was very inspired with him. But anyway, she became confirmed at St Columba’s and as I say Rosemary was christened in the London Scottish Chapel. St Columba’s was bombed during the Blitz and was burned to the ground, and they raised the money to build it up again. And we used to go to the Jehangir Hall in the Imperial Institute. Services there, and then they built the lower part, the hall. The underneath bit of the new St Columba’s and the Queen who was the queen mother it was, the Queen Elizabeth then came and she laid the foundation stone and as it built up as I say seven years later. Margaret Ann always said, ‘It’s not fair. Rosemary was christened in the London Scottish Chapel,’ she said, ‘And I was christened in the church house around in Cadogan Square.’ They hadn’t got the church built by then. But very happy memories of St Columba’s and they’ve been very thoughtful with me over these last months. They’ve been up to see me and I took them up to St Bart’s here which is a lovely little pilgrim’s chapel. I go there because it’s nice and quiet and rather peaceful and a little simple service, rather like a Scottish service. And they’ve been over the years. They’ve been very kind too.
CJ: And do you keep in touch with any of your former comrades?
ML: I don’t think there’s any of them alive now.
CJ: No.
ML: I seem to be the only. I seem to be the only one that [pause] especially as I say the WAAF. I think they’re all gone. But I joined the WAAF Association and I joined the Thanet group and they were all lovely ones. I’ve got masses of photographs of things we’ve done with them. But I think there’s one of them I know is still alive which I’m due to phone. She’s in a home in Canterbury, I think. But all the others have either gone over the years or gone to, there was two of them there who were in about 1939. They were wonderful. Kay, who ran the group, she was very good person but they laid up their colours and they’re in the church in, in Ramsgate. And after that just a few who were about used to meet sometimes over in Margate and have some lunch. But that sort of came down to about [pause] came down to about two or three and then of course I was very involved with golf, and it was always a Wednesday and Wednesday was the golf day. So these are the ones I had known but most of the people as I say it’s a matter of anno domini. The years go and I’ve got happy memories of lovely folk but there’s not a lot left.
CJ: Well, thank you very much indeed for talking to us today Margaret.
ML: Yes. I jumped about a bit, but I can’t remember it all in order.
CJ: That’s not a problem. We’ve got it all recorded. Thank you very much indeed.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Margaret Sinclair Longmate
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Chris Johnson
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-10-19
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
ALongmateMS161019, PLongmatemS1601
Format
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00:42:44 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Description
An account of the resource
Margaret Longmate from Edinburgh came from a family with long links to the RAF. Her uncle had been in the Flying Corps in the First World War and various other friends and family joined the service during the Second World War. Therefore, it seemed obvious that when it came time Margaret would join the Women's Auxilliary Air Force. She began her training as a wireless mechanic and her first day in London she experienced a V-1 attack. For her twenty first birthday Margaret and three friends had the ultimate celebration feast of poached eggs on toast which made a welcome change from the dried eggs that were otherwise on offer. The cousin to whom she was very close was with Bomber Command. He was killed on his twenty first birthday.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Chris Johnson
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Shropshire
England--London
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
entertainment
ground personnel
Harvard
memorial
RAF Cranwell
RAF Dunholme Lodge
RAF Kirton in Lindsey
RAF Ternhill
sport
V-1
V-weapon
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/917/11159/PLambertRW1801.1.jpg
50acb4821fe24c967c2fcc3a49e4e7f9
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/917/11159/ALambertRW180820.2.mp3
7d38449922f636d635cac0250fdd78b3
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
Lambert, Richard William
R W Lambert
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Flight Lieutenant Richard Lambert (b. 1925, 1850934 Royal Air Force). He served as a flight engineer with 101 and 15 Squadrons.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-08-20
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
Lambert, RW
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
RL: Ok. This interview is being carried out for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewee is Mr Richard Lambert. The interviewer is Jennifer Barraclough. The date is the 20th of August 2018 and it’s taking place at Mr Lambert’s home near Auckland in New Zealand. Ok, Mr Lambert.
JB: Right.
RL: Thank you very much for —
JB: Ok.
RL: Taking part. Could you tell us a little about your early life and how you came to join up?
JB: I couldn’t wait to join up and at that time the recruiting age was seventeen and a quarter whereas in the Fleet Air Arm it was seventeen and a half so had to go to the seventeen and a quarter. On that day I cycled in to Guildford in Surrey to, to volunteer and the office was closed. Here we are with a war on, and a volunteer and they’re closed. Anyway, I went, went back on the Monday and volunteered. That was at seventeen and a quarter and a couple of days. So I always wanted to join the Air Force anyway, and so there was a scheme. PNB. Pilot, navigator or bomb aimer. And the initial part of that training was that you would be, you were all about the same intelligence but you’d be graded at a Tiger Moth flying school which was one of the three things you could be, a pilot, navigator, bomb aimer. So if you went solo the chances of getting a pilot’s job were enhanced. If you didn’t obviously they sent you off to Canada to be a navigator or whatever. So that was ok. But then the work for D-Day was well on the way even in 1943. And so, yes having volunteered the first thing we’d do of course is sit around and do nothing because the training was already catching up with surplus to requirements virtually. So we reported to Lord’s Cricket Ground to be uniformed and pick up all your gear and so on. Then off to the first course, the ITW which was in a place called Cannock Chase in, in the Midlands. And that was a six months course but basically having read about it since then it was just a time filling exercise because we went, after six months we went up to Scotland for an ITW, Initial Training Wing which was part of the normal training. So we lost six months already. So down to the Grading School on Tiger Moths. Then around about that time well we went down to London. No. That’s not true. We went to London for regrading and they, they had V-1s and V-2 bombs dropping on us. Dropping on us from Regent’s Park. Anyway, after all of that I was once again declared redundant and we were in London. We did aptitude tests and I became a trainee flight engineer. And then that went to the Technical Training Schools in Locking and St Athan’s. Big places. All part of the 1933 expansion and yeah so I became a flight engineer in those, in those days you didn’t do any flying at all. You just did technical work. So then of course once more I was redundant and I became a ground engineer. Flight mechanic’s course at Cosford. Cosford was the holding place for the returned prisoners of war so they became, they had priority to go in to Cosford. Cosford’s accommodation. And we were shipped to Hereford. And then we were redundant once more. We went up to Lossiemouth of all places. And then from Lossiemouth they started a new scheme for people that could sign on for a three year engagement for just three years and a bounty. Anyway, I was lucky at Lossiemouth. I found favour with the group captain even though I was just a scruffy redundant flight engineer and he got me on the next course to, back to St Athans. So that was about 1947 or something like that. And finally I went to Lindholme which was a Bomber Command base and finished my training as a flight engineer. And then I went to, all the bomber bases in those days were commanded by ex-prisoners of war. The squadron I went on was 617, not that you would recognise it as 617 with a Squadron Leader Brodie who had been a prisoner of war. And of course some of the pilots were flight, were chaps who’d decided to stay on and they became, Peter [Dunstall] was an escapee from Colditz. Although I don’t think he’d escaped from there but anyway Peter was in charge of 101 Squadron which during the war was a radio counter measures squadron, and I believe the shot down rate for that was higher than the rest of the, of Bomber Command. Anyway, I soldiered on in Bomber Command for a little bit longer and then they started, by then it was, the war was off and but they, the Cold War was winding up. We were still flying Lancasters and Lincolns, Lincoln and, but they started pilot recruiting. So this is what I really wanted to do in 1943. So after various aptitude tests in North Weald I went on a pilot’s course and finally became a pilot and rejoined. I could have gone anywhere after that course. I could have, I didn’t have to get back to Bomber Command but I thought well I’ve done all this time with Bomber Command I’d go back because I was familiar with it. So I went to a place called Hemswell and stayed there for quite a long time, 97 Squadron which was a Rhodesian squadron. And then I did some, did some flying for the Dambuster film which, which was fun. And then, then I was grounded. I had a bit of trouble with my ears so became a station adjutant at a place called Tern Hill in Shropshire, and I stayed there two or three years. And then what did I do? What happened then? I can’t think. Oh, I went down to Thorney Island as a, I did a jet conversion course on Vampires and Meteors training navigators and that was a pleasant stay because I had a house further along the coast in a place called Rustington and so I was, I was living at home, commuting to work, it was all very pleasant. So I was there for a couple of years and then I became a bit disillusioned with, I had passed all my promotion exams but the chances of getting a squadron was a bit remote and so I, I resigned and I was going, I had some property to build in a boatyard but the government changed and the money was not available and so on and so on. So I then went down, I had a contact with a chap who had an executive aeroplane and I went to, went to see him and he said, ‘Oh, that’s alright. Come and see me.’ So I flew. I was initially going to say, ‘I’ll fly for you for nothing,’ because I just needed the experience. Not the experience. The time. So, I then worked in [pause] doing executive work and then living at my, I just carried on living at home which was all very pleasant. So I was just like an airborne chauffeur which after a while I didn’t really want to do so I joined British United Airways. And then I stayed with them for eight years, something like that flying various aeroplanes until we, it became jet conversion on BAC 111s. Then my first wife got ill, but she had relatives out here so I thought it would be a good place for her to be. So we came out here and I joined, luckily Air New Zealand. So I was a ground instructor with Air New Zealand. Stayed with them for quite a few years and then retired. And that was me more or less.
RL: Fine. Thanks. That’s really interesting. Thank you.
JB: It’s a tale of perseverance to become a pilot and enjoying the piloting. It was fun working for this, as an executive pilot had its fun sides but my wife was ill, and it was all sort of a bit all downhill for us then. But anyway, there we go.
RL: Thank you.
JB: Oh I could tell you something about —
RL: Yes.
JB: Around Scampton was obviously, it was Bomber Command, but Scampton and Lincolnshire was Bomber Command. Apart from Yorkshire. But there was, there was a pub just down the hill called the Dambusters. And that’s where we did the flying for the Dambusters. They resuscitated four Lancasters. Three of them they put dummy bombs on so they could take them on, take them off which showed some close up pictures of the bomb which was in plywood. And yeah, I can’t remember then when that was but rationing was still on in England and they had, for the film unit they had a mobile caravan canteen. And so rationing as I say was still on and so we ate with the, with the film people. I can remember big T-bone steaks and stuff like that which was fun. And we did all the all the crowd scenes. They used RAF people to do the crowd scenes and the Lancasters were flown by me and four other blokes, and Richard Todd would come on. He would, he would go on the leader, the flight commander’s aeroplane and I went with, it was supposed to be Micky Martin, the Australian flight commander. So that was, we took off on the grass airfield which was at Kirton Lindsey which, Scampton at the time of the war didn’t have any runways. So they took off in a three and they ran at that two or three times to make it look more than it actually was. And then we did the routine flying which was identical to the 617 Squadron briefings, and the same accommodation. Same airfield except they had runways which we were at Kirton Lindsey for no runways. And yeah, we flew late afternoon or early evening over all the reservoirs that they could find and Derwentwater was the main one of course. And yes, so finally of course the film is repeated over and over again. It’s been on, it’s been on the Chaser. You know, which aeroplane of Bomber Command which of course it was a fantastic exercise to do and successful but of course they lost a lot of chaps. Yeah. And they lost the reminder on a raid on the Kiel Canal I think soon after that. And they lost the chaps on the way back across the North Sea. So having survived the Dambuster raid they were shot down. Terrible time and I have found since then of course that all the things I volunteered for as a young person were absolutely suicide jobs. In desperation when I was on the ground I volunteered as a parachute instructor. So I went to Ringway and jumped out of a, out of a barrage balloon and that sort of thing. But one of the chaps on the course got spinal meningitis so we were all quarantined and then I was sent back to Lossiemouth. Yeah. It’s crazy what you do. What else can we say?
[recording paused]
RL: Ok.
JB: One of the Bomber Command exercises that we did which again was good fun was again to go out to Egypt. Their detachments were called Sunray and the idea was to fly out through Castel Benito and into the Canal Zone and we’d stay there for a month. So we’d do bombing and gunnery exercises. It was just like a camp that they used to have before the war. So we’d stay there for a month and fly home again. On the way back once, Peter Tunstall who’d just been released from prisoner of war camp and so on got in to trouble with the storm clouds in the south of France. And of course he went so high he didn’t check that the, an airmen that, we were carrying passengers home subsequently died because he was ill. They landed at Tangmere but it was a bit late then. That was one of the exercises. And then of course the film thing. That was, that was pretty good. Yeah. I can’t get over the fact that we were still flying wartime aeroplanes that were long gone. Although the V-force aeroplanes were just coming in. Valiants and so on. Fran, has just, this is going to be edited I guess. Fran just mentioned that.
Other: [unclear]
RL: The, there was, well one of the biggest things that influenced my life in the Air Force was I was so lucky. I was overpaid on a pay parade. This was when I was on Lossiemouth. Over paid ten pounds or something like that and at the time I didn’t realise it but after lunch I went back to my room and realised I’d got ten pounds more than I should have. Lossiemouth was a long way from home and I thought now, I could go home, see my mother with this extra money. Buy a ticket and so on. But common sense said go and report it. So I went around to the accounts office and said, ‘I think I was overpaid,’ and the, the accountant was so pleased to see me because he was responsible for the ten pounds. He would have had to find ten pounds. Anyway, he came and said, ‘Thank you very much.’ And they said, ‘Just a minute,’ and I was taken in to the group captain. And this is, I was working outside at the time on aeroplanes so I was pretty scruffy I guess. Anyway, we talked together and he then said, ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ I said, ‘Well, I’ve just signed on for three years but I’m not doing a refresher course.’ And so he obviously, he didn’t promise anything but a few days later I was on the refresher course at St Athans that I mentioned earlier. So that was, if I hadn’t been there I would have done the three years on the ground and never flown. But then I did, and of course I got a civilian licence when I left the Air Force so that was lucky. Yeah. So there was something else I was going to mention.
[recording paused]
RL: Go again.
JB: Yeah. I said, I mentioned about volunteering for things. These chaps in in Bomber Command there was a Flare Force. That’s right. I remember. Bomber Command had closed down after the end of the war and the Pathfinders and all those top class people were just let go. And they suddenly realised that Russia was getting nasty and that they needed what they subsequently called the Flare Force and a lot of people might not have heard of that. So we went from the Pathfinders to Flare Force and the squadrons were 97, 101, two Mosquito squadrons 103 and 197. I think that was it. So, and then we just did exercises. People get killed on exercises. Mosquitoes crashed once or twice. Yeah. And of course, most of the people, most of the people became instructors and or either left, and left the Air Force. But it was hard times in those days. If you came out of the Air Force the chance of getting a job was a bit remote. And if you weren’t selected for a commission or, I was, again I was lucky. I was junior chap on the squadron and I always liked to fly the communication aeroplanes which might have been an Anson or an Oxford or something. So I would go and volunteer to get checked out on that aeroplane. So on, on 15 Squadron which was flying B29s we had some, they called them Washingtons. They thought I was going, it would be a good sort of Joe job, ‘Give it to Dick. He’ll do it.’ Anyway, the phone went and it was this group captain who was Gus Walker who’d had his arm blown off during the war. Gus Walker wanted to fly so I, I could fly the Oxfords and he wanted to fly so, and he was a major winner of some golf. One armed golfing champion. Gus Walker. Anyway, I said I’m going to go to with the group captain with his one arm and I’d operate the throttles and generally keep a look out. So that was quite pleasant. So, it was good to have lots of Brownie points when you’re doing that. When you’re a junior and so on. So that was, that again was lucky. And then as I say with my ten pound win that was a good introduction to the group captain and so on. Yeah. I can’t think of any other Brownie points that I achieved at the time. You need Brownie points. Yeah. What do I say then? Bill French was my wireless operator who was, I think he’s anglo-Indian. I’m not sure. But anyway he was Indian of some kind. A jolly good wireless operator. So we’d operate doing that. I kept in touch with the crew initially but they all seemed to die very young. My navigator Roddy Williams, he died ages ago. And a chap called Coffe. C O F F E. Coffe or something like that and he was a a navigator. And my crew, I went to be a station adjutant but my crew went to, out to Christmas Island to do the initial bombing with the atomic bomb for the RAF. Yeah. That was, but I missed that. Yeah. I did do a very hush hush photographic exercise in, over turkey which is I don’t know what that was about. Anyway, there you go.
RL: Ok. Thank you very much.
JB: Ok.
RL: That was great.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Richard William Lambert
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Jennifer Barraclough
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
2018-08-20
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.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ALambertRW180820, PLambertRW1801
Format
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00:21:41 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Herefordshire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Shropshire
England--Somerset
England--Staffordshire
England--Sussex
England--Yorkshire
Scotland--Moray
Wales--Vale of Glamorgan
Description
An account of the resource
In 1943, when Richard was 17 and a half, he cycled into Guildford to sign up to volunteer for the Royal Air Force. He reported to Lords cricket ground to collect his uniform and gear and then went for training at RAF Hednesford for a six-month course. After that he went to the initial training wing in Scotland on Tiger Moths. He became redundant, but then went to technical training schools in RAF Locking and RAF St Athans and became a flight engineer. After becoming redundant for a second time he became a ground engineer, doing a course at RAF Cosford, before going to RAF Hereford and then RAF Lossiemouth where he signed on for a three-year engagement. Richard was posted to RAF Lindholme and became a flight engineer with 617 Squadron. After various aptitude tests and a pilot course he finally became a pilot and went to RAF Hemswell with 97 Squadron. He then stayed in RAF Ternhill, Shropshire for two or three years before going to RAF Thorney Island for a jet conversion course. After leaving the RAF he joined British United Airways, staying for about eight years. When his first wife became ill, he joined Air New Zealand as a ground instructor before retiring. Richard was involved in the making of the Dambuster film.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Sue Smith
Julie Williams
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
101 Squadron
15 Squadron
617 Squadron
97 Squadron
aircrew
entertainment
flight engineer
ground crew
Initial Training Wing
pilot
RAF Cosford
RAF Credenhill
RAF Hednesford
RAF Hemswell
RAF Kirton in Lindsey
RAF Lindholme
RAF Locking
RAF Lossiemouth
RAF Scampton
RAF St Athan
RAF Ternhill
RAF Thorney Island
Tiger Moth
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/550/8813/ALambournJP170112.2.mp3
3f766e868086a89248c411c3c5acaa59
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Title
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Lambourn, John Philip
J P Lambourn
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IBCC Digital Archive
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Lambourn, JP
Description
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Two iitems. An oral history interview with John Philip Lambourn (1925, 1851376 Royal Air Force) and his log book. He flew operations as a flight engineer with 514 Squadron.
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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Transcription
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CB: So, my name is Chris Brockbank, and today is the 12th of January 2017 and I’m in Tilehurst near Reading and talking to John Lambourn, a flight engineer, about his life and times. So, what are the earliest recollections you have about family life?
JL: My first recollections is the first house we had. It was 14 Western Avenue, Henley on Thames. We were a family of just myself and mum and dad. Dad was a foreman at Stewart Turners, who made small stationary engines and electric water pumps. It was a little way from Stewart Turners to our house, from one end of Henley to the other. Dad walked it every day, no bikes, nothing. I can always remember dad being at work, coming home quite late at night because of the walking. But first I can remember [pause], this is a funny thing really, going to the toilet and wiping my own bottom, and when dad came home, I was so proud of this, I had to go up and show dad what I’d done. I don’t know why I remember that, but I can remember that as plain as anything. Sport. Still very young, behind the bottom of our garden was a field, all us local kids used to play out there. I suppose I’m five or so, and for my birthday, I had a new football and football boots. In those days, football boots were solid with big studs in the bottom, and the football was a solid leather lump. We get out, I give a kick to my mate, he boots it back at me, hits me in the face, knocks me out, and I never wore those football boots or the boots again. It really put me right off football. Other things, let me think there. In dad’s shed he had a lathe. This lathe was given to him by my mum as his wedding present, and it was a big treadle lathe. One day we got into this shed — us and two or three of my young lads that were all in the same road, and we were treadling this thing. We was in a submarine, pedalling this thing. My foot fell off the pedal, went underneath this big treadle iron framework. Smashed my foot. I hollered, every kid disappeared [laughs], because we weren’t really allowed in the shed. Dad come home, ‘Serves you right. You shouldn’t have been in there. I told you not to go in there’, but I had this lathe right up to just a few years ago, about two years ago, when I gave it to a friend of ours who was in the engineering side. All my family didn’t want it because it wasn’t in their line of work, so I have got rid of that but I valued and treasured that old lathe for years. The next thing, we moved when I was about six or seven. I just — mum had just had my sister, Sylvia, and she was only about one or two and we moved into this new house. It was a brand new house that dad could buy but it was just before Christmas and of course, in those days, you had to have fires in all the rooms to dry them out because of the old plaster that was used, and Christmas was a big family affair and we all had to go to my grandma and grandad’s. They owned a sweet and big bakery, a sweetshop bakery, and we all — all the families used to go there. I only had a cousin, one cousin at the time, so we all met down there and going back after, I had to go back to our new house, which wasn’t far from the bakery, and there was black smoke pouring out of our new chimney. Mum had burned all the Christmas paper and it had gone up the chimney and because we’d had so many fires there, all the soot was caught alight and it was coming down and it was all over the road, all this black smoke from the old fire. I can remember that as plain as plain. But what really stuck in my mind was the families we had at Christmas. My grandma and grandad had a big family, three girls and one, two, three, no, two girls and about six brothers, so I had a lot of uncles and aunties. Well one auntie and six or seven, and they used to come there. Most of them then weren’t married, but grandad used to cook all his customer’s turkeys in his ovens, and they used to bring them Christmas morning and he used to, he used to roast all their old turkeys and they used to come just before lunchtime and pick them up. And over the road from there was the old gas works, and if you went upstairs, you could see the men working in the retorts making the gas. I can always remember of a night time going up and seeing these men opening the big ovens and the fires coming out and stoking them up, and that’s always stuck in my mind. Uncles and aunties all got married, one of my uncles — no — two of my uncles went in to the Army during the First World War. One went in the Army, one went in the Navy. I wish I’d really got talking to them. One of my uncles — the uncle that went in the Army, I didn’t really have a lot to say and talk to him. The uncle that went in to the Navy, he gave me a really good thing about —he was out in the Mediterranean — he went out into the Mediterranean, and they went over and was supplying Lawrence of Arabia with petrol and him and this mate was left on the ground, the land, to guard all the empty petrol tanks until the next morning. They were told not to do any swimming because there were plenty of sharks out there. Well, half way through the night, cooled down and all these tanks fell down, quite a terrific noise. They thought somebody from one of these Arab countries was raiding them. My uncle just stayed there and stayed quiet, this other chap rushed into the sea, swam out to the boat and informed them. They came back and of course, there was nothing there, it was just these tanks falling down. He gets recommended [laughs] in his, what do they call it? Recommended —
CB: Mentioned in despatches.
JL: Mentioned in despatches and my uncle that stayed there and guarded them, he got nothing at all. And he only got it because he swam across this shark infested — there was no sharks there, but that was the tale he told me. He joined the AA after that and was on the old motorbikes and saluting, saluting people that had the AA badges on. I go on now to school time. I didn’t do all that well at school. We did, it was all As and B classes. When you got up to do the eleven plus, there was an A and a B class. B class kiddies didn’t waste the time of going in because the school teachers knew you wouldn’t get up in to the — anywhere else, so I was in the B class. Got on alright, didn’t do too bad I suppose. So, all my other pals weren’t too bad and they all went in and went to grammar school. I was about one of the only of our, what I called, the gang, that was all us kids that were in Western Avenue. They’ve — unfortunately I think I’m the only one left and it looks as if I’ve got to turn the light out. My last pal — he died about two years ago, and the others I did lose contact with, but I think they’ve all gone now and I’m about the last one. So, anyhow, school. Our school was the ordinary council school. As far as I can remember that’s all it was called was the council school, but we had a funny way of teaching, and it was only in the last few years I’ve really worked this out. We had the usual, all the A’s of arithmetic’s, reading and writing, but we did have gardening and woodwork. Now, if you work this out, we’re going through woodwork. You had to, when you finished your primary woodwork models, you had to do a scale drawing. Maths come into that. Then you had to get your wood. You had to know what the sort of wood was, where it come from and then it was drawing your, getting your — whatever you was going to do. My last model was a pair of steps, big heavy six steps. I’ve still got them today, they’re in the garage. You use them, they’re as good as new. So, there was somebody’s, once you left school, you could go straight in to carpentry. We had, every week we had half a day at woodwork and we had the, the carpentry master. He was marvellous, but if he said to you, ‘Who told you to do that?’ It was wrong. He said, ‘Who told you to do that?’ ‘I don’t know, sir’. ‘Well, bring him here. Bring him here. I’ll have a word with “I don’t know” because it’s wrong’. Well, I twigged this, so when I done something wrong, I said, ‘I’m sorry sir, but that’s what I thought I had to do’. ‘Oh. Well, that was wrong’, and I got on the good side of him and I got on well. I came top every time in exams for woodwork. Gardening — my favourite. I’ve still got an allotment now, and that was the same. Spelling - all the things in the gardening we had to write. In the summer, we had to do the manual side. In the winter, it was indoors writing out what we should put in the allotment, in the garden. Incidentally, the school had taken over the allotments adjoining the school, so we had ten acres of gardening. A good master, Gardening master. He was very excellent. He also taught the people up at the colleges. There was a college there, a college and the grammar school, but at the grammar school, he only done the theory side. In our school, we done theory and practice. I got on well there. There was spelling to do, working out where the plants would go in and how much, how much footage we were using. So, I got — we used our brains when we didn’t think we were using them, because there was a distraction of something else going on, and it’s come in handy for the rest of my life. As I say, I’ve still got half of the allotment I do at ninety-one, and I’ve got the garden here. But then we get on to — well, we, I’d left school at fourteen. This was in September 1939, and as you know, September the 3rd, the war broke out. September the 4th, I started work at Stewart Turners. Stewart Turners being — they made a lot of models, these are the small steam engine models. They made the little steam engine and also the model that was driven by steam and that was in one section. In another section, they made electric water pumps. A little bit different to these water pumps, but they were there. And then in the big workshops, they made stationary engines, which were all two stroke, two cylinder, four cylinder and they had their own foundry there. They had the complete works, drawing office, everything. Dad had left Stewart Turners by this time and gone over to Woodley Aerodrome. That was Miles Magisters, they were making Miles Magisters to training for pilots. He went there in their experimental department, and I — he, he wouldn’t put me in as an apprentice. I never knew why until I’ve worked that out recently. Because he was pals of the foreman, the foremens there, and he’d worked it out that if the foreman’s done what he asked them to do, they would put me through as his apprentice. Well, I had some rough old jobs to start with. Making jets, petrol carburettor jets, I done those. Then we also made milkers for one of the big milking manufactures. We made some, what they called Pulsometers, yeah. That was the manufacturer. Pulsometers. We made these air pumps that pumped the milk. I worked on those for a little while and then I was put on my own, and I realise now all these other chaps that had apprenticeships were with men, being taught. I was there, I made some water pumps. These were different, they had a big motor on the top and they had a proper pumping mechanism. I was put on those. I was shown what to do, of course, by the chap that was doing them. He was moving, and I was all on my own, and one of the things I — the foreman was — his office was right next to where I was working on my own bench, and he come out one day and his, his office was higher so he could see all over the workshop. And he shouted out, ‘Alright Lambourn. Stop work’. And everybody in there went quiet and I thought, ‘What the hell?’ He said, ‘I couldn’t bloody well work with a bench like that, so I’m bloody sure you couldn’t. Clear it up’. Well, I thought it was all right but I had all the stuff all over it, the bits and pieces, and that taught me there and then to be tidy. That’s run through my life now, I’ve always tidied up. But that was a very embarrassing point. Now, why did I join the Air Force? I had no need to join the Air Force because I was in a place where —
CB: Reserved Occupation.
JL: A Reserved Occupation. So, I’m coming back one night, about 9 o’clock from — I was doing a night school engineering and I was coming back. You must remember now it’s black, there was not a bit of light anywhere, and I’m walking along with the little torch. By this time, you’d got used to being in the dark, walking, you could walk anywhere without knocking into anything. I came to a clearing. Our house was on a bit of a hill with the valley and the river running down below, and the other side was a hill with the trees on the top. Now, over the top of these trees, there was flames coming out, big high flames, then it all died down to a red glow and burst out again. And this was London burning. Forty mile away and I could see the London burning like anything. I was all on my own and I said, ‘You bastard. If you’re doing that to my London, I’m going to do it to you’. That’s why I joined. People have asked me since then, I give a few talks on what I did in the Air Force and the first thing they say when there’s any questions, ‘Had you got any qualms of bombing civilians in Germany?’ I told them what I’ve just told you, and I have no qualms whatsoever. I’m getting towards the end of [pause]. Well, when I gave my notice in to the foreman, he went up the wall. He didn’t know I’d already joined, I didn’t tell anybody there and there was me, giving my notice in, because I’d got my calling up papers. And, well, he give a little swore and he said, ‘Well if that’s what you want to do, clear off’, he said, ‘And good luck to you’. So that’s how I got in. Joining up. Oh, I had obviously joined the ATC during my time of waiting. I had three years. My number in the ATC, the local ATC, was number 14, so I was one of the first to join up there and of course, all our little gang all joined. I, by this time, I knew that I was going in to aircrew, but I was going into ground crew but with a bit of luck, I did get into aircrew and that — have I said about the aircrew? No.
CB: Well, you did ground crew to begin with.
JL: Yeah.
CB: So where did you -
JL: I haven’t said how I got in have I?
CB: Say again.
JL: Have I?
CB: Say what?
JL: Have I said how I got into aircrew?
CB: No. How you —
JL: Not on that.
CB: No.
JL: No.
CB: You could now say how, why you joined the RAF but what happened? What was the process on joining?
JL: Ok.
CB: So where did you go initially?
JL: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Ok.
JL: Yeah. Well, I went over to Oxford from, from our first one, the first time we all came over on our bikes from Reading. That was the only place we could go to join up. We went from there, after getting our parents to sign papers, which was very reluctant I’m afraid on most of them, but there we go. We was all young and enthusiastic. We, we were seven — just seventeen then. Went over to Oxford from there to be attested for aircrew. I failed that, I don’t know why. I think I spelled engineer wrong in flight engineer. That put them right off. I missed an E out or something. Anyhow, I, they said I was quite good enough for going in as an engineer, on ground crew on the engines, so that’s what I went in for. Down to Padgate. On the end of Padgate, the first few months, I had to go to lecture. This lecture worked out to be a man from flight, an aircrew, I think he was a navigator. He come to talk to us on how good flying was, and I thought well, here we go again, I’ll have another go. This time, I had to go before the local education officer. We was half way through talking, it was only talking and he made a few notes, done a few sums and that, and the air raid siren sounded for a gas alarm, and everybody in Padgate had to put their gas mask on. So, got my gas mask out. ‘We don’t want to put that on now’, said the instructor, this officer, ‘You and I are talking’. But then he said, ‘We’re nearly finished’, gave me a few more — where I’d lived and what I’d done etcetera, and he said, ‘I think you’ll be alright in engineering and I’ll put you down for aircrew’. And so that’s how I got into aircrew, I got in through the back door. I was only eighteen in a couple of months so now I had to wait ‘til I was nineteen to get into aircrew, because that’s the time they were all being called up, but by the time I’d finished my aircrew, flight engineer’s course, I was still only eighteen, so I was one of the youngest members in the Air Force that was a flight engineer and still only eighteen. One little thing I’ve just remembered, we had, on the flight engineer’s course, three Geordies. One was an elderly man, he worked out to have been an air, a machine gunner in the Great War, he’d obviously put his age back. Another young kiddie — he was, he put his age on. I reckon he was only about sixteen, seventeen. How he ever got into it, I don’t know. And the other Geordie — he was a blooming great big bully and he looked after these two, and you couldn’t talk to these other two or anything, and he was a terrible bloke. Whoever got him as a flight engineer — God help them. But how these other two ever got in to the air, I don’t know and I thought afterwards, well the old man there, he was old, you could see he was old. And the young kid, he must have been pretty good, but I don’t know how they passed out. Whether they did pass out or not because what happened to me on the passing out parade, I’d done, I’d done the course fairly well, and once a week, on a Saturday — a Friday afternoon we had a little exam for the week’s, what we’d done during the week. It was a very good way of working things really. You worked in small groups for a week on one item. At the end of the item, on Friday you —Friday afternoon had a small exam. Put your book in, the instructor looked at that and gave you marks, A, A+, B, C, and on Saturday morning, you went in and picked your book up and he went through the book with you, and if you were low marks, he just put you right on what you was wrong. That worked out and apparently, that went to the final marks of your exam, because the exam was all oral. Oh. No. No. It wasn’t quite all oral, but the all oral went into the usual big hangar and this — I can’t remember — sergeant, flight sergeant — he had in front of him the controls of a Lancaster. No. Sorry I was still on Stirlings. The whole Lancaster, the Stirling, like four boards. Everything in front and he said, ‘Take me up to a thousand feet’, so I had to do everything that we’d done. Take him up a thousand feet and then that bit, I can always remember that was the first bit, and I thought I didn’t really know that, but I ran through that as if I knew it. It was because, I suppose, it was stuck up in my head and that was it. Oh, so that was alright, didn’t do too bad. The whole exam was the whole day, we had to go through everything. The, the — that was all oral. But the working, we had just a small writing exam, that consisted of a few carburettor bits and electronics. No. Not electronics in that day, electrics, and also the main thing is the engineer’s log that was worked out every twenty minutes. We had to do a complete log of a whole trip. We were given the bare minimum of a trip, and we had to work it out on our log book, which I have over there incidentally. That was alright. Anyhow, we all had to parade in this big hangar to see if we’d passed and receive our logbooks, and four names were called out. My name was called out. Oh dear. Go forward, and of course, I’m talking about a hundred, two hundred people in there. The whole course was there. We got up onto the stage. ‘You four have got the highest marks in your aircraft’. That was Stirlings, Lancasters, Halifaxes and Sunderlands. I wanted to go on Sunderlands but I wasn’t tall enough. You had to be a certain height to get to the petrol turnover levers, and I wasn’t high enough to, tall enough to turn them on, so that’s why I was taken the Stirling. And apparently, I got the highest marks in the Stirling. Seventy point seven percent. For a chap that only just went to an ordinary school, so I was doing pretty well. We all, actually I really, the pals of mine that I’d got up with, we really disappeared then because we, I don’t know who the man that — it was a big man with a lot of gold braid to me. I’m in. I don’t know where I was. I was in a daze sat up here with this [laughs], and I mean, the day went well. Luck. We should now have gone outside and us four should have taken the, the — that particular lot of people on a parade to go past, a passing out parade. It was pouring with rain, it tipped down all day, so that parade, pass out parade was missed, so I didn’t have to take [laughs], take the squad on parade. I wouldn’t have minded because I’d done it all in the ATC, but that was my recollections of actual going in to the Air Force I suppose, because until one gets away from parades, you’re not in the actual Air Force doing anything. It was all going here and there, and school was here and school there, on the parade ground. Oh, parade ground, I must tell you this bit. I’m at Padgate, early, very early on. We had our passing out parade, all on the parade ground. There was a whole lot, two or three hundred, because it was all ground crew so there was a hell of a lot there. All rifles. In June or July, July by that time. July. We was on parade, red hot, we was all at standing at ease and this, I don’t know who he was, warrant officer I should think, called us to attention. Come to attention with a rifle. Slipped out my hand. Crash. What do I do? ATC training come in. You do nothing. Everybody’s standing there to attention now, and there was a command come out, ‘Pick up rifle’ [laughs], one step forward, pick up the rifle, one step back. I thought, I’m in for it now, afterwards, and he carried on and never said a word. And that was my ATC training to tell me not to do anything and leave it to the person taking the parade, and I thought, I’m sure he’s going to tell me to report but no, he didn’t. Unluckily I was in the front rank so he could see me, and that was very embarrassing but I just stood there rock solid. And after a second or two, the command come to pick up rifle. Oh dear. The things that come back to you, isn’t it?
CB: We’ll have a break but just quickly. You finished at St Athan.
JL: Yes.
CB: At what point did you receive your engineer’s brevet?
JL: There. I picked it up with my — it was on my log book. Yeah, I forgot about that. When this officer gave me my logbook, he also gave me my brevet, yeah, which was delightful.
CB: And on the graduation parade, was the brevet on your tunic then?
JL: Well.
CB: Or was it pinned on you at the parade?
JL: No, we didn’t get to the parade because of the rain.
CB: They didn’t do it in the hangar?
JL: No, it messed, we missed everything. It absolutely poured down.
CB: Right.
JL: Yeah.
CB: We’ll just have a break.
JL: Yeah.
[recording paused]
CB: We talked about the fact that your ground — your original career was going to be in ground crew and you volunteered for aircrew, which is what you wanted.
JL: Yeah.
CB: What options did they give you? Or was it only that you’d said —
JL: Yeah.
CB: Flight engineer. So that’s what they gave you.
JL: Yes. The officer, the education officer that interviewed me, he didn’t seem to care what it was, and of course, I wanted to be a flight engineer. There was one thing I had missed out.
CB: Go on.
JL: And that is when we finished flying, we were asked to go and pick up our records. Our pilot went in to pick up the records and he come out and he said to me, ‘I don’t know what you’ve done. You’ve been on a charge, haven’t you?’ I said, ‘Yeah. Fourteen days’. ‘What was that for?’ ‘Crossing the railway line in Cardiff to get on the train’. And up the other end, right up the end by the engineer the SP’s were, ‘Where did you come from?’ [laughs] We only done it, not for devilment or anything, but we were late and somebody had told us the wrong platform, and the shortest way to get from one platform to the other in Cardiff is not to go right down on the underground and up again, but was to cross the railway line, and being as it was pitch dark but there was — it was only across one line and there was no trains, we went out and got caught, and two pals that I was always with, we got fourteen days from the CO and that was that. But there was also another note and it said, “Unfit for aircrew” right across the page. There was me just finished a complete set of ops with the top marks of the aircraft in [laughs], so it doesn’t always mean that because you can write and spell and add up that you can get what you want in life. I did work hard for it when I was on the course and I done pretty well on the course but there we are.
CB: Did you get to what was the reason why they put “unsuitable for aircrew”?
JL: Well, that was at Oxford. When I went to Oxford, they were only selecting perfect crew members. You had to have your — what was it called. Certificate.
CB: School Certificate.
JL: School Certificate.
CB: Yeah.
JL: Of some sort of other then. You had to have that -
CB: Yes. Yeah.
JL: And that because they didn’t give you any big writing exams but they took what you’d done in the past.
[Recording paused]
CB: Filled the bill.
JL: But when we, we went to a college, I can’t think what the college was called now, but how I got there I don’t know, because at seventeen, I was — I didn’t go anywhere without mum or dad. We just didn’t go anywhere. And to get from Henley on Thames to Oxford, I suppose I must have gone by train or bus. There was a bus service to there. I can’t think, I can remember walking through these massive, great gates and seeing this frightening college at the back. I’m on my own, my other pals had gone on before me at a different time. I got in there and we were, we went through medical first. I passed medical quite alright, there was no trouble there, then they asked me what I wanted to go in for. We had a choice of going in and flight engineers was fairly new. They were taking mechanics from ground crew at that time and incidentally, one of my pals, he was an instrument maker in ground crew. I can always remember him, a little short chap, and anyhow, so when I went in there, we went into this room with sloping exam rooms, where there was a big slope, and then the instructor on these was low down and there was tiers and tiers of these little tiny tables and chairs and it frightened the life out of me to go in there and see that. It really put me off that did. And I think that’s really put me off and I didn’t, I can remember they said to me, ‘Well you can’t spell “engineers” right and they didn’t ask me anything more. Because I only went to the local school, they knew roughly what my education was like but that’s that was it. I still don’t know how to get square roots.
CB: Right.
JL: But that, that was the most, I know that little chap’s name that came up from ground crew. Ken Rimmer. I lost him, couldn’t find him anywhere, so if you ever have a Ken Rimmer come along. Yeah. He’d be a lot older than me. That’s the trouble, I was so young and I could be one of the youngest flight engineers — well aircrew — that finished a tour. I finished a tour in the middle of December ‘44 and of course, May ‘45 it was all over, so I could be one of the youngest flight engineers. I have been called up. Where was I? Oh, at London. At the Memorial. I went to the opening of that London Memorial and I was wearing my — one bloke come up and he said, ‘How old are you?’ So I told him, ‘Well why have you got that medal on there for? You wasn’t old enough’, so I explained all how I come in to aircrew. One or two people have picked me up, because of my age, I couldn’t have been in aircrew and done what I done. I could have been aircrew but I wouldn’t have completed a tour.
CB: But you did.
JL: But I did.
CB: Yes.
JL: Yes.
CB: Good. We’ll stop there for a cup of tea.
JL: Yes.
[Recording paused]
CB: So, one more thing. Yeah.
JL: Well.
CB: Coincidence.
JL: Talking about St Athans again, one of the instructors there, well they always asked you where you came from, what you do. I said I come — this particular man said, ‘Where do you come from?’ I said, ‘Henley on Thames’. ‘Oh Regatta’. I said, ‘Yes. Yeah. I go to the Regatta every year because we have a week’s holiday during the Regatta’. ‘Oh, I’ve been to the Regatta’, he said ‘and I’ll see you there after the war’. And I did see him there after the war, out of the thousands and thousands of people. What happened was we were, yeah, I finished. I was out the Air Force and I acquired one of our dinghies, aircraft dinghy, and the gang of us was going down to have a go on the river with this dinghy. We had gramophone, a gramophone with us, the lot, and we wanted to pump this up a bit more, so I called in the garage and who was there was this bloody great big Rolls Royce, see, and out stepped the driver. And it was him, it was the blooming teacher from St Athans, all dressed up in his blazer, all poshed up. I said, ‘Hello sir. Fancy seeing you after all this time. You did say you would see me here, didn’t you?’ ‘Oh yes. I can remember you’, and he walked off [laughs]. I’m scruffy as anything and he was all posh, but we actually did meet and he went to get his petrol and he came back and we had a little chat after that. But out of all those people and that particular garage.
CB: Extraordinary.
JL: And the stopping and the timing were just there.
CB: Extraordinary.
JL: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
JL: Yeah.
CB: Coffee.
JL: Yeah.
[Recording paused]
CB: Now when we, when people were going to St Athan for engineer training there were four aircraft, essentially, that they could go for and they weren’t going to be trained, as I understand it, on everything, so it could be the Lancaster, could be the Halifax, could be the Stirling or it could be the Sunderland. What was your choice when you arrived?
JL: Well, I wanted to go on to Sunderlands but there was a height restriction because of turning on the petrol levers which. It was right up in the top and if you’ve ever been in to a Sunderland, it’s a massive thing.
CB: Yeah.
JL: I couldn’t, without standing on something, reach these control levers for the petrol tanks, so my next one was a Stirling. I have no preference. Because I could see that now, now I’ve been on the Lancasters, I think I should have gone on the Lanc but afterwards, I was told that Stirlings were the hardest ones to pass exams on. There was not a lot of hydraulics on Stirlings, they were all electronic, all electrics. Everything was worked on electrical and for some people must have been confusing, but to me, it was a lot easier than a lot of pipes and hydraulics. But that’s my main thing but of course, you can’t beat the old Lanc. It’s, it was a lot, lot easier. The Stirling engineer’s position was half way up the aircraft and it was opposite the wireless operator. It was dark, dismal, and you couldn’t see out anywhere. There was nothing to do bar just staring at your instruments the whole time and that was a bit boring more than anything else. Getting on that. But —
CB: So you were trained specifically on that.
JL: I was trained specifically on that. I had to learn engines again because these were radial engines – Bristols, and the Lancaster had the old Rolls Merlins. That came in the course when I picked up the rest. No. Wait a minute.
CB: Let’s — let’s —
JL: We were on Stirlings first. Yeah.
CB: Let’s just go from —
JL: Yeah.
CB: You graduated.
JL: Yeah.
CB: You’d done all your training at St Athan.
JL: Yes. On Stirlings.
CB: On Stirling. On the Stirling technology.
JL: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: So naturally you went from there to the Heavy Conversion Unit.
JL: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: That was on Stirlings.
JL: That was on Stirlings. Yeah.
CB: Right. So where was that?
JL: That was at — [pause] where was that?
CB: That was at Chedburgh.
JL: Chedburgh was it? The first one. Yeah. Yeah. Chedburgh.
CB: So when you arrived what happened?
JL: We just had a talk on something or other and they said — all of a sudden, they said, ‘Right. We’re getting the pilots in here now’, he said, ‘You’re all going to be crewed up’. Well, it was rather a surprise because — and there were two rows of tables we were sat at. I was the furthest way. The furthest away. The door opened and in swarmed all these sergeant pilots and they just grabbed or spoke to the first lot of people on the first lot of tables. In walked, about half way up, walked in an officer, I could see that by his cap, walked straight around and straight to me, ‘Would you like to be my flight engineer?’ I said, ‘Yes sir. Yes sir’ [laughs]. Officer already here. And there he was, Eddie Edmondson. He was a lovely chap, we’ve been friends all the rest of our lives ever since then, and I don’t know how he came right the way around to me, because the — obviously they knew I was fairly high up in exams. Whether they’d spoken to him or not, I don’t know, but he was, he’d been flying for ages. Years. A couple of years or so. As a matter of fact, we worked it out the other day, just the other day. He was — eighteen — I would say — nearly thirteen years older than me, he was an old man according to us in flying, and he was in his thirties and he’d done a load of flying. Got half a logbook filled before he even went on to Bomber Command. He’d done a lot of ferrying high ranking officers about. He’d left England, he left England when he was three or four, his family took him to America. He’d done all his schooling in high schools in America and he’d done a lot of flying in America before he came back to England. He lived in Sheppey, the Isle of Sheppey when he came back, and that’s where he came from. And there incidentally, we’ve been friends in life all his life. We used to converse after flying. He was stationed quite close to Henley and we got to know his wife well. He was married the whole of his flying career and two daughters. He, he came to our house with his wife when they was local, for Christmas dinner. We had the window that the silver paper stuff we used to use as decorations, and him and his wife stayed for the day with us to have — what did we have? We had Charlie. Oh, dad had some ducks up the top, we had this duck for Christmas dinner called Charlie, and that was good, and we kept in touch all that time. Not so much in our flying careers but afterwards, when he’d left. I’d left, I was married, we were going up north and he was living up north. Anyhow, we were passing his, more or less, his house so we decided could we come for the day and they invited us for the weekend to stay, as we was going up for a holiday up north. I had a motorbike and sidecar. Sunbeam. Sunbeam. It wasn’t mine, it was my brother in law’s we borrowed, and we went up there and he had a paper shop that was a newsagent shop. He wasn’t happy there and he obviously was going to go somewhere. He had two young daughters then, but he was thinking of immigrating to Australia. Anyhow, we went on up, had our holiday. We lost him then, just Christmas cards. He’d, by this time, gone to Australia and joined the Australian Air Force and he was flying in the neighbourhood of Woomera when they were doing the atomic bombs over there. He got up to a couple of stages from flight lieutenant and he was doing very well. Then my daughter immigrated to Australia, my youngest daughter. Australia. Jane. She went out there as a nurse on an exchange system, loved it so much, stayed there. So the first year she was out there, we decided we ought to have a holiday in Australia. Wrote to Eddie and his wife and they said, ‘Yes. Come over and spend a week with us’, so that’s when we really got to know each other personally. And all the crew were — had names. We didn’t go sirs, sergeants, warrant officer, anything, we went by our own Christian names. And the pilot wasn’t pilot, his name was Eddie, and everybody else had their own name. Bar the mid-upper, he was John, but he was called, before I even got there, as Ivan. Why Ivan? He was a communist and an atheist, and his father was a clergyman, and as far as I know, his name was the same name as one of the clergymen over in Oxford. But I lost touch with that bit. But he was, Eddie told me that every station we went on, he was called up before the CO and asked what his conduct was like. He was, he was only a young thing, he was only nineteen, twenty, himself and he — I think he used to like the young lady in Cambridge and used to go to these meetings. We didn’t used to go but he used to go to these meetings. He didn’t use the [unclear], I never knew anything much about that side of his life. Anyhow, Eddie told me that for years afterwards, he had to go and see the CO about him, so they kept a tag on him. Then one year over there, his wife was saying, she was saying, ‘Ronald. Ronald’, and I thought, that’s funny. Why was she calling him Ronald? And it was distinctive that she was saying Ronald, and I said, ‘Why are you calling him Ronald?’ ‘Well, that’s his name’. I said, ‘No it’s not, it’s Eddie’. ‘No. That’s his nickname. Eddie Edmondson’. All those years I’d been calling him Eddie and his name was Ron, Ronald. Oh dear. Oh dear. Oh dear. And anyhow we, in going, we was going every other year to see our daughter over in Australia, so we used to spend time with them. Eventually they moved from the bungalow in to an old people’s place, lovely place that was. We couldn’t stay in there but we used to stay at a hotel around the corner, and of course over there, these big names. It was just outside Melbourne, and we went this particular time, he was getting old and to get from his place we used to have, he used to have to go up to the first turning at some traffic lights, turn left, turn into our hotel, pick us up, come out, turn right and go down in the square and come back to his house again. This place he was living. We were going along a bit and he was talking and I had my eyes shut and he was driving exactly as we were flying. I could see us two up there. The only difference is he was on the wrong side and I had a strange feeling, and I said, we were Ron by this time, I said, ‘Ron, you’re driving that blooming Lanc’. And I don’t know what it was, but he was just somehow or other. It was, it was so strange. He was talking at the same time, and it was just as he was talking to me in that Lancaster.
CB: The significance of that is that the Lancaster had one pilot.
JL: Yeah.
CB: And you, as the engineer, stood next to him.
JL: Yeah. Yeah. Stood next to him.
CB: And ran the throttles.
JL: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: So you were very much a pair.
JL: Yeah. Oh yes, we were.
CB: Whereas on the Stirling, there were two pilots.
JL: Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yes, I was. Oh, that reminds me of something on the Stirlings, we were doing a bullseye. A bullseye consists of the aeroplanes flying out to the French coast and making out that we were going to a raid, but we were only in our flying. We were still under instructions, and we were to distract the radar and make them think we were going out to bomb and so they would get all their fighter aircraft down in our area, and just after us going out, the main force would be going out in a completely different direction and fool them. But this was, this was — as a matter of fact, our crew, well I was more nervous of that particular raid, well not raid, but flying out very near the coast, which could have been caught by their fighters out there and we were on the way back. We were turning and coming back, we were just getting a bit more height and I was looking at the petrol. Oh, I’ve got another ten minutes, a quarter of an hour and I’ll change over. The levers for this were in a damned awkward place on the old Stirling. They were fairly high up again, almost over the head of the wireless operator. So, there I was, I thought, well, I’ll change them over and Eddie suddenly said, ‘Oh, one of the engines has stopped. Oh, another one. And another one’. I jumped up, climbed over the wireless operator, turned on the petrol tanks of another tank. ‘Oh, they’re alright, they’ve stopped, they’re ok now’. I thought, blimey, what have I done wrong? ‘Cause I’m all on my own and in this dark bit, he’s up at the top there. Anyhow, I said afterwards I’ve done the log, I’ve checked it and I had it checked when we came back. ‘Yeah. That’s ok.’ Well, we reported this. I knew it was petrol because four engines had gone on a bloomin’ Stirling. That’s down in the ditch. They all picked up again and we were alright. So the ground crew went through it and do you know what they find? They find the lever from rich — rich to weak — was still in rich. In other words, we were still on choke, and it worked out that that was nothing to do with the flight engineer. It wasn’t one of his questions to ask the pilot if he’d done, which I thought was pretty dicey, because when he said what height he was at, I should have said, it was called a, ‘rich to weak mixture after you take off’, and he hadn’t done it, and it was still left in rich mixture, so we’d used that amount of extra fuel and we were nearly in the ditch [laughs]. I had a very bad look from all the rest of the crew at first but when it was found it wasn’t my trouble, well I was, I was in the safe again, but we never done that again. But of course, when you got on Lancasters, it was a bit different. We could there check with the pilot what he’s done and our take off with the bomb load, of course, I had to take the throttles up and we got that worked out a treat. I could do that without him worrying anything at all about it and he used to take the tail up and then I used to take the throttles up from there on.
CB: Right.
JL: And that was alright. But that was a terrible thing. But —
CB: Made you a better engineer.
JL: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: We’re going to stop so you can have a drink.
JL: Yeah.
[Recording paused]
CB: So now going back to the HCU at Chedburgh. Then you were selected by Eddie.
JL: Yes. Yes.
CB: And what happened next?
JL: We — we was, we then went from that room into a big hangar. Yes, we’d been to this hangar, that’s right, and I was introduced then to the rest of the crew. We — how did I get there? I can’t think. I must have moved then. No. That was the first day I came there, I hadn’t got a place then. We then moved into a big long dormitory with a lot more crews and of course then we got chatting, and that and that’s, that’s how we definitely moved in to this big long rooms, because I can remember looking out the window and there was a chap over the other side singing something or other [laughs], and somebody else on our, these were brick built buildings and he was singing, and this fellow joined in with his singing and the two of them singing between them. But that had got nothing to do with our crew I’m afraid. Our crew. We had a mixed batch really. Navigator. The bomb aimer was young, he was just about the end of his eighteens, end of his nineteens. Then there come the pilot, he was in his thirties. Navigator, he was a school teacher, got a young lady. Oh, the pilot was married. The pilot was married. The school teacher was courting and he was at the end of his twenties. The mid-upper was a young chap. Again, at the end of his nineteens was Ivan, I’ve already explained about Ivan. Wireless operator, he was an elderly man and he was balding and he had one of those wrinkled faces. A northerner. He kept himself quite a bit to himself. I didn’t have a lot to do with him but I think he was married because he was getting on in age. I should say he was a good thirty five, I’d be guessing, but I should say he was there. And the rear gunner, he was a plumpy chap. How he ever got in to that gun turret I shall never know because he was quite a bigish fellow. I met him quite a few times afterwards. He was — when he retired — when he come out the Air Force, he stayed in as [pause] a — oh what was it? In the library. He was a librarian in one. I can’t remember what station it was on but he was a civilian as a librarian. He was a big fella and he was in the end of his twenties. Bald. Bald as bald. You can see that by the photographs I’ve got. That was the crew, and we palled up alright. The elder ones and the younger ones kept between themselves a little bit but we got on pretty well together. And then when we, when we went on the operational stuff.
CB: Just before you do that — what were you actually doing at the HCU?
JL: Oh. Landing. Take offs. Landings. Night flying. Done a couple of long distance flying’s for the navigators. The two gunners didn’t do much at all. Oh yes, we did, we done some gunnery practice somewhere. We done some bomb dropping — dummy bombs somewhere for the bomb aimer. The wireless operator, he was doing two or three things on his old Morse code.
CB: Did you do fighter affiliation?
JL: Oh yes. No, not a lot on those. Refer to the book.
CB: Yes.
JL: We didn’t do a lot on fighter affil at that particular time [pages turning]. We done an experienced dual control with another pilot. That, that was alright.
CB: An experienced pilot.
JL: With an experienced pilot. Then we done a lot of duals. One. Two. Three. Landings and take off was mostly what we started off with and then we done a fair few of those. Days and nights. Then we went on to —
CB: Then you went to the Lancaster Finishing School.
JL: Yes. But [pause] we went on. No, we’re still on there. We done some cross-country circuits. Still with the old Lanc.
CB: The old Stirling.
JL: And the fighter affil, and that’s when we done that bullseye when the petrol tanks ran out dry. Then we went on to Feltwell to do the Lancaster course. I had to go on to a little bit of tuition on changing of engines obviously because everybody went on to Stirlings. Most people went to Stirlings to start with even if they were on Lancasters and Halifaxes. They still went on to some Lancs er, some Stirlings because they were getting them, rid of them from the main aerodromes and coming back on to us so we could wreck them [laughs] and finish them off. The first time the pilot landed a Lancaster was interesting. I can always remember that bit. We were coming in to land as usual, he’d shut the engines down very gently and he didn’t shut them down far enough. We overshot. So, he went around. He said, ‘Well, if that had been a Stirling, I should have been on the ground’. The other pilot said, ‘Yeah. But you’re flying a decent, a decent aircraft now. Not a blooming old Stirling’ [laughs], and we had to shut the engines on the Lanc way down and it just flew itself in to the ground. It was no trouble, but that old Stirling you really had, you really had to fly it down in. But —
CB: How did he get on with the fact — the Stirling — he was sitting twenty-three feet above the ground on that?
JL: Oh yeah.
CB: Whereas the Lancaster was a bit lower.
JL: Yes, that was an interesting thing. When we was down at St Athans, we had to do starting engines up. That was the only thing we ever went in to an aeroplane for on course was starting the engines. So, all the people, all us chaps were sitting outside and with the Stirling, you could walk under the propellers on that when they was revolving, they were so high up, but when you got on to the Lancasters and Halifaxes they were a lot lower and you couldn’t walk through those. And apparently if you stand and watch a propeller long enough, it mesmerises you, and one fellow down there on Lancasters got up and walked through the Lancaster propeller. Yeah. They couldn’t stop him. He’d gone through.
CB: Crikey.
JL: It was terrible.
CB: One of the aircrew or ground crew?
JL: Ground crew. No, one of the the — one of the students. We’d sat there, we’re talking. We were on the Stirlings, we were alright, you could walk underneath the propeller but that was just something that did happen on this site. And apparently a propeller will mesmerise you. I mean, when you’ve got twenty or thirty blokes that have got to get up there and start the propellers up and stop and get down again and he watched this propeller too long. Yeah.
CB: Boring waiting.
JL: Yeah. Yeah. But that was just one thing there I can remember now.
CB: So, the Lancaster Finishing School was relatively short.
JL: Oh yeah.
CB: Because you were just getting adapted to the —
JL: Well, we’d done circuits and bumps and landings day and night. And then yes, that was —
CB: That’s at Feltwell.
JL: We weren’t on that long.
CB: Yeah.
JL: We were only one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Seven trips in the old Lanc.
CB: Right.
JL: And then we was back on to the —
CB: Right.
JL: To the squadron.
CB: Right. So, what was the squadron number?
JL: 514.
CB: And where were you?
JL: We were at Waterbeach which is seven or so miles outside Cambridge on the Ely Road. Our runway finished on the Ely Road, so if you was coming up there when we were taking off, you was nearly getting blown over. Yeah. As I say, Waterbeach is still there. The pubs at the bottom of the — the — going in to Waterbeach is still there and had a reunion up there for quite a few years now. This year it’s the 17th of June. We have a gentleman now doing our reunions, there’s about five people on there. We have ground crew as well as aircrew. I think there’s about five of us now that go there, but there’s about fifty members of the 514 Squadron Reunion Association. These were children, great grandchildren, uncles and aunties have come along. We have a church service out there in the church, then we go to the station which was run by the Army and they’ve moved out now, but we still get somebody comes along and gives us a meal because all the, all the station’s still there as, as it was and we were told the, most of the buildings which were brick built buildings are going to be given to the local Waterbeach village. It is only a smallish village. The rest of the ground will be taken over by — acres and acres of ground up there — and they were going to build a brand new town, but it won’t be called Waterbeach. It’s going to have its own town and Waterbeach will be a separate little village on its own still, plus the school was going to have one building for their school. I suppose they’ll be taking some of the town but I think that’s going to be way, way in the future.
CB: Now going on to what was your first op?
JL: The first op was Falaise Gap.
CB: Right.
JL: Falaise Gap, as you might have known, was that was when the Germans started breaking out from our invasion and the object was just to go and bomb a certain area. There was no actual point of bombing, the Army were going to lay out sheets on the ground and we had to bomb so many degrees from them. Navigator had to give exactly where they were and we could drop bombs in these, these woods and fields and just smash the Germans up, because that was where they were going. That was a very nice quiet one really, there wasn’t nothing much going on there. We then went to an aerodrome and smashed that up, because that night there was going to be a big raid, and they didn’t want that one to do any fighters, so we just went there and smashed that up. That was a nice one. They was three hours a piece. We done a lot of flying formation, air tests, etcetera, then we went on the big one. The Russelsheim, that was eight hours. Kiel. These were night ones from now on. Russelsheim, Kiel and then Stettin. So they put us right smack in the best of the best ones. A couple of things from there. Kiel. I can’t remember much about Russelsheim, but Kiel and Stettin, we got caught in the blue searchlight. The blue ones you might as well just bale out because you just can’t get out of a blue searchlights. It was terrific. This is — I’m saying now quite a few minutes — but it was seconds. I look out the dome on my engineer’s side and down in this, right at the bottom, there was a little tiny aircraft in the same beam. It was definitely like a four engine that, the wings and that but I can see it now, there was this little tiny one down there. He couldn’t have been many, well, feet of the ground. I don’t, that’s what it had caught but it had caught us as well. Out like in the light. Could we see? We’d lost all our night vision. There was our poor gunners up there thinking we’re bound to get shot down here, but we never got anything. But I don’t know why I looked out and looked down at this aircraft but I saw this aeroplane down in, right down, just a little course, it must have been one of our people going in to mark the targets I should think. It was —we were going into the target area but as I say, that poor devil, he never got out. He couldn’t have done. No. And either Stettin or Kiel we, when we came out, it must have been Stettin I think, we were told the route out which took us right over Sweden, neutral, and it said, ‘That’s going to give your gunners a rest for a little while’, because it did. It took eight, eight hours fifteen minutes. No. Yeah. No. Sorry. Stettin took nine hours thirty minutes and if you go over the neutral, that little bit of neutral, you’ll be alright. You’ll be, but it’ll give you a little bit of a rest. They fired on us and they sent up these like balls on a string and they came up. They went pop, pop, pop, pop all the way down. Very pretty. All well, well below us, but it was just one of those things. It was quite nice to see these things coming up, but that’s what they fired at us. Next day we were told that they had reports that they objected to us using their air space, but that was that. Well, there was not a lot but we now came on to Gee. Gee was what the navigator used to use to navigate on, but it could only have been used in England because it had to have three masts to get these three combined and where they, where they crossed was where we were. Something like today’s [laughs] car navigation, but until they’d got something over on the continent, another mast over on the continent, they couldn’t beam over on the continent, so our squadron, this we didn’t know at the time of course, but they were, we had to use then something called GH. GH was very, very accurate and the navigator had to go and have a little course and they sent me along as a flight engineer, just in case to do the same bit of course, but it didn’t do a lot for me. All I knew we had to get these three little dots all lined up and there we were, dead over. This put the crosses, the dots lined up over the target, so when three dots lined up over the target, you was there and the only trouble with this was, everybody else was in the same spot of the sky, and actually we did lose as many aircraft, sometimes with bombs being dropped through that. We didn’t, but one of the crew, one of the blokes brought a bomb back with them which had dropped. We had one bomb bay open dead above us, just feet above us. He moved off. And we were on the bombing run, and he moved off. To see that lot of bombs just above you. And there was, I think, so accurate and if you weren’t doing as you was told at the right heights, this is what happened. GH was dead on. And of course, we used to be able to bomb through cloud. We didn’t have to sight them, the bomb aimer was told to drop the bombs by the navigator. The navigator was told because the bomb release was down in the bomb bay, the bomb aimer — all he had to do was just sit there and press the button. Oh dear. That was, that was good. To do this, GH was fitted with an explosive device because it was so secret at the time. If the Germans had got hold of it, they could easily knock out, knock these, the [pause] oh what was it? They knocked them out and put them out. They had one very similar going across England, they had to fly up and we started pushing out the radar signal, out but this one was so secret they kept it, and if the aircraft crashed, it would explode, to destroy the thing. And we had to destroy it if we were going to make a false landing. Our, we then, when we were flying our tail fins were painted brilliant yellow because we were the only squadron that had this GH, and when we went up, we took off, we had to fly around and the rest of the squadrons local were talking off and when they saw us, they had to formate three aircraft on the back of us and we went off as four aircraft. And when they saw our bomb bays open, they opened theirs. When we dropped our bombs, they dropped theirs. So, I mean we could pinpoint right through the cloud on to a pinpoint place.
CB: But this was daylight.
JL: With four sets of bombs.
CB: This was flying in daylight.
JL: Yeah. Oh yes. Yes. Yes. Only in day. We were, we didn’t do so many night runs then because these were most oil refineries we were doing. We could pinpoint down to the final road with ours, but then we did start on a few nights. I’ll tell you one thing on this, we had the flak coming up. I, of a night time — flak in the daylight didn’t really show, but flak at night and what with the TI’s, the Target Indicators going down, I always used to say it used to remind me of Henley Royal Regatta firework night, because you could see everything going up, coming down, and it was really frightening sometimes. You weren’t even on the bombing run and you could see it in front of you. You’d think, my God, I’m going through that. Searchlights, Flak, you could see the flak bursting and all our green and red TI’s were going down. It was, it was really frightening up there sometimes like that more than everything else, but I always used to say, ‘Oh that’s Henley coming up’. What was the other one? [pause]. Yes. Night flying. We started back on night flying again. We didn’t use like we used to use the master bomber on that. Why we did, I don’t — I think we was out of — because we were out the other side. We were staying in bomb alley, we was down in Saarbrucken and Duisburg and Essen by this time and they hadn’t got these signals that went that way, they went up north.
CB: You’re talking about for GH.
JL: Yeah. GH. We could use GH.
CB: But were you ever using H2S?
JL: No, they could home in on that. We had used it but not for bombing, we used it just for navigational purposes but our navigator, he was pretty hot. Oh, that reminds me, on one of these GH raids we were on, daylight of course, and we were in a stream dropping Window so that it mucked up their radar and we had three aircraft in tow behind us, going along, and we could see aircraft coming back on a different angle to us, but our navigator said, ‘Right. Now turn’, to another angle, and the pilot said, ‘Well, we’re not there yet’. We could see all these aircraft. ‘You turn. It’s got to be turned’, and he said, ‘No we can’t’. So we convinced Eddie that we should turn. We moved out just a fraction — bang bang bang - three shots straight up. How it missed the aircraft, God knows. Our pilot was — Eddie, was back on course. We got out of the cover of window and they caught us straight like that. Didn’t do any damage but if we’d have gone out anymore. What had happened was everybody, or the big first lot, had gone out and they went past the point of return, so they could come back on to the right course. Our pilot, our navigator was so dead on that he had to call, turn on the turn, but he didn’t see what we could see.
CB: Well he couldn’t see out.
JL: He didn’t, he never looked out. I’ll tell you a bit about that in a minute. He couldn’t see anything, and it was plain, well as plain as daylight. We were going on, turning and coming back, and anyhow that that was alright. We did get off but that did shake us, I mean they knew exactly where we were and if we’d have moved out a little bit more. I’ll bet the bloke behind, the pilot behind, was swearing [laughs]. Anyhow, that was Ron. Now the navigator, he never, nor the wireless operator but he got a little dome he could look out of. The navigator was behind his blooming curtain, never been out for daylight or a night run, and we was on this fairly long leg and he asked the pilot if he could come out and he said, ‘Yeah, of course you can’. So, I moved up, we were only in a little space there, I moved up a little bit and he came out and he was looking around. So, ‘Come and have a look out the blister. You can see right down on the ground’. We was — we were coming back off a bombing raid but we were still over a foreign country, and we were both looking out through this blister and all of a sudden, there was a God almighty bang. The blister exploded in front of us, and what had happened — a bit of shrapnel had hit this blister, caught his flying helmet, cut the flying helmet, not his head, cut the flying helmet and there we were with all shards of the blister everywhere. All in our heads, everywhere, all in our hands and face, all these bits of the Perspex. And of course, in come the air and he give a swear and he said, ‘I aint coming out here anymore’ [laughs]. Oh dear. That wasn’t funny I know, but it was laughable really because he came out and saw that. Another one was — it was a daylight again. This trip, the mid-upper said, ‘I can smell burning’, so Eddie said, ‘Pop back and have a look. See what there is’. So I popped back, I can’t see anything. I couldn’t smell burning, I couldn’t see it and so he, we couldn’t do anything at all about that. We were a bit concerned because he was definitely concerned about it. When we got out of the aircraft and got underneath and looked from the other side, looked up, there was this blooming great big hole in the mid, the gunner’s position. The, the gun is moved around on the rollers, and they are covered with a cover just to protect them from the weather and that, and this had gone through this cover and out the other side. A blooming great lump. Well, it must have been one thing and that was just —
CB: Rear or mid-upper gunner?
JL: No. mid-upper, and it had gone out, and if he’d — I don’t know where he was sitting, but if he was sitting with his back to it, it went through about two inches from his back. It went through one side and out the other, but the funny thing was, he never complained that there was any trouble with the mechanism in his turret but there was, we could see up there, this massive great hole. So that’s where the smell came from [pause]. Oh, the last thing was our last trip. Last trip. It was —where was it to? [pages turning] it goes on and on. Oh, it’s me that’s getting muddled, I can’t be muddled with my logbook can I? It must be that. The last [unclear] was Duisburg. Daylight. Daylight Duisburg. Now, because it is our last, our last, we, I don’t know if that was GH or not, it’s not down here but we was, because it was our last flight, but we were to lead the squadron. Honour to lead the squadron, all the way out to Duisburg and back. Right. Got in. The pilot’s always last in because he has to kick the tyres and look around the outside of the aeroplane. I started the engines up and I had to check on each engine to see there’s the — [pause] My mind.
CB: The oil pressures.
JL: No. No. All the oil pressures and all that was ok. I had to switch off the —
CB: Then you’d got all the hydraulics to check.
JL: No. The ignition.
CB: Yeah. The magnetos.
JL: No, the ignition is run by [pause] magnetos. The magnetos. They have two magnetos, two sets of plugs, and you have to check. Magnetos are a bit of a plain odd things sometimes and on old cars and all since before the coils came in magnetos were iffy. You take the revs up to a thousand or so and switch one off and it should drop a little bit on the revs, but not a lot. When I checked the second one on our starboard inner — engine cut out. Magnetos no good. Start up again, give it a rev, tried and see if one of the plugs were oiled up. Still no good. By this time, Eddie had come in and they’d rung back to the tower that we’d got a mag drop. Up comes the ground crew, check it all again, make sure it wasn’t me that was wrong, and by this time of course, we were supposed to be first off. There was a queue waiting to go but no, definitely mag drop. Out, into the spare aircraft, which was in C flight. We were in B. B flight which was right the other side of the aerodrome, had to get the coach up to take us there. All out. All out. Go over. Eddie had to now go around and kick all the tyres. We always say kick the tyres but to check everything.
CB: Yeah.
JL: We were all in, done our sets. Yes. Yes. Yes. He comes up. ‘My parachute’s opened’. He’s caught his parachute release on something in there and there was this white parachute all down the aeroplane. Go back out, get another parachute. By this time, they’d all gone, we were left on the aerodrome. We were determined to go, get our last flight off, so out they comes with a new parachute. Bearing in mind, everything had stopped on the aircraft, on the aerodrome. They was all back. We took off. The navigator took a short cut across England to catch them up at the back, which we did do in the end. Done that. On my logbook, I’m working out one temperature of the radiator was a little bit hotter than the other three, and then this carried on all through and luckily, I report it on my log. The pressure, the temperatures. This went on and it got a little bit hotter but still nothing to worry about. Something’s wrong somewhere, they’ll sort it out, the ground crew, when we get back. So we get back, report back. We finished you know, yay, kicked the ground. Kissed the ground and off we go. We get back and just change. The pilot comes in. Oh, ‘We’re all on a charge’. Now if you’re on a charge on that, like that you go to Coventry. Did you hear of Coventry? Now a lot of people don’t seem to hear of Coventry.
CB: I know about Coventry.
JL: Well, it was out of Coventry, but you were stripped of rank and you’d done two weeks of square bashing for doing something wrong, and I said, ‘Well why?’ ‘Well, low flying’. We’d been reported for low flying. Now, we came straight back over Henley and I was saying to Eddie, ‘Come on Eddie, get down, shoot them up’. Not Eddie, he wouldn’t do a thing like that. Perhaps you might on a daredevil but not him and I, we saw one or two bits of Henley as we went across and I pointed out a big Maltese Cross in wood up on one of the hillsides, and we got, we got low flying. Well we hadn’t done any low flying. He said, ‘Yes it is. They found a seagull in one of the radiators’. I said, ‘Well you tell them to get their finger out and start looking at my logbook’, which they did do, and found that the low flying was nothing to do with the — they never cleared the runway of seagulls before we took off.
CB: Oh.
JL: And so we got off it [laughs]. Oh dear. Yeah. Now that was our last trip.
CB: Were seagulls a bit of a problem at Waterbeach?
JL: Oh yeah. Well we were quite near the, you know, quite near The Wash just there, and they were. They were. But they never cleared them off before, so you can tell how late we were. Now I have one main thing that’s glowing up, going to clear up something that there’s a lot of controversial about, that’s the Scarecrow. Right.
CB: Yeah.
JL: Well I’ve flown through a Scarecrow. The only trouble was, I was the only one in the crew that saw it, and what happened is this. We were on a bombing run. By now he’s down in his bomb place, in the bomb, on his bomb, all ready to bomb. Got all ready there. The pilot was taking orders from him, ‘Left. Steady. Right. Steady’. Looking at his instruments. The navigator was in his cloth [laughs]. The wireless operator was doing something else, I think he was listening in. The mid-upper was facing back watching aircraft above us, and of course the rear gunner was looking out for — and then just yards in front of us was an explosion. Now if it had been a proper shell, I shouldn’t have been here to tell you the tale. It was dead on the nose, and I had just seconds to think, ‘Good God, there’s four engines in there and we’re going to hit these four engines’, and of course, I don’t know why I thought that, but we were through it. Their propellers just scattered it away and nobody saw anything else of it bar me, but I saw this thing actually explode in front of us. It wasn’t all that big but it was one of their fakes which we’d, I’d had seen before.
CB: So, what was your perception of what was a Scarecrow?
JL: It was just a lot of smoke. It, it blew up with a flash and then this smoke, black smoke just right down just like an aircraft going down. It was. But it wasn’t very big but it was dead on the nose.
CB: But was it, was it big enough to be an aircraft?
JL: No, it was, it would have been if you was away but it wasn’t big enough for me, because I could see it. Yeah. And it was dead on. As I say if it had been anything else, like if it had been a shell, that would have been it.
CB: Did you get shrapnel on the aircraft?
JL: No, nothing. We went through it and I could see going through it and the propellers just scattered it all away. Obviously. But to see it from a distance, to see an aeroplane come out of that sort of black ball must have been quite a thing, but it was definitely a Scarecrow. But being as I was the only one that saw it on the aeroplane, that was it.
CB: Why didn’t the pilot see it? Why didn’t the pilot see it?
JL: He was watching his instruments.
CB: Right.
JL: He’s on, he’s flying on his instruments.
CB: Ok.
JL: He would have seen it if he’d have —
CB: How did you know about the word Scarecrow? How did you know about it?
JL: Oh, we’d been told about them.
CB: And what did they tell you?
JL: They told us that they were throwing up these Scarecrows to scare the crews off them, to put them off bombing, but I have, on the television, heard a German say there was no such things as Scarecrows.
CB: Right. So, what else might it have been?
JL: Nothing. I can’t think. There couldn’t have been anything. It was there and my memory I could see. I thought, I thought four engines in there and we’re going through it. I’m going to get smashed, but of course it wasn’t. It was what I thought it was to start with, a Scarecrow, which —
CB: The variation on the theme here is that the Air Ministry was making sure, Bomber Command, that the loss of a complete aircraft was not identified this way. So, the Germans had upward firing cannon in aircraft. Did you know about that?
JL: Yes. Yes. I know.
CB: Right. So that was Shragemusik.
JL: Yeah.
CB: And that was aimed at the port inner tank.
JL: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: And so the explanation put out by Bomber Command was that when those exploded, that they were Scarecrows.
JL: No, we were told to expect these Scarecrows. I wasn’t expecting one, it just —
CB: No.
JL: It was, it was very late. I was experienced bomber crew.
CB: Yeah.
JL: I was. It was almost to the last of my daylights. I don’t know where it was, I didn’t really, I wish I’d made more note of it.
CB: Yeah.
JL: But it was definitely what we were told was a Scarecrow, and it couldn’t have missed us if it had been anything. This was daylight so the gunners would have seen another aircraft, even going underneath us.
CB: Sure.
JL: There was, there was nothing else for it. I can’t think why I had seconds to think of four engines in there and we were going through it, but it was so — I — the only thing is I can imagine, I imagine it further out because it was only seconds before we were through it.
CB: Yeah.
JL: And it was black smoke.
CB: Well, it sounds —
JL: And a pall of —
CB: Yeah.
JL: Of black stuff.
CB: That’s what it —
JL: It can’t have been just smoke, it must have been some something that held it there, you know. It wasn’t just smoke as smoke, because that would have gone, but there must have been something there and it did drop just like something coming down. But we went straight through the middle of it. Even if the pilot had seen it, he couldn’t have avoided it. We were —
CB: No.
JL: Right on the nose.
CB: So you identified this. What did you feel as you went through it?
JL: Well, I was still thinking, God — four engines.
CB: Yeah.
JL: There was nothing.
CB: No.
JL: Nothing. So, it must have been. It was something up there.
CB: Well, if it had been an aircraft, you would have expected to get the flak.
JL: Yeah. We should have gone in.
CB: The debris.
JL: And now, now afterwards I thought about it, it was too close. It was so close that as I say I just thought of four engines, nothing of the rest of aeroplane.
CB: Yes. Absolutely. Yeah.
JL: Four engines in there and we’re going to hit it, and of course, we were through and out. That was it.
CB: What was the trip that you, that that happened on? Which trip?
JL: Pardon me? My hearing aid’s gone off.
CB: Where were you going then?
JL: I don’t know. We was on the bombing run.
CB: Yeah.
JL: Of something but I can’t.
CB: One of the daylights. Yeah.
JL: One of the daylights. Oh yeah. Yeah. You didn’t get them at night. It was —
CB: Right. I’m going to pause there for a mo.
JL: Yeah. Oh.
[Recording paused]
CB: So one of the things you mentioned is that the pilot wanted you to have some flying experience.
JL: Yes.
CB: So how did that start?
JL: Well first of all, he insisted on me going into the link trainer. I had twelve, well, thirteen hours of link trainer, and that was very interesting. My pass out wasn’t too bad. That took over half an hour in the little cabin with the flying instruments, so he let me fly the plane now and again when we was on one of these training courses. And I’m sat there looking out and there was a fighter coming towards us, it was an American Mustang, so I thought, by the way, we’d done over an hour, two hours on this course and the gunners were asleep, I expect, in the back. So we were flying along and I thought I’ll wobble the wings, so I go bonk, bonk as he went past and there was all hell let loose. Everybody in there [unclear]. I must have woken up everybody else on there bar the navigator, because nobody had anything to do. It was just boring. I shook the aeroplane and they went, what the hell was happening? Cor dear, oh dear. That was, that was funny but I think he’d done the right thing. I don’t know if anybody else. I went down there anytime and just booked in a half an hour’s trip.
CB: Yeah.
JL: That was quite good and there we are. So -
CB: Good. Thank you.
JL: Yeah.
[Recording paused]
CB: So, you came to the end of your tour of thirty.
JL: Yeah.
CB: And you knew this was coming up. So what happened then? At the end of the tour. Celebration?
JL: Yes. Yes. It’s the only, the first, I’ll say the first time, it was the only time I got drunk. In the, in the pub was — the aircrews always went together. You didn’t really have any friends outside the air, outside your six, seven of us, so we all go down there. And you never had a pint of beer. You had seven glasses and a big jug, and this jug was full of beer, and that’s what, that’s what you had and you poured your own out of your jug.
CB: Oh right.
JL: That, that pub was never out of beer, it was never out. Now, I could come home on leave and the landlord would say, ‘Only one pint’, and then he would shut. But there, that pub always had beer. So, I mean it was so close to our station that I think the brewery used to look after that and we never had pints, we just had this one big flagon and used to pour it out between us. When you finished a tour, you had the end of your tie, end of your tie cut off and pinned on the wall, up on the ceiling, and also the pilot had a candle and he used to write our names on the ceiling. There was a — it wasn’t a big pub and that’s how we, that’s how we went, and we had a few beers that night. More than normal. We were always. Well at nineteen now, I was drinking quite a bit, went back into the mess and had a few more. Now I’m sitting, I can remember this bit, I’m sitting in the hallway of the mess and I’m sitting on a small table, and Eddie comes out. Eddie used to come in to that, he used to be allowed in for this. He came in and he saw me sitting on there and he said, ‘Here. Come and have a look at old John. He’s got a fix with his eyes’. He said my eyes were coming like that, one and the other. Oh dear. And I go in to, I’ve been into that mess now quite a few times in the past few years, and I can see myself sitting on that same bit of table. That’s all there exactly as it was when I was there on the squadron. And I always said I would ring the fire bell. There were fire bells scattered all over in the little tiny shed things, and we go back to our billet because we weren’t in the mess, we were in some billets just a few yards up the road, and I said, ‘Right, gather in —’. And I got clobbered. I got held by all the men and frogmarched past this bell, they weren’t going to have that bell rung that night. Oh dear, that was it. And the next morning, we used to have an elderly bloke, an old man come in. An old man, little chap, he used to do all our billet. The six of us, well seven, yeah six of us were in one billet and oh, by this time, the navigator had got his promotion to pilot officer, so those two weren’t in there but we had this billet to ourselves. And he come around, goodness knows what time, wasn’t, wasn’t early, and he kept hitting the bottom of my bed with this broom and it was going through my head. I said, ‘Oh George,’ — I think we called him. ‘For God’s sake, clear off’. ‘You get up’. I’ll always remember that bit. And they were already to go out at lunchtime, I went out but I was on lemonades [laughs]. Oh dear. That was, that was the time. The rest of the lads were alright but I did feel it that bad. Oh, I was giddy.
CB: What was the, what was the feeling of the crew? The sense of achievement.
JL: I think it was.
CB: Or despair at being dispersed or what was it?
JL: No. No, we were friends to a point. I didn’t know anybody’s, I had their address, I had everybody’s address by this time so I could write to them, but there was no more comradeship. It was just everybody for themselves again. We was all — all separate.
CB: It was a comradeship of danger really, wasn’t it?
JL: I should think it must have been, yeah, because we wouldn’t have had. I mean, one bloke would have gave his life for the other bloke.
CB: Yeah.
JL: But after that, that was it. When I met these two blokes at the next camp, they just said, ‘Hello John’, not — ‘How are you?’ We just passed as ships in the night, and that was it. For my twenty first birthday, I’d arranged to have leave from there and, of course, the war was over by this time. And I wrote to each of the crew because I knew where they were, a home address and asked them to come along to my twenty first birthday. We’d fix them up for the night. I got — I got a friend. Oh, by this time, got another Johnnie from Leicester, he, he had got his goldfish where he’d parachuted. No, he’d crash landed in the sea and got picked up by the seamen, and him and I got on well together. He was an air gunner. He came along, but none of the rest of the crew. The pilot wrote, he couldn’t get time off. And oh, and Frank, that was the rear gunner, he couldn’t, but the other rest of the crew, I never did hear from them.
CB: Really.
JL: Yeah, but as I say, I was friendly with Frank, the rear gunner, solely because we was both in the London area and we could go for a 514 Squadron had their first reunions in London.
CB: Oh, did they? Right.
JL: But I’m afraid it was them and us. The officers up there and the rest of us was down the bottom of the — [laughs]
CB: Yeah.
JL: But we had one, one of the squadron blokes was another Reading man. I didn’t know until I’m afraid after he moved, and his death, that he was from Reading.
CB: Really.
JL: I could have easily seen him.
CB: Yeah. Yeah.
JL: But there we are.
CB: But going back to the end of the tour, we’ve dealt with the social bit. Emotionally we’ve talked about as well.
JL: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
CB: What about officially? What happened next? Were you all thanked?
JL: Yeah.
CB: By the CO and then dispersed or —?
JL: No. No. As I say the pilot went in for our — there was a conduct report thing that each person had had for the whole time that he was in the Air Force, which said that I was not fit for aircrew thing on and my fourteen day CB. All the rest was clear, clear cut, but other than that, he come out with that and then we each, each individual had a railway warrant to go on indefinite leave, and we had to pick up our pay at the Post Office and that was that. And then I had a letter come through to say I had to report back to St Athans and that was that. And I thought, ‘Oh good. Back to the old’. I got a few young ladies down there I knew [laughs], which incidentally, I decided that I wouldn’t get serious with a girlfriend while I was still flying. I did do that, I had a girlfriend down there and a long time after Clare and I had Clare and Jane, and we was going down past Cardiff to a caravan. Remember the caravan? We was going down there and I thought I’m going to call and see at 14 Ludlow Street. I know there’s a 14 Ludlow Street and I’m going to thank mum and dad down there for the kindness, because they did give me a very nice reception and I did have Sunday lunches with them. Very nice young lady, Sylvia her name was, same as my sister. She was very nice but I didn’t really get serious, solely because I made a [unclear] that I wouldn’t, but now I’m going back, I’m going back down. I mean this is years later, to thank them for looking after me like they did.
CB: ‘Cause families did.
JL: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. Brilliant job.
JL: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
JL: So I knock on the door. No answer. So I knock next door. ‘Oh no Mr and Mrs Benning have just gone out and I don’t know when they’re coming back’. So I explained who I was, ‘Oh I remember you’, she said, this lady said, ‘I remember you coming next door with the daughter, the eldest daughter’. And I said, ‘Well where is she?’ ‘She’s married and she’s up in London’. So I gave them my address to say that I’d been, and if they’d like to come up and thank, would she thank them very much for what they did for me, but I didn’t hear back from them. It was a long time after, we’re talking fifteen years I suppose afterwards, but they were still in the same address, same house. I was glad I went back and thanked them, but I couldn’t wait all that time.
CB: No.
JL: We were, we had these two little ‘uns in the car.
CB: Of course.
JL: And that so — yeah.
CB: So that comes out of your return to St Athan.
JL: Yeah. St Athan.
CB: What was — how were you notified? You all went on leave. How were you notified what you were going to do next?
JL: By post. Well from, from home I was notified to go to St Athans via a letter. No. Telegram.
CB: Ok.
JL: No. It couldn’t have been a telegram because I had a railway warrant.
CB: They sent you a railway warrant.
JL: They must have sent a railway warrant. Told me where to go. Mind you I had all the Christmas off, right through Christmas, all through the thick snow of one of the winters.
CB: This was beginning of 1945.
JL: Yeah, and went down there. I only had a couple of months at St Athans. Obviously, they wanted to get rid of a lot of us flight engineers by now, and then I went up to Peterborough. But I got into Peterborough — that was the, a sort of a private, before the war aerodrome and it was manned by the regulars, the regulars. So being as I got sergeant’s stripes on and I’d only been in the Air Force a few years these, they had me in, these sergeants had me in and questioned me how did you get those stripes by that time. They never knew anybody from aircrew. Bomber Command.
CB: Really.
JL: Had stripes solely to protect them from working if you were shot down in Germany.
CB: Yeah.
JL: I mean that’s what they’re — of course, we had a little pay with it as well. But they knew nothing, they knew nothing of the modern day Air Force, they were still working as pre-war, pre-war Air Force. And they didn’t want me, they couldn’t make out how I’d got these stripes. So when I said to them, well my flight sergeant is due anytime, it’ll be here this week or two, I shall have a flight sergeant, they went up the wall. These poor blokes had been twenty five, thirty years in the Air Force and they had to work for theirs. Or wait for the next person to die.
CB: Yeah.
JL: And I thought what a blooming Air Force have I come in to.
CB: Well, there was a lot of resentment about that.
JL: Yeah. Oh, there were. I could, I said, ‘Well look, I don’t want to stay in the Air Force, I want to get out. I don’t want to take your job’. So in the end, they put me out to the satellite at Sutton Bridge.
CB: Oh, that was it. I see. Right.
JL: Out in the wilds. Yeah. Out in the wilds.
CB: Doing what?
JL: Well I was posted out as [pause] engineer UT I think it was, and I was shown this lovely workshop, beautiful workshop. Brand new lathe in it. It had everything you’d want and I was in charge. I was the only one there [laughs] and I was UT engineer, or something. Well, I thought, well this ain’t no good, I’m going to sit here all day for the rest of my time doing nothing. I could have a go on the lathe and muck around but I thought I want to be a motor mechanic, so I had a stroll around and saw the warrant officer in the UT, well the motor transport side. He was an old man. He was. He was out in India before the war and that and he was a nice old chap, lovely old chap, and I said, ‘Look, I want to learn motor mechanics’. I hadn’t been on, not really. I’d been on engines and I knew what engine was like and what they do on them, but I’ve never been on the actual car. Well’, he said, ‘You can go in the MT section’, and then there was two chaps in there. One had his own business and the other was a manager or something of one and they were both local men from the area. So they used to go home practically every night and it was one of those stations, as long as you kept your nose clean, nobody wanted to know you, and so I went in there, learned the business from them. I learned to drive on a tractor before I went in to a car. We had tractor bowsers and I learned on those. Learned to drive a lorry, all on my own on the old runways. And that’s how I came to start to learn to drive and all the mechanics. And they were both good chaps. I used to do their weekend stints. We used to have to have a motor mechanic on at weekends in case of breakdowns and they used to go off home you see. They only lived sort of a bus ride away and I always wanted to go and see them but never did. You know, these things sort of —. You gets married and life changes completely, but then they closed the camp down. We were training these French pilots and this was their first primary, only two or three planes a day used to go up from there. We went up then to — where was it? Kirton Lindsey. That’s outside.
CB: That’s north of Lincoln.
JL: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Went to Kirton Lindsey. Well, I stayed on to clear the camp up, help clear the camp up. We had nothing to do all day, just, just clean up. When somebody came for one of the cars and that, you just signed. They just signed for it and off you went. I was then — one of the NAAFI girls there was a bit keen on me, I was going out with her a little bit. And I was then shifted up to Kirton Lindsey and I flew, I flew in a blooming old Oxford [pause] or an Anson. Anson. Because when we got flying, I thought, ‘Oh I’ll have a nice look out now’, and the pilot said to me, ‘Wind the wheels up’. And I had to wind it. I think it was an Anson. It could have been an Oxford, I don’t know but I had to wind these wheels up. So I bring them up, said ‘Ok’. ‘Ok then. Wind them down. We’re just going to land.’ I had to wind them back down again [laughs]. Oh dear. And so that was that. And then we had a note come through that one of the cars that was left behind, that the NAAFI were using, wouldn’t go. Could they send a mechanic down? So I had to go back down there again, up and down with these wheels again. Got down there, there was nothing wrong. They just thought I’d like to come down and see this girl again [laughs]. So, I spent about a week down there. Oh dear. The times we had down there with all this. So I just stayed in the NAAFI, had my meals in the NAAFI. There was nothing else going on. It was just the NAAFI wasn’t closed down and just the odd car or two of theirs was still down there and they was still doing the running around. Anyhow, I said, ‘well I can’t stay here all this time. I shall have to go back’, so there was a chap going back up to Kirton in Lindsey on a motorbike, so I hitched a lift on the back of his motorbike [laughs]. Cor, that was cold. But anyway, we got back up there, I reported that I come back. It was getting a bit of a worn old show. By this time of course the [pause] I got something I haven’t got down. A place. Oh, that’s Catterick. That’s alright. I was at this one place when the war ended, that was Catterick. But anyhow I —
CB: What were you doing at Kirton in Lindsey?
JL: Kirton Lindsey. I was now fully qualified in the MT section.
CB: Oh, you were in MT.
JL: Yeah.
CB: Right.
JL: Yeah. MT section. I brought my push bike up that I had, a racing bike, because at St Athans, I was in their Cycle Club. We used to go out for weekends and we used to take tea and a few rations. We used to stop at a farmer, he used to give us a cooked breakfast for the tea and sugar that we used to take down, but, so I took the bike up to Kirton Lindsey and I put it in the stores of the MT section. By this time, I was a warrant officer, I’d got my stripes, and so up there, they didn’t really know what to do but there was quite a few of us flight engineers in the MT section, and they decided — no — before this, my bike was in there. I had no permission officially to have the bike on the camp. It was too quick. I brought it up there when I went home once in the train and so I brought it back. I was waiting to get the form. I’d been in to see their cycle side and what I had to do, so I got that. When I went in there — in to see my bike in this shed, there was a chap in there and he was laughing. He said, ‘The warrant officer’s been in here and he’s put his foot through your bike spikes’. I don’t know. I had a really posh racing bike, Hetchins, posh one it was in them days, and he spoiled it. Smashed it up. I went in to that office, I tore him off a strip. I couldn’t have cared [unclear] but I had the same as he did but he was shivering and shaking by the time I’m finished, because he was wild and he couldn’t say anything to me because I was the same rank.
CB: Yeah.
JL: And I was a young blooming kid and he was an old man. Oh dear. Anyhow, I got it put right by there and I said I was going to charge him for it. Well, his excuse is I didn’t have permission to be on the camp, but I said I hadn’t got time. I didn’t realise I was going to bring it back ‘till I brought it back. Anyhow, that was just one thing between us and the older people on these camps. They just detested us.
CB: Yeah.
JL: I mean it wasn’t that we were pulling rank. It was just we all wanted to get off and go home.
CB: Yeah.
JL: Anyhow one little thing now that we did do, the fire tender was out of time with its engine, and the engine in the back of the fire tender, and so to save, stopping flying on there, it was decided that all us flight engineer, now ground crew, would change these two engines over the weekend, and we would work from morning through the night until we got these two engines changed. So that’s what we done. About a half a dozen of us I suppose. We worked Saturday, through Saturday night, all Sunday and on to Sunday night and we got both engines changed without them stopping training these foreign, well mostly French pilots. We done that. I got in the bath and I went to sleep in the bath. But we did have a bargain of a week, seven days leave. We made a bargain with the CO that we would do that. But there was something else on that. What was that now? [pause] No, I can’t think now, there was something else we was going to do.
CB: So you’re —
JL: It’s gone past me now.
CB: So, when did you leave Kirton Lindsey?
JL: That was the year of the very, very bad winter.
CB: 1947.
JL: Yeah. What happened there was we were absolutely snowed in. Oh now, before that, I will tell you now, I’ve got what I remembered. The French didn’t used to drink tea, they drunk wine and they were drinking wine by the pint bottle, their pint jugs. Well, they were drinking it by that but they were leaving it and throwing it away. Their mess was next door to ours and we could see in. All this wine was being thrown away, and they had these massive great big barrels of wine. Now, the war wasn’t really over, and all, they’ve had this all through the war and they used to, somehow or other, we used to get wine from France over to England during the war. And these French said, ‘Oh yeah, we’ve always had this’, and they never drunk tea. It was always this wine and it was foul, it was terrible, but when you took it home and mixed it with a drop of sugar, and just give it a gentle boil up until the sugar dissolved, it was beautiful and we used to [laughs], I used to take suitcases of that home. One day a pal of mine, he was a wireless operator, him and I, this Pete Marshall his name was, the same age as me, we went into the Air Force on the same day. We left Henley on Thames in the same train. He went to London ACRC there and I went back up to Warrington to the, to the — mine. He passed out about the same time as I did. Pete and I used to, somehow or other, get leave at the same time because aircrew had so many days off and so many days on. I can’t remember. A month.
CB: Six days a month’s wasn’t it?
JL: Yeah, six days a month. Well we used to manage to get it together somehow, I don’t know how, and I used to — because beer was so scarce, I used to take a bottle of this wine around. We used to sit in the bars with this wine. We got in the bar with this wine and put it down, I put it by the fire. We were all sitting there having our beer and there was this God almighty explosion, and this wine had fermented in the heat and exploded [laughs]. Oh dear. Oh dear. And Pete always reminded me of that ever since. The last time — we used to have ATC meetings once a year, all the old boys from our local Henley on Thames, and I always used to keep in touch with Pete with telephone calls. He used to make up poems, so I’d made one up. Give him a ring up, I couldn’t get through. His phone was dead. Now we have relations in the same place. She couldn’t find him. Pete had disappeared. So, I don’t know what happened to Pete.
CB: Sad.
JL: Yeah, and I made this poem up and I can remember it now. How do I start? Oh — “I said to the man at the gate. ‘My mate Pete been here of late?’ He looked at me and give me a smile. ‘Come in and tally a while’. I said, ‘Ha, ha, No thanks. I’ll wait outside’. He said, ‘Ok I won’t be long’. Off he went. Came back, with no smile. ‘I can’t find Pete here. Your mate’. I said, ‘Perhaps he’s gone down below’. ‘Not Pete, won’t go down below. He’s too good’. And that’s what I got, but I never got Pete to give him it and he used to send me. I’ve got all his little poems.
CB: Fantastic.
JL: But that was I was just thinking by memory then. Oh dear. My memory now of that. And I’ve never seen Pete since. I know he had a son down there but we never managed to get his —
[Recording paused]
CB: Now we were talking about your demob. So where was it and when?
JL: Well, I was at Kirton Lindsey when my demob number came through, and it was the middle of the very, very bad winter. We were actually snowed in at Kirton Lindsey, no food, nothing, and the CO sent two lorries with about a dozen men on board with shovels to dig their way out to somewhere outside there to get some food in. I’m not sure about it. We were all put in to the officers’ mess because a lot of the — had been put on leave knowing of this big snowstorm coming. They sent a load of the crews and everything away and so we were only a mild few people up there. We were all moved into the officers’ mess, and the snow was so deep that we didn’t see landscape for about three weeks. Two weeks. Two weeks. We were walking in the, on the ground with all these high banks of snow either side. Couldn’t see a thing. Nothing worked. We had nothing to do. Just that. And that crew never come back, those two crews, we never saw them. We were on rations. And my demob come through where I had to go. The trains were running that way in England, over to Blackpool. I had to go over to The Wash side, down that side of England to London, and back up to Blackpool to get, to get to my demob. Demob was just outside there. I don’t know what the name was now. Preston. Preston. So that’s yeah, I get to Preston and by this time — no, I was sent. I don’t remember that. Yes, I did go straight there, I had to go to Preston for demob. So I had one of my duffle bag full of one lot of clothing, and in the other duffle bag was all my flying clothing, because nobody wanted to take it off me, and I had, in Henley, I had the local chap there make me up some straps. Two straps with a handle so I could carry them with the handles. So luckily, I didn’t have to carry it over my shoulders. And anyhow that was one thing there. I didn’t mind carrying it there and back, but getting up there, I had to hand stuff in, certain bits in, and receive my demob clothes. So I got to that and so I said, ‘Well, here’s all the flying clothing’, and the bloke took one look at the bag. He said, ‘Did you get it from here?’ I said, ‘No’. He said, ‘Well I don’t want it’. So there’s me, loaded with full flying clothing that I didn’t want anymore. But I thought, well I’ll take it home just in case. It’s at home. If the Ministry want it, they can come and pick it up. Well, they never did. I used the outer for my motorbike and I used the goggles for my motorbike and I used the outer gloves for my motorbike, but the rest of it I’ve still got.
CB: Amazing.
JL: Yeah. I’ve got the helmet, my oxygen mask.
CB: Silk gloves. Silk gloves. Inner gloves.
JL: Silk gloves. No, I don’t know where they’ve gone, but I think somewhere upstairs in the box. I’ve got those nice little woollen, knitted mittens, I’ve still got those. We had three lots. Clare has used the inner for going camping when she was in The Guides, that’s still up there. The flying boots are still up there. I take these to show the schools. I haven’t done it lately.
CB: No.
JL: But I used to take it around and show the kids in the schools and that.
CB: Great.
JL: But that’s, but when he told me it wasn’t got there so he didn’t want it back there.
CB: Amazing.
JL: Yeah. But I only spent, what, two days there and then a railway warrant back home.
CB: Right. So you got back home. Then what?
JL: Yeah
CB: What did you do when you got back home?
JL: Well, I’m now — I could have gone straight back to Stewart Turners, there was no — but there was no way was I going to do that type of job. I’d got, I’d got more interest in something that’s not quite so boring. So I was looking around. There was one, there was one car at least. I don’t know how I got the job but he said he wanted this car cleaned up. Mind you, they’d been put away all during the war and people were just getting the petrol now and they could get their cars out. I can’t think what sort of car it was or what it was, but it was in a filthy state. I couldn’t do much with it, it really wanted really cleaning. Not, not just me with a bucket and a sponge, that was one job, but my father was working at the time in Reading. Woodley had a small workshop of special jobs behind a garage in Caversham just over the Reading Bridge. In there was another fellow, and his brother had just come out the Air force and he owned a garage and would I like to go and — would he like him to get his brother to come and see me. I said, ‘Yeah’. Well, he had been in the Air Force and he was on Merlins, and his nickname was Mossie Metham, because he was on Mosquitoes, on engines, and he was a gen man on engines. And so that’s where I started. He had these letters after his name for car engines, MMEB or something it was, he’d got all that. A small little garage. Just another chap that had been in the Army that had been with him before the war, and me. So I got really good tuition on engines and gearboxes, back axles and everything else that went with it on the old cars, so I, I had a real good grounding on various cars. There were from —we had one Rolls there and we got down to Austin 7s. Yeah. So that was quite something. I then came up here to Tilehurst from there. He was a man that didn’t want a great deal. A big place. He could pick and choose his customers because he was so good. Oh, then the elderly chap left, I won’t say anything more on that. It was a family affair that went wrong somewhere and he had to get out, anyhow, he — him and I got on well together and there was — what did I? He, he had a big piece of ground. We had a big piece of ground and he got permission to build a garage and I thought, well here we go [unclear], but he never did do it and it’s never been built on and it’s still a garage when I left it.
CB: Amazing.
JL: It’s like a big stable. Well, it was, it was a stable, a big stable off the main road. The Caversham Road. And my Marjorie lived opposite where I was working, that’s how I got to know Marjorie.
CB: That’s how you got to know Marjorie. So when you did you meet Marjorie?
JL: Yeah, that’s where I met Marjorie.
CB: When. When did you meet her?
JL: When?
CB: Yeah.
JL: Well I couldn’t get out because the garage was one side of the road and her house was the other side of the road, so I couldn’t help but seeing and meeting her and it developed from there.
CB: His hearing aids gone.
CB: Yeah, but when. In what year did you meet her?
JL: Well, ‘78 I suppose. ‘48.
CB: ’48.
JL: No. No. No. What am I like? ‘48. 1948.
CB: That’s right.
JL: It must have been.
CB: And when did you get married?
JL: Blimey. Ask my —
CB: Sixty-five years ago.
JL: Sixty-two years ago.
CB: No. Sixty-four, sixty-five.
JL: Is it? Sixty-four.
CB: That’s 1952.
CB: Two. Yeah. Two.
JL: Yeah. 1952 yeah. Yeah. I’ve got it now.
CB: Yeah.
JL: I got the date. I got the date.
CB: Yes. Well, these things can be a challenge for blokes. Women always know.
JL: June the 21st
CB: Yeah.
CB: Really?
JL: Yeah. The day after my birthday again.
CB: Oh right.
JL: And the day after I joined the Air Force.
CB: Yes. So you joined on the 21st
JL: Yeah.
CB: Of June 1943. And you left in 1947, is it?
JL: Yeah. That was May. May ’47.
CB: I remember. I come from Rutland, so down the road from Kirton in Lindsey.
JL: Wait a minute. When my hearing aids have gone dead.
CB: Right.
JL: In there, you’ll see a little green box.
[Recording paused]
JL: Oh yeah. Yeah.
CB: So you were working locally. Running —
JL: Yeah.
CB: You came. What did you do in the garages?
JL: Well, the friend of my father’s — his brother owned a small garage and he was looking for a mechanic and so —
CB: Right.
JL: That’s how I got my first actual job from the Air Force.
CB: Right.
JL: He’d been in the Air Force, and we’d gone on very well together and the, there was something else from there. Anyhow —
CB: This was at Caversham.
JL: Yes. A small little garage in Caversham. We got on very well together.
CB: Then you went to Tilehurst.
JL: Then I came — there was this, a big garage with petrol station. In those days, we used to serve petrol on the road, over the top of the footpath, and it was a pound for four gallons. It should be more than that, but if you had four gallons, you had it for a pound because it was a long way to walk from the footpath, all the way back up to the shop for a few pence so the boss used to let it go for a pound for four gallons. And before that, I’ll go back to my first employer. When I went on my own, I had a parson, a local Tilehurst parson, as a customer. He went out to Spain to work as a parson over there and he got friendly with one or two of the locals and he —
CB: This is for you.
CB: Thank you.
JL: Yeah.
CB: Alright.
CB: I’ll just stop a mo. Right.
[Recording paused]
JL: While he was over in Spain, the parson, he was talking one day to some people over there and he was telling them how good his motor mechanic was in England. So, my name came up, and this other chap he was talking to said, ‘Oh yes. I know he was the best mechanic there is, because I taught him’. And it was my first man that I got employed from leaving the Air Force that did take me. Oh yeah, I think he, because I have seen the parson since and he came out with this and he said, ‘Yes. I know he is the best mechanic there is because I taught him’, and that was how. Unfortunately, well, he came back to live in England, my old boss did, and of course, I met up with him in the past and but it was rather strange to go all the way out to Spain because my first boss had moved out there.
CB: Oh right.
JL: He’d moved out there after he retired.
CB: But in the end, you set up your own garage.
JL: Yes.
CB: So how did that happen?
JL: Yes. When I was up here in Tilehurst, we had a big garage up here with a lot of agencies. The boss was only in there for the money he could get out of it. He had no idea what a car looked like under the bonnet, and his auditors said to him one day, ‘Do you know’, he said, ‘You might just as well put your money straight in the bank, because interest rate you’ll be getting more than what you’re getting out of this garage’. So he’d no sooner put it up on the market for sale. No way would I be able to buy it obviously and I looked around, because I always wanted to be on my own and have something, and looking around, I found somebody in the next road down from just there that had a, had this, well, a lovely garage for sale. He used it just to house some vehicles. He was a decorator and he was leaving, had to have a quick sale, so I bought that. At the same time, the petrol company didn’t want to know anything about the garage, and the man that came around that I was a liaison with, because I had to look after — fold the garage up. All the customers. I was in charge, I had to say to all the customers, ‘I’m sorry. Don’t come any more’ [laughs]. We were the only garage up here, there was nobody up here and it was, Tilehurst was then a small place, and this, this chap as I said to him, ‘Well what are you going to do with this garage? All the tools. Everything’. He said, ‘I don’t know. I’ll have to sell up I suppose’. ‘Well how much do you want for them?’ I can’t remember now. Perhaps your [unclear] could tell you.
CB: I don’t know. Yeah.
JL: Anyway, it was a ridiculous small figure. I said, ‘Hang on, I’ll go and get the money’. ‘Ah’, he said, ‘There’s a snag’. I said, ‘What’s that?’ He said, ‘You’re not going to get a receipt for it’, he said, ‘You’ve just got to take my word that it was a’, — I can’t remember now. It’ wasn’t a petrol company that’s around anymore. He said, ‘This money goes into their sports fund, and it has to just go in as a gift, it can’t go in as anything else’. I said, ‘Well I don’t care. As long as I can take this stuff out’, and he said, ‘And you’ve got to get it out there by tonight’. Well, another customer of mine had a lorry and he lived in the same road, so that’s how I got it. And I was then living in a private house, so everything had to go around to my private house because I was still dealing with the sale of this other place. But a long story short, I got everything out of the big place to the small place. It’s now a thriving big place again around the garage, but it’s divided in the petrol company at the front and a garage behind. Car sales. We didn’t do much car sales when I was there, we were just there as car repairs.
CB: Yeah. Yeah.
JL: And so that’s right and then I suppose I had — how many years? Twenty years.
CB: Yeah. Must have been.
JL: Must have been twenty years but the garage is still going now with the bloke I sold it to. And his, this garage, I don’t know how many men he’s got there because I haven’t been there for a long time, but the chap I employed after my first lad. I told him when I was sixty-five, I’m leaving. ‘So you can either buy the place off me or you’re going to have to get another place. So you’ll know now, before I’m sixty-five, what you’ve got to do. When you tell me your leaving, you’re leaving. Fair enough, I shan’t mind because I’ve already told you’. So it went. He left, I took another chap on from the garage that had started up here again. He didn’t like the place around there. He came around to live, to stay in my place. He’s still there now. Today. He’s still working around the same place with the new owner. Yeah. So —
CB: Twenty-six years on.
JL: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Right.
JL: Yeah.
CB: Thank you very much, John. That’s been most fascinating.
JL: Well I’m sorry but these things come back.
CB: Such a wide range of things. Thank you.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with John Philip Lambourn
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Chris Brockbank
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-01-12
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ALambournJP170112
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Format
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03:01:03 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
Flight Engineer John Lambourn joined the Royal Air Force at the age of 17, after working at Stewart Turners with engines and pumps. He recollects seen London burning.
He was classed as working in a reserved occupation, but joined the Air Training Corp whilst waiting to sign up for the Royal Air Force.
John was taken on as groundcrew but successfully trained to become a flight engineer at RAF St Athan. He believes he was one of the youngest.
He trained on Stirlings and then went to Heavy Conversion Unit at RAF Chedburgh where he crewed up with Ronald ‘Eddie’ Edmondson, with whom he maintained a friendship after the war. John talks about his crew and the training they did.
Although John wanted to fly Short Sunderlands, he was not tall enough to reach the leavers, so he was assigned to Short Stirlings and flew them with 514 Squadron. John compares the Stirling and the Lancaster, and also describes a bullseye exercise to the French coast. From RAF Chedburgh he went to the Lancaster Finishing School at RAF Feltwell.
John completed a full tour of 30 operations, including trips to Kiel, the Falaise Gap, Rüsselsheim and Stettin, Duisburg. John explains the accuracy of the Gee-H navigation system. He goes on to describe some incidents including instances of a scarecrow, a fictional shell simulating an exploding four-engine bomber.
John carried out 30 operations. He then returned for a short period to RAF St Athan, followed by RAF Peterborough and its satellite RAF Sutton Bridge before the Motor Transport section at RAF Kirton Lindsey. He left the RAF in May 1947 and eventually set up his own garage. John eventually retired at the age of 65.
Contributor
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Vivienne Tincombe
Sally Coulter
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
1946
1947-05
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Norfolk
England--Suffolk
Wales--Vale of Glamorgan
England--London
France
Germany
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Germany--Duisburg
Germany--Kiel
Poland
Poland--Szczecin
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending revision of OH transcription
514 Squadron
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
crewing up
demobilisation
fear
flight engineer
Gee
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
military ethos
Navy, Army and Air Force Institute
RAF Chedburgh
RAF Feltwell
RAF Kirton in Lindsey
RAF Padgate
RAF St Athan
RAF Waterbeach
recruitment
Scarecrow
service vehicle
Stirling
target indicator
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/472/8355/PBlandC1501.2.jpg
47607dc4beca689cae653908ef391be8
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/472/8355/ABlandC150817.2.mp3
7d011bdc0c7786974101ce4ef3b8516e
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
Bland, Charles
C Bland
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Bland, C
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Charles Bland (538762 Royal Air Force). He served as an engine fitter.
The collection has been licenced to the IBCC Digital Archive by Charles Bland and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
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CB: My name is Charles Bland and this is my story of what, the Air Force I suppose. I started off in grammar school, Boston and then I did my school certificate and my school certificate results were sufficient that I was able to become, join the Air Force as an aircraft apprentice in February 1942. February 1942. It was the first time you’d left home and we all had to arrive at Marylebone Station and it was February the 18th, I think it was, February the 18th, and so I left Boston, got down to London and, and found on Marylebone Station a great number of boys, all the same age as me. Most of them the first time they’d ever left home and so I consequently got on this train and I happened to, it was a non-corridor train and you had the compartments and I got in the compartment and they were all Geordies. You sort of, I mean, I’d never met Geordies before or anything and the, the chap who -
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Yep ok, we got in the carriage and that was the first time I’d sort of been away, more or less, and mixed with a lot of other boys from different parts of the country. Eventually we got there and we got to Halton and we, the first time we’d ever been in a room, we got to a room and there was twenty two of us in the barrack room and all of us were exactly the same. Most of us had never left home before and the most, I got, my chap in the next bed to me was a Scotsman, a chap named Jock Blythe and, but anyway that’s how we, we eventually got in and then we, then they, we all had to go off and go in the mess and we all sort of got together and then, of course, became the thing of joining the Air Force and the first thing we had was a medical, and the medical I failed. I failed because in this, for some reason or other, the Air Force had decided that you had to have bite, what were known as biting points and I had one biting point short so therefore I was not fit to be in the Air Force and for some reason or other, I was discharged. So I never joined, so they sent me back to Wendover Station and there was another chap who finished up, an armourer and myself who had failed our medicals and we stood on the platform station and waited for the train. Both, well, dispirited I suppose, and the next thing was, the warrant officer who was known as Beefy Paley eventually came on and called out our names. What was his name? Damn, I can’t remember. Anyway, he became an armourer. So he said, Charles Bland, so we all went back, the two of us went back to Halton and for some miraculous reason they found us a biting point, so I was in the, I eventually got in the service. So I -
MJ: What was your favourite biting point?
CB: The biting. I have no idea. This biting point was how your teeth clamped together I think, I don’t know, I never did find out, but I was in the Air Force. I didn’t care much then. And so we, I came, went back and but then of course, because I’d dropped behind, I was at, my number is a hundred behind where I, where the chaps were originally, but anyway that all came, it all came about but so on February the 19th, February the 19th, I joined the Royal Air Force and got sworn in and got this number, 578762, but er, but you see where the people that I was with, I should have been 662 not 762 but anyway, I went back to visit the beginning. All the initial because there were several methods of getting in as an apprentice. There was service candidate in which was all based on the fact that you had a father or something in the Air Force. By examination which was then you went on, did the exam and various, how you finished up on the exam, or what was known as a direct entry. I was a direct entry because I had sufficient, I had [unclear], what they were called? Credit standards. I think credit standards in my school certificate in maths, physics and chemistry and that allowed me to go as a direct entry. I was a direct entry with others but all of us, a direct entry were in the beginning, direct entry and service candidate had the first choice and then the others who did the examination, depended on where you came in the examination, what you got, how you got treated, but anyway that was it. We all got uniforms and we all won and we all got our classes, all got our classes, but then you had to be, oh I remember this, in this, my barrack room where these, these, all these people joined in and you all had trades. Now, the trades all, you had the one, was the radio trades, ‘cause they went to Cranwell, they didn’t do at Halton but then the others that were all picked out. You all got selected, if you like to put it, what you were going to be. You’d put down on your exam, on your joining what you’d like to be but it didn’t, yeah, it didn’t necessarily mean you did, because, we, in this barrack room where we were, ‘cause we had all those, I wanted to be an engine fitter. Some wanted to be riggers, armourers and instrument makers. Those were the Halton trades and we, we came back and I always remember, oh God, I can’t even remember his name now. Damn, damn but anyway, anyway this we all went this way selected and we got selected and said, you know, I was going to be an engine fitter. That was all. Then there was Jock Blythe, he fancied airframes so he was, and he was alright, but then we had one chap come back and he come back to the barrack room after being selected, and he was in tears and we didn’t quite understand why he was crying, and we thought maybe something had happened, but he came back and said, you know, I mean we were boys and I mean, we’d only met each other but you know you’d think well, why, you know, some sympathy for why he was crying. And why he was crying was that they’d made him an air frame fitter, and he wanted to be an engine fitter, so that was why he was crying. I met him years afterwards and he always, he always used to say, you know he always used to, he was a crew chief same, crew chief with me [unclear] for years on, but it was this business that he cried when he was at Halton, went years on. Years on ‘cause he knew that he, he wanted a different trade. Oh that was something, yes, he cried because he was made an airframe fitter and not an engine fitter, and there we are, but then we did all the, we did all the training that was necessary. Well boys, when you get boys, boys together, all sixteen year olds and you see you, they, you sort of went, you, I think that you went there, you became a disciplined hooligan I suppose really. It was nothing. Because you all went there like choirboys but after you’d been with all this lot, you became as, you know, apprentices. I don’t know how you sort of became, I don’t know, you’ve got, because funny enough how, because you treated NCOs and everything as they were but you’d, I suppose you’d got a cheekiness and whatnot, I don’t know, but you survived. Well survived. I can’t say that but, but a chap, an ex-apprentice I met years and years later and he had been, he had been a Japanese prisoner of war, and for some reason he didn’t talk much about it, but he, his, he reckoned that his survival as a Japanese prisoner of war because he, he treated the Japanese the same way we treated NCOs and whatnot as apprentices, and he put his survival as a Japanese prisoner of war to the fact that he’d been apprentice, and that was his attitude towards authority. So that was it. But that was a digression from that. Anyway, I left Halton after I managed to get an AC1, oh, and I got thrown out of a class once through laughing, but then of course the, but then days as apprentice were something that, incidents, I’ll mention a couple of incidents. One which, because I mean you all swore, you did all sorts of things and the one was that I always remember we were doing, we had, of course, you had engineering drawing. We did all this business there and engineering drawing. Our instructor was, oh, very studious squadron leader I think. Obviously, he was just like a parson and of course, we all lot we had a, because you had, I mean as boys we buggered about, I mean it was, you know. It was one of the things and I always remember my, one of my colleagues, well I’ll say classmate [unclear], Rickards his name was, and he, he was on there and the he said, oh, and of course there that the thing was we always buggered about and of course, we were doing engineering drawing and his, his statement was, ‘Who’s the thieving sod who’s pinched my rubber?’ And this was part of everyone talked about, but the instructor was a bit like a parson he was, and he stopped the class and he said that, he said that it was getting beyond when one boy called another boy a thieving sod. Well, I mean that was of course, that all went and that, that was being an apprentice and then all sorts of things. You were hooligans really, because you did, you did, you know, filing and all the, all the rest of it. You learned how to file, you learned how to rivet, you learned how to do all sorts of things and the, another thing when you did welding or, welding was one and of course, we had, you always got somebody there who was, would get rather picked on. Picked on in a class and one who was a, who was trouble was a bloke named Bryce, he came from Devon and Trevor Boone was another, he was, Trevor Boone was a, he was a bit of a softie. He was rather, he had a tendency I suppose to be bullied a bit. Yeah, because Bryce was a bugger you see, he was, he, we’d do soldering abrasion, welding, welding and of course all doing, we’re doing, we’re doing that. Not arc welding, it was oxyacetylene and of course, then of course, a pair of pliers that you use and Bryce, of course, played his flame on Boone’s pliers, so that when poor old Boone picked his pliers up, he got his hands burned. Devilish things sort of like that. Oh, and then of course, you, ‘cause we had, there again, McDonald beds. Now, McDonald beds were solid iron beds but they had casters on because you had to, you had to make your bed up in the morning. You had this bed. One, the bottom half slid into the top half and your blankets had to be your biscuits which were the three biscuits. Mattresses, or whatever you like to call them, had to be stacked on one another. Your blankets had to be folded with, we had sheets, so the sheets had to be put between the blankets, and then one blanket wrapped around the whole lot that so it sort of made like a sandwich, if you like and it, that was it. Beds have to made up as laid down. That was the one of the comments that you had to do, yeah. But then we, when we managed and the time came then and of course, we had our drill and had to be marched up and down and of course, we had the pipes and the drums and we were all, and it was, it was you carried your books, you carried your overalls and you had these horrible ground sheets which were meant to be capes, and the trouble was when it rained, and you were marching and whatnot, your legs got soaking wet because the damned ground sheet came to your, it was only came just below your knees, you know, the edge of it, but there we are. What else did we do? We used to march back and forth and, oh aye, that was another thing. We had, because we had various engine, as engine fitters of course, we started off on basics, which was an old Gipsy engine, a four cylinder Gipsy engine we had and then of course, you, you moved off, but then of course, we were in, at Halton we were in, started off in what was known as the old workshops, and then they decided, because we had airmen and wartime fitters there, they decided that they’d move the apprentices to the new workshops which was, if anyone knows Halton, I don’t know if they’re all like that now, but the old workshops, the new workshops were newer buildings and across the other side of the road. I can’t remember our position now but anyway it was across the other side of the road and we all moved. There was er to, going down into the new workshops was a downhill run, if you like to put it, and of course, we happened to be when we, when they changed to the new workshops, we happened to be on the radial engines, which were mercury engines, Bristol Mercury’s, and we were on radials and then we had to move the whole class and our engines from the old workshops to the new workshops, and we had an instructor named Mr Petty. He was the instructor. And so as a class, we moved our engines, but the thing is, when you get a bunch of boys and all of us, they decided to move these engines and of course, these engines were in stands, on castors so we pushed them up to the top of the hill, but then there was a downhill run to the new workshops, so of course they decided then, of course, being boys and whatnot, we decided that the only way to get these down there was to run them down and stand on the stand so that it went down like a trolley. Well of course, this was all, this did very well until we came and there was a curb by the side and of course the next thing was, one of the engines of course, hit the curb and thank goodness there was a bank there. It went into the bank and tipped over but it was not completely over, but of course, it had hit this bank and of course, we came down. We had to heave this engine back on its trolleys and push it back into the workshops, and then of course the thing was, we all got there, and the comment, Mr Petty said that he could not understand why one of his engines had got soil amongst the cooling fins, but nobody enlightened him that it had fell, it had fallen over. But then you had, and I always remember, you know, all, you know, you remember these sorts of things. I remember we had another instructor was a Mr Palmer and Mr Palmer was quite a, he said, ‘If you’re using a hammer, use it’. Don’t, you know, don’t dilly dally with it. Use it. And there was a boy called Hind in our class and, Mr Palmer, I don’t know what happened there, whether it was a hard face or whatnot, but he hit something. The hammer head came off and it finished up in Hind’s stomach so it, it was quite funny really because all it was, was Mr Palmer just extricated this hammer head out of Hind’s stomach and carried on. Hind was a bit breathless but never mind. But there was the other thing we used to do oh, and that was again Butch Hind, was, we did magnetos of course, but then of course, using magnetos of course, you can charge, you know, the thing is, you get a spark and whatnot but they were doing magnetos, and it was found that Hind, by judicious of winding these hand starter magnetos up, that Hind could be charged up and I don’t know if it was, he wore rubber boots or, so he was, you had to gently sort of, Hind would hold the leads and get himself charged up and then someone would go up, put a finger near his ears and he’d get a crick across the ears, you know. It was, oh we did all sorts of things like this, I mean, it was ridiculous really. And we had, we had a lot of civvy instructors and we had one for basic was a Mr Tatum, and Tatum could do anything with a piece of metal that I know, but then you had, he used to be doing because you had to have your, some on the file and some on top. You had to hold the files correctly and if you weren’t holding the files correctly and you were doing something, you suddenly find you had a whack on the finger, because you weren’t correct and he used to come around and give you a whack on the finger. But it was, you know, I suppose, brutal really. I mean you wouldn’t have it now, ‘cause they was being mistreated or something. I don’t know but I mean, you just accepted it. You accepted it. Well he was, but I’m ok. There we are. Then of course, you had your various exams, and that was another one. Petty, another one. He got killed. He went aircrew and he became a pilot, he got killed in a Canberra. Colin Petty. And we had, during exams, there was various means of making bolts and one was what was known as a cold headed bolt, which had all these had different markings in, ‘cause this was all part of the thing of knowing what your markings of all these various equipment and steel and everything were, and one was, a bolt was known as a cold headed bolt and it was a bolt where the head had been pressed in cold. Not, not been turned. It was pressed and this had a ring around the top, but in the exam, it was, ‘How do you recognise a cold headed bolt?’ And of course, Petty didn’t know, and so Petty wrote, ‘Wears a balaclava helmet’. He got seven days for that, seven days jankers for that, for being frivolous on an examination paper. That was how, that’s how things were, you know, you got done for everything. You couldn’t smoke. Oh you got a smoking pass at eighteen, but you weren’t allowed to smoke everywhere and the toilets down in workshops of course. Toilets, yeah, and you could hear because you could have puffs, I mean, you could make a cigarette end last with a pin till the last puff. Oh dear, it was all sorts of things like that. As an apprentice, you did everything, always pushed to the limit, and it, and all your instructors. Oh, and there was another incident, I always remember that we had a named, chap named in our class, Dicky Burke, and Dicky Burke was, he was a oh, he was the same as anyone else, but one time we had a, we had er notes. A corporal, I can’t even remember his name, a corporal was giving, he was an instructor and of course he said we had to, I can’t remember what it was. Anyway, he said take, get your notebook and take these notes, and Dicky Burke said, ‘We’ve already got these notes’, and the corporal said, ‘It doesn’t matter, you’ll still do it’, you know. And under his breath, Dicky Burke said F you, and the corporal heard him and so he was wheeled up to the squadron leader, and in less than two hours, Dicky Burke was, was doing a stretch of twenty eight days in the guardroom, but he still had to come to, well he was doing a stretch but he, he, he was doing his spell in the guardroom but he still had to come to school. He still had to do his doings, so one of the corporal apprentices, a bloke named Ted Atkinson who was a friend of mine, had to go to the guardroom and march him down to school and then march him back up to the guardroom for his, his lunchtime and any off duty, so he did his twenty eight days on off duty, more or less, so he was one of these, one of these incidents that er, but he did the twenty eight days and was shovelling coal from one side to the other and all the rest of it, but as I say, they used to make you do anything. I don’t know, but that was Dicky Burke and his twenty eight days. I’m trying to remember humorous incidents of things and very, it was, of course we were apprentices anyway but then, of course, the other thing was they had Air Training Corps, ‘cause they were the civilian side. I mean, most of them were the same age as us but of course, we were apprentices as opposed to theirs was, well Air Training Corps wasn’t it? People that you join and they had the air training corps come and did a spell well in the camp near Halton, which of course upset those, a bit of an upset, and of course the apprentices raided them as normal, it was normal sort of business. Used to, oh dear oh dear. Apprentices. The other one was, all daft things really. And of course, you had not money, you used to get, we used to get paid a fortnight of three [unclear], nearly new two shilling pieces. That was our pay. Three, three every fortnight, which I mean you had, you could buy chips in the NAAFI and the old rock cakes and whatnot, but, but then of course, there was, generally you used to run out of money or something and they used to do odd, and there was one time, oh, what was his name? He was short of money, and then the thing was that we had, because there was twenty two of us in a room, twenty two of us including a corporal or a snag which was a LAA, a leading aircraft apprentice. He had one stripe on his arm and then you had a corporal apprentice, a corporal he had was probably in the bunk at the end of the room, was the corporal apprentice, but then of course, then they’d get someone short of money and one of the, one of the, one I remember is, I can’t remember his name now, never mind, short of money and then it said was halfpenny around the room. That would give him ten P. A halfpenny around the room and he’d run around the barrack block stark naked which was a, oh God that was brass and of course, he said he’d do it and that so everybody, but then of course, you had to, then had to, everybody, this was immediately transmitted all around the rooms that he was going to run around the block stark naked, and so that meant that everybody was, when he set off, everybody was at the barrack block windows, shouting and cheering him on as he went around. And that was another incident, anything to make money. And then there was, you had jankers, ‘cause that was another one. Your jankers, seven penneth for doing anything. No I managed to avoid that, I wasn’t caught smoking or missing church parade. Anything to scrounge. You get seven penneth and then, but then you were allowed, they decided that you, that the jankers would be separated from the other boys. For what reason I don’t know. And there was a Corporal Croft. He was a corporal in the DI we had and they put him in charge of, ‘cause we had the barrack blocks but then we had wooden huts, and they decided to put the, the jankers in the, or a wooden hut with this corporal in charge which was then, ‘cause he was Corporal Croft, and that was known as Croft’s Cottage, but I think, I think they abandoned that because you got all the ne’er-do-wells who wanted to pinch anything all at, do and that was not, they weren’t distributed cause they used to supposed to do jankers in the cookhouse and they were the ones that always got fed the best, ‘cause they always managed to purloin something. Food or something. It was, it was all part of the game. Part of the game. I mean the best of it was of course, some of the worst offenders became commissioned officers. That was the best of it wasn’t it? I mean years, years on. There was one there, Hammer Mallet, Tom Mallet. He was, he was one but he became a squadron leader engineer. Just shows you ,doesn’t it? How to become commissioned? Become jankers, you know. But then, that was the years. Went through that lot and of course came, I mean we were doing our drill with our rifles and bayonets and all the rest of it as well, and then came the day of passing out and then you had to do, but then you had your exams but then your exams depended on where you were doing, whether if you got, if you got called that you would do your oral exams and boarded, as they used to say, and you’d go for your board to these, you know, either senior NCOs or officers and you were questioned on your trade. I mean, as well as written exams, you had written exams as well which was, you know, like school and whatnot, but your boards were you were all against mostly to gain your trade. They asked you, you know, how you would identify some stainless steel or some question how would you do this or do the other, various things so, but then you, you’d do your board and then if you were you didn’t know how you were doing, you sort of go back again and then, and sit down and go back where you came from and then someone would say, ‘They want to speak to you again’. And you’d think, now that meant either one of two things. That A) you hadn’t got enough marks to pass out or B) you got sufficient marks that they were doing, that they were doing you that instead of AC2 pass out or AC1, you got an LAC. That, that was the thing but I mean, you had to know whether you’d done well enough or poorly or not because if they asked you back again and you’d done very poorly and you were only getting to re-boarded, you again to become an AC2 and I got, I had to go back again because I didn’t get an LAC. Anyway, I did, I finished up AC1, that was how I passed out. I passed out then from Halton, that was then and they said, right then, we are posted. Where were your choices to be posted? Well I come from Lincolnshire so I suppose you put Lincolnshire. I mean, ten to one you never got what you put down for. I put Lincolnshire and I finished up, posted to Kirton Lindsey. That was, and of course the thing was, in those days, and you used to get trains and you didn’t know where you were and blackouts, and you get on a train. There was several of us posted to Kirton Lindsey, I think about four, four of us posted to Kirton Lindsey, and of course, on these trains, you didn’t know where the hell you were going. You got a train, you had to get a train to so and so, and then of course, the only time you ever knew where you were, was if some porter called out, you know, the name of the platform or stop where it was, and we got out at Kirton Lindsey. There was four of us and some airmen as well, and so we got out there and some of the airmen were worldly, more worldly wise, get transport, and they eventually came, got transport and of course, it’s a blackout, you didn’t know where the hell you were. Got to, went to this, got to the station and eventually the guardroom and we were then sent to transit block. Transit block. And the transit room, you went in there and you, you were, I can’t even remember now whether you had, whether there was bedding in there or you had to go to the bedding store and get your blankets, I think. Anyway, doesn’t matter. Got there and eventually we got dished out to the general office, and then we were given wherever we were going, so it’s, you were sent down to the tech side and then they decided where you were going, ‘cause I mean, they were riggers or fitters. I finished up in R&I. R&I. We were doing majors on Spitfires there. Got R&I, some of them got others. And there was another place called Hibaldstow, which was a satellite of Kirton Lindsey. Two of them got sent to Hibaldstow. As I say I was sent to, to R&I. I don’t know, I think I was the only one out of our group who went to R&I, which is Repair and Inspection, which was the major. We were doing majors, majors on Spitfires but, so we used to have the flights when the flights board there, I mean, I mean, oh, and the other thing was, I must have mentioned this, the other thing they had now, so that we, we had, ‘cause we had WAAF fitters as wel,l and we had, I was put into, put into a gang with Corporal, Corporal Shear was in charge and I was put in this gang and of course, I was an, I was an AC1 apprentice fitter. Apprentice, ‘cause the others in the gang were all wartime blokes. One was a bank clerk, one had been, one was, one had been a waiter, I think, but they were a good lot anyway.
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So we, now, we got to Kirton Lindsey now so that we got to the WAAF fitters, and I was put in a gang, and I can remember Corporal Shear was the corporal in charge, and all the others were wartime. Well one was a fitter, two mechanics I think, we were doing majors on Spitfires and Sadie was the WAAF, and Sadie was, I mean I was only, what, eighteen and whatnot, but I didn’t fancy her really, but I think she rather well she, I don’t think she fancied me. All she did was bugger me about really, ‘cause she would, if you were doing on the engine and whatnot on there and she was sitting on the main plane she’d, and you were doing something, she’d suddenly put her legs out and wrap them around you, you know. But she wasn’t really my type at all, so I didn’t really fancy her and she, the trouble with WAAFs. they either overtightened things or didn’t tighten things up enough. Couldn’t, plugs. they never put the plugs in tight enough and they’d bloody shear off a bloody two by eight or something like that. but anyway that was, that was the WAAFs. But incidents. Incidents, oh the other thing of course, they were Mark II Spitfires and they had Merlin 12s, and they had Coffman starters and cartridge so that you had a cartridge, and one of the things was the flight sergeants, ‘cause we had, oh all part and parcel, you had to, you had your sort of annual booze up and whatnot, and of course, then money had to be put in and the flight sergeant used to fine you for A) for being late if you were late for work or whatnot you’d, he’d fine you sixpence or something, which all went into the fund, and they used to do cartridge starters. I mean, you had to be starting a Merlin on, with a cartridge. You could do it with one cartridge or two but if you had more than two, he used to fine you sixpence a cartridge. So, so the thing was, you had to make sure it was primed and everything before you could, he’d be there, but he’d listen to you, and you would fire up on one and you’re all right. Fire up on two and if it didn’t fire you think, God there’s another sixpence gone you know. So that was the fine, I mean that was a fine for using too many cartridges, but that that was one of the things. Another incident here I always remember, we changed over from Mark II’s to Mark Vs and the Mark Vs were coming in, and this was during the summer of 1944. The warm weather. And we came, we were in, we were in R&I and of course, we were duty crew, if you like, and of course we were at, they were bringing in these Mark Vs and we were, all of us nice summer evening it was, sitting outside and we were all thinking of going down the boozer, and he said, ‘Righto we’ve got, we’ve got four, four spitfires coming in.’ And they were all sitting there in the sun, at the wall of the hangar and the first one came in and of course, then you were all sitting there. Who was going to see the first one in, and I said, ‘Oh bugger it, I’ll see the first one in’, and off I went in to see the first one in. Taxied in and, lo and behold, it was when, when the pilot of course, took her helmet off, it was an ATA pilot. A blonde. She had blonde hair, and who she was I don’t know, and of course, I saw this one in and of course immediately the others saw this girl taxiing this one in, they all rushed out to see the others in, but anyway I don’t know who she was, I’ve no idea. But I often think of the ATA pilots because, oh she was older than me but, and she had blonde hair and I often wonder, having seen ATA pilots, you know, years gone on and wondered who it was. But that was, we got Mark Vs then instead of, but then of course, the time came and then the incident I mentioned of the only time we got involved in Bomber Command In those days was, we had a Spitfire lab down at North Creake, which had Stirlings on and we had to do an engine change, and doing this engine change underneath the belly of a Stirling. That was quite interesting but then that was, then I’ve, then of course, my posting overseas came so then I went up to Blackpool and met all, a lot of the chaps who were at Halton with me. So that was, so we were at Blackpool there, getting kitted out. Marks and Spencers of Blackpool, well then because they had all the, which was Marks and Spencer, had all the kit in there so you, and when the tower, well anyway, that was September ‘44. We went, went to Gourock. Gourock and then we boarded this, I can’t remember even, can’t remember what my, my draft number was. Anyway, but anyway we were boarded on the Orion and the thing was, was this a battleship, no, it was a cattle ship, because there were five thousand, troops, troops in it. That was an incident. There was Army at the bottom, Air Force in the middle and the Navy at the top ‘cause they were the best. Anyway, so we, we went out on that, through the Suez ‘cause then, I think they’d cleared the Med of subs. We went to India via, via the Suez Canal and not around, around the end of South Africa. That was it, no incidents. We had some ex Australian prisoners of war on board and they were well fed, and they used to give us a bit of grub now and again, but and then eventually we got, got to India, but of course, the other thing of course, I’d better mention it that was the, the beginning of my marriage I suppose, ‘cause this friend of mine, who had had the, this corporal apprentice, had to go back to my brother in law who was, he was also at Halton but he was two entries after me, and my friend was a corporal apprentice, was in charge of his room and my brother in law, Bill, he, he gave my, he had a twin sister who became my wife, but he’s, this corporal apprentice started writing to Margaret, but then, I don’t know, it all petered out or something, and then of course, we came on, came on the boat going to India and of course, was one of the things, anyone got any girls to write to? And he gave me Margaret’s address and said, ‘Don’t tell her I gave it to you’. So I came out of the top of my head was a load of rubbish that I found her address floating on the deck of a bloody troop ship’ you know’ but anyway that was that. I wrote to her and of course that was, we got out to India and I was then posted from [unclear], I went to a place, I was posted down to Ceylon to a repair and salvage unit ,121 RS, oh R&SU I suppose. We just used to call it just RSU. So we went down by seven days on the rail, down to India, down all the way down in from Bombay, down all the way down India. Took us a week. Then to Ceylon and we eventually ended, finished up in a place called Vavuniya in Ceylon, and we formed, well I think we formed this R&SU there, We serviced Beaufighters. We had two Beaufighter squadrons and a Spitfire squadron. I can’t remember the Spitfires, but the Beaufighter squadrons were 22 and 217, and we did engine changes and then I got, I got detached to 22 Squadron because they were short of fitters, and I got detached there for a, for a spell. So, I was doing, working with 22 Squadron but then of course, everything changed and they decided that we were going on a, we got, we got sent, we got notification we had to pack up, what was it? Operation Marbrisca I think it was, and get everything, gear and of course it never came about and we then, we moved the whole lot, the unit moved up into India. And Marbris, that was an interesting thing because it was years, years later after I came back home and the I went to, went to school and there was a master at school who had also been out there, but he was in, in SEAF or SEAC operations and I mentioned about this, oh years about this Operation Marbrisc, and he told me what it was. It was in actual fact, they were going to take the island of Phuket. I mean we called it something else as you can imagine which is, I mean, is a holiday island now, and the idea was, they were going to build an airfield on Phuket and operate from there against the Japanese, but then he said that the casualty situation would be, was exorbitant and they cancelled it. So that was where we were going. This Marbrisc. Anyway, that was cancelled and we moved up into South India, basically to, I think it was preparation for the Malayan invasion, ‘cause we moved about. God, as an RSU, we sort of did anything. We did some servicing on Thunderbolts of all things. Then, then we sort of petered out and did nothing really. We sort of, all we did was, oh and then of course the next thing was, they said, oh we got issued with jungle green, so we all got issued with jungle green and we had, then we got to have equipment to do this invasion or whatnot, back up so we got a lot of new waggons and cranes and all sorts of things, all ready to do this repair and salvage, because we were supposed to, I think, we were supposed to service two Beaufighter squadrons and a Spitfire squadron. I don’t know whether they were the same ones that we had before but, but then of course, they dropped the atom bomb and that was, that was the end, that was the end of our sortie to Malaya, but, but then of course, the whole thing wound up. What was the next troubles? ‘Cause it became, the whole thing then, the war had ended and all the blokes that were in the war in Europe were getting demobbed, and people with the, on the unit with the same demob number were not being demobbed, because they were in the Far East, and then of course, we came, these problems what do they call them? What do they call them? Riots I suppose. I think they termed them as riots when they were bloody you know, I don’t know, you were nearly court martialled but anyway, but then of course that all, this came, the whole of India was like that but of course, we were regulars so we, we weren’t involved. They, we, we just didn’t get involved in all that, any of these struggles at all, but then of course, our lot folded up and we were posted to, and then they said, oh we’re going on occupation force Japan. {Unclear] and we went to a place in India called Tamberam, to get to move out but then they cancelled the whole lot so we were less than with all this gear and whatnot, in this Tamberam, and then they decided that we were going to be disbanded, we were. So all the equipment had to go back. All these new lorries and cranes and whatnot, so they were all moved and taken to a place called Visakhapatnam, I think it was. Viso we called it, and they took all this and there were hundreds and hundreds of vehicles. All just, all lease lend stuff. And that was, and they shifted us to a place called Redhills Lake, which had been a flying boat station, to disband. Well, and of course the thing was, and it had a lake there so we did a bit of swimming. That was for a while and apart from that, we did nothing, just sort out equipment, half of it got dumped in the lake and then the day came when I was posted. We were posted, we were distributed and I was posted to 353 Squadron at Palam, and that was Delhi, and that was right up north, and so the next thing was of course, to get the train from, was it Madras, I suppose. I think, I can’t remember where, so, to Delhi and oh, it was a troop train. It was marvellous, marvellous train because it had been a casualty train for, for carrying wounded, not a trooper and oh, it was most comfortable. Had a real good trip ‘cause against all the others we had a, ‘cause normally the trains in there you had same as the doings. You had the hard wooden benches and the ones that slap down on chains for sleeping on, but anyway that was, but anyway we got to Palam and that was 353 Squadron was a Dakota squadron, but then of course, they’d centralised servicing really so that it didn’t matter what squadron you were on, you were, you were put in workshops. I was in engine repair and in engine repair was you did anything really. A Pratt and Whitneys, it didn’t matter what came in and you said, because Palam was a, was a main, well it’s now Delhi airport isn’t it? I think, yeah, and Dakotas, but we used to get all the mail stuff come through. That was the Yorks. And we had also the, was it British Air? No, BOAC was it? BOAC in those days. And it had BOAC Yorks came because the airport was at, was at Palam. Well it was Delhi Airport, but part of Palam, but just around the peritrack and so I did, I did a spell with Dakotas and Yorks. I had engine changes on Yorks. We actually did minor a inspection on Lancasters that flew in. Oh, I did a couple of jobs on BOAC Yorks, but they had landing trouble and they had no fitters, and they used to get sort of co-opted on the engineer, BOAC engineers. They had no, no people at all, so I did a couple of jobs on BOAC Yorks while I was there and then of course, came a time that I didn’t get mid tour leave although I’d put my name down, I wasn’t lucky enough to get any. And then of course in April, oh, then of course the Partition was on. India was, and things were not, things were not very good then. You, you didn’t, if you wanted to go out you made sure that at least there was two or three of you together, ‘cause things, I don’t know why, they didn’t like us really. And then in April, I got a raise and I came home in April. I came home. I went out on the Orion and came back on the Chetril and then we arrived back. It was quite, they say about you know seeing England when you come back, it was, go on, anyway we landed at Southampton and we had to be shipped up to Burtonwood near, oh where is it near? Oh God, Burtonwood. Warrington isn’t it? I think it’s at Warrington. Anyway, when it comes to the point there, we got back to there and everybody was, of course all they wanted to do was get home, and they would have flown us and said this, that and the other, until everyone was chuntering and whatnot the bloke at Burtonwood said, ‘Right’, he said, ‘Get on the lorries and you can go to the bloody station’, you know, it’s up to you where, you know, you go. We’d got our warrants and I think there was, I think a train going south and a train going north and it cleared the station. Didn’t care, you really didn’t care where you went as long as you left there and on the way home. So, I sort of, I got from Warrington to Manchester, and Manchester and of course, while I’d been, while I’d been overseas, my parents had moved from Lincolnshire. They’d moved to Yorkshire, and so I didn’t know where I was going home so the er, got to, I got to Manchester and got to Leeds, and I thought what and I got my parent’s telephone number so I thought, oh I’d better, I’d better ring them and let them know, and so I phoned up and my mother answered and of course she said, ‘Oh your father’s in, in the Isle of Man at the moment’, ‘cause I said, ‘well can you, can you pick me up at the station?’ And so anyway the incidents, isn’t it? So, so I said, ‘Well I’ll go to Harrogate’. I had to go to Harrogate, from Leeds to Harrogate and the, get in the train and the, ‘cause I had two kit bags and your webbing and everything and you know you were sort of carrying these down, and of course I’d asked where the train, the -
[phone ringing]
Train was there and of course I’d got my kit bag on, and you know you’ve got a kit on, a kit bag on your arm, your webbing and a kit bag on the top, and of course there was an airman in a carriage doorway, and I says, I said, oh you know , ‘Open the door’, and I bend over and let the kit bag drop on the floor, and my father was on the, on the train and he picked it up, so and that’s how I met my dad. He came and then my sister, mother at the station. So, incidents, you know, that, ‘cause I came back and of course my father was on the train with the gear, and so my mother and sister at the station. The incident I’m trying to think of. Not that is, ‘cause I didn’t, oh dear, I didn’t stop by. OK now then, we’ve got to, we’ve got to Knaresborough, that was where my parents lived, so and the next thing I had to do, as I’d been writing to Margaret for, oh, since, when was it? 1945. I wanted to get down to Hereford, so I went down to, went down to, go down to Hereford but it’s quite strange really that I’d been writing to her there, but it was, I’d got down to, got down from Manchester, get down to Hereford and the, the last stop before Hereford is Shrewsbury, and I debated whether to get off the train. Why I don’t know but there we are, but anyway it all worked out. We met on Hereford station and that was, that was it, so the beginning of our relationship. Yeah. Anyway, then that all finished and the next thing was of course, we got posted and then, oh God, that was it. Posted, posted to Wheaton, Wheaton, what the hell was at Wheaton? I thought what on earth’s there? Blackpool, near Blackpool. So off I goes to, to Blackpool. Get back on the train, get off at Wheaton and what’s Wheaton? Trainings. Bloody training station, nothing to do with aeroplanes. Bloody drivers, fitters, blacksmiths, welders, everything bar anything to do with aeroplanes, and I thought, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ So, anyway, of course, I arrived on the station and this is in, and I thought, you know, and I went and they said, you’re going to, you’ll be on one wing, I think it was. MTMs, Motor Transport Mechanics. So what the hell am I doing here? And anyway of course, I went in to the general office, off I went, report to squadron leader so and so, so I went to him and immediately I went in there and of course, there was a few, there was an MT fitter and whatnot, and me. So, anyway, I immediately said, complained, ‘What am I doing here?’ you know, and MT and all the rest of it, and this officer, whoever he was, said I was posted as an instructor. I said, ‘I don’t know anything about MT at all’. And this, I remember this officer, who he was, he said, ‘You’re an ex apprentice, aren’t you?’ I said, ‘Yes sir’. ‘Well’, he says, ‘In that case’, he said, ‘You can do any bloody thing’. So that was that. That was me teaching motor mechanics, MT mechanics, and I knew nothing about bloody brakes or anything like that. Well, I think, anyway so I went down to this, where was it? Where I was supposed to be? The phase office, that was it, the phase, the phase office, and there was a sergeant MT fitter there, and I said, ‘Well I know bugger all about motor transport’. He said, ‘Well I’ll tell you what’, he said, ‘I’ll put’, he said, ‘you’ll be on’, I’ve forgotten what it was, but he said, ‘I’ll put you with, there’s a civilian instructor’, he says. ‘You can have a spell with him’, he said, ‘you’ll pick it up from there’. Oh God love us all. So, anyway, I was with this, oh I can’t remember his name, and he was an ancient civvy and so I was picking up brakes and steering, and I never knew there was a blinking theory on brakes and how line up and all this business at all, and of course I was doing this and that, was the, I was on the first week. There was a fortnightly course for this MT mechanics. A fortnight course so I was in there for a fortnight. I’d done one week and there was a fracas in there, and one of the corporal instructors had clobbered a, or hurled a coupling at one of the trainees, and he was then immediately taken off instructing, and the only person to take, put on, was me, and he was on the second week and I’d only done the first week, and the second week was completely, was ridiculous. But anyway, so I had to do it. Have you ever taught, taught people about something you know nothing about? Well, that was what it was with me, instructing people. I had to try to gain a, oh dear, it was ridiculous, but anyway. Then, of course, funnily enough, then they started to er, a phase on diesel engines. Well funnily enough I’d been very interested in diesels, even in India, and I had had my father send me books on diesels, high speed compression ignition engines and whatnot, and so therefore I knew quite a bit, and when they started this phase on diesels, I said well I, you know, I’d done diesels. Oh, they were quite, and shoved me on diesels straightaway, so that was, that was the way it went. I finished up doing diesels and did various other things and then of course I, I, I, I wanted to get away from Wheaton. I’d liked to get down south somewhere ‘cause I mean I was courting then, I mean, and it’s a long way from, from Wheaton, Blackpool down to Hereford, which I used to do on a blinking short weekend. It was bloody fast because I used to have to, I’d travel all night back and have, get my breakfast and kit bag and sort of virtually go straight to the classroom, you know, and get straight, but anyway, but then of course I, I got, I got a what was it a payform 36 posting, because for some reason, I don’t know how I managed it, but anyway down to Hereford. At Hereford. And I was still instructing but when I got down there, I found out there was nothing there, it was equipment assistant. Stores bashers. I thought what the hell am I doing here? But then of course, I got there and the next thing that I’d got there was another, in fact an apprentice, ex-apprentice was a bloke named Don Rigby, and he was posted there as an instructor. He was, he’d managed to get fitter one scores in his career and so the two of us there. What the hell were we doing here? But then of course, we went down to the general office who sent us to this. He said, ‘Yes, you’re definitely posted here’. I thought someone had made a mistake, you know, but then we went to, the pair of us went down to see this squadron leader, and I said, ‘Well what are we doing here?’ I mean. ‘Well you’ve got to tell them all about’, you know, ‘it’s yours to sort of give them an interest in the mechanical things of aeroplanes and engines’. And I thought what am I doing, and we had no syllabus, we had nothing, so we had to, between the pair of us, we sort of worked it out, but God what a, talk about a working week. I think we, our working week was about two or three hours, all week, working week was two or three hours, so we were there so I mean, but we got on ‘cause all the equipment, all the store bashers, instructors, were senior NCOs. We were the only corporals there in the doing but er, we got on very well with them because if they wanted to go off shopping, we’d take their class on, you know. It was, it was or if, you know, something they were getting short of time and they’d, they’d use our time and it was doing but anyway, that all went on and then that collapsed but then of course, at that period of time, I’d been courting. This was 1949 I get, I got married, we get married. So, I got married in 1949, got back off the honeymoon, to the bunk was a piece of paper slipped under the door and it says, ‘Go to the general office ‘cause you’re posted to MCOS’. MCOS. What the hell was that? MCOS. Never heard of it. Nobody doing and this was at Wythall, which is just outside Birmingham. So, Wythall. Wythall. I’d never heard of a Wythall. No airfield that I knew of at Wythall, but anyway MCOS. We’d no idea. So anyway gets to MC, gets to, my, my colleague who was the other corporal there, he got posted, he got posted to, he got his posting to Suez Canal, so he was, he was gone anyway and there was MCOS, so got down to Wythall and doing I found out that this was what was known as the Mobile Classroom Operating Section. So I was back on instructing only in a mobile classroom. I was, as I’d done diesels and they put me on wheels and tyres for starters because I’d been, I’d been steering and whatnot, but then that, that, I can’t remember but I think the instructor on diesels, he was posted and they knew I’d had, done diesels instructing experience and they put me on to the diesels.
So that was that, but that was out on the road for six weeks and back at Wythall for a fortnight, so we roamed the countryside teaching. You went to any station that wanted you and you’d instruct on whatever’s going there, but there’s that was the biggest lot of rogues. The drivers, mostly the drivers, ‘cause you had a driver and instructor with each wagon and the drivers, I think they were the biggest bunch of rogues I’ve ever come across. Pinch anything. And oh, and then the other thing of course we, we were at Wythall which was, had been a balloon base, but Austin’s had taken half of it over to store, you know, their manufactured equipment and whatnot. Gearboxes and whatever you could think of and of course, it was, this was all partitioned by wire netting from the mobile classrooms and of course, knowing the drivers and whatnot and the people that were in Austin’s store place and whatnot, people got, stuff got passed over the wire which as the drivers were traversing the country, you’d get to a transport café and you could sell anything so, you know, parts of cars got sold but then they got wise with it, because the police, Air Force police and whatnot, got wise to it and you got, they, they stopped the wagons at the guard room and got searched and so you couldn’t have any, any Austin components in there, but they used to be fiddling the thing. They used to, somebody, one bloke even moved a whole family because, I mean, the classrooms were big and so they use it as a pantechnic and one chap moved somebody there. I mean they used to, these corporals would do, do anything really. That, but of course the thing was, you see, once you got to the station where you were instructing course they had nothing to do. You were doing the instructing. So they sort of you know did anything really. It was quite. They were a bunch, a really, especially one -
[Pause]
Right. So having, Wythall finished these mobile classrooms and then I got posted to the Middle East. The canal zone so, and the canal zone, went on a, oh what was it, oh I can’t remember the boat, but that was another one, anyway we got to, got to Abihad and Abihad was 109 Maintenance Unit, and that was the repair of Merlin engines, and they were set up, sort of posted on, to start up a repair service on Hercules but that never came about, and I finished up on the overhaul of the propellers. That was, that was a standard sort of a job but it was er, the mid, then of course we had the problems, in fact when my wife came out, the problems of the riots and all the rest of it which that we were, we lived in Ismailia, we had a flat in Ismailia but then all the problems came and we got, if you got enough points, my wife, we got a hiring on the Canal Road, which is not far off the Great Bitter Lakes, you know, where the canal goes through and we, we got this hiring which was a bungalow, it was sort of quite a complex of bungalows. It was typical Egyptian, oh, and of course, I must have mentioned that our bungalow was the only one with a bath, all the rest had showers. We had a bath and this bath must have been built by the Egyptian who made the tombs and whatnot, ‘cause it was like a big concrete but we were the only one with a bath, but then we had no hot running water so the only way we had a, the only way you could have a bath, in fact the ladies, my wife’s friends and whatnot, well, service people that lived there, they had a bath, you could have a bath and by having two primer stoves and put the zinc bath on top of the two primer stoves, get the water heated up enough, tipped in to this massive bath and put some cold with it and then you could have a decent bath. But the ladies, all the wives, there were quite a number of us there and of course my wife would ask the ladies if they wanted to have a bath, so they come and we’d heat, well my wife organised it and they’d have a bath then. Anyway, that was so that was it, but at that point in time was, was the, my wife was pregnant with our first child, and the point was then, then there was this big expansion programme of, I suppose with the V bomber pilots and whatnot and they wanted fitters and riggers back, back home and I was premature re-patted, but then there was a major problem of my wife was pregnant and of course, she had to come back and they, they, it depended on if they couldn’t come back, I’d have to go out, but then it depended whether the aircrew on the aircraft would bring her back. Would they have her and that and it was a Hastings flight and they said yes. So my wife who was, oh was she near, I wonder if, ‘cause that was, oh she’d be at least eight months. She must have been eight months so it was really, you know, it was touch and go, but anyway she came. They decided to take her so we, she came back in this Hastings or we came back in this Hastings and of course, the bloody thing went u/s in Malta, so we all had to get off and of course, she was the only woman on board the aeroplane. The rest was all, all men. She was the only woman and of course, then, of course in those days, there was no family accommodation. There was only women’s and men and so my wife finished up in this nissen hut all by herself and me in the, with the, ‘cause I was a corporal, with the rest of the men and because I was doing and then I remember in a morning, some chap out there says, ‘Is there a Corporal Bland in the hut?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I am’. He said, ‘Your wife wants you’. I thought, Oh God, you know, we’re not going to have the happening in Malta, you know, but no well when I went out she said, ‘When are you getting up?’ So that was it but eventually we, they got the aeroplane serviceable and we came back, and then of course, they wanted to put us in transit, and my wife said no I’m not going in transit, I want to go home and I’d bought a camera out there and then I had trouble with the customs. I said, ‘You can keep the bloody camera’. But they didn’t like that much, but anyway, we finished up at, where was it? Swindon Station. God knows what. Coming back in the milk train ‘cause we were going back to South Wales to her home in Newport or [unclear] and so we had there. So we, we finished up on this, and oh, Swindon I’ll always remember that. She was wanting to lay down and I said, ‘Alright’. and then of course, it was a bit chilly or something. Was it? I don’t know, but I know a porter came in and lit a fire in this waiting room, ‘cause there was only the two of us, and so eventually we, she kipped down on me, but anyway we got the milk train, we got back to, got to Newport and got a taxi from there and of course, the thing, because she was pregnant, my wife wouldn’t, wouldn’t tell her parents that she was on her way home. So, so we arrived completely unannounced, caused consternation as you can well imagine, but anyway that was it. I got posted to Worksop and she had the baby in Pontypool, and I think she’d have been better off in a military hospital then she was in a national health. I didn’t, she didn’t get treated very well there at all, anyway, that’s by the by, so we got to Worksop and I was on Meteors. So, posted to Worksop. Worksop which was an old wartime airfield which had been renovated, and we got Meteors there. So of course, I was, I was then a corporal still and then I got, I passed my senior technician’s exams, so I was a corporal, but I wasn’t really due for my senior, ‘cause at the time, wasn’t due for my senior and then I got my third. My sergeant came through, so I was a sergeant senior tech qualified. So that was the way it went on for the time being. I hadn’t, the time was it, wasn’t to go for the chief so that was the way it was. So I was on Meteors there in R&I, in Meteors so that was, that was my spell there. Then that went on till was it 19, I think it went on until 1955, and then a friend of mine who was also at Worksop, and he was a great reader of AMOs and he said, he said there’s an AMO about this new V bombers and their looking for aircraft servicing chiefs. ‘Oh’, I said, ‘that’s a good idea’. ‘Oh’, but he says, ‘they’ve got to be aircraft fitters’. Well I‘m only an engine fitter, I wasn’t an aircraft fitter. He was an aircraft fitter. Anyway, he volunteered for it and because he was an aircraft fitter, he finished up with it. Anyway, he was waiting and then, then they changed it and he came to me. He said, ‘Ay’, he said, ‘They’ve done, they’ve done a change on the AMO’. He said, ‘They’re taking on airframe and engine fitters’. ‘Oh’, I said, ‘Right’. So I went straight into the office and volunteered, and saying that was in 1955 and, yes and that was at the beginning of ’55. Must have been because then I had to go and they said alright, and I got this and I had to go to Brampton for an interview for this aircraft servicing chief. So I went there for this interview and a panel of officers, wing commanders and educators and electrical officers and so I had to, you know. What the hell for I don’t know. They ask you all sorts of questions. So that was it. You didn’t know anything about it at all until, when was it? It would have been, when would this be? July, August something like that, and it came through and told me that I’d got to, now I’d got to, where did I have to go first. I had to go Wheaton first, to get, to go on an airframe course. So I went on this airframe course, which was quite a small one. I don’t think I learned much more than I knew in the first place, but anyway I went on this airframe course and then from then on, I sort of moved on to, we had to then, had to go down to Melksham to go on the instrument and electrical course, so having done that, we went to Melksham, and then they allocated you from Melksham. It depended on how well you did, what you, what aircraft you went on, ‘cause the Valiant was in progress ‘cause there were Valiant crew chiefs, had been trained and I can’t remember how many crew chiefs there was. Twenty of us on the course? Was it? I can’t remember now how many, but anyway, then it worked out the Victor came in and the Vulcan and, and the Valiant but some Vulcan crew chiefs had been trained before, but out of my course there was four Victors that went on the Victor. There was eight, eight, was it eight? Yeah, eight Vulcans and the rest were Valiants. So that’s how I was, and they did you, on the, you were allowed to volunteer which aircraft you want, went, went on but it depended on your position in the final exam which aircraft you got. Unfortunately, I came top so I was able, I had my pick of Vulcan, I didn’t want the Victor. All the others were interested in was the Victor, I wasn’t interested in the Victor at all so I went and got on the Vulcan. So then from Melksham, we went on to Avro’s. Was it Avro’s? No Avro’s weren’t first. Where did we go? Boulton Pauls power fliers I think. Boulton Paul. Was there Avro’s then? I don’t know. A V Roe’s. And then you had to, Bristols was the engines you had to do that so that was the end of, I mean, this was taking you up from, so that was, what are we saying? Was it May? May or June? I don’t know, ’55? So this was 1956 and we were all posted to Waddington, all of us, and all the crew chiefs, the Vulcan crew chiefs, were at Waddington. Half of us had nothing to do. In fact, what did we do, because I’d been in, here it is you see, you come back, you’ve been MT, so you’ve been working on MT and you’ve got an MT driving licence and whatnot, so I finished up driving a bloody lorry, making a car park. That just shows you. Crew chiefs. We were doing sweated labour if you like. And then the first Vulcan arrived in, was it June? July? Anyway, whatever it was and that was it and of course, the only one that was Geordie Colley, who was the number one, and so it did a while and then he had to go down to Boscombe Down on intensified flying trials. And then during this space of time, they’d allocated crew chiefs for the OCU. The first squadron which was 83, which became 44, and then the second squadron was 101, which was going to be at Coningsby and of course, we’d all been buggering about this long, so four of us, we decided we’d try to jack up the system a bit and we get posted to Coningsby. We were all ready for the Vulcan when it came, what a doing that do? Anyway, I got nominated by the engineering officer to go as number two to Geordie Colley, so I finished up going down to Boscombe Down on the intensified flying trials with this XA 895. That was the first Vulcan. The other one of course, the one that crashed, was Broadhurst was 897 and I was 89, with 895, so I went down there with Geordie Colley and then Geordie Colley’s wife had a baby, so I was left on number 1 with this bloody aeroplane that I knew, well I say you knew nothing about. You were one of the one’s that knew anything and everybody, before they did a bloody job, came and asked you was it right, and you had no bloody idea either so it was, and that was the way it went. So I did my spell at Boscombe Down, fell out with the engineering officer, and so he sent me back, which was very nice. So I came back to Coningsby. I get back to Coningsby. No aeroplanes at Coningsby so what, what do we do? You’ve got a crew chief here with no aeroplanes in the wrong airfield because they’d decided the Vulcan wasn’t going to Coningsby, it was going to Finningley, so we got four, four crew chiefs all trained up in the wrong place, wrong time, wrong everything, you know. So I went in to the squadron leader, Coningsby was on C&M I think at the time, ‘cause they were, they were, they got some Canberras there I think, but then I went in to see, ‘cause I went there, went in to see the engineering officer, was a squadron leader OCUEng, and so anyway ‘cause then he says, oh, do airframe and whatnot. ‘What have you done, Chief?’ I said, ‘Oh, just instructing MT’. ‘Just the man’, he says. ‘You’re in charge of MTSS’. So here am I, a fully trained Vulcan crew chief, in charge of MT servicing, so that was, that was it and I thought, well crikey I’m a, you know, I’ve got sergeants here, MT fitters. I’m not, you know, qualified but anyway it didn’t matter, and then there was another chief tech there doing, so anyway and then the flight sergeant came so I was able to hand over to him without any trouble at all. And they put me then, the MTO said, ‘Oh you’d better come on the MT operating section’’ and that was, I went on the MT operating section and that was when, I suppose, I achieved an ambition as a small boy. As a very small boy, all I wanted to do was drive a big lorry, and so anyway, ‘cause I had the MT operating section and whatnot, the MT, I had a 658 to cover me on everything and I managed to drive one of these damned great snow ploughs. So I thought I’d achieved a very ambition of long ago when I was a little boy, so that was it, but then, then of course things all changed and then the next thing that happened they, where was I? Was I still at Coningsby? Yeah. Or was I oh, no we got posted to, did we get posted to Finningley? Got posted to Finn, oh the, we managed to get ourselves, four of us, back to Finningley, and of course at Finningley, of course there were new quarters. No equipment barrack equipment in them. We were posted, so the barrack warden, you know, he said, ‘I can’t’, you know, ‘I haven’t got the men. I haven’t got transport’, I haven’t got do this, that and the other to furnish these quarters, which need doing, so what we did, I got the 658 and I could drive the truck, so we furnished the quarters. The four of us furnished our own quarters out of the stores and all the rest of it, so we furnished our quarters so we could move the families in. So that was, that was Finningley, and then of course all this was done, and then the next thing, they despatched me back to Waddington, ‘cause they, they were taking the Vulcan to America on a bombing competition. So they detached me back to Waddington so that I could go on this, the SAC bombing competition with these, with the Vulcans and because you weren’t allowed to, you were only allowed, you weren’t allowed to have two crew chiefs per aeroplane, the thing was you’d got to have, in your crew, you’d got to have a crew chief standby in case the original crew chief went sick, so I was, this was the best of it was, I was an engine fitter and basically an engine fitter, so I went as an airframe, an airframe mechanic. I went as an airframe mechanic to Florida on the bombing comp, so that was it, but then of course that all went. Came back home and then of course the second squadron, ‘cause the first squadron, the ones that were at Waddington had all got, been crew chiefs and got their aeroplanes, and my friend who got killed, Taf Everson, he got 908, XA908 but, and anyway they, they, he went and everyone got their aeroplane and because I’d been in America, course I was way down the list, so I eventually, eventually when was it? Would have been ’57, would it, then? Yeah, ’57 aye, yeah. Came up and I went to, I had to go to Woodford and I picked up XH475 that was, that was my aeroplane, so anyway I went up there and got that and became part of the squadron, you know. That was the crew chief. Didn’t matter what you were. And of course, got this aeroplane and took it all over the place. Got stuck all over the place. Lost an engine in Goose. Pump failure. So that was on. Got hydraulic failure, the hydraulic system in, where was that? Oh God. It was, oh dear. Where was that? And that was in America. I can’t remember. That was somewhere and then of course we got, come back and you did the ranges. Then they had the, what was it, oh I can’t remember. The exercises you had to go to. Butterworth. Was it profiteer? I don’t know what it was, I can’t remember now. So I took 475 there. I was flying, I was flying with the wing commander’s squadron. Flew out there and got out there flying and whatnot. I had a day off and of course they wanted to do something, and they, my aeroplane, I had a day off and I came, went back and found that some daft bugger had closed the bomb doors on the safety razor and broken one of the bomb door links. Oh God. And that was, I said, ‘That’s a brilliant one isn’t it?’ So, anyway, only had to be, how am I, there we were, how were we going to get back and there’s all the gear we got there and of course, you opened the bomb doors and we could open them and put all the stuff in and then you had to, we’d close the bomb doors. The only way then was we had, got local blacksmiths to make a turn buckle, and with turn buckle, so you could close the bomb doors and once you’d closed them, we wound them up so that you couldn’t open them. Anyway, took the fuses out and everything, so I had a bomb door, bomb bay full of US equipment, all my tyres had been burnt and worn, so I said to the wing commander, I said, I said, ‘I’ve got no I’ve got no gear in as I can use’. I said, ‘If we get left behind, we’re stuck’. He said, ‘We won’t get left behind’. But then of course, the next thing that happened was, I don’t know how, CRACK. My bomb aimer’s window was cracked. Oh dear. So I said to the wing commander, I said, ‘We’ve got a cracked bomb aimers window’. I said, I said, I said ‘I don’t know, we’ll have to fly back with it’. I said ‘I’ll do a pressurization and see’, you know, ‘if it’s alright’. He said ‘we’ll do the pressurisation on the way home’. That was it. So I flew home with a bomb bay full of rubbish, a bomb er, cracked bomb aimer’s window and came home that way. Landed and that was it. We managed without any trouble. I can’t remember, did we have any troubles? I normally get all sorts of troubles and that but, but I didn’t. I think we got back home without, and then of course, that was it. And then of course the next one was the CnC and whatnot, wanted to go on a lecture tour of America or something but he, he didn’t go in mine. He went on, I forget, was it 909? I think it was, with his own crew chief, Bill Neane I think, but then that got, flew via the Azores to Bermuda. Got to Bermuda and the inverter failed and his brakes, the brakes failed. The CnC wanted another aeroplane to go in so that was it. God knows what time of night I got knocked up in my night quarter, and they said, ‘Chief, we’re going, we’ve got to take, get an aeroplane to Bermuda. His inverter’s gone, brake units so we’ve got to take all the spares’. So there’s me, middle of the night with a pannier, getting bits and pieces and loading it all up, and then off we get to go to Bermuda via the Azores. The Azores. Always remember the, the, was he, is it Portuguese? I think he was, this officer looked as though he’d come out of what’s the name? I can’t think of the place. He had tassels on his uniform and all sorts of things, and did I want compression. I said, ‘Did I want compression?’ I couldn’t figure out what he was on about. Eventually I worked out that he, ‘did I want compressed air?’ Oh yeah, I wanted compressed air, yeah, so, but anyway that was left there without any trouble at all. Got to Bermuda and then of course met the crew chief and the crew of this 909. Landed there, got off the aeroplane and I got, got met by two Canadian Navy petty officers with a big bottle of whisky. ‘Come and have a drink mate’, you know. We’ve got, you know. I said, ‘I can’t drink and do’ and anyway my other crew chief there I said, ‘Alright we’ll have a drink’. So managed to have a couple of whiskies, but we got to change everything on these two aeroplanes because of all the gear from his aeroplane had to be transferred from mine to his and all the rest of it, so we did a pannier change and wheel change with the only support we had, ‘cause it should take four men to winch a pannier down off a Vulcan, was two crew chiefs and two drunken Canadian naval petty officers. So, but we managed and that, that was that. We had a bit of a problem. They had an electrical problem on start-up. It was robbed of, robbed a component off the aeroplane and that was my aeroplane cause I’d been, I’d changed, I’d made, well I’d thought I was going to go through with, with 476 but then, I don’t know whether the CnC wanted Bill Neane. I don’t know what it was but I finished up with this heap of rubbish in Bermuda instead of going onwards. And then, oh dear that, where did we get to? Yeah. Two drunken petty officers winching the pannier. It was amazing we got it down but anyway, we got it down. We got the gear changed over and everything, and Bill Neane wouldn’t drink anymore so as I was stopping, I was stuck. These two petty officers and whatnot decided we should finish this bottle of whisky. Oh God. What a thing isn’t it? So that was it. Then they changed over, then of course, they all got in. The bloody aeroplane went u/s again. That was the one I’d brought in so the CnC had to go, he had a date in America, the CN not the CnC was he? Not the CnC. Whatever he was. Whoever he was he had to go on by, by American transport and how humiliating really. So then of course, I had to rob, I robbed the aeroplane, robbed the u/s aeroplane to get this one serviceable. Then of course, had to get to America, and of course the CnC was acting as co-pilot, so of course there was one pilot missing, so the only way was the co-pilot that came up, came over with me, had to go on to America with this, with this, this other aeroplane. I don’t know how they finished up but anyway the co-pilot came back, but then, then of course the problem came, of course, I had this, left with this aeroplane in Bermuda with brakes troubles and inverter troubles. They’d sent an inverter, they’d sent an electrician out via BOAC to give me assistance on this electrical stuff, but then of course, he came out and I said, righto we’ll, we’ve changed the inverter. We’re alright. We’ll change, do the brake change. We can do the brake change and of course he was an electrician, and of course all he had to do to help me was to jack up and whatnot, and of course then, there was, then came a sorry tale. I got the jack underneath to, to change the brake units on this and I found that the bogie beam had a crack in it, a crack right along the end. Oh, at the end. I thought, what the devil do we, so anyway, all I got, I said to the captain, I said, ‘We’re in trouble here’. I said, ‘We’ve got a cracked bogie beam’. ‘Oh dear’, he said. So anyway, I’ve signals going back and forth, this cracked bogie beam. I said ‘well could drill a hole at the termination of the crack, but then the bogie beam takes all the stress of landing’. So I thought, oh well, but anyways I left it up to the UK air to decide, so they sent out a Doughty draughtsman, techno, oh, stress man or something, to see whether there was any possibility of doing this and he came out, and of course, no. Obviously he wouldn’t say it was even, if it probably was, because if it had cracked and the aircraft had crashed, it would have been him, so that was, that was it, so I was left there with this bloody aeroplane, with the rain pouring down, wind blowing, with this, with this aeroplane. Salt air was making things go a bit rusty but anyway they decided, well they had to change the bogie beam, the bogie beam. I don’t know [unclear]. The bogie beam carries the whole aeroplane of four wheels on one side, you know so, and the weight of the aeroplane so that had to be jacked up. The thing was, was all the equipment, was getting the equipment out to me in Bermuda and of course, the Air Force in those days, hadn’t got any bloody transport aeroplanes at all I don’t think, so they had, they had to hire, hire a DC6 to carry this. So I’d got four jacks, one hydraulic rig ‘cause retractions had to be done, so I had four jacks and a hydraulic rig, and of course they sent it out in this DC6, but fortunately they sent two, a chief tech out of their hydraulic bay and another rigger who was, he was, he was ex Halton boy, the same as me. So we had a chief tech, me a crew chief, a chief tech rigger, a sergeant rigger and a sergeant electrician and the aircrew, and these jacks all had to be built up ‘cause they couldn’t fly them in the aircraft whole so they were all in bits, so I had to build all these jacks up, fill them with hydraulic oil and do everything there to get these jacks up before we could jack the aeroplane up. And the other thing was a negotiation with the, the master sergeant of the hangar, ‘cause there was only one hangar on Bermuda and that was, had the doors welded open so that the wind could blow through it ‘cause otherwise it would have blown off and this, as I say, this master sergeant looked like Geronimo. I’m sure he was Indian anyway and we got on but he was not, he was a hard looking man and of course then he said, I said, well you know trying to negotiate use of this hangar for jacking up. He said, ‘Yes’. He said, ‘You can have the hangar but’, he said, ‘for twelve hours only and that’s all’. Twelve hours. I thought, bloody hell and all that, you know we’ve got to change and do hydraulic tests and everything on this, but anyway we managed it. And then a dry, to drive these axles out of the, of the bogie beam was, was the only way we could use - the Americans had solid chocs like sleepers and the way we drove these axles out of there was by one of these chocs and heaving it like a battering ram, but anyway we got the axles out. We got it all done anyway, and all the rest of it and retractions and the wind was blowing through the hangar, but we managed it. We did, we did it all. Much to, well we had to do it in the time, we hadn’t got much option and anyway, we got it out and on the, then of course all trouble started ‘cause then of course, I got water in the pitot system. That was ‘cause of all this terrible rain and the pitothead covers were bloody ridiculous so that was another job I had to do. Clean out, get all the water out of the pitot system. So that was it. ‘Righto’, he says. ‘That’s it. We’ve still got to do an air test’. So we got down to do, I forgot to mention that the only power, the only power source ‘cause the Vulcan bombers was a hundred and twelve volt DC and the only power source they’d got, ‘cause the Americans don’t use it, they use twenty eight volt but the, and only one we could do was borrow. They had a hundred and twelve volt for the, was it the Britannia on the, BOAC, BOAC side or British, yeah, British Airways side of Bermuda, so I had to borrow their diesel generator when they weren’t using it, so that was another thing. So I had to borrow this and then I had to tow it across the airfield to me. So anyway, that was, that was that was another thing, borrowing it and negotiating and all the rest of it. So we got that, got that done and eventually got it, got it started and, ‘Righto, we’re off’, you know and, oh that’s right. When I found that it goes boring off again and, that’s right and of course, they shut down and came back. I said, ‘What’s, what’s the trouble?’ ‘We’ve got no ASI’, no Air Speed Reading. This was when I found out that these pitothead covers were no good ‘cause I got water in the pitot system, so that all had to be drained, all that drained, done, everything else. ‘Have another go’. So we had another go, air test. Off they went and they flew around. I thought, ‘Oh we’re in business here’, they landed and I said, ‘Any?’ ‘Yes. Compass’. Oh dear God. Compass. I said, ‘What’s the matter?’ They said, ‘Our readings are wrong’, you know, somewhere along. I said well you know, so after much investigating, I thought, well it’s near impossible, the two pilot’s repeaters were duff. I thought it’s either that or the master indicator. The master. And I thought, if it’s the master, we’re in trouble ‘cause we’d got to do a compass sweep and all the rest of it for that. So anyway, back goes signals and the next thing comes out an instrument maker who happened to be an instrument maker off my entry of course, so I knew him personally. A chief tech. Instrument came back BOAC. I mean his, his, his excess weight baggage was off because he’d bought a compass, a master indicator, the blinkin’ whole bloody bag of shoots with him, and what state to do a compass sweep if he had to. Anyway, it turned out it was the two, as I thought it was, the two pilot’s repeaters were both u/s. Most unusual. So, anyway, that was, that was changed. I mean, mind you in this, [unclear] I know all this stuff had to be packed up and whatnot and landed on this DC6, to be flown back home and so that was another job. And where had we got to? Oh aye, the compass, that was it. Oh, that was it. Then the other things was, the thing that was before the compass, I can’t remember. Number 3 tank on the portside had developed a bloody leak and the Mark I tanks were not what I’d call brilliant. Anyway, the only way I could do it was, I thought, well I don’t know what I can do with this leak, and the Americans had some, had some peculiar sealant that they had, ‘cause they used a similar sort of thing that I used, and after much, as I say, I got to know this, my master sergeant quite well and I had a long chat with him, and I said, ‘Well have you got some stuff I can maybe cure this leak?’ ‘Cause I knew where it was. The tank where the pump housing and everything was, prone to split. The bolt holes tend to split so I, after much talk with this man I dropped the, I dropped the pump on number 3 tank and lathered this sealant in place, hoping it would do it because I mean, the tank change was beyond and so I had a go. It wasn’t, it wasn’t much good at all but then of course, we’d had the air test. We’d had everything done. We were all ready to go home, but with this tank and I said ‘well’, I said, ‘we’ve got the pilot who was’, Beavis, his name was. Who was he? He finished up a, was he master of the Royal Air Force or something? Mike Beavis, and I said to, and John Ward was the co-pilot, I said, ‘Well look. I can, I can put fuel it for you to go home’, because by this time, we were, we were, this was the only thing that was stopping us. I said, ‘To go home’, I said, ‘Look, we either if you can work it out with number 3 tank empty, we can make it’. I said, ‘Otherwise’, I said, ‘I’ll fill number 3 tank’, and this was number 3 tank port, I said, ‘And then you use all that fuel off that tank for everything to empty it’. And then I said, ‘What’s left we’ll just have to let it leak out’. And so John Ward did his calculations, that we could fly back with that number 3 tank empty, so I then sort of took all the fuses out, took the pump off it and everything. Well, the pump was there but I took the fuses out and everything so that the pump couldn’t overheat or anything, and that was, so we flew back from Bermuda to the Azores. So we land back to the Azores and so I said we were alright from the Azores back home with still number 3 tank empty, and then, of course, oh damn. The Azores, we started off on my pack that I’d got, with the battery pack that I’d got in the bomb, in the pannier, started up and was doing and then they said, Number 3 inverted, was the one that I’d changed, we’d changed in Bermuda. Number 3 inverter had gone down. I said, ‘Oh God’, you know, I said, I said, ‘Well we’re sunk’. I said, ‘I’ve no spare inverters that I can change’. I said we, we, I said, ‘Look. It’s, it’s number 3. We can go on’. Number 3 was the sort of standby. I said, ‘We can either’, to the captain, I said, ‘Look. We either wait here and I get an inverter to change it or we fly home on everything we’ve got with no spare’. So, after a bit of a discussion they said, ‘We’ll, we’ll, go home’. So we started up and flew home. Got, ‘cause we came from Finningley really. Course we landed at Waddington and of course, we had to there for customs clearance of all things. So we landed at Waddington and the wing commander was there to greet us, and my captain who was not the, not the first pilot, he was the navigator, ‘Oh’, he said, we could, he said ‘If you put a brake chute in, we could fly home couldn’t we?’ I said, ‘Look’, I said, ‘I’ll put you a brake chute in but’, I said, I said, ‘I’ll walk home’. I said, ‘That’s a bloody heap of rubbish this is’. A heap of rubbish. So anyway, the wing commander was there and so I said, ‘Well that’s it’. And, and that aeroplane at Waddington, took them a fortnight to get it serviced to fly it to Finningley. So that was, that was me. I came home after months in Bermuda and the wing commander said, ‘You’d better have a couple of days off’. But that was a bloody aeroplane. Bloody aeroplane. 909. XA909. It wasn’t mine, it was Fred Harrison’s. It wasn’t one I fetched, and then oh, after that, we went to, we went on a, to Butterworth. Went to Butterworth and then we, because this was when they shut my damned, did I tell you about that. I haven’t put that on there have I? No. I can’t remember, I’ve told that much. They shook my, they shook my aircraft [unclear], broken the bomb doors. I had to take 9, I had to take, the aircrew wanted to go, were minded to take an aircraft to Manila in the Philippines from Butterworth, and mine was u/s with the bomb doors, and the only one I could take was 909. The engineer said, ‘Do you mind taking 909?’ ‘Cause that was the one that was stuck in Bermuda, Bermuda with. I said, ‘I’ll take anything as long as its serviceable’, so, and that was the only, the only range I ever did where I had a serviceable aircraft from start to finish. I flew there no troubles. No troubles there and flew back and that was the only, only trip I ever did in a Vulcan where I didn’t have any problems.
MJ: On behalf of the International Bomber Command Archive I’d like to thank Warrant Officer Charles Bland at his home in Lincolnshire on the 17th of August 2015. Thank you for the recording.
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Interview with Charles Bland
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Mick Jeffery
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-08-17
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Sound
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ABlandC150817, PBlandC1501
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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eng
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Royal Air Force
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Vivienne Tincombe
Description
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Charles Bland joined the Royal Air Force in February 1942 and went to RAF Halton as an Aircraft Apprentice.
He tells of his training at Halton, and describes the different trades and his exams to become an Leading Aircraftsman 1st Class, where he was then transferred to a Repair and Inspection Unit (R&I) working on Spitfire engines.
Charles then went to India via the Suez Canal and then on to Ceylon to 121 Repair and Salvage Unit, looking after 2 squadrons of Beaufighters and 1 squadron of Spitfires, but he says that because he was an apprentice, he could turn his hand to anything.
He was posted to instruct at a Motor Transport Unit, and spent time learning about the maintenance of other equipment including diesel engines.
Charles was posted to 109 Maintenance Unit, repairing Merlin engines, however at this time the V Bombers were coming into service. He trained as a Crew Chief and after passing these exams he was assigned to the Avro Vulcan XA908, at RAF Waddington.
Charles related the stories of the work he did when the Vulcan had hydraulic failure at Goose Green, the bombing competition in Florida where the aircraft suffered broken bomb bay doors and a cracked bomb aimers window, and the trip home from Bermuda with no fuel in one tank and a broken bogie beam.
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Pending revision of OH transcription
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02:21:37 audio recording
Beaufighter
C-47
fitter airframe
fitter engine
ground crew
ground personnel
Meteor
military discipline
military service conditions
RAF Boscombe Down
RAF Coningsby
RAF Finningley
RAF Halton
RAF Kirton in Lindsey
RAF Waddington
RAF Worksop
service vehicle
Spitfire
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
York
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/126/20/ACarterRH150629.1.mp3
8d3dc3e95f435d5e1448963ba9a2e5f5
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Title
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Carter, Robert Haywood
Bob Carter
Robert Carter
Robert Haywood Carter
Robert H Carter
R H Carter
R Carter
Description
An account of the resource
16 items. The collection contains an oral interview covering childhood and wartime experiences of Robert Haywood "Bob" Carter who was a farm labourer and auxiliary fireman during the war living close to RAF Dunholme Lodge. Documents including identity cards and clothing ration books for Robert Carter and Eva A Haire as well as a victory message from the King and prisoner of war camp money vouchers; newspaper article about an airman reunited with his wife after being a prisoner of war, Photographs of home guard and auxiliary fire service personnel in Welton and Dunholme.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Bob Carter and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-06-29
Identifier
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Carter, RH
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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[Before the interview commences there is some preliminary chatter; not transcribed]
DE: Right. So, this is an interview with Bob Carter. My name is Dan Ellin. This is for the Bomber Command Digital Archive and we’re actually at Lincoln University. So Bob could you tell me a little bit about your childhood for a start please?
RC: Well I was, actually, I was born at Scampton, just on the Tillbridge Lane in a farm cottage there. But I don’t remember it because in those days seventy percent of village workers, men, worked, um, on the farm. A few came in to work in the factories in Lincoln but it was so labour intensive in those days on the farm and horses of course and um, so the men moved around mostly, very often for another sixpence a week. They’d moved to another place. And this is what happened I think in my life. I was born at Scampton there and we went then to Ingleby which is near Saxilby. I do just remember a little thing happening there actually with, our neighbour had geese and I found a goose egg and I thought I was doing a good thing and was taking this goose egg in to this woman and she sort of screamed at me when she saw me. I didn’t know that the goose, the geese, were actually sitting on these eggs to produce young ones [laughs], others and I dropped the thing because I was trying to shut this big farm gate with one hand and I suppose I’d only be about three years old. Anyway, we moved from there to Scothern. And then Scothern we moved to Welton. And I was five. In that time I was only five and done all those moves and I started school at Welton when I was five years old. So I was there. And then at twelve of course, at twelve years old the war started. And do you want me just to carry on?
DE: Yeah, yeah definitely, yeah.
RC: That was to us kids I suppose which would be wrong we would be all excited because this war was going to start until we, it grew on us that it was something more serious. But they were starting to rebuild Scampton at the time. I think it was about 1936 or somewhere there. Scampton was being rebuilt so we got used to seeing a bit of activity up there. But as, as the war went on then Dunholme Lodge, all these other airfields in Lincolnshire, Dunholme Lodge was made. And I’d, I’d left school, and went to, at fourteen I left school and went to work at Scothern Dairies for the harvest time of that year ‘cause I left at the Easter and then I moved to a, a farm halfway up Welton Cliff Road. Their name was Carter but no relation to me and then he asked me to go to his son’s at Faldingworth and he said he wants a tractor driver and so I went to, from Welton I used to cycle every day to Faldingworth and driving this tractor. And of course I wasn’t old enough to do that really but Jack the boss, he used to give me, if I had to come to Welton to borrow one of their machines, rolls and different things, he used to give me his trilby to wear so the policemen might think it was him on the, on the tractor. It never, it never dawned on me that’s why he was doing it at the time but as the years went by I realised and I never got stopped anyway.
So, but I had a year to - before I went there I was working on the farm up on Welton Cliff there and of course it’s horses was the main thing. In those days farms were known by how many horses. It would be a six horse farm or a ten horse farm or that sort of thing. Tractors were just coming in. They had a couple of tractors but I had to work and when the potatoes were being lifted I had to drive the carts up and down the fields to the pickers and I was only of course about fifteen then. And I had to yoke these horses out in a morning and some of them were quite tall and one, a mare, she was very awkward because when she saw me coming with her collar she would hold her head right high up and there was me trying to reach her so I thought, “Oh I’ll beat you to that. I’ll get in the manger at the front and then I’ll be able to reach.” So I threw this collar into the manger and I clambered in to it, into the manger, and yes, it did happen, as you might be thinking, yes, the mare backed off away from me and I couldn’t reach her then. But it only happened once and I never forgot that incident but I used to have six to do in the morning, six horses to yoke up and get them to the fields up as far as Scampton to the A15 there. His land went all that way and I was involved in that, then I got helping the shepherd in the winter time with some sheep out on a turnip field in all weathers. We just had to get these turnips up and cut up and feed, feed the sheep and um, eventually I had a chance to go to Dunholme Lodge Farm to White’s Dunholme Lodge Farm.
DE: Ahum.
RC: And I, so I moved employment and went to Dunholme Lodge Farm. I stayed there right on, right through the wartime. So and in this time they’d bought, they made the land at Dunholme Lodge into an airfield. And I lived on the road from Welton to Scampton so looking out our, our front room we looked straight up the runway of Dunholme Lodge. You could see, in the far distance you could see Lincoln Cathedral.
DE: Ahum.
RC: And all that and so we were seeing things first hand really and the, all the administration offices were all on the outskirts of the farm, on Dunholme Lodge Farm, so we saw quite a lot going on there in the daytime.
DE: Do you know how the farmer felt about losing some of his land to the airfield?
RC: No ‘cause it happened when I went there so I don’t know. I was, I was thinking about that only the other day. They must have took about half of his land.
DE: Ahum.
RC: That he had. When I think what he had was down towards Dunholme and then we got the land back after the war. But they must have taken half of his land. Yeah.
DE: So you’re saying you were living at the end of the runway there. Can you, any, any stories you can, you can tell?
RC: Yes. We, we were supplied with a metal table in, in our kitchen because we were within, I think it was eight hundred yards of the perimeter of Dunholme Lodge. So we were allowed to have a better shelter, bomb shelter.
DE: Ahum.
RC: Which was very handy until you’d knock your knees against it [laughs]. Being steel it didn’t give up, give way at all. But eventually they asked if we would give it up. They wanted to send them to London because London was getting all the bombing and so we did give it up eventually and went back to a wooden table.
But when they were taking off northwards they were coming almost straight for our house we were the last house up that road at the time. Today there’s quite a lot of houses gone beyond it now
DE: Ahum
RC: All at the back there as well. It was all fields and they were so low we used to wave to the pilot and the co-pilot, the flight engineer as they went past they were so low. We could see them.
And my mother used to take in, we had a spare bedroom. Eventually my mother used to take in the airman’s wives that had came to see their husband for a weekend or week or something like that. And she said, “I won’t take flyers in case anything happened“ but she eventually did and she took this couple in actually. Young couple, hadn’t been married long and they were from Ipswich and he was, he was in 44 squadron which was a Rhodesian squadron and the 44 was stationed there at one time and he was in - their lettering was KM and he was in S. S for Sugar. And she the, the briefing room used to be down near what is known now as William Farr School. Down there their briefing office and so she used to walk with him around with him there when he went for his briefing in the afternoon and then they’d be away at night. And I was in the local fire service and I had to do every fifth night. I had to do duty and one night I was going home next morning at 6 o’clock, had to get ready and go to work on the farm and I was watching them coming in and of course they were quite low. They were going, they were landing north to south in the morning and I saw KMB go past.
DE: Ahum.
RC: Quite plain to see because they were very low so you couldn’t miss it. Anyway when I got around the back the back of our house going in the back door Kath was looking out the bedroom window, his wife and I said, “Has he come in yet?” She said, “He’s just gone in.” and I said, “No that was B. That wasn’t S”. She said, “No it was S.” so I thought well I’m not arguing. I had a good plain view of it, broad view of it and so I left it at that.
DE: Ahum.
RC: Off I went to work at the farm. Then during the morning I had reason to go around into our barn at Dunholme Lodge for something and just over the fence was all the administration offices of the RAF and such like and I saw this officer with this woman. Be about, getting on for a hundred yards away from me I think and I thought oh that does look like Kath. Anyway we’d finished work at 12 o’clock on a Saturday so I went home 12 o’clock and I knew as soon as I walked in our back door there was something was wrong I thought. So I said to my mother what’s wrong. She said, “Frank’s hasn’t come back”. I said oh. She said, “No they’ve been and picked her up.” I said, “Oh I knew that was her.” I said I saw her from the farmyard. I said I thought that looks like Kath and they’d been and collected her and she stayed with us a little while after that and then we found out he’d been taken prisoner
And eventually it was getting, this was getting on late in the war of course and they escaped and got home again but they, they escaped into, into Russian lines ‘cause they came down to see us then after he’d got home again and they said they’d escaped into the Russian lines and that was worse than being with the Germans. They nearly got shot with the Russians, convincing them who they were. And one newspaper had it, the headline - Home By Way of Odessa - and that was the way they’d come home and he told us, he said, he didn’t tell us they were attacking Stuttgart. I never, as we were talking after ‘cause they came up and had a holiday with us and he said he doesn’t know if he was thrown out, blown out or how he got out of his aircraft all he remembered was landing in this street in Stuttgart and the SS women bent over him, questioned him, getting to know where he was from all the rest of it before he came to his senses and all the rest of it and they would never let on and when he was a prisoner of war he was in solitary confinement because he just wouldn’t talk and they used to bring him out every morning the Germans did in the office, into the office and quiz him and said to him one morning, “Ah Sergeant Walters. Now then, let’s see, Scampton wasn’t it?” and he thought wow you’re only two fields away but he said I never would let on where he was and Dunholme Lodge was only a couple of fields from Scampton anyway and he wouldn’t, he wouldn’t tell them where he was from.
But they came and had this holiday with us and I had the good fortune ‘cause I went - going back to the farm.
DE: Ahum
RC: You couldn’t change jobs other than farm. Well you could if you wanted to go in to the army. If you went, if you left the farm you got automatically got called up in to the army.
DE: Ahum.
RC: But I think it was about 1947 when that was lifted and I couldn’t wait to get off to try and get a job with a bit better wage to it. And I started truck driving.
DE: Ahum.
RC: And that really was the basis of my working life through was on the trucks so I used to get down to Ipswich when Fysons had a factory here in Lincoln and we used to take stuff from there to Fysons in Ipswich and I used to call and see Kath and Franl and stop the night with them sometime if I wasn’t going to get home again. Stopped the night with them.
DE: Ahum.
RC: And he’d got, he was in to civvy street then of course and he was making himself a motorbike and sidecar in his shed. Building this all up and everything and then he contacted us one week and he said, “You’ll never guess.” So we said, “What?” He’d got this thing done but he couldn’t get it out his shed. He had to take the side of his shed off or something to get the thing out of his, out of his shed yeah. But yes I haven’t heard from them for years. I don’t suppose they’re alive. They were older than me so.
DE: Ahum.
RC: I suppose they’ve passed on now. Yeah.
DE: But you struck up a friendship while they were living with you and carried on.
RC: Oh yes. Yes, we, we, they used to come. We used to go down to the Nelson at Dunholme. They liked that seemed to like that pub and we used to go down there with them and yes. So, well I think at the time she was only about eighteen but I have a newspaper, the Daily Mirror, from that time and they are on the front page, Kath and Frank are, and the Mirror paid for them a weekend in London and it was saying about how he’d been a prisoner of war and such like and they paid for the to have the weekend in London for them both, bought her an outfit and top seat in a, in a theatre. Top seat - seventeen and sixpence. That was the price of a top seat in those days. Yeah they gave them weekend out and then they came up to see us and we couldn’t believe it. My sister, a younger sister of mine went to our door that morning and picked up the paper – the Mirror.
DE: Ahum.
RC: And she’s looking at it walking back up the hallway and said, “That’s Frank and Kath,” and blimey we are famous yeah.
DE: Smashing. You say you were in a, in a bit of a hurry to get out of farm work as soon as you could. Was, was -
RC: Well the wages weren’t good.
DE: Ahuh.
RC: The wages weren’t good and there was better, the war was over and so there were better opportunities about plus there was no fear of getting pulled in to the army or something like that.
DE: Ahum.
RC: If, if, if you left. You could leave the farm but they’d have you for your fitness and what not straightaway and have you in in no time. Or I think it was coalmines as well where they were, they didn’t have to enlist without they were called up. So, yes so I travelled the length and the breadth of this country and it came in handy for some people. People started to go more around the country for their holidays and people, see they didn’t have cars. In my younger days there, there was only two people in Welton had cars. Nobody else had a car.
DE: Ahuh.
RC: But people got their own cars and people very often would come to me, hey Bob how do you get to so and so wherever they were going holidaying and I was often having people coming on a Friday or something and say oh tomorrow we’re going to - where’s the best way to go sort of thing.
DE: Ahum.
RC: And this was of course before motorways. Even the A1 was only just an ordinary road. It wasn’t even a dual carriageway.
DE: Yeah.
RC: Dual carriageways became a new thing to have dual carriageways before motorways and such like.
DE: So who would be the two people in the village that had a car then?
RC: There was a shop. Well they had a van. Well they had a van. It’s now the co-op at Welton. It was some people called Applewhite.
DE: Ahum.
RC: They had, they had a van and the people who had a car - the post office did. I think, can’t remember what they did? I think another family did have a car I suppose he was business of some sort. But our job when we left school used to be, “Don’t run off you lads. I want a push with my car” and that used to be and we’d push him from the school was, it’s flats now I think almost on Welton Green and that was the only school there was in Welton. Just this one building. So I did all my education there and the woman who had the post office at Welton, her name was Crosby but she eventually married George Howton [?] who were our teacher and it was him that wanted a push with his car and we’d push him right down as far as Hackthorn Lane before the thing struck up and he daren’t stop it again so he just left us all to walk back. We tried to get out of school quick before he mentioned this big word, “Don’t go away lads,” you know. Oh dear. Here we go again. Yeah. Good old days.
DE: Marvellous.
RC: Yeah.
DE: So you, you were showing us earlier some photographs which you’ve kindly let us scan for the archive. There’s one with some people in the Home Guard and one with, with Auxiliary Firemen. Can you tell us a little about those pictures?
RC: Yes well like I was showing you the photographs of dad’s armies as it’s called, the Home Guard were called. My dad was a corporal and our next door neighbour was also a corporal and then there were others. And there was one officer. Oh the village blacksmith he was a sergeant. But we were doing, it would be for November memorial I should think. There was this parade on at Welton and the Home Guard from around about, from Dunholme and all those places I think they came as well but my dad and Harry Lawrence next door they were going to be guard of honour at the cenotaph at Welton and they were the only two with rifles anyway. And so Harry being smaller, a bit smaller than my dad came around ‘cause he lived next door to us and he was concerned that they would get it together when they sloped arms and presented arms you see and my dad said to him, my dad had been in the army when he was younger and he said, “Don’t worry I’ll count to you”. He said, “I’ll say one two three one two three without anybody really hearing,” he said so they’d got this all worked out. So they thought they’d give it a try in our kitchen. So they stood there side by side and my dad said, “One two three one two three,” and they went to slope arms, of course they had to do it all properly. They had to have, they had to have the old bayonets fixed as well. The old type bayonets. I don’t know, about thirteen inches long, and Harry stuck his straight through our kitchen window - ceiling. And as the, as the thing came on television what not - Dad’s Army I think about that occasion. I thought, oh so funny. They needn’t have to have the bayonet fixed on. It didn’t matter at that time. But they had to everything proper yeah. Oh, so funny that was.
DE: Ahum.
RC: Yeah.
DE: The other photo you had was the Auxiliary Fire Service.
RC: Yes the fire service. We were, we had two of the places at the, down in the backstreet. One for the pump and the other for the, for the room where we, well the beds in it and the table, what not where we - I joined the fire service there. You had to be the Home Guard or something. It wasn’t everybody had a fire service in the village. We had one so I joined the fire service.
DE: Ahum.
RC: And we went out to one or two crashes and what not. We went out on to Dunholme Lodge when it was being, apparently they were laying the runway at the time but of course there wasn’t much light to be going on and there was an Irishman there, I think it was an Irishman and I think he’d been the night watchman or something over all the goings on there but something had caught fire and the fire engine had, oh it was the RAF the RAF had got one there that’s right. And they’d used foam on this fire and -
DE: Ahum.
RC: We got there and this chap was right panicking. He’d lost his watch. His pocket watch and of course you’d got blobs of foam about and he was trying to find tis pocket watch. Well I thought he wasn’t bothered about the fire or anything it was his watch he was looking for. Yeah. He didn’t find it while I was there anyway. He lost his, why they put foam. Water would have done but yeah there was quite a few Dads Army type of things happened then when you look back. No wonder they made a programme of it really. It was silly things did happen yeah.
DE: So how did being an auxiliary fireman fit in with, with working on the farm?
RC: It had to fit in. That’s it. We used to be on every fifth night from 10 o’clock till six in the morning. Then you’d got to go to work. If, you know like if there’d been a red warning and you’d stayed you couldn’t go to bed but it was alright you could go to bed if there was no red warning.
DE: Ahum.
RC: And we were attached to Charles Warner’s had a garage at the top Wragby Road, top of Lindum Hill, Wragby Road area and we were attached to them and we were supposed to let them know if we were turning out. I think really we were supposed to wait until they said we could go but we found out if we did that we’d never go. They’d never let us go. They’d say oh we’ll go first if they need two pumps we’ll call you out. So when we did have to turn out we’d wait while they’d gone then we’d ring Lincoln and tell them it was urgent and we’d turned else we’d never have got out.
RC: We went to Hull one night.
DE: Really?
RC: The old way when you had to go around Gainsborough and around
DE: Oh of course, yeah. Yeah.
RC: Oh I tell you what. That night, that was frightening. Really frightening. Terrible experience, that, I mean. It really took a pounding Hull did. And not knowing the place as well.
DE: Ahum.
RC: And it sounds silly really but one of the, well he was our boss really of the crew I was with [?] he said, “Have a look down there and see if you can see a hydrant”. Well a hydrant in those days I think they’re on the floor now. There used to be a yellow plate on the wall and you knew that the hydrant then was four feet from that. And the silly thing was that the ships that was in the dock and all the the dock warehouses were blazing away and we couldn’t get near. All that water and we couldn’t get near it cause the ships were burning anyway and so he said see if there’s a hydrant around there and I’m looking for this for the plates on the wall or something and I just – “there aint one around here” and then a voice in the dark, a voice in the dark alleyway said, “Isn’t there one around here”, and I looked - it made me jump at first and there was this, a woman’s voice and it was this young, I don’t know how old she’d be - eighteen or nineteen nearly about my age and she said, “Our house has been hit” and I said well, “you didn’t ought to be here. There’s a police station down there”, I told her where the police station was. I said go there.
Anyway, when I went, I’m looking around and realised that our crowd had gone.
DE: Ahum
RC: And I thought now where has everybody gone? Here I am. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know the place at all and just down the road was a fire station so I went down and I said that I was with Welton I said and they said oh they’ve gone down to a wood yard down, I forget the road now to me it didn’t mean a thing and he said alright you can stay here and take messages. I thought -charming. I don’t even know the place and I’ve got to go to other pumps and I didn’t have to go with any luckily enough and after about an hour our pump turned up. They came back from this wood yard and so and we came home.
DE: Ahum.
RC: And like I say when you got home you still had to go to work.
DE: Ahum.
RC: You know. That’s how it was in those days. Yeah.
DE: Yeah so what so what so what sort of pump did you have and how many people?
RC: Foster Gwynne, Foster Gwynne pump. Made in Lincoln. They was mainly Coventry Climax pumps and we used to have competitions sometimes and they would, they would seize up sometimes some of these Coventry Climaxes would and they’d overheat and our Foster Gwynne’s would be whooping it out - two channels sixty pound pressure. Brilliant little pump it was. It was made in Lincoln that was.
DE: Ahum
RC: And I often wonder who finished up getting that. And most of the pumps the Coventry Climaxes they were painted grey or red. Ours was its original chrome and everything and that’s why we used to go around on a Saturday afternoon polishing it. We were proud of our little pump.
DE: Ahum.
RC: And they couldn’t do anything about it but they were a bit jealous of it I think some of the bigger fire stations that we had this little pump. Yes we used to have some good fun with that. Yeah.
DE: And how many people were you? Were you, were -
RC: It was a five man pump that was.
DE: Right.
RC: Yeah. It was. I had to take, it was my job to take the first roll of hose and you’d stand there with your arm out while the number two came and grab it as it came past, connect it then I had to at the back of the pump get the third hose, length of hose.
DE: Ahum.
RC: And the, and the hand pump and run off down with that.
DE: And what sort of vehicle pulled the thing?
RC: Oh a Daimler. I don’t know whose it had been but obviously it had taken over by the government obviously. Yeah we had this Daimler. Lovely car
DE: Ahum
RC: By jove it was. Yeah we had that at Welton yeah, yeah.
DE: How did, how did you feel being in the fire service then?
RC: Pardon?
DE: How did you feel being in the fire service?
RC: Well, we, we felt one up on the Home Guard anyway. At least we were one point higher than them. Not a lot was said on that line really I suppose. Its age wise you know. I was lucky that I enquired there and they said yeah we need another. We need another one in ours to make our numbers up for the pump and you see they needed at least well needed about thirty all together. They needed twenty five for the pump people and then there was always somebody would have to stay on the phone if you turned out.
DE: Ahum.
RC: And that’s how we got by and like I was saying before we, we in the fire service we got paid for it. I can’t remember what it was but we used to get it monthly. But it was, especially if you worked on the farm it was very nice. It was, I can’t remember now probably a fiver if that much but it was always appreciated.
DE: Ahum.
RC: And then there was a parade or something come along so we were having a bit of a practice at marching in the back street of Walton. Always having a bit of little laugh between us about it and then we did an about turn and there was two of the officers from Lincoln [laughs]. They halted us when we got to them. They tore us a strip off and said you’ll be better than them at Buckingham palace by the time they finished with us so we were put through our paces a bit but I think there was some big parade going to be in the village and we was going to turn out as well, we had to have to turn out as well with them yeah.
DE: Ahum.
RC: Yeah there was some good times on it yeah.
DE: Did you get much training?
RC: No, no you didn’t. There really wasn’t too much training. One thing you had to do you had to be able to carry from off the first floor with a ladder up to the first, up to the second floor. You had to be able to carry an eleven stone person up on his back down this and I remember I did it.
DE: Ahum.
RC: And I was only about eighteen but you know I worked on the farm throwing sacks of corn about and you were used to, you know and if the person you’re carrying just stays limp and doesn’t try and do it for you sort of thing.
DE: Ahum.
RC: It wasn’t too bad. And we were talking about the rectory had a big place like that where we were, a flat roof and so we was able to do it from that yeah. And he had some nice pear trees in that rectory as well. They were very nice. So sometimes if the red warning was on, we couldn’t go to bed so we used to walk around and have a pear.
DE: Ahum.
RC: Yeah.
DE: Can you explain red warning for us?
RC: Well that’s when there’s a raid on sort of thing and the night that Lincoln Nurses’ Home got hit that was one Sunday teatime.
DE: Ahum.
RC: I was at home at about half past five. We heard this explosion even at, even at Welton and we came out and stood outside our back door which was Hackthorn side sort of thing and to anybody listening it was Hackthorn out our back door, out that way but we heard this German and looked up and it was just broken cloud up above but I did just see it.
DE: Ahum.
RC: Go from cloud to cloud sort of thing but they did get it down over Grimsby. But the, the Kirton Lindsey was fighters and oh five minutes more after that there was the spitfires err Hurricanes going towards Lincoln from Kirton Lindsey way and you felt so helpless. You felt like saying, “Oi they’ve gone that way,” and anyway he was shot down near Grimsby. Yeah. I remember that happening. We didn’t know while later on that it was near the Nurse’s Home where the bomb went off but there was, it was obvious that Ruston’s, they, I mean the Germans knew about Ruston’s and that’s why but they used to say that lord Haw-haw used to come on and break into English radio, Lord Haw-haw and he, for Germany and he said one night we shall not bomb Lincoln Cathedral because our pilots know the way to Sheffield when they get to Lincoln Cathedral. I remember that happening yeah. He’d break into the, I think it was the 9 o’clock news on the radio.
DE: Ahum
RC: Not every night but it made people put the radio in case he did, hear what he had to say. Yeah. Lord Haw-haw yeah.
DE: Did you ever witness any aeroplane crashes then when you were in the fire service?
RC: The one, that one on, on at Scothern on a Saturday afternoon. There was a Lancaster at, oh three parts of the way up that cliff road Welton Cliff Road toward Scampton, a Lancaster and I think he must have run out of fuel. No fire or anything and he was just on top of a hedge in a way, just run into a hedge. Another, another half a mile he’d have been at Scampton sort of thing but I think they must, but they took it to bits and took it away again.
DE: Ahum.
RC: Yeah that was about the only actual fires that we, we, we saw in our time yeah.
DE: You were talking earlier about another? Another crash that you’d attended?
[pause]
Where there was another crew as well, another fire crew as well.
RC: Oh that was when the, the RAF crew.
DE: Ahum.
RC: That was the one at Scothern.
DE: Right you talked.
RC: If we’d known where they were from Welton they said Dunholme but in those days it was Dunholme Lodge was the thing that stuck in your mind.
DE: Ahum.
RC: But Dunholme village wasn’t that way at all. If we’d known it was actually, it would look like Dunholme cause Scothern from that angle was beyond Dunholme.
DE: Ahum.
RC: And if that woman had said, you know it looked like Dunholme. Dunholme was there and Dunholme Lodge was over on the right. We would have been straight there, we’d have been there by the time we were going to Dunholme Lodge and finding them still gawping there down the road at all the smoke.
DE: Ahuh.
RC: We’d have been, we’d have been there but we couldn’t have done anything.
DE: Ahum
RC: The biggest pieces was the wheels.
DE: Really?
RC: There was just nothing left of it. It hit the high cables.
DE: Ahum.
RC: It hit the yeah hit the high cables and it just blew it to pieces. I don’t think there was a bomb on board and been blown to pieces that way. It might have had but I didn’t hear exactly. I know it had hit the cables.
DE: Ahum.
RC: Yeah and they were all killed on it yeah.
DE: Talking about some, some probably happier times did you, talking about seeing certain, certain people?
RC: Oh yeah, yeah well at the Black Bull at Welton was the nearest pub for them just out of Scampton and I was at the green one, near the green, Black Bull area one night and this car pulled up and these two young RAF fellows got out and a dog with them and off they went in to the Black Bull for a drink. And then this, this raid took place down to the dams.
DE: Ahum.
RC: And it became more, it was all in the news quite a while every day about this busting the dams and dambusters and all this, that and the other and Gibson’s photograph became more prominent in the papers and then one day I’m looking at the paper and I looked at this, this photo and I thought I don’t believe this and it was Gibson and another man. Looking at him this was one of the photos of the fellows I’d seen that day outside the Black Bull.
DE: Ahum.
RC: And the dog would have been N*****. I mean it fussed around me and I thought nothing of it at the time. I mean I liked dogs and thought of nothing but you know I can do it, I in my own mind I can say I was stood near him but it’s only as he’s became more popular, his picture was always in the paper it suddenly struck me I thought he was one of them blokes.
DE: Ahum.
RC: Yeah. And then they was on about when his dog got run over. His, his his batman was also his truck driver he got fourteen day [unclear] for that.
DE: Did he?
RC: Yeah. We used to get, we used to know this from some of the lads, ordinary lads that used to come into the Black Bull used to play darts with or whatever, football or something used to play football with us yeah and they said it was outside. One airman, and I thought he said one of the airmen he’d been to when he was getting his crews together and he’d been to the middle another airfield forgotten the name of it just south of Lincoln anyway but he was I was just been reading a book the other day and it said outside Scampton main gates.
DE: Ahum
RC: And I thought these blokes had told me at the time it was outside this other camp main gates that he was getting his crews together ready for this raid but he said he got two weeks [unclear] for letting the dog get out the - and that was another thing, they used to have open days at Scampton and Hemswell.
DE: Ahum.
RC: And some of the lads would say, “Are you coming on Saturday Bob?” and I’d say, “Oh yeah of course and I said yeah see N*****’s grave” and they said, “You won’t. This year you’ve got to go a different way.” ‘Cause I knew Scampton, I saw it built and everything and used to go past it a lot and they were saying, they said to , “You know last year when you went this way, that way,” and I said, “Yeah.”, “Oh you’re not doing that this year you’ve got to inside the main gates and you’ve got to go left,” and they was telling me where and I knew where they meant you see and I said oh we shan’t go past N*****’s grave then and they said, “You will. We’ve moved it”. And all they’d done was pull the cross up and put it somewhere else and then there was a bit back in the Echo I was reading they was on about where was N***** buried and I thought I bet nobody really knows - this is between me and you – I thought nobody really knows where that dog was buried. They just used to move the jolly cross to suit them. Yeah
DE: Have to get Time Team to
RC: Yeah.
DE: To come up.
RC: Oh dear yeah but yes those were good days out they were yeah ‘cause they, when they first opened I was, I used to be errand boy for a local butcher at Welton before I left school. Used to go before school in the morning, after school at night and all day on a Saturday and me and there was the butcher and he had the man that worked for him Ken [unclear]
DE: Ahum.
RC: And Ken used to do Scampton and Hemswell married quarters. There was eleven officers houses at Hemswell and err Scothern err Scampton.
DE: Ahum.
RC: And thirty four ordinary house and Hemswell was just the same they had thirty four and we used to ‘cause you see rationing was on so you had to be joined with a butcher somewhere.
DE: Ahum.
RC: And we used to do them on a Saturday morning and another lad who worked for them for a bit he used to go with the boss himself and he used to do Welton and Dunholme. They used to come back for dinner and then after dinner the boss and Ken who I’d been with they used to go to Snarford and Foldingworth and out that way on the butchers round with the joint sort of thing, the rations and that sort of thing and me and the other lad used to stop and used to scrub the shop and the slaughterhouse.
DE: Ahum.
RC: Cause they used to slaughter a lot of their own animals themselves there and I used to get six shillings a week for that and then when I was leaving school he wanted me to go full time. Oh and we used to have my meals there as well on a Saturday but he wanted me to go there full time and, and have my meals at home - for eight shillings. And I was getting, and my dad said you get a pound on a farm and that’s how I come to really go on a farm. That’s all they used to pay you for that. There wasn’t a joint of meat I didn’t know. I used to make stones of sausages and they were renowned for their sausage at Welton, their sausage. I can say their name now cause they’re not alive now – Applewhite. He was renowned for his sausages. His Lincolnshire sausages. I made stones of the things before I went to school in the morning.
And then there was one morning I got an order he wanted me to take to the farmer at Dunholme - a Mr Lilley and so off I went on my bike. This was before I went to school and there’s me going down down there and while I’m going down there Ryland towards Dunholme and there was a Hampden cause this was before Lancaster.
DE: Yeah.
RC: And I thought what’s he doing just going around and around like that. And then I saw a parachute come out of it and I thought wow a chap’s jumped out of that and I eventually got to Lilley’s down at Dunholme and they used to, nobody locked the doors, they just used to shout come in and I knocked on the door and come in and I went in and there was an airman sat there.
DE: Ahum.
RC: With his hand wrapped up and it wasn’t him that I’d seen jump out the aircraft but he had jumped out of it. And he’d landed in the hedge of this farmhouse and he’d hurt his thumb.
DE: Ahum.
RC: And what had, what had happened was that the Hampden couldn’t get it’s wheels down but they jumped out and then he got his wheels down and he landed safely at Scampto. Yeah but the crew had all, but the pilot, had jumped out and he was, what he was doing as well he was using fuel up as well and then he would belly land it somewhere. That was the plan.
DE: Ahum.
RC: But then his wheels came down so he went to Scampton and landed yeah but the chap sat in the house waiting for the ambulance to come and whoever was going to come like to him and I think he’d broke his thumb or something yeah. So you saw a bit of life at times.
DE: Going back to the dams raid from Scampton.
RC: Ahum.
DE: The first time I met you, you told me a story about seeing them take off.
RC: Oh yeah. Yeah we had a like we’ve had lately a lovely, lovely day you know the weather had been absolutely perfect and me and the lad next door to us George Lawrence I bumped into him only a couple of weeks ago in Gainsborough market and we remarked about this story which I’m about to tell you. So we stood there talking away and suddenly we heard the familiar noise of these Lancasters and we looked towards Scampton and there’s these three Lancasters flying ever so low and weren’t attempting to gain height at all. They were just, and we were almost speechless seeing them so low and they went by and George said to me, “Look they’re sending them barrels of beer now.” and I said, “Yeah.” and off they went to over between Welton and Hackthorn and ever so low not trying to get any higher. Course then when we heard the news and as time went on we found it was a low level job all the way anyway and we realised that what we’d seen were the bombs, the different type of bombs that they’d got on yeah. But we never, we never saw any more take off that night from Scampton although there was more went but I don’t know. I don’t know which way those three had took off because the way they were coming there wasn’t a runway facing that way so they must have took off somewhere, circled around and then got the height they wanted to be and that was it and off they went. Yeah. Saw that quite clear, yeah.
DE: Well that’s smashing. I think I’ve well I’m almost running out of questions. What do you, what are your feelings about the way bomber command has been remembered over the last seventy years?
RC: Oh I think it’s very good I, I I’ve got loads of books on it and there’s, there’s, there was three books came out about, with all the crashes that happened, where they’d flown from, where they’d been going to. I can’t remember the name of them. Have you seen them?
DE: I think so, yeah.
RC: But we later on in life we lived in Lincoln and we had a bed and breakfast place and we had these books and sort of things out.
DE: Ahum.
RC: Not to be taken away. Then we suddenly find that I think its number three book was missing. We must have had somebody staying with us saw something in it that rung a bell with them, with, about someone they knew probably and they must have took it home.
DE: Ahum.
RC: And they’re out of print now. They’re out of print. I couldn’t get another one.
DE: Oh dear.
RC: I went to Ruddocks and they said oh they’re out of print now. So I’ve got the other two which, you know and I often get them out. I think oh yeah I remember that one. They’d ring a bell with me but yes cause it was sad about that because any of those Lancaster books I have to refrain myself a bit now ‘cause the bookshelves tend to get rather full you know but yeah I love reading about them.
DE: Yeah.
DE: Yeah so these books did you manage to go through them and find crashes that you knew about?
RC: Yeah, yeah two like I say two of them, the other one someone took it home anyway with them and if you notice at the time you could say something you know, have you pick a book up by the way.
DE: Yeah.
RC: So it was more sad because I couldn’t get another.
DE: Ahum.
RC: I don’t know how much they were at the time but that weren’t the point if I could have got another but no so I’ve just got the two of them. I’ve got loads of other sort as well about the Lancasters but those have got, they’ve the crew in and 44 squadron they were Rhodesian squadron actually at Dunholme Lodge. I think they came from, I think they came from up Brigg side some, not Brigg near to Cleethorpes side somewhere like that. Ludford, not Ludford but somewhere like up there I think they came.
DE: Ahum.
RC: To Dunholme Lodge oh and then after they’d left Dunholme Lodge we got, we got the Polish people. Now that was an experience that was.
DE: Really.
RC: Oh had a laugh with them at Welton we used to have. On bikes a lot of them.
DE: Yeah.
RC: And of course they didn’t, Poland didn’t ride on the same side of the road as we did but that didn’t matter to them they – dear, dear me. We, yeah, they used to be all over the road with their bikes and didn’t get involved with the local people very much. Anyway, us lads was at the fish shop one night. I mean Welton now has a good name, it’s always had a good name, Welton fish but anyway I went at the fish shop one night and this young oh and the I’ll say this the WAAFs Polish WAAFs most of them most could go on a slimming course I’ll put it that way and we were at the fish shop this night and this really smart girl WAAF came along. Polish. And she just wanted a bag of chips and there was three or four of us and I was always up for a dare and anyway so one of them said I bet you don’t speak to her when she comes out so I said I bet bet I dare so anyway out she came and I said I’ll push your bike and you eat your chips and I tried to explain to her that and she just sort of smiled and I walked with her bike and at Welton village hall used to be the that’s where Polish people were stationed when they come and Welton well not the old one, it’s a new one but it used to be used to be WAAF community meeting place where that was and we got nearly there and thought I’d better not go any further. I was about fifty, a hundred yards away from there and I sort of indicated to her that I wasn’t coming any further and so off she went and I went back and having a good laugh we was you see and anyway after that I got talking to must have been some English airmen that was there and I never saw this WAAF again you see. I never saw her again and they said she’d been moved and they said oh if they know that she’d been talking to an Englishman they’d move her to another camp ‘cause I never saw her again.
DE: Ahum.
RC: I saw some that I used to see regularly you know but that one, she was really a lovely looking lass and you know quite slim compared to what all the others were yeah and they reckoned yeah reckoned they had moved her to another camp.
DE: Crikey.
RC: Yeah so yeah but yeah some these things you suddenly remember again. You know.
DE: Ahum.
RC: Memories.
DE: The other things that you brought with you are some Italian POW.
RC: Oh yes they were, they were two Italians. We had two Italian prisoners who worked with us at Dunholme Lodge and there’s a cottage down there now it’s used as a memorial place.
DE: Ahum.
RC: For Dunholme I don’t know if you’ve been to it or not down at the bottom of the farmyard yeah and they, there was three of them. Two smallish fellas - Italians and this really biggish bloke and he only had to do two hours a day on the farm and quite honestly we could do without him. He was useless. Anyway and there would be I think they came from Kirton Lindsay there were two camps there was a German and an Italian camp there. Anyway I got to be sort of spokesman for these two lads, got to understand them a little bit and any problems they had I’d see David Whites and you know tell him. Anyway they, they were saying, and they good little workers as well they were and they were saying something about the food and they said would I ask David Whites if he could send him back to camp and they would look after themselves. So righto so when I saw the boss I said I don’t reckon they get much food I reckon. And he used to walk into Lincoln this fellow did you see at the weekend and they reckon he knew a woman in Lincoln and he was taking her food. So anyway David Whites got it done and they took him back to camp and these two lads managed on, and do you know the three months they really were like little pigs. You know they really did put some weight on Gino [?[ [unclear] and Mosello[?] [unclear]
DE: Ahum.
RC: Mosello Ovello [?] [unclear] Italy – that’s, that was his address. I used to write to him when they went back after the war and I went, as I say they stayed until the end of the war until they were repatriated. And then they have open days at Dunholme Lodge now. Their gardens. About twice a year and the spring and over the years David Whites married, he married a vet. His wife was a vet. She’s died now. But one of the Italians was so excited one day he was on about Mr Whites. And I said yeah? That’s the vet’s car. He’d seen them around one of the crew yards plenty kissy kissy he said [laughs] and eventually he did marry the vet and now he’s got, he’s got two, I don’t know if he’s got a daughter but he’s got two sons and they still live up there. And I thought when had this place, remembrance place, bottom of the farm and opened up the, the farm and I thought I’ll have to have a look around there one of these times so I went one year. Well when they found out that I knew these Italian prisoners I’m the only one now alive that worked there, you see, you know.
DE: Ahum.
RC: And when they knew that I was, I knew these Italians and reeled off the address like I did you just now I said yeah I used to write to them. Oh they thought it was marvellous they did.
DE: Ahuh.
RC: And you know I’m sort of very friendly with them now and go up and look around and they always get on and say we never met anyone who knew these Italian prisoners. I said oh yeah I remember them coming, I remember them when they went I said.
DE: Ahum.
RC: So I was there until I was about twenty five or six something like that I worked there. They were nice lads and one of them wanted me to go to Italy and marry his sister or something yeah but Marcello Orvello [?] yes they were nice lads and they used to, one of them used to come to the dances at Welton and I used to say to them they’d be no bother to you if you’re no bother to them.
DE: Ahuh.
RC: I was sort of in charge of, no I wasn’t nobody bothers them. And [?] used to love it, coming to the village dance at Welton but they used to say you remember [unclear] I used to smoke then they used to bring me their full packet of cigarettes cause they, neither of them smoked then like.
DE: Ahum.
RC: And with this here other fella and it turned out actually when he was taken back to camp they said to me used to say to me the next day I wasn’t to bring any food with me, good eat with them. [unclear] they called food [unclear] you had to eat with them so I said to me mother I didn’t need a pack up.
DE: Ahum.
RC: Marcello [?] and [unclear] want me to have my dinner with them. What I’m going to get I don’t know and I went with them and they did it all over the open fire in a frying pan sort of thing. Everything went into this frying pan sort of thing and they also showed me the room he had, the other bloke had a room on the right. They was upstairs and on the back of the door was a swastika of the other fella.
DE: Ahum of the other guy, right.
RC: They got rid of. Yeah and he was a German but they were Italian so they must have been at Kirton Lindsay camp both of them.
DE: So they were living in a farm building?
RC: Yeah oh yes it’s still there now and it’s used a remembrance place now. Yeah
DE: And what sort of work were they doing on the farm?
RC: Same work yeah what we did.
DE: Ahum.
RC: Yeah one of them used to drive one of the tractors in the end.
RC: And they had quite a bit of freedom to come and go.
DE: Oh yeah yeah they were no bother them lads weren’t no. But yes they told me their address and if ever I was in Italy. They told me around to visit. I’ve been to Italy just over in to Italy once on a holiday like but I never got around to going. Well actually [?] left me a photograph, he said it was his sister, come and marry my sister you know. And I haven’t got it. I don’t know where it went to, yeah.
RC: But there wasn’t any sort of hard feelings with them being in the village.
DE: No, no, no, no, no we had some good times together but, but the Whites were over the moon because they’d met someone who was still alive that worked on the farm and knew these Italians. Their dad used to tell them about these Italian prisoners oh yes [unclear] and [unclear]. [unclear]. I said I wrote letters there. They didn’t get there. I used to get them back. The trouble was when I got a reply I couldn’t read it and in finding somebody in Welton who could decipher it all and it was very, very difficult and I think that’s what
DE: Right.
RC: In the end we sort of drifted apart. We never, you know, so what he was actually saying in the letters. Well he did say, I got it done once, would I ask Mr Whites if he would get them back to come and work for him again
DE: Ahum
RC: Yeah they loved it there. And we got the land back from Dunholme Lodge as well while they was with us as well and had all that to plough up.
DE: Right.
RC: And had to rush around that spring and put barley down and all of it there and yeah but
DE: Right.
RC: Yeah we had some good times with them.
DE: I think that’s smashing unless there’s anything else you can think of.
RC: No.
DE: Might be of interest that’s a wonderful interview thank you very much.
RC: No it all happened in such a short time. Something happens even nowadays and it reminds you then of something, oh yeah I remember a similar thing happening in you know and I’m glad I can still, my wife wouldn’t think so like but I think my memory is pretty good. [laughs]
DE: I think so too, yeah.
RC: You’ve got to remember what you’ve got to remember when the wife’s around [laughs]. Yeah no but she would, she said if she’d come with me today she said all she would be able to say was that she lived at Metheringham and they built that aerodrome. We are going actually, probably go Saturday anyway. Never been to their to their -
DE: Oh. The Visitor Centre.
RC: The Visitor Centre. We always say we’re going but never get there. Yeah but yeah I’ve seen it all happen. Saw Scampton when it was all being built. About 1936 when they started to rebuild that and I’m told that in the First World War it was more where the showground is.
DE: I think that’s right yeah.
RC: All that way so I don’t know. I used to be, I used to play golf with the flight engineer off the Vulcans.
DE: Ahum.
RC: He’s dead now. A chap from Hykeham and he said that they used to go on these with the Americans on these bombing,
DE: Exercises.
RC: Exercises and the Vulcans used to go out tops every time like, you know. They reckoned they were brilliant aircraft. And when they come back from America when they came back from abroad with them they had to go through like you would if you were on a flight, you had to go through customs and whatnot but they used, I think he said they used to come back through Grimsby and so Waddington would tell Grimsby that they’d got aircraft coming back from you know and used to tell them time of arrival, you know and John said if we’d get up to forty thousand feet he said and you got a good back wind he said with the Vulcans he said we can knock an hour off easily. That’s what he said. From America. And he said some of the lads used to, he wasn’t a big drinker John wasn’t but he said you had to back a whisky and what not and what’s the name would come and say you’ve got a plane coming back from America something and oh they’re in, they’ve been, they’ve gone home ages. [unclear] Yeah. Them Vulcans could really move.
DE: Yeah.
RC: If they kept to forty thousand he said. Yeah
DE: Smashing that’s great thank you ever so much.
RC: You’re welcome.
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 Rob Carter
Subject
The topic of the resource
World War (1939-1945)
Fire fighters
Description
An account of the resource
Rob Carter was born in the village of Scampton and reminisces about his life on the land before the war. He recounts the foundation of RAF Dunholme Lodge, which his house overlooked. During the war, he served in the Auxiliary Fire Service. He was called to put out the fire at an aircraft crash site near RAF Dunholme Lodge. He describes the pumps that the Auxiliary Fire Service used, Foster Gwynne and Coventry Climax. He recounts experiencing bomb attacks on Hull and Lincoln, in which the Lincoln Nurses’ Home was hit.
Creator
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Dan Ellin
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-06-29
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Heather Hughes
Format
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01:06:53 audio recording
Language
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eng
Identifier
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ACarterRH150629
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.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Hull
England--Lincoln
England--Welton (Lincolnshire)
England--Scampton
England--Yorkshire
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
animal
bombing
childhood in wartime
civil defence
crash
firefighting
home front
prisoner of war
RAF Dunholme Lodge
RAF Kirton in Lindsey