1
25
12
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1213/16058/EDonaldsonDWSladeRG450625.2.jpg
e486988b4db417378fe7d4ed0b34e749
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
Donaldson, David
David Donaldson
D Donaldson
Description
An account of the resource
309 Items and a sub-collection of 51 items. Concerns Royal Air Force career of Wing Commander David Donaldson DSO and bar, DFC. A pilot, he joined the Royal Air Force Reserve in 1934. Mobilized in 1939. he undertook tours on 149, 57 and 156 and 192 Squadrons. He was photographed by Cecil Beaton at RAF Mildenhall in 1941. Collection contains a large number of letters to and from family members, friends as well as Royal Air Force personnel. Also included are personal and service documents, and his logbooks. In addition, there are photographs of family, service personnel and aircraft. After the war he became a solicitor. The collection also contains an oral history interview with Frances Grundy, his daughter.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Anna Frances Grundy and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-06-02
2022-10-17
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Donaldson, D
Grundy, AF
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
[inserted] 29 [/Inserted]
192 Squadron,
R.A.F Station,
Foulsham,
Nr. Dereham,
Norfolk.
Ref:- 192/C.2151/P.2 25th June, 1945.
Dear Group Captain,
Enclosed please find cheque value £1.0.0, which is my contribution to the S.A.S.O's presentation.
Yours sincerely,
D.W.D.
Group Captain R.G. Slade,
R.A.F. Station,
Swannington.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Letter from David Donaldson to Group Captain R G Slade
Description
An account of the resource
Enclosing £1 contribution to S.A.S.O's presentation.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1945-06-25
Language
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eng
Type
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Text
Text. Correspondence
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
EDonaldsonDWSladeRG450625
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Norfolk
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1945-06-25
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.
Creator
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David Donaldson
Format
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One-page typewritten letter
Contributor
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Frances Grundy
192 Squadron
RAF Foulsham
RAF Swannington
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1258/17169/PBarronAJK1901.2.jpg
f6b3bac684a11f7127d93f5570e15270
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1258/17169/ABarronAJK190510.2.mp3
592fca1b7e87ec021b88a698e656db66
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
Barron, Andrew
Andrew James Kelton Barron
A J K Barron
Description
An account of the resource
Three oral history interviews with Flight Lieutenant Andrew Barron (1923 - 2021, 163695 Royal Air Force) He flew 38 operations as a navigator in 223 Squadron at RAF Oulton flying B-24s.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2019-05-10
2018-04-19
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
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Barron, AJK
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
NM: Okay, so this is Nigel Moore, I’m with Andrew Barron and we’re going to catch up from where we started last time. So Andrew, can you tell me a bit about life on the squadron when you were off duty, when you weren’t on ops, what were you, how did you socialise, what did you do?
AB: I’m sorry, what was it you wanted?
NM: When you weren’t on operations, tell me about the squadron life, what did you do for recreation and down time?
AB: Drank too much and sang silly songs! Really, wasted my time I think would be the, the most succinct explanation. I had no social life really, on the squadron, as I’ve already explained. I was pitchforked into this half qualified crew in the Bahamas and I had really no sort of social contact with them. The captain had flown, as far as I know, half a tour in Coastal Command, so had the navigator and so had the, the chief wireless operator. The rest of us were all sprogs who were drafted in to the crew to make it up and we had no particular social contact. I don’t know what their, what they did. I don’t think Scotty Steele, the skipper, was very happy. He’d, his experience had all been Coastal Command long range patrols, flying at about a thousand feet, two thousand feet perhaps, over the oceans for twelve or thirteen hours, and he had no, he had, I don’t think he had any chums in the squadron either, they were all stranger to him and I don’t think he took to night flying in the, at high altitude in the Liberator, and in fact I think he had one or two rather dodgy landings and I believe [emphasis] he sort of disappeared from the squadron after a few weeks. The, I was pitchforked into this Canadian crew, and as I’ve explained, the skipper, his father had been in the British Army in the First World War in Mesopotamia, funnily enough the same as my father, and I think Tony used to go off searching up his English relatives up in the north of England. The co-pilot, Mervyn Eustace, his brother had just completed a tour in 4 Group, I think it was 4 Group, which was the, either 4 Group or 6 Group which was the Canadian bomber group and Mervyn used to go off to seek out his brother who was, um – god, what are they called - he was at Shawbury acting as an instructor to new crews coming over so that disposed of them and I just used to go home and as far as, when I was on leave, and as far as the rest of the time was concerned, I think we worked a rather more intensive pace in 100 Group than the average main force group. If you look in Middlemiss’s tome The Bomber Command Diaries you’ll find that, you know, a different, groups weren’t turned out, they didn’t operate at every night that Bomber Command was operating: 100 Group did. 100 Group went out with everybody. Either we went with the main force to jam the radars in the target area or else we were sent out with, as a diversionary force or if main force wasn’t operating we were sent out to stir up the Germans anyway. So you look at my log book and there’d be, perhaps, in a week we’d fly four sorties, maybe, five sorties; Bomber Command didn’t operate at that pace. So we didn’t have all that much of a social life in the mess anyway and some of us were bookish, and Ron Johnson, who was one of the squadron navigators, he studied music I think in his spare time in the mess. I just used to go in there and drink and when I’d had enough, or probably too much, I’d stagger off to bed and sleep it off until the next day. And we used to sing silly songs, you know, good night ladies and of course the WAAF officers never did go off to bed, they used to stay and listen to us. They were all schoolboy songs, just snippets of which I remember [chuckle] and that was it. I know, oh dear, think er, I’ve forgotten the chap’s name, but the fellow who more or less runs things in the little village of Oulton le Street organises the teas for all us chaps when we come up for our memorial celebration in a week’s time and he’s asked me sort of what were my impressions. I didn’t have any impressions of Oulton, you know, they were just houses there and we drove past the houses as we went to our various offices, the, there was an intelligence room which had digests of the previous night’s operations and you know, you could leaf through those and I remember my sort of impression of them was that if the losses had risen to two figures, you know, we hadn’t done a very good job, you know, we ought to have done better than that and it had various publications of, you know, trying to instil a better spirit in us I suppose, but I don’t think, well, as I say I [emphasis] don’t think, I don’t think, I’ve no idea what other people thought because we never discussed the previous night’s operations, we never discussed what we were doing. The jamming was highly secret and it was more than your life was worth to try to chat up anybody about what all these weird instruments were that were in the back of the aeroplane, you know, they’re not your business laddie, but would you like to have a spell in Sheffield in the RAF’s penitentiary for asking too many questions, so you didn’t ask any questions and we just wiled the, they er, wiled the, our life away if you know. One day some of us went up to town and bought ourselves revolvers and small arms of that kind and I know I got a Webley which had a 22 sort of insert in it and we used to go down and shoot at the trees on the Blickling Estate. It just really, wasted my time.
NM: Going back to operations, when you wrote to me, an email you described -
AB: Pardon?
NM: When you wrote to me an email recently you described how you were, on approach back to Oulton, you were overtaken by a German fighter aircraft on its way to shoot down a B17 ahead of you. Tell me about that.
AB: Oh yes, that was Unternehmen Giselle, trust the Germans to make Giselle into an unfortunate name like Giselle. Anyway, the Germans in, I think it was, it’ll be in my log book, but early March ‘45 they sent in I think about two hundred night fighters with the, they infiltrated the main force on its way back home and they kept schtum until they were over the UK and the planes were circling their bases coming in to land and they intercepted a B17 which was, of 214 Squadron, which was coming in to land and shot it down, literally, just about as it touched down and they were all killed, all the crew were all killed. And according to Mervyn Eustace the plane had actually flown past us as we were orbiting overhead, you know, waiting our turn to land, and of course as soon as the balloon went up we got the order to disperse and the, Tony said: ‘course for Brawdy navigator.’ Brawdy being somewhere down in south west Wales, so I gave him 270 as being the nearest westerly heading that came into my head and off we went. All the lights out, all the gunners at their positions and everything on an active basis and we stooged off into the darkness of the Midlands and after about twenty minutes I got a fix, you know, a Gee fix, not a, that kind of fix, and found a wind from that and did the job properly you know, and laid off a course for this place Brawdy and we got there about, oh I don’t know, about an hour later, something like that and kipped down for the night, flew back the next day.
[Other]: I’m really sorry to interrupt. Daddy, do you know what mummy’s pass code is for her?
NM: So you took part in the last operation of the war, tell me about that.
AB: Yes, we, it was um, a feint to Schleswig. It was when they thought that the Germans were going to mount an attack from the forces that they’d got in Norway. There were two things, there were, one was that they were going to launch an attack from Norway and the other one was that they were going to launch their forces from down in the Alps, I think, using Bertchesgarten as the operational headquarters but both failed of course and the Germans surrendered.
NM: So how many of your operations were in daylight and how many were at night time?
AB: Sorry?
NM: How many of your operations were in daylight and how many were at night?
AB: Oh, I only did four daylight, those were the Big Bens right at the very beginning, you know, when they thought that the V2s were radio controlled, but they discovered that they weren’t so that was finished. They realised that there was no protection against the V2s, no warning, nothing, they just came out of the blue, and er, ooh, and blew a, excuse me, I’ve got a bit uncomfortable there-
NM: Are you all right? Do you want to move?
AB: So, as I say, the Big Bens were closed down and we were put on to the, the ordinary Window diversionary sorties, well the, the three operations. One was the escorting of the main force, jamming whatever the special operators could pick up as we flew along with [emphasis] the main force and when we got to the targets, orbiting it for, oh probably eight or ten minutes, something like that and jamming anything that they could hear, they could pick up. That was the one operation then the second one was the Window spoof forces, where a couple of dozen or so mixed force of Liberators, Fortresses and Halifaxes went out from the Heavy Squadrons in 100 Group and they mounted a, a spoof; they would break away from the main force and pretend to be an attacking force on another target. I used to think at the time that it was all a big guessing game but in fact it was very carefully thought out and timed to convince the Germans that it was a genuine attacking force, it wasn’t just a, a spoof. And then if Bomber Command was stood down for the night, usually because of the weather, 100 Group would be sent out, a couple of dozen planes would go out, everything else, a Mandrel screen would go up to, to screen the approaching forces from the, from Britain and that was carefully timed and little gaps would be opened in it to allow the Germans to get a glimpse of the opposing forces coming behind the screen and we would be sent out to threaten some town or city. It was helped by the fact that one of the other squadrons, I forget what its number was, but it was an Australian squadron, they always carried a few bombs and markers cause as they said, [Australian accent] they weren’t gonna come half way round the world just to drop bits of paper over Germany! So they carried bombs but we never did. The Fortresses and the Liberators were both completely, all their bombing equipment had been all stripped out and so that was left to the Halifaxes and that was it and then on May 2nd it all finished.
NM: So when it all finished, what was it like on the squadron?
AB: I don’t really remember. I think everybody was sort of, you know, quite happy, have another drink. We were allowed to go on Cooks’ tours round the Ruhr, you know, to see what sort of damage had been done by Bomber Command and crews were left to pick their own routes. And I did a couple, I did one with Tony in a Liberator, they’re in here somewhere. [Noises of opening box, looking through papers] You see here’s November, November the 4th, the 15th, the 25th and then the 25th, 26th, 29th, 30th – well main force didn’t operate at that sort of strength. See the 25th of November was a Window, we had to climb to twenty four thousand feet. That was another of the advantages of the, the Fortress and the Liberator, they had a higher ceiling than the Lancaster. Then the next night it was a Window, again, and then three nights later another Window, and the next night another Window: busy, busy. And one or two other months were a bit like that. February: 20th, 22nd, 24th, 28th as I say you compare, and March 7th, 20th, 22nd, 23rd, if you compare that with the Bomber Command Diaries it would have been different groups would have been out and not all the squadrons in all the Groups would have been turned out, so that over a fairly [emphasis] short period I flew thirty eight sorties. Even April, 2nd, 7th , 10th. The 2nd was a Window, the 7th was a target, Malbis, which is an, sort of a outskirt of Leipzig, and the 10th again was a Window all way to Dessau to Leipzig. The Russians are coming – show ’em what the RAF can do. Well, there was an element of that. And that was, as I say the Meritorious Service and Good Airmanship in that a full operational tour. I was only once uncertain of my position and that was I think on the 1st of January 1945 when I’d been very late to bed the night before, celebrating the New Year, and found myself on the ops list on the 1st of January, rather hung over, and I made some gross navigational error, I don’t know what it was, I’ve not been able to discover what it was, but anyway it, we ran out of Window. We ran out of engines actually, we ended up on two and a half engines for a start, and then we ran out of Window and so Tony decided to cut it short and go home but we didn’t get penalised for it which was what counted.
NM: You made it back home on two and a half engines did you?
AB: Yes, yes.
NM: Running low on fuel.
AB: Yes, but then you say, at the, I never did get on to the Cooks Tours; here we come. May the 2nd, that was the last operational sortie; that was the Window to Schleswig aerodrome: uneventful, thirty two, and then on the 5th of May we did an air test and on the 7th of May with Tony, we did a cross country: we went to Gravesend, Dungeness, Cap Griz-Nez, Ypres, Brussels, Aachen, Koblenz, Cologne, Dortmund, Essen, Duisburg, Krefeld, oh and so on and back home and that was the one I remember. It was a nice clear day, sun shining and we flew all over the Ruhr and the whole thing was glistening with the broken glass and in the whole length and breadth of the Ruhr there was only one railway train to be seen operating, so you know, it was, it was flattened. Mind you it was a bit deceptive because of course what the bombs did, they blew out the windows, they blew off the roofs, but they didn’t in many cases, they didn’t destroy the heavy machinery so that a lot of production carried on. That was on the 7th and then on the 26th I was called in to, I was at RAF Swannington at that time – I’ll tell you about that in a few minutes - on the 26th of May I did a trip in a Fortress of 223 Squadron and that was a rather limited one. We did Cap Gris-Nez, Antwerp, the Ruhr, the Mohne Dam, Vimy Ridge and back to Oulton. I was rather keen on Vimy Ridge because when I was a boy, one of my father's friends in Wolverhampton was actually a Canadian who’d come over with the Canadian forces and had decided to stay in England after the First World War, and of course Vimy Ridge was a Canadian operation, they organised the whole thing themselves and it was a majority of Canadian forces who took part in it and they captured the Ridge and it put Canada on the map. After that Canada got its independence.
NM: When you flew over the Ruhr and places like the Mohne Dam what did, can you remember what you thought at the time looking down at all the damage?
AB: Pardon?
NM: Can you remember what your thoughts were when you flew over the Ruhr valley and saw the damaged cities?
AB: Not really. No, I, you know, I didn’t feel vengeful, or sort of there you are you bastards, you got what you asked for.
NM: Was it just professional detachment?
AB: I just noted the fact that the place was just a carpet of broken glass glistening in the sunshine. I don’t think, I mean, again, I can only speak for myself, I can’t speak for others cause I never asked them anything, but I don’t think, I don’t think many fellows had a vengeful feeling, you know, we got in to the war and we won it and that was it. You know, I don’t know if fellers whose fathers had been in the trenches in the First World War used to talk about it with their fathers or if they did, what they had to say about it. No idea, it was, you were just there and you did it.
NM: Tell me about your RAF -
AB: Pardon?
NM: Tell me about your RAF service after the war.
AB: Er, yes, well of course, I remember vaguely being posted up to Yorkshire, to, and according to my log book where you can record your units at which served as observer, 223 Squadron 7th of May ‘45 and then the 10th of May, 77 Squadron, Full Sutton, Yorkshire for a day: got 10th of May to 11th of the May and then the 11th of the May, of May I was posted to 102 Squadron at Pocklington until the 15th and I do have some record of that. RAF, 102 Squadron, 1st of June: local flying: circuits and bumps. And 7th of June: more circuits and bumps. And this went on until the 9th of June, was a busy day, flew four sorties, to, we flew to Snaith where we picked up a load of bombs, thirteen by eight by thirty pounds and we flew out to sea somewhere and dropped them in the sea, I ask you. We did three of those.
NM: That was in Halfaxes.
AB: And that was with, yes, in the Halifax, that was with Flying Officer Briscoe as the captain. Well Flying Officer Briscoe had been a pre war University Air Squadron pilot and had learned to fly, he’d actually got his wings as a cadet in the University Air Squadron and he was an ex, he worked in the Air Ministry as a Civil Aviation, came under the aegis of the Air Ministry pre war, and John Briscoe was a member of that organisation so the instruction came round that we were destined to be Tiger Force to go out to the Far East and teach the Japanese what was which, but obviously some time in June the decision was made that you had to be a volunteer to go out to the Far East and John Briscoe had decided he didn’t want to volunteer, so that was that. He disappeared. And then mixed up in the middle of that you see it says here, 102 Squadron: 11th of May to 15th of May, June disappears and then I was, on the 15th of May to the end of May I was sent down to RAF Swannington which was one of the 100 Group night fighter bases and was the home of 85 Squadron and 157 Squadron and I was sent down there to learn these Mosquito navigators how to do the job properly. I felt a right bloody lemon cause there was me, you know, nothing on my chest but a few hairs and half these blokes had got DFCs and DFMs, and DSOs and you name it and so as I say I felt a bit of a lemon and then I was, that was cancelled and I was sent back to, I suppose I was sent back to 102 Squadron. I remember one of the Mosquito fellers flew me up to Pocklington to rejoin 102 Squadron or whatever it was. And then Japan collapsed and I wanted to, I decided that I didn’t want to go back to college, that I’d stay in aviation, there was a future in aviation and I’d stay in aviation and become [cough] a civil navigator, little knowing of course at the time that the pilots were busy manoeuvring all the other crew members out of their seats; the pilots were going to take over the navigation, I don’t know what was going to happen to wireless operators, I think they were just going to disappear because it was all going to be voice transmission over the oceans and everywhere but anyway I decided that I’d stay in civil aviation and [cough] what I needed was experience of long distance flying, you know, to present to some prospective employer that I was the right sort of material that they wanted. So I tried to, [cough] I tried to get in to one of the squadrons that was doing these long range passenger work, I think I mentioned that the Lancasters and Halifaxes were re-employed to fly out to the Far East and come back with, you know, fifteen or couple of dozen squaddies who were due to be demobbed because the airmen and soldiers in India and the Far East were getting very restive because they knew that men were being demobbed in Europe and they weren’t and they didn’t like that and there were some near mutinies. But so anyway, I left Pocklington, presumably I left Pocklington, according to my log book it said 102 Squadron and actually the next entry, 102 Squadron, oh that’s right, Pocklington, 31st of May to the 11th June ‘45 and then I entered into an interesting period, during which I was crewed up with a, I forget what his name was, Purvis I think, who’d been, a man who had been flying Halifaxes and we were posted to Mashing, we were posted to Great Dunmow, Earls Colne, about a half a dozen aerodromes in 38 Group in Essex. We were posted to them and we’d get to them and they’d say: oh no you, you’re Halifax trained, we’re flying Stirlings in this squadron so, you know, go away on leave and so I stayed on leave until [laugh] until the 13th of November 1945 when we arrived at Shepherd’s Grove which is just east of Bury St Edmunds, 196 Squadron and it was flying Stirlings in 38 Group and they said, oh yes, you know, no problem old boy, you know, we’ll convert you on the squadron and this is in fact what they did because I stayed with them until March of 1946. And in March 1946 I was posted to the Empire Air Navigation School at Shawbury to become a specialist navigator which would hopefully improve my possibility of gaining a permanent commission in the air force. Well in fact, I didn’t get, I was turned down, I don’t know why. In those days you weren’t told if there was something unsatisfactory in your RAF career. There is now apparently, they have to tell you and you have the right to, I forget what the wording is, anyway, you can complain against the fact that you were turned down for a permanent commission or whatever but in those days you weren’t so I ended up at Shawbury and I spent probably two months at Shawbury, learning to be an advanced navigator, which in fact was a load of old rubbish because you know, we thought it was a laugh a minute you know, the RAF had got its fingers on all sorts of German navigation equipment and they thought it was a bit of a laugh but in fact of course, it wasn’t; the Germans, certainly in 1940 were well advanced on the RAF. The RAF’s pre war navigation was, well it wasn’t a joke, it was very much less [emphasis] than a joke, the RAF hadn’t got any idea how to bloody well navigate at night or at long distance and they would land near a railway station and ask them where they were all that sort of stuff. The Germans had this nichbein, bent knee, I think that’s what it meant, they had this nichbein equipment which enabled them to bomb Coventry with considerable accuracy in 1940. [pause] It erm, and they had various other bits of equipment; they had a thing called the kirskopler which was really just a method of following a defined track, what the RAF, when we were training in Canada, was look down on on its nose, called track crawling, where you, you followed the track that you’d been given to fly and when you’d found you were off track, you made a correction of course to get back on track, which I used to do, much to the disgust of our Navigation Leader of course, who used to call it guestimation. But we thought we were going to be the bees knees, but in fact of course I mean even at that time the airlines were busy phasing out the navigators, as I said, they were training pilots to be navigators and there were two or three rather advanced BOAC pilots who, who had cottoned on to this jet-stream business, you know, they had been transatlantic pilots and they had noticed that you got these very strong winds and they happened under certain meteorological conditions and I mean you know, proper navigation, it took off after that, but I didn’t know of course all that, it was happening. So I quite happily went to Shawbury and did the short N navigation course which didn’t get me a permanent commission or anything like that. So I left Shawbury and was posted to Tarrant Rushton down in Dorset which was within weeks of closing and I was posted in as deputy Station Navigation Officer, a high faluting title. My boss was V. J. Wright I think, who’d been a bank manager in Great Dunmow and he was the Station Navigation Officer and it was interesting, they’d taken part in Arnhem. Incidentally I forgot to mention that at 196 Squadron where we finished our tour round East Anglia and were given a home, every man on the squadron had been shot down over Arnhem, it was that bad, and one of them had got the MC and they reckoned he would have had the VC if he hadn’t shot his mouth off quite so much about his exploits once he’d been shot down; I forget what his name was. Anyway, and then when Tarrant Rushton closed down and I left there with a truck full of surplus instruments of various kinds: I had three or four sextants and that, because the worst thing you could do in the air force was to end up with a surplus on your inventory. When you came to close down an inventory you couldn’t show any surplus equipment because, well, where did it become surplus from? And then of course there was a long and tedious investigation as to why [emphasis] this particular piece of equipment was surplus to requirement? So in the, anyway, from there I was posted to Netheravon which was one of the first World War One RAF aerodromes and in the foyer of the officers mess they had a, oh I don’t know, one of these pre First World War rotary engines on a stand and the story was that when they were doing some [cough] excavating there they’d dug this engine up [laugh] and it was on display. The, the Chief Technical Officer, he was a bit more down to earth, he said, oh he said, you know what happened there, they found it was surplus to somebody's inventory and they buried the bloody thing. Well they might have done, but anyway, they had this thing on display there. It was an interesting unit. It was the Heavy Glider Servicing Unit of 38 Group and they had the Horsa gliders which was the, no, the, yes it was the Horsa glider, which was the man carrying glider in use in the British forces. They used to carry about, I think it carried about a couple of dozen soldiers, you know, volunteers, you, you and you, you – you’re all volunteers. They landed hours before D-Day on the west, on the eastern side of the British Sector and their job was to capture the bridge over the river Orne which bordered the western edge of the, of the zone, the landing zone, and they did this and it was abs, we, it’s worth a visit if you get the chance. These gliders, they landed these bloody gliders within feet, [emphasis] I mean feet [emphasis] of the targets that they were supposed to land the things on. Mind you, the chop rate was pretty terrible. I think about half the glider pilots were killed of course because they, it had made these heavy landings in the darkness and very often they came to rest on these steel girders which the Germans had buried in the ground as a deterrent to that sort of thing. But it was an incredible job, they, they, this glider force, who were, I think they were the Ox and Bucks Light Infantry, you know, they were just volunteered for the job and they did a, anyway they had these Horsa gliders at Netheravon and they used to do all sorts of experimental things, like snatching them. You know, you’d sit in the glider and the tow rope would be taken out in the front and a big loop put up on a pole and a Dakota would come roaring over the top trailing a hook and this hook would engage in this loop and literally pull the glider off the ground; it was quite exciting. I mean you, I did it both sitting in the glider and sitting in the Dakota and the glider took off with a bloody great jerk and the Dakota came sailing over and the airspeed indicator read something like about a hundred and, I don’t know, a hundred and thirty, a hundred and fifty knots and the hook would take and this bloody great drum in the, in the Dakota would start spinning round and the airspeed would go “eurgh” and fall down to about eighty knots, very exciting. But, er, I spent some months doing that and then where was I, at H, yeah, the Heavy Glider Servicing Unit, oh that’s right and then I was in June ‘47 I was posted to TICU, Transport Initial Conversion Unit at Bertram Newton which was very nice because that was a pre war station as well. I mean Netheravon was very nice cause it was pre First World War station and it was, that was very pleasant. I used to have a running battle with the adjutant there, Ross Beldin, because I used to go off every weekend, used to go back home every weekend and I was busy courting then and on Monday mornings I’d catch the local train cause Dorothea lived in the next town up towards London, so I’d catch this train and meet up with her at Hampton station and when we got to London I’d walk her across to her office in the city and say goodbye to her and then I’d get off to Waterloo station and catch the nine something to Salisbury, where I’d get out. I’d had breakfast on the nine o’clock train, very civilised, and I’d get off at Salisbury and the glider pilots, there were always a load of glider pilots on the train and they’d always got transport, you know, they’d got their own jeeps and that, so I’d get a lift up to Netheravon and I’d sneak in to Netheravon just about round lunchtime and the Adjutant, the Station Adjutant, Flight Lieutenant Beldin, he knew I was up to something, he knew I was absent on Monday mornings but he never managed to catch me and, until one day he saw me after lunch I think, and he ‘oh!’ he said, ‘the CO wants to know where you were this morning.’ So I gave him some cock and bull story, ‘oh well,’ he said, ‘he wants a report about it,’ he said, ‘so let me have it this afternoon.’ So I thought you sneaky bastard, he doesn’t know I’m missing in the mornings, so anyway I went back to my room and wrote this report and took it up and there was nobody in the adjutant ‘s office so I thought ha, I’ve got you you bastard, so I knocked on the CO’s door to give him this report and the bloody adjutant was in with the CO, he said: ‘oh yes,’ he said, ‘I’ll give it to the old man, thank you very much.’ And that was the last I ever heard of it, but he, later on, he got dismissed from the service for having hanky panky with a WAAF when, the days when it wasn’t allowed to do that sort of thing I think. It’s a bit, they’re a bit more open these days, but not in those days they weren’t. So anyway, I went up to TICU and that was quite pleasant, but it was just classroom work and I wasn’t getting any flying, and I thought well sod this so I deferred my leaving the air force by about two years I think, but I realised I was wasting my time, the air force wasn’t going to give me what I wanted so I packed that in and after about, I don’t know how many months at TICU, oh, about six months, 23rd of June to the 2nd of December 1947 I came out and I went to ooh, something aviation training limited and got myself a civil licence which again was full of esoteric rubbish, you know: how to construct a chart and all sorts of things that you, you never saw in a year’s, so anyway I got my licence. There weren’t any jobs going and I was very lucky, I got engaged and I got a job, I think it was advertised in the Telegraph or something like that, as a navigation instructor at one of the RAF’s Reserve Flying Schools. They’d reconstituted the Volunteer Reserve after the war and I got a job at Castle Brom with number, forget which number it was, it was either 5 or 18, 5, 5 RFS at Castle Bromwich, which is all blocks of flats now, and that was quite interesting, I learnt a lot there. I learned not to shoot lines, because I discovered that I was talking with, many of my reservists had forgotten far more about operational flying than I knew. One chap had been flying Vickers Wellingtons, which was a single engined RAF long range bomber pre war [laugh] an antiquated machine and he was flying with a squadron of them from, I think from Khartoum actually, and when Italy entered the war on Germany’s side, he said they had to go and bomb Eritrea and Italian East Africa and he said they used to get the wogs, they used to get the natives to light a bonfire at a deter, at a designated position sort of way out in the desert a hundred, hundred and fifty miles away from Khartoum and they’d fly to that and find a wind from it and then they’d use that to navigate round Italian East Africa. [Laugh] Very crude navigation, but that was the standard of RAF navigation, you know, I mean the first sorties that the RAF flew over Germany in 1939, 1940 were ridiculous. I mean the Germans were in fact well ahead of us. Well that’s it then.
NM: So, Castle Bromwich, what happened after Castle Bromwich?
AB: Pardon?
NM: You were at Castle Bromwich?
AB: Oh yes! I spent about eighteen months, two years at Castle Brom and the Chief Flying Instructor left and went down to Fairoaks, which is near near Woking, and he contacted me and he said he had a vacancy for a Chief Ground Instructor would you like to come down and have it? It was another, I don’t know fifty, hundred pounds a year pay better of, which mattered in those days. I mean you know, when I started my pay was about four hundred or four fifty a year and we lived quite happily on that too. So anyway, I accepted his offer and we bought a caravan and lived in that. Somebody towed it down to Fairoaks for us and we lived quite happily in that and I spent about another three and a half four years doing that, until - I’ll give you the date - until 19th of June ‘53, 19th of June ‘53 when the government of the day decided that the next war was going to be a push button war and there wouldn’t be time to call up Reservists let alone retrain them, so the Volunteer Reserve was shut down and we all had to look for other jobs and the best offer I got was as a flight navigator with Scottish Aviation flying Yorks all over the world and I did that for five years until they decided that they weren’t going to do that sort of flying any more, but I enjoyed it. Whether it trained me for married life I don’t know, probably not.
NM: So after Scottish Aviation?
AB: But er, pardon?
NM: After Scottish Aviation?
AB: Yes, I was flying Yorks. The York was the transport plane developed from the Lancaster in the, in the 1940s and of course it was basically the RAF’s only heavy transport aeroplane. Churchill used one for flying around about all over the world and it was extensively used. Wasn’t a bad plane. Climbed like a lead balloon, terrible rate of climb, you know, about five hundred feet a minute or something. So it took me a long, long time to get used to the modern aeroplanes’ rate of climb. You know, you get in the thing, you sit on the runway and the pilot calls out rotate and the next thing you’re about three thousand feet up in the air!
NM: So what did you do after Scottish Aviation?
AB: Pardon?
NM: What did you do after Scottish Aviation?
AB: I became an air traffic controller, which um -
NM: Where was that?
AB: Well actually I was flying from Stansted with Scottish and I became an air traffic controller and at that time one of the training stations was Stansted so fairly naturally they posted me to Stansted to do my initial training and from there I went to Gatwick. I didn’t get on very well with the Civil Aviation Authority. At the time it was, hmm, it was a government department then still, and I forget which government, I think, which department it was in then. Anyway, I did me training at Stansted and then I was posted down to Gatwick and did further training and you had to validate at the end of your second training station’s time and you passed the eagle eye of the deputy chief, act, in the, no I forget what, we went through department after we started out as the Ministry of Civil Aviation, then it became the Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation, then it became the Ministry of Transport and so it went on as governments changed they changed the nomenclature of the thing, anyway I didn’t get on very well and I was very nearly thrown out, but given another lease of life and sent to Blackbushe, which was, which is west London, sent to Blackbushe to have another go and I did that and that actually passed out from there and then I was posted back to Stansted but -
NM: You stayed at Stansted for the rest of your career?
AB: Pardon?
AB: Did you stay at Stansted for the rest of your career?
AB: Well, no, I didn’t actually, I was posted back, I went to Blackbushe and then from Blackbushe I was sent back to Stansted and I qualified at Stansted and I stayed there and then they brought in the requirement that you had to qualify on radar before they would grant you permanent status and so I was sent to London to qualify on the radar at, not actually at the airport itself, but at the Area Control Centre. Civil Aviation was becoming more and more organised. When I first joined it was very much do it yourself, where do you want to go to old boy, oh so and so and so and so, well put the ruler on the map, draw a line on it then go, but then the system of airways percolated over from the States and controlled airspace, where you couldn’t fly, or you could only fly, in certain areas, you know, by obeying strict control rules. Well anyway the first such centre in, was established in the UK in London and I was sent there to train up on the radar and oh, it was interesting and it became a matter of domesticity. I used to spend my afternoons off driving round the countryside looking at houses which were as far the other side of Heathrow as I was living at the time, so ,I one day somebody said, ‘oh,’ he said, ‘would you like to go back to Stansted?’ I said yes please. Somebody who’d been posted away from Stansted needed replacing so back I went to Stansted and I got the radar ticket at Heathrow and Stansted had everything except [emphasis] radar, they didn’t have any radar! But that didn’t matter, I’d got the rating so I didn’t have to worry about. I stayed at the Heath, at Stansted all the rest of my time and I enjoyed it. It, for a junior controller it was a rather satisfying job, you had the responsibility. I mean at somewhere like Gatwick or Heathrow, if an aeroplane came in and called up some kind of emergency you had to call the watch supervisor and if it was a bad enough emergency you had to call the, the Chief Air Traffic Controller of the whole kaboodle, but if it happened at Stansted - [pause]
NM: So if it happened at Stansted you -
AB: Pardon?
NM: If it happened at Stansted, an emergency, you had to take responsibility yourself did you?
AB: Oh yes, you were quite a junior, I remember we had, we were still a civil, a civil service department and the boss man was the Commandant and he used to go home at five o’clock and he didn’t want to know about the place, he expected the duty controller to look after things when they were gone. We had a KLM aeroplane come in to refuel on its way to New York and they poured the petrol in and it started leaking out and so it ended up that they had to defuel it to the point where it didn’t leak any more and then fly it off to Amsterdam where they could either change it for a serviceable aeroplane or fix the leak and so normally Stansted closed at eleven o’clock at night but the duty controller had the authority to extend the hours for three hours, you know, under various circumstances, so I extended this and it got to three hours and this crisis had developed and as I said to the point where they could defuel the plane and then fly it off to Amsterdam, so I said well, you’d better do that and it ended up that I shut the airfield and I was passing, as I was driving home, I was passing the fellows who were coming in to open up for the morning and the next day when I was on duty the commandant rang up, and he said, well he said, who authorised [cough] all this and I said well I did, and I explained the circumstances and that was it, you know. Nobody else was involved. So, and you know those sort of things happened, you know, you weren’t expected to call in higher authority, you were [emphasis] the higher authority on duty and you were expected to get on with it, make your decisions and justify it, but the blokes at Heathrow used to think we were a load of drongoes, you know. Well Heathrow, of course, like all these big airports, it’s an entirely different thing: it’s time is what matters at Heathrow and New York and all these other places, you know, you’ve got to, everything’s got to go on time, you’ve got to, you can’t afford to have fifteen seconds’ time wasted between aeroplanes, I mean that’s how you don’t get the movement rate. I mean Heathrow gets its movement rate by the fact that the planes are coming in like that, and they’re fifteen seconds apart and that’s it. It’s got to be fifteen seconds, not fourteen, not thirteen, fifteen and if you don’t make that they don’t want you.
NM: Andrew can I take you back to something you told me last time we met. You mentioned a man called George Sidebottom. Was he in Bomber Command?
AB: Oh yes, George. I was at school in Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton Grammar School, George and I were in the same class in Wolverhampton Grammar School.
NM: And did you say he ended up in Bomber Command?
AB: That’s right, yes, a few years later. He ended up as my, brother in law’s skipper in Bomber Command and he was in, I think 100 Squadron in Grimsby, I’m not quite sure which group that was in, whether that was in 3 Group I think, but I’m not sure, Grimsby. And my brother in law was his flight engineer and they’d had to abort two operations due to mechanical trouble but the CO wasn’t very receptive to that and told George in no uncertain terms that if he did it again he might very well find himself down the mines, so they were pressing along, they’d got some mechanical trouble, I don’t know what it was, I’ve forgotten, and anyway they were on their way to Leipzig and I think about the about the 13th of February 1944, something like that, be in the book and well it’ll be in, I’ve forgotten, the chap who has the record of all the Bomber Command casualties. Anyway they were chugging along and they were attacked and they were shot up and they were badly enough shot up that George said look chaps, he said, you know, we’re not going to make Leipzig, let alone get back to base, so he said I give you the option of baling out now, so they all decided to bale out and they all got away with it and apparently when the news got back to Grimsby that they’d all baled out there was a bit of a oh yes, hmmm, you know, hmmm, he’s done it twice, got away with it the third time, but my sister in law told me that, or told us, that she was reading some book and it was a reminiscences of a German night fighter pilot and he quoted this, he quoted this plane, this sortie you know, serial number, everything and you know, it was proof that -
[Other]: Are you taking a plate and a fork please?
AB: Oh thank you my darling.
NM: Lovely. Thank you very much.
AB: And it was proof that George hadn’t just done a “come on chaps let’s finish the war”.
[Other] [Unclear] on the table darling.
NM: I’ll just grab that if I may, thank you very much, lovely, thank you.
[Other]: What’s wrong, take another piece.
AB: And it got back to the squadron that – thank you darling - that it was a genuine one that they’d all baled out and Vic and, Vic and one of the other crews, they were picked up about two days later, but two of the crew got all the way to the, I mean they baled out near, oh, well near Potsdam, quite close to Berlin, but two of the crew got as far as the Dutch frontier and they pinched a couple of bicycles and they’d cycled across this bridge into Holland and for some reason or other they were sort of unsure, they were uncertain of where they were or something and they turned round and went back and they were challenged and apprehended by one of the German Volksturm, one of the German Home Guard [laugh] and Vic ended up in Heidekrug which was as far north west as you could get in Germany, it was right up in the tip top tip of east Germany and of course when the Germans, or rather when the Russians started advancing seriously across Poland and then into East Russia, the, East Germany, the Germans evacuated and Vic ended up on the Long March. That was rugged. Couldn’t look a turnip in the face after that.
NM: But he survived and was repatriated, yes?
AB: Mmm?
NM: He survived and was repatriated?
AB: Hmm.
NM: So he was a prisoner of war until the end of the war.
AB: Yes, eventually, the, [eating] they ended up in central Germany somewhere, I don’t know where.
NM: So his name was Vic, and what was his surname?
AB: Mendelski, Victor Mendelski, I think it was 100 Squadron and it was about, round about, round about February 13th I think, something like that. And as I say, it’ll be in Bill Chorley’s books. You’ve got those have you?
NM: We’ve got access to them.
AB: You’ll find it in there, something through that.
NM: Okay, just to finish with then, you’ve been going to the 100 Group reunions for a few years now.
AB: As I said, when Scottish packed up we all had to find other jobs and a number of them got jobs with the Civil Aviation Flying Unit which was based at Stansted and which was responsible for, it was responsible for the flight checking of all the radio aids, the navigation beacons, all the instrument landing systems and so on throughout the country and some of them abroad and they also did the flight checking of applicants for pilots’ licences and then for instrument ratings because one of the things that devolved from the airways system and all the control zone system that I mentioned earlier on, was that pilots had to be able to fly on instruments, had to have an instrument rating, and Stansted did all the examining for that. Well I got to know a few of them who’d been at Reserve Flying Schools and after I retired these chaps said, oh he said why don’t you join the Aircrew Association, which was an association which was open to [cough] all aircrew, everybody, cooks, stewards, the lot of them if they’d been flying, one of the chaps his wife had been an air steward in the RAF, she was a member, anyway, but I did join but I didn’t take to it, it was a, perhaps I shouldn’t say this but it was full of air gunners for one thing! And they used to meet at a pub in Saffron Walden which was not really convenient for me and perhaps I’m not the club-able type, a great cry of I’ll say rises to that, but so I dropped out, but during my membership I saw a notice in their magazine of a memorial stone being dedicated at Oulton, you know where I’d flown from, so I thought oh well I’ll go and go up to that so I went up to Aylesham and stayed in a B & B there and I happened to meet a fellow Squadron Leader, Richard Forder, a retired engineer who was researching the fate of one of the three Liberators that was lost from 223 Squadron, it was, oh I forget, it was captained by, he was either Flying Officer or Flying, or Flight Lieutenant Ayres, nicknamed Lou Ayres naturally, who, one of whose gunners Richard Forder had met when he was a small boy, I forget where he was, he was somewhere in the West Country, Shropshire, somewhere like that, and he’d met this chap, this RAF sergeant who’d given him some toy trains as a souvenir and this chap had been one of the casualties of this, [cough] of this flight and Richard was researching it and I’d been on the same detail. We’d done a spoof, a Window feint to Cassel. We’d come out from, we’d split off from the main force which had gone on to somewhere in the east, Leipzig or somewhere like that and we’d formed a force which flew on up to Cassel which some of the Halifaxes had bombed and we turned back from Cassel and gone home and on the way back from Cassel, Lou Ayres was shot down and we passed over his, over the wreckage of his flight and I was able to provide Richard with all sorts of information, you know, flight times and all the rest of it and proved the accuracy of my navigation, [laugh] reasonably. So that’s how I got involved with the 100 Group Association, kept it up ever since.
NM: You’ve got the next one next week I gather.
AB: We’re meeting the next, what’s the date today?
NM: 10th. May the 10th.
AB: Next weekend. Come along some time.
NM: Really looking forward to it.
AB: We congregate at the memorial stone which is on the eastern end of the old Oulton airfield. It’s about half past three, four o’clock, four o’clock something like that and say a few words, and I usually get asked to, well there’s two things, there’s the one: When you go home tell them of us and say for our todays, we gave, for your tomorrows we gave our todays. I can relate to that. And the other one is, the better known one, is the, what is it, it’s the, oh I’ve forgotten, it’s the [pause] no I’ve forgotten. But I, to which I can’t relate because it’s the one that says about the fellows, for their tomorrows we gave our todays or something like that and I’m thinking I bet they bloody well wish they’d still got their tomorrows.
NM: I think that’s a very good point on which to finish. So thank you very much for your time Andrew. Shall we finish the interview there?
AB: It’s [crockery noise].
NM: Shall we finish it there?
AB: I think so yes.
NM: I think that’s a good place.
AB: Yes. I never, you know it was, I stayed in aviation, as I say, I met all sorts of chaps when I was in the Reserve and I learnt not to shoot a line and then after the Reserve I went flying with Scottish and there were a few occasions where I was rather more frightened than I had been at any other time in my aviation career and because I was a married man by then, I’d got responsibilities and I was rather more aware of the fallibility of aeroplanes and of course, in something like the York, you used to have to fly through it not over it and the prospect of having to fly through the Monsoon was not something which you exactly looked forward to, I mean the rain was so heavy that you could barely, oh haven’t got my civil log book with me, you could barely see the inboard engines, let alone the outboard engines, but I mean it was real flying and you had to do it yourself.
NM: Very good.
AB: Mind you, there’s still real flying going on as that Russian aeroplane the other day. Not very funny.
NM: No indeed.
AB: Has there been anything more in the press about it?
NM: I haven’t seen anything since the accident itself, sorry. Andrew, can I just finish by saying thank you on behalf of the IBCC for giving us your story. Much appreciated. You’ve given us a lot of time.
AB: What’s the next step now? You get it -
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Andrew Barron. Three
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Nigel Moore
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2019-05-10
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ABarronAJK190510, PBarronAJK1901
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Format
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01:56:35 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
Andrew said that during leisure time the crew drank, sang silly songs but didn’t really socialise much. He recalled an occasion when the Germans sent in about 200 night fighters infiltrating the main force on its ways home. They shot down a B-17 as it came into land and all crew were killed. The German aircraft had passed Andrew’s one as it was waiting to land. He mentions four daylight operations: over a fairly short period the squadron did 38 operations. Andrew remembered on 1 January 1945 he was on operations and made some gross navigational error – he had been up late on New Years’ Eve and had drunk quite a bit. May 1945 ended operational flights: on the 26th Andrew did a trip with 223 Squadron from RAF Swannington, in a B-17. When the war ended, they were allowed to go on one of the Cooks tours around the Ruhr to see what damage had been done. Andrew was then posted to 102 Squadron at RAF Pocklington doing local flying with circuits and bumps. They did three flights in a Halifax disposing bombs into the sea. Following various postings, he was demobbed and trained for a civil license.
Contributor
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Sue Smith
Anne-Marie Watson
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Norfolk
England--Yorkshire
Germany
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1945-01-01
1945-05
Conforms To
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Pending revision of OH transcription
100 Group
102 Squadron
157 Squadron
196 Squadron
223 Squadron
85 Squadron
B-17
B-24
bombing
C-47
Cook’s tour
demobilisation
Halifax
military living conditions
RAF Pocklington
RAF Swannington
shot down
Window
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/530/25990/MShawSR3002545-160211-15.2.jpg
64233735a3dc7bb38205a8314df55045
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Shaw, Stanley R
S R Shaw
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Shaw, SR
Description
An account of the resource
37 items. An oral history interview with Stanley Shaw (3002545 Royal Air Force) Photographs, documents and his log book. He served with a Repair and Salvage Unit and attended many crashes. He later served in North Africa and the Middle East.
The collection also contains two photograph albums; one of his RAF service and one of his time in a cycle club.
The collection has been licenced to the IBCC Digital Archive by Stanley Shaw and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
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.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-01-14
2016-02-11
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
Aircraft Recovered by No 9 Party, 54 MU
Description
An account of the resource
A list of 29 aircraft recovered during 1944-45 by No 9 Party, 54 Maintenance Unit.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Stan Shaw
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One handwritten list
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
MShawSR3002545-160211-15
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
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Bedfordshire
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Norfolk
England--Suffolk
England--Wiltshire
England--Thurleigh
England--Ely
England--Felixstowe
England--Desborough
England--Northamptonshire
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
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
1945
B-17
B-24
B-25
Battle
C-47
Halifax
Lancaster
Mosquito
P-51
RAF Bassingbourn
RAF Bourn
RAF Castle Combe
RAF Chedburgh
RAF Desborough
RAF Duxford
RAF Felixstowe
RAF Gransden Lodge
RAF Graveley
RAF Henlow
RAF Hethel
RAF Kimbolton
RAF Martlesham Heath
RAF Mepal
RAF Oakington
RAF Podington
RAF Stradishall
RAF Sutton Bridge
RAF Swannington
RAF Swanton Morley
RAF Tempsford
RAF Upwood
RAF Warboys
RAF Watton
RAF Woodbridge
RAF Wratting Common
Stirling
Walrus
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/530/25993/MShawSR3002545-160211-18.2.jpg
60a35022b79fcf174b96b3e632431e01
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
Shaw, Stanley R
S R Shaw
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Shaw, SR
Description
An account of the resource
37 items. An oral history interview with Stanley Shaw (3002545 Royal Air Force) Photographs, documents and his log book. He served with a Repair and Salvage Unit and attended many crashes. He later served in North Africa and the Middle East.
The collection also contains two photograph albums; one of his RAF service and one of his time in a cycle club.
The collection has been licenced to the IBCC Digital Archive by Stanley Shaw and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
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.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-01-14
2016-02-11
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
(3b)
6) [underlined] SWANNINGTON MOSQUITO [/underlined]
METHOD OF TRANSPORT. FUSELAGE LIFTED FROM WINGS. (3 QUEEN MARY’S). HUMAN BALAST ON TAIL. BOLT CROPPERS TO CUT CABLE. CRANE JIB. HIGH WIND.
7) [underlined] LITTLE PORT B.24. LIBERATOR [/underlined]
A/C BLEW UP AT 16,000 ft. WRECKAGE SPREAD 3 MILES. BOMBS UNEXPLODED UNDER 4 ENGINES. CREW MEMBER IMPRINT. AMMUNITION. WING IN FARMYARD FILLED WITH EGGS. WIRELESS SET AND KITE ON PARACHUTE.
8) [underlined] DUXFORD. MUSTANG COLLISION [/underlined]
COLLIDED WITH WINGMAN OVER AIRFIELD. DOING VICTORY ROLLS. 1 AIRCRAFT LANDED WITH DAMAGED FIN. OTHER BY ROADSIDE. DIVED VERTICAL FORMED CRATER. PILOT OR ENGINE NOT RETRIEVED. 25 ft. DEEP.
9). [underlined] HETHEL [/underlined] 389 BOMBER SQDN. LIBS. SKY SCORPIONS
HALIFAX. CAT. B.
BILLETED WITH C109 CREW AIRCRAFT TRANSPORTING PETROL TO ADVANCED AIRFIELDS IN FRANCE. WENT ON TRIP. TRAINING DAK PILOT ONTO 4 ENGINES. 7 LANDINGS.
RETURNING AMERICAN AIRCREW P.O.W.s FROM SWITZERLAND. KNEE DEEP IN CHOCOLATE & ALPENHORNS
10). [underlined] WATTON. LANCASTER. CAT. B. [/underlined]
FLIP IN 8th AF PRY MOSQUITO. 3 IN FORMATION. RATTLING IN REAR FUSELAGE CONTROL BRACKETS FELL OFF – 2 FORTS ON COOKS TOUR OVER GERMANY. COLLIDED NEAR BASE IN MIST. 64 KILLED.
11). [underlined] BRIZE NORTON [/underlined] GERMAN A/C. FOR EXHIBITION IN HYDE PARK
12). [underlined] KEMBLE [/underlined] LANCASTER. COLCHESTER & CHELMSFORD EXIBITION. [sic]
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Seven Aircraft Recovered by Stan Shaw
Description
An account of the resource
A list of seven aircraft recovered by Stan Shaw and his team.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Stan Shaw
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One handwritten sheet
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
MShawSR3002545-160211-18
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
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Gloucestershire
England--Norfolk
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
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Tricia Marshall
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1945
B-17
B-24
crash
Halifax
Lancaster
Mosquito
P-51
RAF Duxford
RAF Hethel
RAF Kemble
RAF Swannington
RAF Watton
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/530/26006/PShawSR1614.1.jpg
fe4a876bb781a29dc4248d1aa14523a1
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/530/26006/PShawSR1615.1.jpg
10e32e22f322c32a7f1f8b74a5a01d3b
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/530/26006/PShawSR1616.2.jpg
ef4ca1ee1fbdb72d1f892a4d7e2466e9
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/530/26006/PShawSR1617.2.jpg
73e5f4506e5743dde4e38cd154bcf8ef
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
Shaw, Stanley R
S R Shaw
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Shaw, SR
Description
An account of the resource
37 items. An oral history interview with Stanley Shaw (3002545 Royal Air Force) Photographs, documents and his log book. He served with a Repair and Salvage Unit and attended many crashes. He later served in North Africa and the Middle East.
The collection also contains two photograph albums; one of his RAF service and one of his time in a cycle club.
The collection has been licenced to the IBCC Digital Archive by Stanley Shaw and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
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.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-01-14
2016-02-11
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
Crashed Mosquito
Description
An account of the resource
A crashed Mosquito being recovered by Stan's team. Seven ground crew are posed at the front of the aircraft. Their lorry is parked at the front. On the reverse 'Mosquito Crash Swannington 1944-45 No 9 Salvage Party 54 M.U. R & S'.
In a second image eight ground crew are sitting on the wing of the aircraft. On the reverse 'RAF Swannington 1944-45 No 9 Salvage Party Sgt Reg Shipp'.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Two b/w photographs
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PShawSR1614, PShawSR1615, PShawSR1616, PShawSR1617
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
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
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Norfolk
crash
ground personnel
Mosquito
RAF Swannington
service vehicle
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2118/35548/EHamiltonCBHamiltonJ-[Mo][Date]-01.pdf
1822c9f9b1bf2124903f1f79f5cbe5c5
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
Hamilton, Charles Blackley
C B Hamilton
Description
An account of the resource
Nine items. The collection concerns Flying Officer Charles Blackley Hamilton DFC (174685 Royal Air Force) and contains correspondence. He flew operations as a navigator with 85 Squadron and was killed 13 April 1945. <br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Brian Robertson and catalogued by Barry Hunter. <br /><br />Additional information on Charles Blackley Hamilton is available via the IBCC <a href="https://losses.internationalbcc.co.uk/loss/211704/">Losses Database.</a>
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-04-16
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Hamilton, CB
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
R.A.F. SWANNINGTON
NORWICH
[underlined] NORFOLK. [/underlined]
Dear Mum & Dad,
Here I am at long last, I am very sorry for not writing sooner. But I did not realise it was such a long time. I must have had one of my lazy spells again.
Well Mum I got Ruth’s letter, & I am very sorry to hear about all the bad news. I do hope by now you are all feeling
[page break]
[underlined] 2 [/underlined]
much better.
Dad & you have certainly have had a very bad time. You will both have to take very great care of yourself. It shouldn’t be so bad now the good weather is coming. But still take very great care, & do as you are told.
I suppose by now you will have Gracie down on holiday, it
[page break]
[underlined] 3 [/underlined]
will be a holiday of work for her I suppose, but I am sure she wont mind. It was a good job you got Leah home. I hope we shall all be home very soon for good. The news certainly looks good. It looks, & we expect it all to finish any day now.
I was sorry to hear about Sye McGill, & Bob [indecipherable word] it all must have happened very sudden.
Jean has some bad luck with Helen, round holiday times. It is very hard luck, & Robert coming home.
Well Mum I dont know when I shall get any leave but I hope it is very soon. That seems to be all for now. Things are all very quiet round here. Hope this finds you all much better. And take care of yourself. Lots of Love. Charles.
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/.
Description
An account of the resource
In his letter Charles apologises for not writing sooner, sends his regrets about bad news from a family member and his Dad's health. He hopes to see them soon.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Charles Hamilton
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
Text
Text. Correspondence
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Four handwritten sheets
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
EHamiltonCBHamiltonJ-[Mo][Date]-01
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending text-based transcription. Under review
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Tricia Marshall
Title
A name given to the resource
Letter from Charles Hamilton to his parents
aircrew
RAF Swannington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/934/36538/MLovattP1821369-190903-74-01.1.pdf
fb8bdc0a3359bad330631a99725ecf91
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/934/36538/MLovattP1821369-190903-74-02.1.2.pdf
518e2b514f18dba39e9302770bce90ba
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Lovatt, Peter
Dr Peter Lovatt
P Lovatt
Description
An account of the resource
117 items. An oral history interview with Peter Lovatt (b.1924, 1821369 Royal Air Force), his log book, documents, and photographs. The collection also contains two photograph albums. He flew 42 operations as an air gunner on 223 Squadron flying B-24s. <br /><br /><a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/1338">Album One</a><br /><a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2135">Album Two</a><br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Nina and Peter Lovatt and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-09-27
2019-09-03
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lovatt, P
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
The Offensive Phase
Volume Two of Two
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Peter Lovatt
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Norway--Trondheim
France--Brest
Russia (Federation)
England--Hartland
England--Beer Head
Europe--Elbe River
England--Dover
England--Folkestone
England--London
France--Bruneval
France--Pas-de-Calais
Germany--Lübeck
Germany--Rostock
England--Norwich
England--Cheadle (Staffordshire)
England--Salcombe
England--Sidmouth
France--Cherbourg
France--Boulogne-sur-Mer
France--Dunkerque
France--Cassel
England--Salisbury
Russia (Federation)--Kola Peninsula
Russia (Federation)--Arkhangelʹskai︠a︡ oblastʹ
Germany--Berlin
Poland--Szczecin
France--Desvres
France--Arcachon
France--Nantes
France--Chartres
France--Reims
England--Swanage
England--Malvern
England--Plymouth
France--Lorient
England--Lincoln
Scotland--Edinburgh
England--Hull
England--London
England--Bristol
France--Montdidier (Hauts-de-France)
England--Guildford
France--Poix-du-Nord
Germany--Mannheim
Czech Republic--Pilsen Basin
England--Harpenden
France--Morlaix
Spain--Lugo
Spain--Seville
England--Radlett (Hertfordshire)
Germany--Cologne
France--Boulogne-Billancourt
Germany--Rostock
Germany--Essen
Germany--Schleswig-Holstein
Belgium--Liège
Germany--Bremen
England--High Wycombe
Germany--Osnabrück
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Wilhelmshaven
England--Sizewell
Germany--Peenemünde
Germany--Stuttgart
Germany--Munich
Germany--Kassel
England--Crowborough
England--Huddersfield
Netherlands--Den Helder
England--Mundesley
Germany--Schweinfurt
Europe--Baltic Sea Region
Atlantic Ocean--Bay of Biscay
Germany--Braunschweig
Germany--Bremen
Germany--Wolfenbüttel
Germany--Magdeburg
France--Limoges
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Leipzig
Germany--Stuttgart
Germany--Munich
Germany--Schweinfurt
Germany--Augsburg
France--Yvelines
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Kiel
Poland--Poznań
France--Dieppe
Turkey--Gallipoli
Egypt--Alamayn
Egypt--Cairo
Morocco
Algeria
Italy--Sicily
England--Ventnor
England--Beachy Head
France--Abbeville
France--Somme
France--Seine River
England--Southampton
England--Portsmouth
Scotland--Firth of Forth
Iceland
England--Brighton
France--Normandy
France--Cherbourg
England--Littlehampton
England--Portland Harbour
France--Amiens
Netherlands--Arnhem
France--Normandy
Germany--Gelsenkirchen
France--Le Havre
France--Arromanches-les-Bains
France--Bayeux
Belgium--Wenduine
France--Beauvais
England--Ditchling
England--Henfield (West Sussex)
England--Canterbury
England--Crowborough
England--Dover
England--Chiswick
Netherlands--Hague
Sweden
Belgium--Antwerp
Germany--Aachen
Germany--Trier
Germany--Siegfried Line
Netherlands--New Maas River
Netherlands--Waal River
Russia (Federation)--Kaliningrad (Kaliningradskai︠a︡ oblastʹ)
Germany--Darmstadt
Germany--Duisburg
Germany--Braunschweig
Netherlands--Walcheren
Germany--Bremen
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Bochum
Germany--Cologne
Europe--Ardennes
Belgium--Bastogne
Germany--Leuna
Germany--Essen
Germany--Ludwigshafen am Rhein
Germany--Duisburg
Germany--Ulm
Rhine River Valley
Germany--Mittelland Canal
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Dortmund
Germany--Castrop-Rauxel
Germany--Hannover
Belgium--Houffalize
Germany--Neuss
Germany--Grevenbroich
Germany--Dülmen
Germany--Dresden
Germany--Leipzig
Germany--Magdeburg
Germany--Bonn
Germany--Kamen
Germany--Dortmund-Ems Canal
Germany--Chemnitz
Germany--Dessau (Dessau)
Germany--Hannover
Germany--Kiel
England--Coventry
Italy
Poland
France
Great Britain
Egypt
North Africa
Germany
Belgium
Czech Republic
Netherlands
Norway
Russia (Federation)
Spain
Turkey
Europe--Frisian Islands
England--Milton Keynes
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
England--Devon
England--Dorset
England--Gloucestershire
England--Hampshire
England--Herefordshire
England--Kent
England--Middlesex
England--Norfolk
England--Staffordshire
England--Suffolk
England--Surrey
England--Sussex
England--Wiltshire
England--Worcestershire
England--Yorkshire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Warwickshire
Russia (Federation)--Poli︠a︡rnyĭ (Murmanskai︠a︡ oblastʹ)
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. Coastal Command
Royal Navy
United States Army Air Force
Wehrmacht. Luftwaffe
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
178 printed pages
Description
An account of the resource
A continuation of Peter's thesis on electronic warfare during the war.
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
MLovattP1821369-190903-74-01
1 Group
100 Group
101 Squadron
109 Squadron
141 Squadron
169 Squadron
171 Squadron
192 Squadron
199 Squadron
214 Squadron
218 Squadron
223 Squadron
239 Squadron
3 Group
4 Group
462 Squadron
5 Group
617 Squadron
8 Group
aircrew
B-17
B-24
Beaufighter
Bennett, Donald Clifford Tyndall (1910-1986)
Chamberlain, Neville (1869-1940)
crash
Defiant
Do 217
Fw 190
Gee
Gneisenau
Goering, Hermann (1893-1946)
H2S
Halifax
Halifax Mk 3
Hampden
Harris, Arthur Travers (1892-1984)
He 111
Hitler, Adolf (1889-1945)
Hudson
Ju 88
Lancaster
Me 110
Me 410
mine laying
Morse-keyed wireless telegraphy
Mosquito
navigator
Oboe
Operational Training Unit
P-51
Pathfinders
radar
RAF Defford
RAF Downham Market
RAF Farnborough
RAF Foulsham
RAF Little Snoring
RAF North Creake
RAF Northolt
RAF Oulton
RAF Prestwick
RAF Sculthorpe
RAF St Athan
RAF Swannington
RAF Tempsford
RAF Upper Heyford
RAF Uxbridge
RAF West Raynham
RAF Wittering
Scharnhorst
Stalin, Joseph (1878-1953)
Stirling
Tirpitz
training
Typhoon
V-1
V-2
V-weapon
Wellington
Window
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2219/39742/SReidK473650v20016.1.jpg
b198b8b434678e91ad010f21c9fe52ec
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
Reid, Kathryn. Songs and poems
Description
An account of the resource
Thirty-seven items - songs/poems about wartime experiences.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by David Stuart Miers Reid and catalogued by Nigel Huckins
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-01-23
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Reid, K
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
THEME SONG FROM RHAPSODY IN HUT 13-SWANNINGTON
Has anyone a fag’
‘Oh Annie must you nag?’
‘Are you going out Ray?
‘Yes going out with Sash
Girls, bags and bags of pash
With my honey child’
(One day that dame will drive me wild)
‘Bee have you a fag?’
‘No I haven’t any
But I’m going out with Penny
And he’ll give me some
‘oh Bee you are a one
Going out again
In all this pouring rain’
‘Well its worth going for’
‘Bee it won’t get you anywhere’
‘That’s what you think’
‘I think I’m going for a drink
Up to Ye Olde Naafi, are you coming Cathie?
‘No I’ll not come, bring me back a Naafi Wad
And a concrete bun’
‘Did you say you’d come Jan?’
‘Yes I’ll come with you Ann, but when I come back
I have my bag to pack, and some ironing to do,
Then I’ve quite a few things to get together,
And I’m wondering whether I should really wash my hair-
But then-I’ll wait till I get home,
Oh dear I can’t believe tomorrow I’ll be on leave
Look out mum, here I come’
‘Rita have you a fag?’
‘I’ve only matches in my bag and bother I’ve to phone’
Says Rita with a groan, ‘to tell them I’m going to the Section
Chiefy has a selection of eggs and bacon
Poor Tom he’ll thing he’s forsaken
I haven’t written for ages and he writes me pages and pages
I guess I’ll write him tomorrow’
‘Won’t anyone let me borrow
Just ONE fag’
‘For the sake of our sanity Annie
[inserted] Go & [/inserted] Put your head in a bag!
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Theme song from rhapsody in hut 13- Swannington
Description
An account of the resource
Multi-line poem echoing chat between friends. Asking for cigarettes, mentioning going out, going to NAAFI, domestic chores, boys.
Language
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eng
Type
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Text
Text. Poetry
Format
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One-page printed document
Conforms To
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Pending text-based transcription. Under review
Identifier
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SReidK473650v20016
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Norfolk
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Contributor
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Tricia Marshall
arts and crafts
ground personnel
military living conditions
RAF Swannington
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2219/39744/SReidK473650v20018.1.jpg
ca380980227fc4a97a19721313d37fc4
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Reid, Kathryn. Songs and poems
Description
An account of the resource
Thirty-seven items - songs/poems about wartime experiences.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by David Stuart Miers Reid and catalogued by Nigel Huckins
Date
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2018-01-23
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
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Reid, K
Transcribed document
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
RADIO ROUNDELAY
Mosquito’s at Swannington impatient to land
‘Round and Round I go
Heigho! Heigho!
‘Never get shut eye at this rate’
‘Oh hell you never can tell’
‘Listen old man I’ve got a date
With SNAKEHIPS and she’ll not wait’
‘Not with SNAKEHIPS again!
You are really tempting fate’
‘My good lord what a bore
Going round and round
The landing ground’
‘At Angels 9, 10 and 11
Going right up to blinking heaven!’
All this natter come to me
Over Swannington R/T
As Mosquito crews ‘muse’
Their patience just a little frayed
When waiting to pancake after a raid
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
Radio roundelay
Description
An account of the resource
Sub-titled 'Mosquito's at Swannington impatient to land. Eight verse poem about aircraft orbiting waiting to land.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Norfolk
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Poetry
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One-page printed document
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending text-based transcription. Under review
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
SReidK473650v20018
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
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Tricia Marshall
arts and crafts
Mosquito
RAF Swannington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2191/39804/BReidKReidKv1.2.pdf
28fabcdeccb529d543bf15aa641fb9c3
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
Reid, Kathleen
Reid, K
Reid, Kathryn
Reid, Katy
Description
An account of the resource
92 items and a <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2219">sub-collection with thirty-seven poems/songs</a>. The collection concerns Kathryn (Katy) Reid (Royal Air Force) and contains memoirs, correspondence, poems and photographs. The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by David Stuart Miers Reid and catalogued by Nigel Huckins
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-01-23
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Reid, K
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
ONE W;A.A.F’S [sic] WAR
My Call up Papers had stated I was to report at Innsworth Camp on the 1st of January., Eager to answer the call, I arrived at a very unearthly hour in Leeds station, the day before. Railway Stations during the war were live theatre, all the comings and goings. the thousands of uniformed men and women struggling with their kit bags and rushing to catch a seat on a train filled to bursting. Then the sad goodbye’s heartrending and tearful, and the thrill of the reunions between loved ones. The Stations were always dimly lit, and always in a smoke screen from the Steam Train pouring out its billowing clouds of smoke, giving a cloak of mystery to the dramatic scene.
I was travelling down to Glousester [sic] with my current boy friend, who by happy coincidence was returning from leave to his aircrew training camp near Gloucester. My Father came with me to the station to wave us off, poor father, he a very shy man, was very concerned at my leaving for what he thought; would be a life full of evil temptations. He plucked up the courage to enquire of two Waafs on the station, If they were happy in the forces? Their replies of assurance did not entirely reassure him and it was with a sad countenance he bade me farewell.
The train was crowded standing room only, and we arrived in Gloucester, in the evening. Found the hostel where I had booked in for the night, said a sad farewell to my boyfriend, whose last instructions were ‘Arrive in camp as early as you can tomorrow, then you’ll be able to get out to meet me, by Boots in the high street, at 8 o’clock to go to the cinema.
I had read, that Hostels in America, frequented by ‘Gentlemen of the road, where they had to sleep leaning on ropes fastened from the walls, and I braced myself for the prospect of a balancing act or a rope trick.. so, it was with much trepidation, I entered to portals of the hostel and found ---=== Everything whitewashed, dazzling white walls, long polished passages. A mature lady in a white coat gave me a bristling business like welcome and without more ado, took me upstairs to a vast long room. Never had I seen so many beds,, this was better than ropes!!
In the room were seversl [sic] girls, in different stages of undress, confusion covered me I had never shared a room with anyone before. I rushed to a bed at the far end of the room, the farthest away from an occupied one, undressed in record time and dived under the top blanket, where I lay and shivered all night.
Outside the snow was falling, my one top blanket was no protection in the unheated vast barrack=likr [sic] rroom. [sic] Was this a baptism, for hardships to come? By morning light, I found I had been sleeping= or trying to --- on the top of three more blankets and two sheets. My first lesson --- Look before you leap!
09-00 the reveille for breakfast and after dining on porridge, baked beans on toast and tanned tea, I paid the magnificent sum of one shilling, for breakfast and my night’s lodging.
Tramping through the snow, now lying thick on the Gloucester streets, I caught a bus to Innsworth Camp, walked the long, long lane, traversed thousands of times before by raw recruits and reported with nervous apprehension to the Guardroom, guarded by two RAF armed police who informed me ‘I was she [sic] first recruit of the day and I must await the arrival of the WAAF orderly.,
I waited for what seemed an eternity, under the scrutiny of the RAF guards, I took a dislike to them then and I never had the pleasure of altering my opinion. The orderly eventually arrived, a homely looking [inserted] girl [/inserted] [deleted] weighedth [/deleted] a cheerful smiling face, How good it was to see a smiling face! With a friendly offering ‘To carry my bag’ she escorted me from the gates of freedom into the arms of captivity. I plied her with questions ‘What was Waaf life like?’ ‘Did she like being in the Waaf?’ Her answers were far from cheering, but worse was to come, In reply to my question ‘Will I be allowed out of the camp tonight?’ [deleted] weighed most heavily upon me [/deleted] ‘Once you are in here, you are here for weeks’
I felt a net tightening round me, I wanted to wrench my case from her hand and run back the way I had come, but my feet, as if oblivious to the desire of my mind, ontinued [sic] to follow her. We entered a long low room [deleted] xds [/deleted]. On a large trestle table, there was surely, all the steel collection of Sheffield,, thousands of knives, forks and spoons, my escort selected one of each and asked t
[page break]
[underlined] 2 [/underlined]
My escort asked if I wanted anything to eat. As I didn’t, I was then taken to a long row of wooden huts row upon row as far as the eye could see. They looked cold and comfortless, rising from the snow covered ground, black and bleak. Entering in, I found it as cold as it looked. The big black iron stove in the centre was unlit.. Down each side of the hut were 12 iron beds and stacked on them were grey blankets and three small square buff coloured mattresses. Biscuits they were called. I dumped my case on the bed nearest to the door and near to one of the few-all too few-windows, then sat down on the available seat … that of the iron spring mattress.
There I sat, shivering, until another new recruit joined me about lunchtime. Together we braved the unknown terrors of the cookhouse. It was a long low building with bare walls of a non-descript shade. Concrete floor ornamented here and there with scraps of food and pools of spilt tea. The tables were long and bare with backless wooden benches to sit by them. The eyes of all the girls already dining there seemed to be pinned upon US. Was this because we were the only ones still in civilian dress?
We nervously approached the Hot Plates. Now what do we do?. Suddenly a loud YELL behind us. “Take off your headgear when in the dining room”. We turn in terror to see a Corporal WAAF – Gosh we were in the presence of a veritable god!. And it was glaring at US!
We immediately doffed our offending winter headgear and grabbed a plate, holding it out to the girl behind the Hot Plate. She threw upon it with great vehemence, a spoonful of potatoes. We walk a few paces to another WAAF in a dirty overall and cap, she with the same GOOD GRACE, provided us with some watery cabbage and a few-very few-pieces of meat. THEN with a dull thud a piece of pudding is thrown on another plate. We balance them and retire to the further most table from the uniformed throng and start to attack our dinner.
Our fastidious tastes and stomachs, revolt at the food before us. We push the main course uneaten, to one side and begin to try to bombard the pudding. She who has tasted airforce boiled pudding can never forget it. If only it was worth its weight in gold!. We give up the task of trying to eat it as a hopeless one and deposit it down the holes provided for hopeless repasts and depart as hungry as before – declaring that we would NEVER NEVER eat such a meal …… by the next day we were only thankful to eat ANYTHING provided, we were so hungry.
I was later to learn of the hard work and long hours the WAAF’s in the Cookhouse had to endure. If anyone got a raw deal they did ….. so did we, sometimes at the receiving end.
By late afternoon the hut was full of girls, all shapes, sizes and variety from all walks of life. Everyone of us wrote letters home to say we had arrived safely and not to write back for a week. Talk about severing relationships – we all felt cut off and cut up by cruel officialdom.
At nine o clock we all marched, well tried, to a hanger at the farthermost part of the camp. In this huge hanger I felt the size of a fly. We were seated at long tables, provided with pencils and paper and were told by a WAAF sergeant that we were to have an intelligence test.
Feeling far from intelligent, tired by the events of the day and bewildered by so many people around me, we were given maths, english and psychology questions – the latter consisting of fixing squares with squares and circles with circles. Talk about putting a square peg in a round hole! .. A time limit was set. I looked around with great satisfaction to see others likewise nibbling at pencil ends and other eyes beside mine gazing at ceilings and walls seeking inspiration!. The cold walls gave cold comfort – my mental assets were frozen like me and I handed in my papers with great unsatisaction. [sic]
We were marched back to our huts through a Gloucester snowstorm to find that the sergeant in charge of the hut had lit a coke fire. Warmed at the thought we made up our beds in the approved RAF style – [inserted] Grey Blanket [/inserted] corners tucked under biscuits. – followed by a cold wash in a cold ablution block.. Ah those ablutions!. The memory of the odour in them lingers yet. I retired to bed, my troubled sleep broken by sobs from adjacent beds. My first day in the WAAF’S was over. What would tomorrow bring?
[page break]
COMPTON BASSETT
The next morning on parade at nine feeling smart and resplendent in our uniforms we began to shiver and became numb with cold – it was snowing hard. We were taken in charge by a WAAF corporal and put through our paces. The next four hours consisted of marching. Left right left right: about turn: saluting to the right: saluting to the left: eyes right eyes left: eyes crossed – well I felt mine were! My feet in strong flat shoes ached and my mind felt blank under the cross fire of orders directed from an outside source. Instead of choosing my own way I had to follow orders quickly and mechanically. This felt very strange but would have to be got used to which of course we did. After 6 weeks of “square bashing” we were fit enough to bash anything!
We had lectures on hygiene, health matters, social graces and smoking – the latter being a “filthy habit” the young WAAF Officer stressed. On going to her office to get a pass to the nearest town I noticed a cigarette dish brimming over with fag ends on the front of her desk. A case of “Do as I say not as I do”!
We did have a farewell concert. The Corporal who produced this fancied himself as a theatrical agent and chose the girls on a show of legs! We – the chosen ones – had to send home for our most glamorous gowns. Mine was backless but had a fancy jacket to wear over it. The producer insisted that I shouldn’t wear the jacket but I overruled him. I was too shy to wear a backless dress in front of an audience of airmen – how times have changed! Our efforts were noisily greeted – talk about audience participation! All light-hearted banter to close a chapter of our introduction to service life.
At the ‘passing out’ parade we had a splendid band playing all the popular RAF tunes. A very handsome young officer took the salute. My marching companion remarked ‘Doesn’t it make you feel proud’? I replied ‘I haven’t done anything to be proud of yet’! The handsome officer chose the prettiest girl in the parade to talk to – we felt rather proud as he had chosen a girl from OUR hut maned Margot Nunns. I wonder what happened to her? I’m sure she would be a success as she had started well!
[page break]
[deleted] 34 [/deleted]
[underlined] 5. [/underlined]
For a month we marched, had hygiene lessons and physical jerks. Every morning we arose at 6am and stood by the side of our beds to be inspected from head to toe by a WAAF Officer whose eagle eye missed …… nothing. We had vaccinations against typhoid and other diseases. I propagated against them to the other girls saying that I had read that we could refuse to have the injections. As we lined up with left arm bare for the needle, the WAAF orderly took a dim view of my stammering refusal to have the injection and gave me such a withering look as she said “Well if you refuse to have the injection and become ill we can refuse to look after you”. I then weakened and succumbed to her instrument of torture only to find that the other WAAFS had taken my advice and refused. I suffered more from my embarrassment about not practicing what I had preached to them, than from the needle!
Some of the girls – [deleted] about 18 in all [/deleted] [inserted] about 12 in all [/inserted] – had to queue at the tailors to have alterations to their uniforms. They had to wait a long time and this, along with the intense cold and the fact that they had just had their injections, had a depressing effect upon them. The result was I, and the other occupant of the hut, witnessed in all their entrances the same procedure. The door opened and a white face appeared. The owner of it staggered through the door and made an unsteady bee-line to her bed. And after throwing herself upon it burst into tears. After witnessing this monotonous behaviour 12 times, the afore mentioned witness remarked “Well if I didn’t know where I was I’d think I was in a lunatic asylum”. However my turn was to come. That night I was on fire picket duty. This meant reporting to a corporal sitting in a hut about half a mile away. I had to write my name in a registration book and under threat of a charge had to stay in my own hut all evening – so that in case of a fire I could put it out. We had one small – but none the less heavy-bucket in the hut and I was not sure what use this would have been in the event of a fire. In any case my legs were like jelly as a result of the earlier vaccination and I would not have been much use should an emergency have arisen. However I had to take the bucket to fill it with water. Staggering back with it into the hut I found the window between my bed and the next one – which I had opened before going out – had been closed. The cold and the injection must have befuddled my senses because this constituted a major tragedy and I howled myself to sleep
The next morning, with swimming heads and stiff arms, the order was to “March and Swing ‘Em”. She meant arms not heads although the latter would have perhaps have been kinder to me in my present state of mind [inserted] AFTER A MONTH OF [deleted] I [/deleted] ‘Square Bashing’ I felt I could bash anything. [/inserted]
[page break]
COMPTON BASSETT
After lunch we were marched through the rain to the Equipment Hanger. A huge place reminding me of a prison mailbag room – it smelt the same. I hasten to add that my visit to Armley Jail was to entertain prisoners with the concert party I belonged to! At the first counter we were issued with caps. The great coat came later. Then with an empty kit bag we filed past what seemed dozens of counters filling the kit-bag till it overflowed with items – knife fork and spoon; woollen hood; grey stockings; pair of flat shoes; 2 blue shirts; bloomers (passion killers); humbug striped pyjamas; gas mask; tin hat; WAAF hat; two skirts; 2 jackets; waterproof cape and identity card. I had to drag it along as the kit bag was as big as myself! It took a lot of manoeuvring on my part. At last we were in possession of every article His Majesty’s Government were please to give us! As we came out of the opposite end of the hanger it was with a sigh of relief to see lorries waiting to take us – and our burdens – back to our huts.
We couldn’t get back quick enough. Although tired and dispirited by the day’s events and not a little dampened by the eternal rain, we simply had to try on our uniforms! Mine fitted where it touched but I did not trouble about that! But I remember I put my collar inside my shirt neckband instead of outside and nearly succeeded in chocking [sic] myself. Conscientiously articles were marked with the ink provided – with name, number and date. Then lights out and sleep. Nature’s blessed curtain of peace descended upon us – yet not all of us as I still heard sobs from adjacent beds.
The next morning on parade at nine feeling smart and resplendent in our uniforms we began shiver and became numb with cold – it was snowing hard. We were taken in charge by a WAAF corporal and put through our paces. For the next four hours life consisted of marching. Left right left right: about turn: saluting to the right: saluting to the left: eyes right eyes left: eyes crossed – well I felt mine were! My feet in strong flat shoes ached and my mind felt blank under the cross fire of orders directed from an outside source. Instead of choosing my own way I had to follow orders quickly and mechanically. This felt very strange but would have to be got used to which of course we did. After 6 weeks of ‘square bashing’ we were fit enough to bash anything!
At the ‘passing out’ parade we had a splendid band playing all the popular RAF tunes. A very handsome young officer took the salute. My marching companion remarked ‘Doesn’t it make you feel proud’? I replied ‘I haven’t done anything to be proud of yet’! The handsome officer chose the prettiest girl in the parade to talk to – we felt rather proud as he had chosen a girl from OUR hut named Margot Nunns. I wonder what happened to her? I’m sure she would be a success as she had started well!
Then came the posting to a different station – BAWTRY HALL
[page break]
COMPTON BASSETT
We did have a farewell concert. The Corporal who produced this fancied himself as a theatrical agent and chose the girls on a show of legs! We – the chosen ones – had to send home for our most glamorous gowns. Mine was a backless but had a fancy jacket to wear over it. The producer insisted that I shouldn’t wear the jacket but I overruled him. I was too shy to wear a backless dress in front of an audience of airmen – how times have changed! Our efforts were noisily greeted – talk about audience participation! All light-hearted banter to close a chapter of our introduction to service life
Bawtry Hall in Norfolk was the next chapter. Dorothy and I arrived there in the rain and we were housed in the cook’s hut. The language upset Dorothy so much that she said in tears “Oh Katie what have we come to?” By the next morning we knew! The WAAF Officer gave us the task of cleaning the ablutions! “How good of the Air Ministry to send 2 girls to clean the station”. After three months Dorothy “escaped” to be the secretary to one of the top Brass in 1 Group and I escaped by the kindness of Sgt Spud – not a fitting name for a very beautiful and kind girl. She took me into a very large telephone exchange. I took an exam for this work and passed. One night I was alone on duty when Sqdrn Ldr. Sharp called into the exchange for a chat. I told him I hadn’t joined the force to become a switchboard operator. I wanted to be a radio operator with the planes and be where the action was. He promised that he would help me and soon afterwards sent me for just 2 weeks to RAF Grimsby (Waltham). I arrived on station to see beautiful Lancasters emerging from the mist. I fell in love with them – still am! After 2 weeks in the telephone exchange I asked Flt Lt Reece if he would let me stay. He said that he would be delighted to keep me. Then followed the happiest time spent on the happiest station where tragically death had dominion – but so had laughter, romance, happiness, humour and YOUTH.
The telephone exchange was small and sited in a hut. It was manned by one operator at night and two by day. Our Corporal Vera was lovely and really mothered us. She was also in charge of our Nissen hut – number 13. Belying the number it was a happy hut lying cheek by jowl with the wonderful Waltham Windmill. I practiced learning to cycle around the base of the Windmill – a bike was a necessity to get up to the operations station. It took me a long time to balance when getting on and off the bike When large vehicles bringing fuel and bombs to the base passed within a hair’s breath I used to throw myself and my bike into the ditch and then wait for a kindly passer by to hold the bike whilst I jumped back on
[page break]
COMPTON BASSETT
We did have a farewell concert. The Corporal who produced this fancied himself as a theatrical agent and chose the girls on a show of legs! We – the chosen ones – had to send home for our most glamorous gowns. Mine was a backless but had a fancy jacket to wear over it. The producer insisted that I shouldn’t wear the jacket but I overruled him. I was too shy to wear a backless dress in front of an audience of airmen – how times have changed! Our efforts were noisily greeted – talk about audience participation! All light-hearted banter to close a chapter of our introduction to service life
[inserted] THEN CAME THE POSTING – NO NOT BY MAIL! BY COINCIDENCE BEING YORKSHIRE GIRLS WE WERE POSTED TO YORKSHIRE [/inserted]
Bawtry Hall in [deleted] Norfolk [/deleted] was the next chapter. Dorothy and I arrived there in the rain and we were housed in the cook’s hut. The language upset Dorothy so much that she said in tears “Oh Katie what have we come to?” By the next morning we knew! The WAAF Officer gave us the task of cleaning the ablutions! “How good of the Air Ministry to send 2 girls to clean the station”. After three months Dorothy “escaped” to be the secretary to one of the top Brass in 1 Group and I escaped by the kindness of Sgt Spud – not a fitting name for a very beautiful and kind girl. She took me into a very large telephone exchange. I took an exam for this work and passed. One night I was along on duty when Sqdrn Ldr. Sharp called into the exchange for a chat. I told him I hadn’t joined the force to become a switchboard operator. I wanted to be a radio operator with the planes and be where ethe action was. He promised that he would help me and soon afterwards sent me for just 2 weeks to RAF Grimsby (Waltham). I arrived on station to see beautiful Lancasters emerging from the mist. I fell in love with them – still am! After 2 weeks in the telephone exchange I asked Flt Lt Reece if he would let me stay. He said that he would be delighted to keep me. Then followed the happiest time spent on the happiest station where tragically death had dominion – but so had laughter, romance, happiness, humour and YOUTH.
The telephone exchange was small and sited in a hut. It was manned by one operator at night and two by day. Our Corporal Vera was lovely and really mothered us. She was also in charge of our Nissen hut – number 13. Belying the number it was a happy hut lying cheek by jowl with the wonderful Waltham Windmill. I practiced learning to cycle around the base of the Windmill – a bike was a necessity to get up to the operations station. It took me a long time to balance when getting on and off the bike When large vehicles bringing fuel and bombs to the base passed within a hair’s breath I used to throw myself and my bike into the ditch and then wait for a kindly passer by to hold the bike whilst I jumped back on
[page break]
Bawtry Hall in Yorkshire was the [deleted] next chapter. [deleted] [inserted] First posting you are asked where you would like to go – but rarely sent there!! As we were Yorkshire girls we didn’t mind Bawtry Hall Sounded nice [deleted] [indecipherable word] posting [/deleted] [/inserted] Dorothy and I arrived there in the rain and we were housed in the cook’s hut. [deleted] The [/deleted] [inserted] Their [/inserted] language upset Dorothy so much that she said in tears “Oh Katie what have we come to?” By the next morning we knew! The WAAF Officer gave us the task of cleaning the ablutions! “How good of the Air Ministry to send 2 girls to clean the station”. After three months Dorothy “escaped” to be the secretary to one of the top Brass in 1 Group and I escaped by the kindness of Sgt Spud – not a fitting name for a very beautiful and kind girl. She took me into a very large telephone exchange. I took an exam for this work and passed. [inserted] [symbol] [/inserted] [inserted] [symbol] many months later [/inserted] One night I was alone on duty when Sqdrn Ldr. Sharp called into the exchange for a chat. I told him I hadn’t joined the force to become a switchboard operator. I wanted to be a radio operator with the planes and be where the action was. He promised that he would help me and soon afterwards sent me for just 2 weeks to RAF Grimsby (Waltham) [inserted] [symbol] [/inserted] [inserted] [symbol] reminding me it was only for 2 weeks [/inserted]. I arrived on station to see beautiful Lancasters emerging from the mist. I fell in love with them – still am! After 2 weeks in the telephone exchange I asked Flt Lt Reece if he would let [inserted] me [/inserted] stay. He said that he would be delighted to keep me. Then followed the happiest time spent on the happiest station where tragically death had dominion – but so had laughter, romance, happiness, humour and YOUTH!
The telephone exchange was small and sited in a hut. It was manned by one operator at night and two by day. Our Corporal-Vera-was lovely and really mothered us. She was also in charge of our Nissen hut – number 13. Belying the number it was a happy hut lying cheek by jowl with the wonderful Waltham Windmill. I practiced learning to cycle around the base of the Windmill – a bike was a necessity to get up to the operations station. It took me a long time to balance when getting on and off the bike When large vehicles bringing fuel and bombs to the base passed within a hair’s breath I used to throw myself and my bike into the ditch and then wait for a kindly passer by to hold the bike whilst I jumped back on it!.
When I was first on duty in the telephone exchange lots of aircrew came in to ‘look me over’ but as they thought I only looked 14 they soon ceased calling sad to report!
The duty that I did not enjoy was on operational nights. We had orders to listen in for aircrew calling their girlfriends to sadly inform them that their date was off and why. We had to pull out the plug on these calls. I knew why there was a necessity for doing this but I always felt guilty and sad about it. They couldn’t phone from the village phone box as it was wrapped in coils of thick rope and guarded by a policeman. I later discovered that Aircrew had a way of getting around these restrictions. They would borrow a bicycle and cycle to the next village to ring from the phone box there – with no ropes and no policeman to prevent access! Foolish perhaps putting their lives and those of other aircrew in danger – but love always finds a way!
The Group Captain used to call in to see us – he was kindly and friendly as were all the pre-war Officers. When the Sqdn Ldr discovered that I was waiting for the RT/DF course at Cranwell he said “Half Pint” (my nickname for being the smallest WAAF on the station) after keeping you here from Bawtry Hall it breaks my heart to loose you but I’m sending you up to Flying Control so that you will be proficient before the Cranwell course”. I was but that’s another story. [inserted] The weeks flew by I could’nt [sic] have been happier. I loved my work though our losses were many saddened us. [/inserted]
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Bawtry Hall in [deleted] Norfolk [/deleted] [inserted] YORKSHIRE [/inserted] was the next chapter. Dorothy and I arrived there in the rain and we were housed in the cook’s hut. The language upset Dorothy so much that she said in tears “Oh Katie what have we come to?” By the next morning we knew! The WAAF Officer gave us the task of cleaning the ablutions! “How good of the Air Ministry to send 2 girls to clean the station”. After three months Dorothy “escaped” to be the secretary to one of the top Brass in 1 Group and I escaped by the kindness of Sgt Spud – not a fitting name for a very beautiful and kind girl. She took me into a very large telephone exchange. I took an exam for this work and passed. One night I was alone on duty when Sqdrn Ldr. Sharp called into the exchange for a chat. I told him I hadn’t joined the force to become a switchboard operator. I wanted to be a radio operator with the planes and be where the action was. He promised that he would help me and soon afterwards sent me for just 2 weeks to RAF Grimsby (Waltham). I arrived on station to see beautiful Lancasters emerging from the mist. I fell in love with them – still am! After 2 weeks in the telephone exchange I asked Flt Lt Reece if he would let me stay. He said that he would be delighted to keep me. Then followed the happiest time spent on the happiest station where tragically death had dominion – but so had laughter, romance, happiness, humour and YOUTH.
The telephone exchange was small and sited in a hut. It was manned by one operator at night and two by day. Our Corporal Vera was lovely and really mothered us. She was also in charge of our Nissen hut – number 13. Belying the number it was a happy hut lying cheek by jowl with the wonderful Waltham Windmill. I practiced learning to cycle around the base of the Windmill – a bike was a necessity to get up to the [inserted] [symbol] The long white road. [/inserted] [inserted] [symbol] SITE [/inserted] operational [deleted] station[/deleted] [inserted] site [/inserted]. It took me a long time to balance when getting on and off the bike When large vehicles bringing fuel and bombs to the base passed within a hair’s breath I used to throw myself and my bike into the ditch and then wait for a kindly passer by to hold the bike whilst I jumped back on [inserted] IT. [/inserted]
When I was first on duty in the telephone exchange lots of aircrew came in to ‘look me over’ but as they thought I only looked 14 they soon ceased calling sad to report!
The duty that I did not enjoy was on operational nights. We had orders to listen in for aircrew calling their girlfriends to sadly inform them that their date was off and why. We [deleted] then [/deleted] had to pull out the plug on these calls. I knew why there was a necessity for doing this but I always felt guilty and sad about it. [inserted] [symbol] [/inserted] [deleted] In addition [/deleted] the village phone box [inserted] [symbol] They couldnT [sic] phone from the village phone box as it was wrapped in coils of thick [deleted] wire [/deleted] rope [/inserted] was wrapped in coils of thick rope and guarded by a policeman. I later discovered that Aircrew had a way of getting around these restrictions. They would borrow a bicycle and cycle to the next village to ring from the phone box there – no ropes and no policeman! Foolish perhaps putting their lives and those of other aircrew in danger – but love always finds a way!
The Group Captain used to call in to see us – he was kindly and friendly as were all the pre-war Officers. When the Sqdn Ldr discovered that I was waiting for the RT/DF course at Cranwell he said “half Pint” (my nickname for being the smallest WAAF on the station) after keeping you here from Bawtry Hall it breaks my heart to loose [sic] you but I’m sending you up to Flying Control so that you will be proficient before the Cranwell course”. I was but that’s another story.
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CRANWELL
Bernard had carried my kitbag up the long White Road to where the station transport was waiting for me. He looked forlorn and lonely and my heart ached for him. But with a cheery “I’ll see you at Christmas” I waved farewell and kept waving until he was out of sight.
Arrived Cranwell by station transport at 1pm. The winter winds blow hard across the lovely Lincolnshire countryside – the leafless trees unable to stop them. Cranwell in December is cold enough to freeze a brass monkey. After waiting a year for the course I would die for – if absolutely necessary. On arrival I was billeted in one of the huts that had previously been allocated to married Air Force families during peacetime.
I shared the downstairs room consisting of a kitchen, bathroom and bedroom with 2 other WAAFS on the course. One Scots girl (Ann from Paisley) who had the fiercest temper which occasionally I had the misfortune to being on the receiving end of and a London girl called Tony. They were in situ first and so had arranged their beds nearest to the fireplace! The fire had to be refuelled in the evenings with sticks and brush wood found around the camp as there was a fuel shortage – the coal ration soon ran out. Wood gathering was supposed to be a united effort but depended solely on me! There was an old fashioned copper boiler in the kitchen for heating the bathwater but with the scarcity of fuel we had to contend with cold showers!
The furniture was Spartan. Three iron bedsteads and two hard chairs. Also a wooden box for a locker. Food was provided in the mess hall. There were vans arriving at different times of the day to provide refreshments. The Catholic van was the most expensive and the Church Army the cheapest – and the most popular because of the prices. Refreshments were very welcome on the cold days we were experiencing.
The next day we were shown over the camp by a WAAF corporal. We had a look inside Cranwell College and the large room we would occupy. It was just like school – blackboard; school desks and no heating! I was then enrolled on the RT D/F course with about 30 other girls. The following day we all met again after marching in squads to the cookhouse. Lanterns were carried at night to avoid being run over by passing traffic in the dark
As Cranwell classrooms were large and cold we sat at our desks wearing greatcoats and gloves – even the lecturers wore their outdoor attire. Towards the end of the course two months later some of us had chilblains on feet and hands.
Our instructors were CPL Metcalfe (a kindly middle aged man) and CPL Gallagher – a Scot from Glasgow. Both men in civilian life had been teachers. They were excellent instructors. For a Limey like me the accent of CPL Gallagher had to be listened to very carefully to understand what he was saying. He spoke with his mouth virtually closed and I often wondered why. During the late 1960s I worked as a teacher in the Gorbals district of Glasgow. I came to the conclusion that Glaswegian mouths are not opened too wide because of the strong winds that blow through the city!
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It was a crash course of 8 weeks and included physics; electricity/OHMS law; principles of the internal combustion engine; compression; induction power and exhaust; morse and aldis lamp practice; R/T AND D/F direction finding. In the hanger – draughty and colder than the classroom – we were instructed in wiring; soldering and VHF short range. We were instructed by a civilian technical teacher and for me it was the hardest part of the course – not being at all practical. This instructor will be remembered for his opening words which were always the same and appealed to our sense of humour. “Now girls – always remember first of all to Tin your irons”. I had waited for this course and I was determined to pass it. I was so anxious to qualify that I studied all of the time. As a result I did not learn about – or make use of – the stations social amenities. When I was not studying I went into the nearby wood to collect twigs and branches to keep the fires going – a fire that I could rarely enjoy as the two other WAAFS commandeered the chairs by the small fireplace when they were not out enjoying the night life of Cranwell. I was really scared of the Scots girl’s fiery temper. I think I was resented because I was keen to study and they weren’t. It was a sad and lonely time and so cold the greatcoat was a blessing as it served as an extra blanket at night as a defence against the cold
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CRANWELL
Cranwell was isolated from the world. There were no newspapers; no news reports. We were instructed that if we heard an aircraft take off with an unusually sounding engine we were told not to talk about it to anyone. I later learned that it was the jet engine being tested
I can’t quite remember but I think it must have been because of a lack of fuel that we were moved from a downstairs room. I was given an upstairs flat to myself. My ex room-mates appeared to regard Cranwell as an opportunity to improve their social life. There were many foreign men on the station – especially Poles whose reputation did not enhance for me their attraction. I’m sure that some WAAFS will have failed the course due to their choice of priority!
The Church Parade was a very important occasion for His Majesty’s Forces. At Cranwell it was held every Sunday. One Sunday we assembled on the square in front of the Church as usual. After standing for what seemed hours with a wintry gale blowing right through us we were the last unit to enter the church. There was some grumbling amongst us about how cold we were – but nothing more. However the following Sunday morning no WAAFS turned up for the parade. I swear that there had been no conspiracy or consultation. We were all in the same frame of mind having been very very cold.
Pandemonium and a rude awakening for us! NCO’s began rushing around the WAAF’s quarters, banging on doors and shouting our names. We were hauled from our beds – all 200 of us – and told to report with full kit to the Admin Office. We were eventually charged to report with full kit every hour every day for a fortnight to the Office. We were also allocated evening cleaning work and confined to camp. The NCO’s (admin) were very cross because they had to do all the supervising – and they were also therefore confined to camp! WAAF Officers heads must have rolled too.
By the end of the fortnight Cranwell had never been so clean. But someone must have felt a little sorry for the way in which we had to face the wintry blast as we were never instructed to attend again!
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I was pleased with my test results from Cranwell
1st Test TEC 75 percent
PROC 93 percent
2nd Test TEC 81 percent
PROC 80 percent
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1.
L.A.C.W. Kathryn Reid (Nee Kathy Myers)
W.A.A.F, No. 473650. R.A.F. Oulton 1944.
After training at Cranwell as R/T.D/F Operator, I was posted to Sculthorpe, I had already had experience in this work at R.A.f. [sic] Waltham with 100 Squadron, and was hoping to go back there, as it was such a happy station, but instead of Lincolnshire, I was posted to Norfolk.
After a few months at Sculthorpe, the Station was closed. It was no longer Operational because the runways were in such a bad state of disrepair, the result of the many sorties that had been undertaken from this Station, under the leadership of the very famous fighter pilot, Group Captain Pickard D.S.O. .D.F.C.., This was the reason given to us when we were all moved, British and American personnel to Oulton.
As the whole camp was being moved, I can’t remember the reason why three of us from Signal Section, were dumped from a Station transport on to a deserted Norfolk lane one morning in March. We were quite lost in the endless Norfolk lanes, criss-crossing the chequered countryside --- no signposts of course. We stared across the flat monotonous landscape, hoping for a glimpse of grounded planes and strained our ears for the sound of revving engines --- but all in vain.
The reflection of the white surface of the lanes in the glare of the midday sun tore at our eyeballs -- the pangs of hunger tore at our senses and the heavy unwieldly Waaf shoes. tore at our heels, leaving our flagging feet, sore and blistered --- and always there was the fear that we were just going round in a circle, as people in desert places are reported to do and we would arrive back at our desolate starting place.
Three more sorry specimans [sic] of homeless, hungry and unhappy Waafs could not have been found in any English lane that day --- if there had been a living soul to find them! but the landscape was quite devoid of human life and it seemed as if we three, were the only ones left in the whole wide world.
With the coming of evening, the sinister silence was at last broken by the sound of aircraft engines, revving up to race across the North sea. We staggered towards the sound and found --- at long last --- the Oulton technical site -- complete with cookhouse! We sat or rather fell down to the festive board to a repast surpassing the food of the Gods --- a supper of burn’t [sic] beans and cold tanny tea.
The Americans were billeted near the technical site -- the best site -- and had their own cookhouse. Their food and their living quarters were good, even their uniforms were made of excellent material. We Waafs were housed in Nissen huts by the lake, a picturesque spot, but, after snow or heavy rain, the huts were often flooded ankle deep! The Aircrew, [deleted] I think [/deleted] were billeted at the far side of the lake or in the Hall. The far side of the lake was out of bounds to us.
[inserted] It was several miles it was in the opposite direction of our billets & after night duty we were often too tired to cycle there [/inserted]
As we Waafs had a long cycle ride to the cookhouse to get our meals, after night duties, we were too tired to go for them. With the result a notice appeared on D.R.O’s that ----- ‘Any Waafs reporting sick and found to be suffering from malnutrition, would be put on a charge’ Our meals were not good, one of the girls was advised by her father, a doctor, to tell us to put plenty of sauce, of any variety or quality on our food to obtain some nourishment, this we did. They helped to camouflage the beefburgers and [deleted] corn [/deleted] [inserted] corned beef [/inserted] beef that were monotonously served up to us.. The bread was thick and sometimes of uncertain age, the jam more sugery [sic] than fruity, The tea, like washing up water --- oh yes the duty officer used to come round regularly to our ‘festive board’ but complaints were few, we knew it was useless [inserted] [deleted] They fell on deaf ears [/deleted] [/inserted] to do so and at least we had food and it was – wartime.
After emerging from the cookhouse, [deleted] we used to [/deleted] [inserted] We as usual dangled our irons [/inserted] dangle our ‘irons’ – knife, fork, spoon and mug into a tank of greasy water, that was situated by the door, then having waved them in the air to dry them, we mou nted our bicycles and cycled to duty or back to our Waaf site.
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[underlined] 2 [/underlined]
Our mail was opened and censored. One parcel I sent home to my parents containing fruit etc; that I had purchased from a neighbouring farm, when delivered, had gained an Airman’s sock!. One Waaf friend in Meteorology, had written a graphic account to her parents, of the exotic food that had been especially flown in from abroad, for a high ranking Officers party. This letter resulted in her being brought before the Waaf Officer, who gave her a severe warning not to repeat this performance, or she would be put on a charge. The letter of course was destroyed.
The Americans used to get upset at the slow mailing system and classed it as ---- Stagecoach --- They were very friendly and charming and treated us with respect. I cannot speak too highly of them, especially of one; Sgt: Ford Killen, who became a lifelong friend.
The R.A.F. Aircrew, also from Sculthorpe, were being converted from Stirlings, to fly American aircraft at night. They had suffered terrible losses on Stirlings and the strain of this showed. The American crews were operational during the daylight hours. Although we in Flying Control liaisoned [sic] with them, they had their own Signal section, to control their aircraft landings and take off. I was told, that, after a bombing run, returning American pilots were directed to land by personnel, instructing them from an aircraft over the Drome! In our Flying control, we had the duty of course to listen out for all aircraft in our radio range and many an American Pilot calling ‘DARKY’ becaues [sic] he had lost his way over Norfolk, was helped by us, to find it again!.
It was truly an awesome sight, to see the great mass of American aircraft, filling the Norfolk morning skies as they passed overhead on their daily bombing runs. One morning there was a mid--air collision and many of the crews parachuted safely on to our Drome --- It did look at the time, rather like an invasion!
In May 1944, B19 Flying Fortresses of 214 Squadron, with a detachment of the 8th Air Force, No 803 Squadron; were engaged in various radio Counter measures. Jamming the enemy’s radio transmissions on a variety of wavebands. The V 2 Rockets and the Big Ben Jostle etc. All aircraft was fitted with this equipment. It was found that the B 24 Liberators were better suited to the working of this. Until we learned of this important radio work. we had wondered why, every American aircraft, when grounded on the Drome, had an armed guard, day and night. Their first daylight mission was on the third of June and their first night’s operation, a few night’s later, in support of D. Day. landings.
I was on duty in Flying Control the morning of D. Day. There was a lot of aircraft activity, but we were unaware of the reason for this, until much later. I remember an American Sgt: enquiring of me if our signal controls were working alright, as their important signals weren’t. He was rushing around very upset indeed,
Our night duties were of 12 hours duration, if there wasn’t any flying I was on duty alone. ‘listening out’, the Flying Control Officer would be on call if needed. Compared to my night duties at Oulton, when 100 Squadron was taking part in their nightly bombing raids, duty at Oulton was quieter and less traumatic. We occasionally got ‘intruders’ German fighter planes, straffing the Drome. It was dramatic, to see from Flying Control, strands of their gunfire criss-crossing the Airfield like jewelled ribbons. The action always happened too quickly to alarm me, and their fire, caused no damage to men or machines the times I witnessed this. But the problem was, that our aircraft, if waiting to land, had to be diverted away from the Drome. No small problem, if they were short of fuel, as was often the case. [inserted] – they always seemed to have the minimum of fuel for their Bombing raids. This fact we always felt sorry for the Aircrew as it often meant a difference between life and death [/inserted]
[inserted] we had to divert them away from the Drome [/inserted]
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3
In the following 3/4th of March, a large force of 100 enemy intruders attacked returning aircraft over Norfolk Airfields. At Oulton, a B17 from 214 Squadron was shot down near the Station sick quarters and only two gunners escaped.
The girls in Signal and Met: Sections, because of their night duties, were usually accommodated, in the same huts. At Oulton, we were all in Nissen hut 13. I remember some of the girls there --- Jean Anderson, Louise Simmons, Renie Saunders, Ann Cross, Daphne Verbeke, Joyce, Yvonne and Margaret. The Nissen hut housed about 12 girls, we took it in turns to keep the place tidy, Thursday night was ‘Domestic night’ followed by an Officer inspection on Friday. We also had to take our turn to light the ugly coke stove, in the centre of the hut. This to me was almost an impossible task and I spent hours coaxing the coke and twigs of wood, to inflame. Coke was often in short supply, so being the smallest Waaf in the hut, I had occasionally to creep into the ‘coke hole’ to steal some.
I remember the croaking of hundreds of frogs after rain, carpeting green our pathways, roads and lanes, also the large number of rabbits on the camp. The wonderful trees and the beautiful lake, that had been out of bounds, but in May the ban was lifted. Also we were given permission to wear, when off duty, civilian clothes. Not many of us took advantage of these concessions. [inserted] We had lived too long in our uniforms & [deleted] were [/deleted] we were proud of them & we’d no coupons for glad rags! can’t remember even window shopping in Norwich gazing at lovely dresses made one feel nostalgic would we ever wear again pretty dresses girls yearn for – anyway shopkeepers in Norwich only seemed to stock swords – how the Americans loved them. [/inserted]
Blickling Hall was out of bounds to us --- we would pass by and admire it, but never set foot in it. I think Officers were billeted there and Dominion air-crew. I did hear a rumour of one of the Canadians, falling from an upstairs window and breaking his leg.!
Off duty, we were allowed 24 hours leave every month. We used to cycle to Norwich and stay overnight at the Y.W.C.A. near the Cathedral. There were plenty of entertainments for the Forces. Dances and Concerts. I remember going to see a performance by the singer ‘Hutch’ and how, between his songs, he mopped his brow with great affectation! I remember too, on my first cycle ride to Norwich with my American friend Ford, we got lost and had to find our way across the big American airfield Horsham St Faith --- Of course we were stopped by a convoy of Service police, but when we showed our identity, they kindly -- but quickly, escorted us to the nearest exit!
With the girls from the Signal and Met: Sections, we spent leisure hours cycling -- how quiet the roads and lanes were, perfect for this activity. We cycled to Sandringham and found the little church there, decorated with yellow Spring flowers, making a glorious golden glow. We often visited the Slipper Chapel, that too was always decorated with flowers. I remember a Cafe near there -- a village house with the front room converted into an eating place. The lady of the house apologised because she couldn’t give us a hot luncheon, ‘But would we mind making do with an egg?’ We enjoyed the meal she kindly placed before us, a splendid repast of [inserted] 2 [/inserted] eggs and ham, followed by plums and custard, a rare feast for eyes and stomach!
I found Norfolk people very kind and friendly. The best friend to us on the Station, was ‘Mother Riley’ She and her family, owned the grocers shop in Cawston and kept open house to us all. Making us welcome with wonderful meals, and also inviting Aircrews and their wives to spend their leaves there. I sometimes attended the little Chapel in the Village with ‘Mother Riley’ we all caller her that. [inserted] – [deleted] not because [/deleted] she [deleted] had [/deleted] [inserted] did not have [/inserted] the slightest likeness to the thin popular variety character Mother Riley but because she was a Mother to us all who were fortunate enough to know her. [/inserted] On Sunday evenings we used to have a sing-song round her piano, especially good when Welsh [deleted] singers [/deleted] [inserted] RAF boys from the station joined us [/inserted] joined us.
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4
There were dances in Cawston, but they were rather overcrowded for dancing. The Americans held one dance on the Station, I was invited to go, with a very nice boy called Robin, I didn’t really know him, but enjoyed his company and the dance. I would have enjoyed it more with my friend Ford had he asked me first, but he, disappointed that his invitation came too late -- boycotted it. We, on the Station, never shared in the good food the Americans enjoyed and even on this festive occasion, we did not get [deleted] even [/deleted] a taste of their icecream, [sic] We were invited, however, to an American celebration dance in Norwich. We had transport there and on arrival, were each given a rose -- made one feel very feminine. No one danced, because, surprise, surprise, the band was Glen Millers. He was conducting of course, making the evening wonderful and unforgettable.
One night a play was performed by an all American cast -- very glamorous the Actresses were. We had entertainments with audience participation, such as Any Questions, Quizes [sic] and Musical evenings and films. ‘Mutiny on the Bounty’ and ‘[deleted] A [/deleted] Chip off the old Block’ and there was always fish and chips in Cawston and a shandy at the ’Rat Catcher’!
While on the subject of leisure and entertainment, I must record, that I cycled to Nelson’s birthplace and was impressed by the sight of the cobweb remains of his victory flags in the church there. I’ll always remember too, the sight of the white ghostly fens, stretching out as far as the eyes could see, into the misty coast line, Cromer was out of bounds, but I got a special pass to go there and found it very shabby and sadly in need of paint. Barbed wire was everywhere covering the beaches, where hundreds of troops, young and not so young, [inserted] X Many seemed quite middleage. They had obviously seen military action before were training in readiness for the D Day landings. I felt heartsick for them. Visiting the Broads, I enjoyed a short sail, a change from cycling! Norfolk seems flat until you cycle there, then you soon find out it isn’t. [inserted] with an American who had kindly invited me to share his rowing boat! He [deleted] was ]/deleted] was so busy rowing his [deleted] kept his han [/deleted] hands were well occupied! [/inserted]
When any of the American airmen were carpeted for an offence, the whole American camp was confined to Barracks. This caused quite a few difficulties as regarding arranging to meet our friends. Also, as the camp was so big and scattered, communications were almost non-existent. The American [inserted] RAF [/inserted] and Raf camps being out of bounds. We Waafs were well disciplined to obey rules and regulations, with the result, we often had to wait for our American friends to turn up for a date, sometimes, from no fault of their own, they didn’t.!
One episode I experienced wasn’t very pleasant’ One afternoon. I was taking in the basket of my bicycle, sheets of music for a concert rehearsal. About twenty drunken Americans grabbed me and my bike, then proceeded to scatter the sheets of music over the footpath and the field. I eventually managed to grab my my [sic] bike and get away, but for weeks afterwards, sheets of music were floating around the camp to remind me of a very upsetting episode. I didn’t report this, understanding that war, brings out the best and worst in all caught up in the tragedy of it, also sadly, I had learnt that not many Waaf officers were interested in our welfare and we had to look after ourselves.
One of my friends in the Met: office was being demobbed to train as a Doctor. Walking with her on her last night in camp, a jeep stopped by us and [inserted] [underlined] very [/underlined] [deleted] Young? Handsome [/deleted] [inserted] the occupants of, it, two American Officers, invited us to ‘jump in’ Margaret did so with alactrity -- to chaperone her = of course -- 'I followed and we were taken to their wooden chalet. All very cosy, with all mod cons, a great difference to our hut.! [inserted] & that of our Aircrew – which had been reported to me – never having ventured or [deleted] the opp [/deleted] been invited to their billets I hasten to add. [/inserted] We were offered sweetmeets [sic] and fruit, served on the point of daggers (they had quite a collection!) We were shown the list of their bombing runs, many of the items listed were classed as ‘Milk runs’, This was explained to us to mean, they had not been able to find their target, so had returned without bombing. Where they had got rid of their lethal cargo, we thought it wiser not to ask. After pleasant conversation, we were taken back in their jeep to the place where we had been
[inserted] Margaret took off her tunic & relaxed on one of their bed plumping up the cushions & reclined there much as attractive film stars preparing for a love scene – My heart sank – we were young on forbidden terrotery [sic] young with handsome American officers what was she up to? I talked about anything & [inserted] everything [/inserted] nothing – so conversation became paramount [deleted] we [/deleted] we were shown the list of I assure my reader nothing more [/inserted]
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5
‘picked up’ I wasn’t too pleased and questioned [inserted] spoil sport that I was – questioned Margaret [/inserted] Margaret about the escapade’ She informed me, she had wanted an adventure before leaving the Waaf and knew that I would have been able to handle any situation. --- had we have been found out, she would have been away the next day, leaving me to face the music, however it had been an adventure!. [inserted] – [underlined] interesting [/underlined] adventure [/inserted]
While at Oulton, I passed my test for L.A.C.W., this meant my pay went up to three shillings and fourpence a day!. I was recommended by the Signals officer, Flt Lt Collings for Corporal tapes, sadly, instead, because I had spoken up for the girls in Flying Control, at their request, to air their complaints to him, about the Waaf corporal there, I was posted to Swannington.
[inserted] A Stirling A/c that had landed the night before – with casualties bespattered with Blood – I agreed I had refused at first But when this corporal had placed on the shelf over her bed space a piece taken from & speaking up – or out of turn for the girls I never did get promoted [/inserted]
[inserted] The Corporal had asked to see the plane that had crashed the night before she had put the piece from the rear gunners perspect [sic] on show on her shelf above her bed space for us all to see. [/inserted]
The girls were upset for me, but not one of them dare approach him on my behalf. W.A.A.F/Officer Lawson, sent for me and assured me there would be no record of complaint against me because of this incident and she was very sorry I was being posted. I was upset, but being naive I just accepted the situation, however, on reading my records when demobbed, I found she had been truthful to me. No mention of the matter, but a recommendation [inserted] from [/inserted] by Flt Lt Collings that I should receive my Corporal tapes --- alas because of the posting, I never did get promoted.
Oulton, was my first and last experience of being on a large R,A,F [sic] Station. Swannington was much smaller and I became happy there, so the move proved quite good for me. Swannington was the last airfield to be opened during the war in April 1944 for No 100 Group Bomber Command. Two Squadrons of XIX Fighter Command Mosquitos were stationed there, to give fighter support to the Bombers and for other special duties.
Oulton, being only a few miles away, I was able to cycle back there, to see my friends and also still enjoy the kindly hospitality of ‘Mother Riley’. My cycle rides there, in the early evenings after duty, were always slower than the ride back.! The lanes were dark and the trees many and high, overhanging the hedges in the narrow lanes. They seemed to be like weird witches, their branches clutching out to catch you as you cycled past. It worried me too, that I should take the wrong turning, as without signposts, all byways looked alike. Mother Riley’s schoolboy son, leaning out from his bedroom window, used to call out my name as I cycled past in the darkness, a nice friendly gesture! Oh the relief I felt on hearing our planes, or seeing the welcoming airfield lights! but this lonely ride never stopped me, from returning to see my friends at Oulton once a week.
The Americans left Oulton in August and I cycled up for the [deleted] first and [/deleted] last time, to the American billets to say goodbye to Ford. I was given his beloved gramophone records of Tchaikovsky’s Concerto No 1 in B Flat Minor, N.B.O/orchestra, conducted by Toscanini; to keep safe for him. I balanced them on my bicycle handlebars and was bid a fond farewell, from him and all his friends gathered there to bid me goodbye. I got the records safely back to Swannington and still keep them for him, although sadly, he is no longer on this earth. [inserted] [deleted] To enjoy them [/deleted] [/inserted]
I received a tribute from him when he returned to America. Writing in a New Orleans newspaper of his impressions of England -- I quote -- 'Cathy possessed infinite charm, not only attractive physically, she was also very intelligent. She accepted without insult, my constructive criticism of England, lent a sympathetic ear to my dreams and ambitions, without expecting anything in return. My knowledge of English girls is perhaps limited, but if they are half as nice as Cathy, I nominate them as the world’s best.’
With this kindly tribute, I felt I had made a good effort for race relations!
Although stations at Swannington for a year and a half longer, until the end of 1945, I never again returned to Oulton --- But I’ll never forget the good friends I made there.
[page break]
D-DAY APPROACHING
I was stationed at R.A.F. Swannington in flying control. For a few months before D-Day our mail had been censored and the coastal areas out of bounds to us
At the beginning of June 1944 however I was given permission to travel to Cromer to try to contact a relation stationed there with the paratroopers. I didn’t find him but I found Cromer looking battle scarred. So shabby and in need of paint to brighten the exteriors of the depressing neglected buildings. The war years had certainly left their mark
Heading for the beech [sic] to cheer myself up I found my way practically barred with huge rolls of barbed wire. Beyond, resting on the sand, were what seemed to be a whole Army of men – their Khaki uniforms blending with their surroundings. One large group invited me to join them. What a cheery group they were! Older and wiser having already had their baptism of war on foreign beaches. We laughed, joked and yarned our way through that sunny June afternoon – they told good jokes
On leaving them a sad faced sergeant approached me to ask what all the laughter had been about. I replied – ‘he looked in need of some’!. I don’t think he thought I was a spy! The next day the beach was deserted – left to the sea and the gulls. The army had left for a deadlier shore
[page break]]
SWANNINGTON
RADIO ROUNDELAY
Mosquito’s at Swannington impatient to land
‘Round and Round I go
Heigho! Heigho!
‘Never get shut eye at this rate’
‘Listen old man I’ve got a date
With SNAKEHIPS and she’ll not wait’
‘Not with SNAKEHIPS again old boy
She’s bad luck you are tempting fate’
‘My good lord what a bore
Going round and round
The landing ground’
‘At Angels 9, 10 and 11
Going right up to blinking heaven’
All this natter comes to me
Over Swannington R/T
As Mosquito crews ‘muse’
Their patience just a little frayed
When waiting to ‘pancake’ after a raid.
Mosquito crews rather thought of themselves as fighter aces as in a way they were. Although carrying two bombs they also protected the bombers when escorting them on raids. As a result the crews were individuals and inclined to be flamboyant and sure of them selves. They were difficult to discipline when being stacked for landing unlike the bomber crews whose lives were dependent on silence and strict R/T procedures. Stacking the Mosquito’s was a difficult task for the R/T Operator when trying to get landing procedures to them through their continual ‘nattering’ Tragedy [deleted] once [/deleted] struck at Swannington on 22nd December 1944 when one pilot called R/T indicating that he had a serious problem with the ailerons on his Mosquito. He asked for permission to approach the airfield from the opposite direction to that taken by [inserted] the [/inserted] other aircraft. I passed this request to the Officer on duty in the Control Tower who gave permission for the Mosquito to approach as requested. I radioed the plane a number of times to say that permission had been given but because of the constant ‘nattering’ from other crews I could not hear any response. Therefore no one knew if the crew had heard the messages that may have saved their lives. The Mosquito approached the airfield from the usual direction and sadly dived into the ground in front of the Control Tower. I had to watch as both pilot and navigator burned to death – whilst trying to concentrate on bringing 27 other planes in the circuit safely to ground. The other crews were silenced on witnessing the incident – sadly too late! There was
[page break]
an enquiry into the incident and the notes taken by my R/T companion clearly stated that I had done everything I could to assist the crew with their emergency. The names of Mosquito’s crew were F/L W Taylor and F/O J. N Edwards. F/O Edwards is buried at Haveringland (St Peters Church) – not far from the airfield.
[page break]
When stationed at RAF Swannington in common with other station personnel I visited the home of Mrs Riley – a grocery shop in a nearby village. Mrs Riley had moved to the area from the Midlands for the health of her 10 and 11 yr old sons
Mrs Riley became affectionately addressed as Mother Riley – not because she was like the music hall character of that name but because she became a mother to those of us in the forces. We were fortunate enough to enjoy her kindness and hospitality. She always welcomed us with a cheery smile and a wonderful meal of rationed goodies
WAAFS on the station who were married to aircrew posted to other bases were able to spend precious time together because Mother Riley let them stay at her home
On Sunday evenings we attended the small village chapel with Mother Riley. She got some of the boys to sing solos. I was always asked to recite making her cry sometimes – with pleasure I hope! We would go home with her and sing old time songs – especially good if RAF Welsh boys joined in as they often did
Whatever wartime tragedies the coming week might bring Mother Riley was always there to give comfort and cheer. A wonderful friend to all
[page break]
CHURCH FENTON
Six girls manned the circular Fixer Post/Tower situated at the top of a Yorkshire hill near the village of Saxton. The WAFFS [sic] were on duty 24 hours a day. There were three Fixer Posts situated several miles from the Fighter Station at Church Fenton. We took bearings on aircraft coming into the sector and transmitted these to the Ops room at Church Fenton. They then used the information to direct fighter pilots to the position of the intruders. To hear a triumphant “TALLY HO” always gave me a thrill. Two WAFFS [sic] at a time operated the receiver set – both wearing ear phones. One WAAF operated a horizontal wheel measuring 360 degrees and giving the direction from the Tower to the aircraft. When we detected a sound in the sky that went down we called it ‘catching the dead space’ and we knew we had located an intruder. The bearings were then passed on to the Ops room. Three points of intersection would give the position of the aircraft on the plotting table. If our pilot became lost or could not immediately locate the intruder he would be asked to transmit for a fix. By using the three intersections the Ops room would provide the pilot with a vector to steer within a minute. He was then asked to transmit for a fix at minute intervals.
If there was no flying when we were on night duty we had to sleep on the Fixer station floor. My mother made me a sleeping bag which was much appreciated. Following the harvest rats used to seek shelter underneath the station and being hungry they satisfied their needs by knowing [sic] on the wooden floor. We used tin dinner plats to cover the holes they made.
One night I was rudely awakened from slumber to feel something run up the side of my sleeping bag. I jumped up and reached for the sweeping brush that was always kept behind the Receiver Desk. Standing on the desk I put on the light. There was nothing to be seen. My companion – like me rudely awakened – was not pleased and said I’d been dreaming. When rolling up my sleeping bag the next morning I discovered a large hole where my feet had been. Rats had been hungry!
The following day I wrote a poem to the Signal Section Church Fenton about the experience. As a result the rats were removed quickly and efficiently.
The two chores I didn’t enjoy were cleaning the windows of the Fixer Post – as I was all window! – and getting rid of he [sic] contents of the toilet. These tasks were often neglected by the other groups of WAAFS and it seemed to be our lot to deal with it. The windows were attacked with old screwed up newspapers and made to shine bright and clear. The Elson was another matter – often there was a squeal coming from the maggots. Between us we would lift the heavy bucket and remove its obnoxious contents down a hole that we had dug for the purpose. All the water we used had to be carried up from the village – it was in short supply. We carried the buckets of water on our bicycle handlebars. It was a steep climb but a lovely quick descent!! By the side of this hillside was a wild rose hedge. Kit assured me that in summer the hedge had
[page break]
red and white roses on it – white for the Yorkshire soldiers and red of the Lancastrians who had fought on this site. I never saw evidence of this but when the wind howled round the Tower on dark winter nights we felt that the ground we were on was rather spooky. Several of the leaders of the battle are buried with their horses in the local churchyard and according to Kit after the Battle of the Roses the beck at the bottom of the hill ran red with Lancastrian blood – not Yorkshire’s of course!
[page break]
It was amazing! How the Farmers – even the ancient ones – knew what time we WAFFS [sic] were on duty at Saxton Tower and if we were absent on leave or standing in for another girl they knew. Woe betide us if we were late on duty
I was billeted in the village of Saxton with a girl from Liverpool called Audrey – she was tall and blond. We were polite to each other and worked together quite well. But we were too opposite to become close friends. We shared a small bedroom at the end of the house – it had single metal beds. Yorkshire farmers were real characters. They had a reputation for staying on the family farm and being looked after by a doting mother. When sadly she died they would marry a young girl from the village to ensure that in their old age they would be cosseted. This was the case with the farmer and his wife where we were billeted. He used to say to me ‘EE Katie this is a wicked Village’ I used to reply ‘Well tell me why’. He never did and we never had time or energy after our hours of duty to find out for ourselves!. His brother lived with them and still wore his army coats from the Great War. He never paid his sister in law any money for his keep. He lived on a harvest of his brother’s pigs-bacon for breakfast; pork for dinner and ham for tea. The ceiling of the kitchen seemed to groan from the weight of the hams hanging there. He never had a bath although the Farmhouse bungalow boasted a lovely modern bathroom. I sat next to him at mealtimes and I used to look at him rather carefully. I was always surprised to see how clean he looked. I presumed that his skin was so tough the dirt just skimmed off it. One day his nephew persuaded him to have a bath. We all waited outside the bathroom to witness his exit. His first words to us were ‘Never Again’ – and he stuck to his word!
He slept with a safe in his bedroom – or so we were told having never ventured there. Until one ‘mischievous night’ we made him an apple pie bed – with brushes and many other things. We listened outside his door but there was no sound of anger or surprise. We could only assume that he was so tough that he never noticed his hard bedfellows! Kit the Farmer was as tough as old boots. He had his own chair and place at the table. We never saw him give affection to his hard working wife. He used to tease her by looking out of the window when other women from the village passed by saying ‘My what a smart or a fine woman Mrs so and so is’ Grace never rose to the bait but kept on scrubbing the kitchen floor tiles
They had a dog called Shep which the farmer said he would shoot if it wouldn’t follow the gun. Of course it wouldn’t. We WAAFS pleaded with him to keep his dog. In retrospect it would have been kinder to shoot it as it lived out its life tied to a short rope in a leaking kennel and lived on scraps. That was not good for any animal – it suffered and eventually died of malnutrition and lack of affection.
I missed the life of the camp and the opportunity to be where the action was. During the winter the bedroom was like ice as is had no heating. I used to say on retiring “Well I’ll now go up to Siberia” but this remark fell on deaf ears. Whilst there was the luxury of stable food and no restrictions about how often I could have a bath – paradise for WAFFS [sic] in comparison with the billet in Norfolk – I missed the action and the friends I’d left behind.
Being free from regulations – I didn’t always wear my identity badge as we were required to do – I hitched a lift on the back of a lorry to York. On arrival I stepped
[page break]
straight into the path of a very large and tall WAAF MP. She stopped me in my tracks and asked me for my identity badge which of course I didn’t have – did I?. There was I in uniform except for my hat that would have blown off as I was on the back of a lorry in a high wind
In a matter of days I was called upon to face a charge for not wearing my cap in York. A WAAF Officer – she appeared very young or was I growing old in service? – tore me off a strip and sentenced me to ten days in the cookhouse. I reported there after cycling down to Church Fenton early the next morning. The kitchen was crammed full with out of work Air Crew – hostilities having been wound down. “What are you doing here” asked one handsome young pilot – they were always handsome. I told him that I was reporting for my punishment. “You have to cycle down to Church Fenton for ten days – forget it”. We’ll do the chores for you”. What a knight in shining armour he was. I pedalled back to duty quicker than I’d come having been saved from my sentence!
My drama tutor had written to the Ministry re my Service release – I had not asked her to do so. As a result of a achieving an Honours mark on my associate Certificate I was given a scholarship to a prodigious acting academy in London. I had not asked her to do so. Whilst anxious to take up the scholarship I was reluctant to leave the Services. Had I not had this offer I would definitely have made a career in the WAAFS. However as a result of her plea I was called in front of the most handsome Officer I had ever had the pleasure of meeting. He explained kindly how he couldn’t release me early and was then interrupted by a young WAAF Officer. Fortunately not the one who had sentenced me earlier! She stood in front of his desk and gazed so lovingly in his eyes that I felt like an intruder. Without saluting I quietly withdrew from the room. I hope that she got her man!. I didn’t get my early release.
Oh how we WAAFS worshiped these brave men and boys – mostly from afar of course. On Operation Stations our thoughts and prayers were always with them and they knew this. The atmosphere on these camps was not death and destruction but optimism; love; laughter and comradeship. With a will to do our best in the work that we loved. We were helpful and competent partners in a situation that sought to triumph over the evil of a war that was not of our choosing
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
One WAAF's war
Description
An account of the resource
Commences with call up and journey to Innsworth camp. Describes accommodation, activities and compatriots in detail. Continues with very detailed description of training and activities at Compton Bassett. After a farewell concert was posted to Bawtry Hall. Describes life with companion and work. Manages to get out of cleaning work and was sent to RAF Grimsby where she worked in telephone exchange and fell in love with Lancaster bombers. Subsequently sent of aircraft controllers' course at RAF Cranwell. Describes camp, life, accommodation and training at Cranwell. Mentions church parade where no WAAFs turned up and subsequent consequences. Continues with new section with title 'LACW Kathryn Reid (nee Kathy Miers) WAAF No 473650 RAF Oulton 1944'. Covers posting after training as R/T.D/F operator to Sculthorpe which was under command of Group Captain Pickard DSO, DFC. Sculthorpe was closed and all units, including American ones moved to Oulton from where she describes location, activities and work. Mentions RAF aircrew converting from Stirling to fly American aircraft at night as well as describing her work in aircraft control. Mentions she was on duty for D-Day. Goes on with description of operations and mentions B-17 from 214 Squadron shot down near station sick quarters and only two gunners escaped. Continues with more derails of work and life on camp including entertainment. Mentions American friend. Next was posted to RAF Swannington and describes work and operations with Mosquito. Final posting to Church Fenton where once again describes location and work in detail.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
K Reid
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Gloucestershire
England--Wiltshire
England--Yorkshire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Norfolk
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
United States Army Air Force
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Memoir
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Twenty-six-page printed document
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending text-based transcription. Under review
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
BReidKReidKv1
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Tricia Marshall
100 Squadron
214 Squadron
B-17
B-24
entertainment
ground personnel
Lancaster
military discipline
military living conditions
military service conditions
Mosquito
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
RAF Bawtry
RAF Church Fenton
RAF Compton Bassett
RAF Cranwell
RAF Grimsby
RAF Innsworth
RAF Oulton
RAF Sculthorpe
RAF Swannington
sanitation
Stirling
training
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2191/39881/MReidK473650-180123-23.2.jpg
d93c4ce5dac59d08fb1119cf08487f01
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
Reid, Kathleen
Reid, K
Reid, Kathryn
Reid, Katy
Description
An account of the resource
92 items and a <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2219">sub-collection with thirty-seven poems/songs</a>. The collection concerns Kathryn (Katy) Reid (Royal Air Force) and contains memoirs, correspondence, poems and photographs. The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by David Stuart Miers Reid and catalogued by Nigel Huckins
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-01-23
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Reid, K
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
Draft notes
Description
An account of the resource
Outline draft notes for memoir. Mentions posting, Grimsby, flying control, Lancaster, people, dances, parties, heartbreak, Americans, Heathcliff, removal of camp, posting to Swannington, Mosquito and more.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Norfolk
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
United States Army Air Force
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One-sided handwritten document
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending text-based transcription
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
MReidK473650-180123-23
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
entertainment
ground personnel
Lancaster
military service conditions
RAF Cranwell
RAF Grimsby
RAF Oulton
RAF Sculthorpe
RAF Swannington
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2191/39887/OReidK473650-180123-01.2.jpg
eda63fb7fa3ab91883f068d2c72f0757
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
Reid, Kathleen
Reid, K
Reid, Kathryn
Reid, Katy
Description
An account of the resource
92 items and a <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2219">sub-collection with thirty-seven poems/songs</a>. The collection concerns Kathryn (Katy) Reid (Royal Air Force) and contains memoirs, correspondence, poems and photographs. The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by David Stuart Miers Reid and catalogued by Nigel Huckins
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-01-23
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Reid, K
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
Record of postings
Description
An account of the resource
Shows postings to 1 Group, Binbrook, Sculthorpe, Oulton, Swannington and Church Fenton.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943-04-03
1944-01-27
1944-05-16
1944-06-05
1945-04-09
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Norfolk
England--Yorkshire
England--Tadcaster
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One-sided printed form with handwritten entries
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
OReidK473650-180123-01
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
1 Group
ground personnel
RAF Binbrook
RAF Church Fenton
RAF Oulton
RAF Sculthorpe
RAF Swannington
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force