2
25
1219
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/163/2111/PBanksP15020106.1.jpg
02a268fca0996c2c1128ec4c4f81160b
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
Banks, Peter. Album two
Description
An account of the resource
The album contains a varied collection of photographs taken whilst based at RAF Feltwell from 1937 onwards. There are aerial views of Windsor and Buckingham Palace, Harrow aircraft, plus social and service events. Post-war he was transferred to Singapore via India and Burma. The album reflects his social life with occasional photograph of his service activities at RAF Seletar. His return to UK via Bombay at the time of Indian independence is recorded, followed by scenic shots round Wick in Scotland. Finally there are some photographs of Angkor Thom in Cambodia. It also contains pages from newspapers dated 18 and 19 June 1940. <br /><br />Return to the <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/140">main collection</a>.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One photograph album
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PBanksP1501
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
Married quarters, Seletar
Description
An account of the resource
Photograph 1 is of the outside of married quarters. Captioned 'No 96 The Crescent, Seletar. Married quarters 1946'.
Photographs 2,3 and 4 are of the inside of a room with table and rattan furniture. Captioned 'Rattan furniture purchased in Singapore'.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1946
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Four b/w photographs mounted on an album page
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
PBanksP15020106
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
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1946
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.
Singapore
military living conditions
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/163/2123/PBanksP15020118.2.jpg
db3ddfbd0ddfe3fc4c72c8c79b9990a4
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
Banks, Peter. Album two
Description
An account of the resource
The album contains a varied collection of photographs taken whilst based at RAF Feltwell from 1937 onwards. There are aerial views of Windsor and Buckingham Palace, Harrow aircraft, plus social and service events. Post-war he was transferred to Singapore via India and Burma. The album reflects his social life with occasional photograph of his service activities at RAF Seletar. His return to UK via Bombay at the time of Indian independence is recorded, followed by scenic shots round Wick in Scotland. Finally there are some photographs of Angkor Thom in Cambodia. It also contains pages from newspapers dated 18 and 19 June 1940. <br /><br />Return to the <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/140">main collection</a>.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One photograph album
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PBanksP1501
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
Married quarters, Seletar
Going home
Description
An account of the resource
Photograph 1 is the married quarters.
Photograph 2 is three women and Peter in the garden.
Photograph 3 is a man pushing a bike up a path.
Photograph 4 is the married quarters.
Photograph 5 is a man on a path.
Photograph 6 is a woman in the garden, hanging out washing.
Photograph 7 is a man standing on a path.
Photograph 8 is three or four people and Peter with packing boxes.
Photograph 9 is a local man with a bucket of water.
Photograph 10 is a woman and two Indians with a bike. They have items for sale.
Captioned 'Going Home'.
Additional information about this item has been kindly provided by the donor.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One b/w photograph
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PBanksP15020118
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Royal Air Force
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.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Singapore
military living conditions
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/165/2275/SWrightAC1149750v20128.2.jpg
3b369ae4694ebefe716bb5dd7a4da669
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/165/2275/SWrightAC1149750v20129.2.jpg
d592e2e83f3f1d5feae1f6f8ee588a9a
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Wright, Jim
J R Wright
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-05-21
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Wright, J
Description
An account of the resource
93 items. The collection contains two oral history interviews with Jim Wright, letters, cuttings and photographs. It concerns James Roy Wright’s research into his father, Sergeant Arthur Charles Wright (1911 - 1943, 1149750 Royal Air Force) and an operation to Turin 12/13 July 1943 which caused 100 aircraft to violate Swiss airspace. Two aircraft were shot down or crashed in Switzerland. There are many photographs and details of the activities that night including reports by the Swiss authorities. The crews are identified with photographs and there are several photographs of the funerals at Vevey. Additional material includes aerial photograph of bomb damage in Germany and the logbook and airman's pay book of W G Anderson. <br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Jim Wright and catalogued by Nigel Huckins, with descriptions of official Swiss documents provided Gilvray Williams. <br /><br />Additional information on Arthur Charles Wright is available via the <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/126015/">IBCC Losses Database</a>. This collection also contains items concerning Hugh Burke Bolger and his crew. Additional information on Hugh Burke Bolger is available via the <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/102186/">IBCC Losses Database</a>.
Access Rights
Information about who can access the resource or an indication of its security status. Access Rights may include information regarding access or restrictions based on privacy, security, or other policies.
Permission granted for commercial projects
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
Three men, two in swimming trunks, one in airman's uniform
Description
An account of the resource
Two men sunbathing whilst an airman is hiding with his head under a tent made from a chair and a towel. They are seated outside a wooden building. On the reverse 'Humewood Port Elizabeth August 1942'.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1942-08
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One b/w photograph
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
SWrightAC1149750v20128, SWrightAC1149750v20129
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.
South Africa
South Africa--Port Elizabeth
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.
1942-08
military living conditions
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/165/2283/SWrightAC1149750v20137.1.jpg
3484eaf6c84305d6bc1e83a59147b782
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/165/2283/SWrightAC1149750v20138.1.jpg
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/165/2283/SWrightAC1149750v20139.1.jpg
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/165/2283/SWrightAC1149750v20140.1.jpg
00b852ef68e6ff9c96c5d993417c69c5
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/165/2283/SWrightAC1149750v20141.1.jpg
6c007753a486a812695226deeac08d24
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Wright, Jim
J R Wright
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-05-21
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Wright, J
Description
An account of the resource
93 items. The collection contains two oral history interviews with Jim Wright, letters, cuttings and photographs. It concerns James Roy Wright’s research into his father, Sergeant Arthur Charles Wright (1911 - 1943, 1149750 Royal Air Force) and an operation to Turin 12/13 July 1943 which caused 100 aircraft to violate Swiss airspace. Two aircraft were shot down or crashed in Switzerland. There are many photographs and details of the activities that night including reports by the Swiss authorities. The crews are identified with photographs and there are several photographs of the funerals at Vevey. Additional material includes aerial photograph of bomb damage in Germany and the logbook and airman's pay book of W G Anderson. <br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Jim Wright and catalogued by Nigel Huckins, with descriptions of official Swiss documents provided Gilvray Williams. <br /><br />Additional information on Arthur Charles Wright is available via the <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/126015/">IBCC Losses Database</a>. This collection also contains items concerning Hugh Burke Bolger and his crew. Additional information on Hugh Burke Bolger is available via the <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/102186/">IBCC Losses Database</a>.
Access Rights
Information about who can access the resource or an indication of its security status. Access Rights may include information regarding access or restrictions based on privacy, security, or other policies.
Permission granted for commercial projects
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
[postmark] Brighton & Hove Sussex 17 Dec 194 [indecipherable] [/[postmark]
[postage stamp]
Mr & Mrs Wright,
150 Hatherly Gdns,
East Ham,
London.
[pagebreak]
[RAF Crest]
COURSE 40(a) BUNGALOW 49
75 AIR SCHOOL
LYTTLELTON CAMP
TRANSVAAL
S. AFRICA
Monday March 16th 1942.
Dear Henry & Lil (& Barbara)
I received your letter to-day [sic] and was tickled pink to get it It’s the first letter I have had since I left England and to read it gave me quite a big thrill. As you can see by the date of this letter it takes quite a while for mail to pass between the two countries and when you write in the future will you please date you letters. I am very comfortable, healthy and contented and Sth. Africa certainly agrees with me. I hope you are all keeping well and I bet your baby daughter gives you something new to talk about every day. Well I daresay you have received the letter I wrote to you from the boat so I’ll give you a resumé of events from the time we landed. After a very uneventful sea voyage (the only incident was when a German long range bomber, a Focker Wulf Condor, shadowed us off the coast of Portugal for about 4 hrs) we got up one morning and there ahead was Durban. We docked, and, next day had [indecipherable] hrs shore leave in this town and what a town! And what people!! Well to carry on – the first thing I had was an iced drink which after the fare aboard tasted like nectar. Then came the bath and then the piece-de-resistance; a meal and
[pagebreak]
[underlined] 2 [/underlined]
what a meal. I had steak, eggs, onions, chips bread and butter and tea, then fruit and ice-cream and another iced drink in a swanky restaurant for 2/8. Well after this I went to an open-air dance which had been organised for us costing us nothing, and then had supper in a services [indecipherable word] which was as palatial as the lounge of a first class hotel still for no charge. You can imagine how I felt after 6 weeks of virtual hell aboard that ship. Next day we boarded an electric train for our journey up north. I have never seen such scenery. There was something new at every turn of the wheels and the food on the train was marvellous. It is in a narrower gauge railway than ours and is very comfortable. There were six of us in each compartment and every man had a bunk. The temperature was very high being about 80 in the shade but as we were climbing all the time it got cooler. I enjoyed every moment of the train journey. After 23 hrs of this delightful travel we arrived at our camp. We had one dissappointmen [sic] which was that we didn’t go straight to flying school. The system here is that after I.T.W (which [missing word] did a [sic] Finningley) we have six weeks of Advanced Training Wing before going to the actual flying school. I am now about halfway through this A.T.W and every
[pagebreak]
[underlined] 3 [/underlined]
thing is going satisfactorily although this course is very intense. We have our first parade at 6.15a.m and then go on through the day with a 3 hr break until 8.45 at night. Incidentally I have cut a class to write this letter. We are in between Pretoria and Johannesburg and each week-end I go to the last named place for a break. The people here are very hospitable (the English I mean) and they have organised quite a variety of things in Jo’burg [Johannesburg] for us. I stay in the ritziest part of town in a house the owner of which is very rich indeed. It is a beautiful house with marvellous grounds, tennis courts an orchard and the duckiest swimming pool you could ever hope to swim in. For the first couple of week-ends I had to get the billet from a place that deals with all service men who come into town and have nowhere to go but now an open welcome has been extended to me and I am liberty to go there any-time I like. If the house-keeper is not at home I simply ask one of the boys (black servants) for the key and then the house is mine for the week-end to come and go as I please. The owner of the house is out of the country on government business and the house-keeper has permission to billet airmen. She or the boy (if she is not at home) fixes us our Sunday morning breakfast at any time we want it and as
[pagebreak]
[underlined] 4 [/underlined]
the most who ever stay there are four, for a week-end I live like a millionare [sic] I was very pleased to here [sic] your job is still going along O.K. but the biggest kick I got from your letter was the report of the football match. How I wish I could have been there and what a thrill you must have had when the ball carried on and sailed [underlined] through [/underlined] the net. It sure must have been a mighty powerful drive. To read that account when the sun was blazing down as I did gave me a breath of the Old Country which drives home forcibly the fact that there is “No Place Like Home”. To be really honest I have not been homesick much since I landed mainly because I have been so busy I suppose, but at times when things are quiet I miss you all terribly. However it will all be over one day an when we do meet again I’ll have a million things to talk about. I should like you to keep me posted regularly and when you write cram your letters full with all the news you can think of as these letters are very seldom censored and I am simply dying to hear how London is going along. Well I think this is all for now. [deleted word]
So hoping to hear from you again as soon as possible
Your loving brother
[underlined] Arthur [/underlined]
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Letter to Mr and Mrs Wright from Arthur Wright
Description
An account of the resource
Letter to brother Henry, Lil and Barbara from 75 Air School in South Africa from Arthur Wright. He describes sailing to Durban. He is impressed with the food, the city and the people. Then a 23 hour train journey to the camp. He discusses his social life but his training is busy, too.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1942-03-16
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Envelope and four handwritten sheets
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Correspondence
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. Training Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
South Africa
South Africa--Transvaal
South Africa--Durban
South Africa--Johannesburg
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
SWrightAC1149750v20137, SWrightAC1149750v20138, SWrightAC1149750v20139, SWrightAC1149750v20140, SWrightAC1149750v20141
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
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942-03
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Emily Jennings
military living conditions
military service conditions
sport
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/177/2340/ABattyPH161014.1.mp3
5c4ac0fc187b4591d3ca4948980d7baf
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
Batty, Philip
Phil Batty
P Batty
Description
An account of the resource
19 Items. The collection consists of one oral history interview with Philip Batty (b. 1925). He discusses the death of his older brother Dennis early in the Second World War, his wartime service with 50 Squadron at RAF Sturgate as a wireless operator/ air gunner, and his long post war career. The collection also includes a number of group photographs of airmen after training, photographs of aircraft in southern Africa, his log book and propaganda material.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-10-14
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Batty, P
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
CH: Right, this interview is taking place at Phil Batty’s home in Wellingore, Lincolnshire on the 14th of October 2016, it’s being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archive. The interviewer is Cathie Hewitt, also present are Guilia Sanzone, Ann Batty and Chris Aram. Okay Phil, if you’d like to give me this information of your date and place of birth and your early childhood.
PB: Right, well, I was born on the 7th of March 1925, at a small village in Yorkshire. Er, my parents, my father was, actually in the Flying Corps in World War One, and he, he stayed in after the war and married my mother in 1918, but mother didn’t care for the Air Force, they were stationed at Castle Bromwich, and father decided that they would leave and he got himself a job as a draughtsman at Rolls Royce in Derby, but unfortunately came the depression and he was laid off, the only job that he could find was in the mines up in Yorkshire, which is where we went, but mother hated that even more, she was determined that we were not going to stay there [laughs] and er, we emigrated back to the West Midlands where father got a job with Walsall Town Council as a roads foreman, and, that’s where I was brought up and educated, at Elmore Green Central School. Mother didn’t care for that either [laughs] I went to sit the entrance examination for I think it was the King Edward Grammar School in Birmingham, I passed it but unfortunately Walsall refused to pay the fees. So, I was stuck in Walsall and went to Elmore Green for my secondary education. I was quite happy there, and, I stayed there until of course war broke out in 1939 when I was fourteen, I was just about to leave school anyway, I’d got a job at the town council myself in the transport department as a clerk, and, there I sat, waiting for things to happen. My brother Dennis, of course was a fully qualified wireless operator air gunner [indistinct], he was with 226 Squadron and once the army got themselves organised they all deployed over to France as the advanced air striking force with the British Expeditionary Force. They were equipped with Fairey Battles, a single engine light bomber, utterly unequipped to face the Luftwaffe, but there they are, and there we sat and waited. Dug a big hole in the back garden, built ourselves an Anderson shelter [laughs] and that sort of thing and waited for the real war to start, which eventually, it did, with a bang, crash, wallop, and, er, Dennis came home when the army retreated, they suffered horrendous losses. He kept a little diary while he was in France of his — of his friends who didn’t come back, because the Messerschmitts knocked them out of the sky like fly swatting really, er, but he came home eventually with his kit bag full of champagne and [laughs] and stayed with us for about a week and then went back, and his squadron reformed with Blenheims and were based at Wattisham, and there they started to bomb the Channel ports where the Germans were then assembling an invasion fleet. It was on bombing, there was bombing raids they went in, inland to bomb an airfield, and they were attacked by some Messerschmitts, the pilot was hit, in the neck, but Dennis shot one Messerschmitt down and that put them off, they left them alone and they got back to base safely and that's where all three of them were awarded the DFM. And, Dennis came home to celebrate. Unfortunately he was posted up to Scotland, I think he was going on the gunnery leaders’ course, but this is a week later and he was killed in a flying accident [pause]. This was my first [pause] real [pause] [cries].
CH: Would you like to take a break?
[interview paused]
CH: Okay?
PB: And er, of course, that’s the last thing my mother wanted [laughs] she said, ‘No, no way, you’ll never pass the medical’, ‘cause I’d had an ear operation, she said, ‘You won’t pass’, [interference] anyway, she said, ‘You’re not going until you’re called up’, and of course eventually I was [laughs]. Passed the medical, went for aircrew, went to Birmingham to the attestation centre, er, which was where they gave you a little exam to make sure you could read and write a little essay and that sort of thing, and, then they did [indistinct] a little test with a little machine keeping a dot in the centre, and they said, ‘Oh, what do you want to be?’, and I said, 'Well I want to be a wireless operator air gunner’, they said, ‘Oh you, no we’re, what about pilot, navigator, you know?'. I said er, ‘Well, how long’s that take?’. He said, ‘Well, you’ll be put on a list and we’ll call you when we want you’, but I said, ‘Will I be quicker being a WOP AG’, he said ‘Yeah a bit’, I said, ‘I’ll have it’ [laughs] and er, that was it then, er, course mother was dead against it, but I said, ‘I’ll be alright’, [emphasis] you know it’s, I hadn’t the faintest idea of course that the losses were mounting for bomber crews at the time but, anyway eventually I got this paper asking me to report to Lords cricket ground, I thought, whatever, funny place for the Air Force, but off I go and they were playing at the time, I think it was the West Indies, I’m not sure, but that’s where you got issued with uniform, numbers, 2220759, ha, ha [laughs] you never forget it [laughs] and er, all the stuff you needed, and put your civilian clothes in a suitcase and send ‘em home, and, we were accommodated in London, in flats at the time being, for a little while, and then put on a train to Bridlington. Bridlington by the sea, yes, and there we were taught to march, yes, and I thought oh God, if this is aircrew, you know, I thought we were going to fly [emphasis] but no, we were marching up and down the promenade and [laughs] and er, learning the Morse code and that sort of thing, signalling by lamp and all the rest of it, and er, we were there for about , I suppose about four to six weeks and then I was posted down to the radio school at Madley to be taught the real skills of being a wireless operator air gunner and, there started the real training really. Er, I was there, I suppose about eight months, passed out, but that was the real jump [indistinct] because when you got your brevet, you got immediate promotion to sergeant, and now this is a big lump, a big jump really, er, and I was posted at the same time over to a place called Staverton, just outside Gloucester. They had a sergeants’ mess, we had sheets [emphasis] on the bed [emphasis] [laughs] fantastic, and we had knives and forks set out in the mess, we thought, you know, we’ve started to live, yeh. Er, the other funny thing was that we were briefed secrecy, you will see an aeroplane here, which you’ve never seen in all your life because it hadn’t got a propeller, it just whistles, and of course it was the jet, the very first, and it did seem very odd I must admit. Er, and we were there for six weeks flying an Anson and that’s where I first met up with my navigator, John, and we flew together for some time, and I think it was when we finished at, there, we went off up north to Dumfries and by God it was cold, [emphasis] we were living in Nissen huts and they were freezing [emphasis] oh, one stove in the middle that everyone tried to huddle round and how it is, but, once again it was just about six weeks, and then we went to, down to the OTU, that was just outside Leicester, where we upgraded to Wellingtons and that’s where we got that leaflet, the operational crews were diverted in one night, and I must admit they all looked clapped out [laughs] very tired, but er, I think that, we went, OTU was where we first started to fly as a crew, we picked up a pilot, a co-pilot, er, I still flew with John Tidmarsh, we’d been flying together then for six, seven months or so, so we de-, decided we’d stick together and the rest of the crew could join us [laughs] which is what we did, as you do, a little band of men. And, we did, I think it was a couple of months on Wellingtons, flying round the countryside practising navigation, bombing, and waiting to march onwards which we did eventually. We were posted to a Lancaster conversion unit, and I think I went to the one just outside Newark, er, it’s in my log book somewhere, and that was the, yes [pause]. Chris’ll find it in there [pause].
CA: Winthorpe.
CH: Winthorpe.
PB: After I, after we’d finished at the, I remember looking at the, where we were, 'cause it had big chimneys at the end of the runway, and I said to the pilot, he's a bloke called Ford, Henry, I said, ‘I hope you can manage to get a Lancaster over the top of those chimneys’, Henry [laughs] ‘they look pretty ominous to me’, he said, ‘Don’t you worry Phil’ [laughs]. Anyway, we passed and eventually 'cause we are coming to right to the end of the war now, and I didn’t, didn’t think we were going to make it before VE Day, we just about did it, we would have done, but not quite. We were posted to a squadron, posted to 50 Squadron at Sturgate and, off we went, and we’d just done the, squadron commander flew with us and pronounced us fit to join his squadron and, but I think it was a week later that we had VE Day, that was it, the war was over. So, we came into the briefing room one morning and saw [unclear] the squadron commander and said ‘Well fellas, well done’, he said, ‘It’s over’, he said, ‘We are now part of the Northern Striking Force', he said, 'Who we’re going to strike I don’t know but that's who we are’, he said, ‘5 Group are going out with Tiger Force to the Far East to fight the Japanese, but we’re staying here, but I’ve got some good news for you’, he said, ‘You can draw some khaki drill’, he said, ‘'Cause we are off to Italy on Monday’, [laughs] he said, ‘What we’re going to do’, he said, he said, ‘We’re going to pick up some prisoners of war up and bring 'em home’, he said, ‘Everyone, yes’, he said, ‘Our [emphasis] prisoners of war [laughs] not theirs’, he says 'We’ll paint twenty circles on the floor’, he said, ‘You put twenty passengers each and off you go’. 'And it’s like an operation, there’ll be sixty or so aeroplanes and some are going to Pomigliano and some to Bari, but we’re going to [unclear]’, he says, ‘Now there’s three things, one, do not try and change your money on the black market, none of that, don’t go down to Naples and get drunk on the local vino, right, and make sure you look after the soldiers [laughs] 'cause they won’t have flown’ [laughs]. But of course they hadn’t, but they were very pleased to jump on board the Lanc, er of course it took a long time, I think it was seven or eight hours trip each way but they didn’t care. Is that what you’re looking at Chris? Yes, they called it Operation Dodge, yes and we did one or two of those and, that was how the — the war virtually ended for me.
CH: Did you bring many prisoners back with you?
PB: Yeah.
CA: I don't think he heard you.
CH: Did you bring many prisoners back on the trips in the Lancasters?
PB: Pardon?
CH: Did you bring many prisoners back from Italy?
PB: Yes, yes, yes, and we landed in the UK at, Polebrook, yes, I don’t know how many times oh, er, eight was it, I don't know. Chris, I think is looking now [unclear]?
CA: Yes, at least eighty.
PB: I did several trips, anyway, yes, I remember that we went to see the ruins of Pompeii, John Tid — Tidmarsh and I, yes. While we were there we thought we might as well, yeah, yes, but, very interesting actually, yes, we did behave ourselves and we did realise that the best things to take out were cigarettes and coffee for trading, and er, we could hand those in and bring back jewellery and that sort of stuff, yes, from the Italians, yes, er, quite enjoyable. Chris is looking now in my logbook, which will be scanned presumably? Yes. The length of the time that the trips took, yeah, quite long, yeah, okay.
CH: What happened after you finished doing these trips bringing the prisoners back?
PB: That was it for the time being, erm, I was posted then to, out to Transport Command for a little while, and then the air force [background noises] in their wisdom thought [?], in their wisdom, sent me out to Southern Rhodesia for two and a half years, er, onto [?] the navigation training school, flying Ansons, where I had a marvellous time [laughs] I really did, I thoroughly enjoyed it, you know, there were no tourists, the game was wonderful, it really was, marvellous place. We went to Victoria Falls and that sort of thing, er, saw the whole of the country at low level 'cause we were flying Ansons, and the navigators for their passing out trip, we took 'em down to Cape Town and back again, and after two and a half years I came home, and I decided to stay in the Air Force and rejoin Bomber Command, and, they’d got Lincolns then, so I was back on the old Lincolns and posted to Wyton and I was waiting there when of course the atom bomb came in, and the old Lincoln, I’m afraid, wasn’t big enough. So we borrowed some B29s from the Americans, the air force called them the Washington, and er, we converted from the Lincoln to the Washington, and that’s where we ended up at, Coningsby er, on the B29 or the Lincoln, and that’s where I was for quite a while until I think that I moved around a bit, on coastal, I think that, I spent a —a little time converting, then I was posted out to Malta and did a tour out there, with my good lady [laughs]. The Cyprus problem blew up — [interruption]
CH: That's —
AB: And, we were doing trips from Malta to Cyprus, once round the island and back, sixteen hours [laughs] rather tiring, so they decided to send us out to Cyprus and, camp on the edge of the airfield instead, so we could do shorter trips. So, we ended up camping on Cyprus for a bit until it was [laughs], time for us to come home, which we did in nineteen, ooh, was that sixty we came home?
AB: I think so.
PB: Yes, something like that, and I was [pause] posted back up to, Coningsby I think.
AB: Topcliffe.
PB: Yeah, oh, Topcliffe one or the other, yes, and er, after that they sent me back to, Bomber, where I converted on to the Vulcan eventually, that’s where we stayed did we not? Yes, I think so. Yes, they, the Cypriots had taken the [background noises] the explosives in a sandwich — in a sandwich tin, just in it, just in between two pieces of bread and they put 'em on the hinges of the aeroplane and blew the wing off, yes, the pilots didn’t like it, no, weren’t too keen on that. So, they put closer guards on the aeroplanes, that’s the only thing they could do [background noises].
CH: What year was this?
PB: Yes.
CH: What year?
PB: Erm, gosh, what year was Cyprus Chris? It’s in there, when we're doing the Cypriot runs. Five, yeah, it’ll be listed there. [pause] 'Cause they were gun running as well, that’s what we were doing there [?] just trying to pick up the gun runners at night [background noises].
[inaudible]
CH: I'll pause that. What were you saying about the Cypriots?
PB: They were very clever in the way they smuggled their weapons and stuff in, that’s why we were doing these orbits around Cyprus at night to try and catch the boats, the little boats they used to get weapons over, and explosives and that sort of stuff, yeah.
CH: Was this the time of EOKA?
PB: Yes, exactly, yes, yes. [pause] I think it was eighty something, yes.
CH: That would have been in the fifties, nineteen fifties.
PB: Yes, that’s it [indistinct]. But I moved over onto the Vulcan, 'cause we went off to Finningley for our conversion and I’d only flown on piston aircraft, piston air, and I sat in this, monster and he said, er, ‘opening the throttles, full throttle’, whump, and I found myself up over my seat and I thought, good grief, [laughs], and I, I got the instruments in front of me 'cause we’d got an altimeter and an airspeed indicator, and he shot down the runway and I watched the altimeter go like that [laughs], winding upwards [laughs]. I’m not in a fighter but a fantastic performance, it really was, but I did get used to it of course, in the end, but, one or two of the blokes I flew with like Dave Thomas and, and Andy, could really handle a Vulcan well. Dave Thomas, when we’d, we'd done a display, we were coming home one Sunday and he said, ‘Do you mind if I try and roll it?’ and I said, ‘Well, I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t Dave’, and he did a roll and my desk lid lifted about half an inch and went down again, that’s all I knew, but somebody on the ground saw him, reported it to 1 Group Headquarters, and we were all summoned to see the AOC [laughs] 'cause we were both squadron leaders and he gave us both a right rollicking, and he said, ‘Don’t ever do that again’, [emphasis] well he said, ‘If you do don’t let anybody see you’, [laughs] ‘And would you like to stay for lunch’, [laughter] so he wasn’t really annoyed [laughs], but. Ah, ha, but, we did have some fun in the Vulcan one way and another [pause]. Ah. When we were training we were given a weekend off and, mother was always very pleased because we got a special, ration for aircrew and it added to her points, I think it doubled them just about and of course we got a free railway warrant, so I used to always, um, ask for a one to Birmingham and I used to exit at New Street station which was open and then catch the bus home, and that way I ended up with a few free tickets, you see, that I, I could use later on, which I did and during the war, yes it was very handy, but , yes every six weeks we were sent, to, to clear off and have a rest, eh, because we never knew but the sky over Britain was, must have been full of aeroplanes at night, that we didn’t know about, there was no radar cover, nothing like that, you just flew and fingers crossed, hope for the best that you saw everybody else, eh, fortunately we survived, no problems [laughs].
CH: Did you keep in contact with any of your crew that you flew with in the war?
PB: Yes, yes, eh, I haven’t contacted Henry, I did John Tidmarsh for a little while, I’ve lost contact with him.
AB: Johnny, Johnny King.
PB: Yes, but , Johnny King that, flew with since the war, yes, still in contact with him, he's in Canada but, we're in regular contact, yes, we flew together on, on Lincolns, yes, in fact he was a flight engineer and then, changed to pilot, trained to be a pilot, yeah.
AB: Lorenzo, Lorenzo.
PB: Yes, eh, anything else I’ve forgotten?
AB: Lorenzo.
PB: Oh yes, I kept in contact with Keith but he’s dead now of course, passed away.
AB: The Canadian ones, we’ve been over to Canada and stayed with them.
PB: But, [interrupted].
CH: Were there Canadians in your crew?
PB: Er, no, no there was, one Irish and the other one was a Londoner, the two gunners, yeah, one London, one Irish and one London. Paddy Mack [?], he was the rear gunner and there’s a little London fella, I can’t remember his name is the mid upper gunner, and I was the reserve gunner if necessary [laughs] but, I was never used [pause]. I think that’s about all I can remember, apart from the fact that flying was always cold, very, very cold [emphasis]. The only warm place in the Lancaster was in my position in fact, er, that wasn’t too bad, but the rest of them the Anson and the Wellington were perishing [laughs]. You used to wear as much clothing as we could to keep warm and you could hear the gunner in the back cracking the ice in his oxygen mask [laughs], crunching away [laughs], [coughs] but eh, you learn to live with these things [pause]. On Vulcans, Andy Milne and er, the rest of them [interrupted]
AB: Dave Thomas.
PB: Yes, but I think Andy Milne [interrupted]
AB: Jerry Strange.
PB: Was the best, 'cause we, we went on the bombing competition twice so we must have been pretty good [interrupted]
AB: And won, each time.
PB: But eh, yes, we beat the Americans at one stage but er, out in Barksdale, they didn’t like that very much [laughs], poor old, but they’ve been very good to us the Yanks I must admit, yes, um, but yes that was, that was a very good crew I must admit and we, we're still in touch, all of us. Yes, Andy's down in Devon with his own small holding, and, but our co-pilot settled in the Far East, built himself a house [unclear]
[inaudible]
PB: And er, my navigator’s still around, he comes, still comes to the meetings occasionally [pause] but, trying to think that’s, that’s about the limit of -. 'Course, there was our, my crash in the Vulcan, that was quite interesting [laughs]. Well we got to — went out to fly one day, Flight Lieutenant Galway was the captain at the time and, I was the AEO, Stan Grierson was the co-pilot, and we had, Alan Bowman and, was the radar. Anyway we got, this, almost brand-new Vulcan, it had got about ten hours on the air frame. Anyway, climbed on board, and set off and we were flying about an hour, when Ivor said, ‘The hydraulic pressure's reading zero’, I said, ‘Well tap the gauge Ivor, you know, use the old knuckle’, [laughs] he tapped it, wouldn’t come back you know, I said oh, ‘Hang on then I’ll see if it’ll move my,’ got a little scoop on the rover gas turbine in the wing, a little motor, I put my switch on and off, didn’t move, I said, ‘This looks ominous Ivor, it looks to me as if we’ve lost all our hydraulic pressure’, ‘But we’ve got air, we’ve got air, yes, have no fear, we’ll go back and use the air,’ he says, 'Okay, right', so we, we came back to base and um, burnt off a bit of fuel, you know as much as we could and then he said, ‘Right selecting emergency air, undercarriage down,’ down it went, bang’ [emphasis]. Two greens, one red. Oh dear, [sigh] ‘Which is the one?’ he said, ‘It’s the starboard wing, port undercarriage has not gone down and locked’. Now that’s bad, you can’t do anything about that at all. ‘I’ll check the electrics just to make sure that it’s not a fuse’, it wasn’t. So, he said, ‘Well , what about bailing out?’ I said, ‘Bailing out!, the nose wheels down', I said, 'I’ll go sliding out and the first thing I’m going to hit is the nose wheel,’ I said, I’m not too keen on that Ivor, if you don’t mind,’ I said, ‘The navigator and the radar might want to have a go?’ but, he looked at me and said, ‘No sir, I said, ‘What are you going to do Ivor?’, he said, ‘Well, I’m going to land her’, he said, ‘I’m going to try and land’, I said, ‘Well I'm, you are going to have two, three passengers on board as well, so to make sure you don’t clear off we’ll keep the safety pins in the seats all right, if you don’t mind, so you don’t accidently pull those handles and disappear,’ [laughs] he said, ‘Right oh,’ he said, I said, ‘Well, shall we prepare for a crash landing,’ he said, ‘That’s a good idea,’ so, we went through the drill, he said, ‘What we’ll do, we’ll pull the handle, get rid of the canopy, so that we can get out of the top at the front if anything happens,’ you know, that, and he said, ‘We'll, we’ll try.’ So he, he did a roller and it held up, but eh, and we went round again, came in, he said, ‘Well, here we go, hang on fellas.’ And eh, as he lowered the wing, bump [emphasis] down it went, straight onto the ground [laughs]. Round we went, twice [laughs]. We came to a halt about twenty yards from another Vulcan [laughs]. The bottom, our exit was okay, it was clear, actually, we could get out and the aero, the aeroplane was still upright, there was enough room for us to get out and clear off, which we did, as quickly as possible [laughs]. The aeroplanes left there with its wing on the ground, eh, yeh, a complete failure of the down leg had cracked [whispering], split, and all the hydraulic fluid had vented [?] to air. Nothing you could do about it [background noises].
CH: Let’s just pause this.
[interview paused]
PB: Crash landed twice in Rhodesia, [laughs] flying along and the pilot [background noises] said to me, ‘The controls have jammed,’ he said, ‘I can’t move the control column Phil, [background noises] can you come and give me a hand up here?’ I did, we couldn’t shift it at all, we were in a steady slow climb, so he said, ‘[unclear] I'm going to wind full nose trim on, we’ll go down and look for somewhere flat’ [laughs]. Which is what he did, [laughs] we did a very slow descent, we got two nav- cadets on board and I said, ‘Get in your crash landing position, it might be a bit bumpy when we land,’ but they [unclear] were very good you know, straight in, bent the props back and all the rest of it, chopped the ground up a bit, but er, opened the back door and the two lads jumped out, not even a bruise, yeah, yes. A clapped out old Anson you see, the control cables had dropped through the guides and jammed, you couldn’t move 'em, but there we are [laughs]. These are little things you’ve got to be ready for [laughs]. Yes, I had a time when I had to fly the aeroplane back when the pilot fell asleep, as well, poor [unclear] Freddy [laughs]. I said, ‘Fred, [laughs] we need to go back to base Fred’, [laughs] Fred Holloway, ‘What you say Phil?’ [laughs]. I said, ‘One eighty and head for Thornhill Freddy,’ [emphasis] [laughs] ‘oh, you’ll have to do it Phil’, I said, ‘Oh, crikey, I’ve not done this before Freddy,’ [laughs] ‘Nothing to it,’ he said, ‘Just keep it steady,’ he was right, you know I just [laughs], half an hour we were back over the top and he was awake by this stage. I said, ‘Do you think you could land it Freddy?’ oh, got the goose necks out there they are, I could see them, oh, he managed it. Ah, he’d been flying continually for, I think it was a week we’d been doing night flying and without any rest, or something like that, he’d overdone it [pause] yes, right oh, [pause] yes. Well the, the trips to the Congo were, well the Russians packed it in, they wouldn’t go, they, they’d got their aircraft out there, but , they said it was too dangerous, apparently. The weather was always icy [unclear], you know, going through the front but, we just, filled the old Hastings up with their soldiers and off we went and did it, but , we managed to get there and back okay.
CH: What was it that you were doing in the Congo?
PB: Ferrying the United Nations troops from, Nigeria and Ghana into the Congo to, as a peacekeeping — peacekeeping force really, because there were, having a, a dreadful war out there, Katanga, and political as well. They were slaughtering each other left, right and centre, as they do, out there, and so that’s what we were doing, ferrying the troops back and forth [pause]. RAF Transport Command, the black people saw 'em and thought they were commandos, that we were ferrying commandos in to attack them. And eh, we had to go through Leopoldville, which every time we went through, this chap in his ragged [unclear] came out with his hand, wanting so many thousand dollars so that we could go through and get into the Congo proper, where we wanted to be, and, I've forgotten how many thousand dollars we had to hand over, and if you didn’t they set up a light machine gun and trained it on the aeroplane, [laughs] so we paid [laughs]. Yes, we had to put on our United Nations hats, be part of the United Nations force, as opposed to the Royal Air Force [pause].
AB: I don’t know I didn’t hear what she said either Phil.
PB: Eh [unclear] yes, but , yes, yes, you never know — know when you were going to get through or not, that was the trouble, they tried to pull us back once because they thought we’d got the Prime Minister on board, they thought he was, the, the Prime Minister that had been giving them all the trouble, they thought we’d kidnapped him and we were taking him away [laughs] and they said, you must return to Leopoldville immediately, but er oh, it was old Bill Corker[?] who was flying, he says, ‘Tell 'em not bloody likely,’ [laughs] he said, ‘We’re going back to Accra as fast as we can [laughs] and we're not going back to Leopoldville, thank you’ [laughs]. Yes, that was their, the, the biggest problems were handling these people properly, so they could be very tricky these, black politicians. I’ve forgotten what his name was now but he was, [background noises] he caused a lot of trouble out there [pause], 'cause they’re all starving, and, we gave them all our food, all of us [unclear], as much as we could [pause].
AB: And this is one of the letters from the one he's talking about.
PB: Yes [unclear].
AB: Because they used to write regularly to us, letting us know what was going on in the other, the half and I just thought there might be something in here, erm, well there is about killing two Europeans before they got off, before we let you go we are going to kill two Europeans. I’d have to go through the whole of the letter for. I think they're the only two letters we kept, we had piles of them, didn’t we? [pause]. Yes, why I brought that out that was to show you that that’s how we used to communicate.
PB: I remember that, that’s the first time I saw Dennis’s name in, in print after he was , in the chapter called, “Men Like These”, yeah.
AB: Yes, it is only a small part of it, but I just thought that you would be interested, you know, because a lot of it happened in the era that you don’t remember. But, I think maybe David’s got the book.
PB: Oh yes, possibly yes, the one with the red cover, yeah, yes, bit tatty but , yes, yes it was a good book, yes.
AB: Any book that’s got a bit about the family in it, is good [laughs].
PB: I’m sixty, four, forty, KCs, but, as I say the aircrew of course, treat these things with er, well I, I can’t say it really, because its racist but er, [laughter] ‘Hello, hello darkies speak to me you black’ [laughs] and such like, as aircrew a lot, but, bit like that I’m afraid [laughs]. But, er, he’d never heard of it he said, but I said, 'Oh I can assure you it was an emergency [unclear] system during World War Two'.
AB: I know this has only got to do with [unclear].
CA: Not to mention the high jinks you got up to after a dining in night, and you decided to drive down to London to see the Queen, in a sports car, four of you, do you remember that?
AB: I remember them going, yeah. I remember them coming home [laughs] yeah, but that, is that the sort of thing you also want to know about?
PB: What's that?
AB: When you and, erm, what’s his name, all climbed into his sports car to go to visit his auntie, in London.
PB: In Mayfair.
AB: You and?
PB: Stan Grierson.
AB: And Ivor Galway.
PB: And Ivor Galway.
AB: All in their mess kit.
PB: Yes, not, not the best thing to do.
CA: Not having [?] imbibed a certain amount of alcohol?
PB: Weren’t in our right senses, no. ‘We’ll go and see my aunt, she lives in Mayfair [interrupted].
AB: This is from Cottesmore [unclear].
PB: 'She’s got a very nice flat’. ‘Okay Stan, yes, let’s go’. We get the car [laughs] oh dear.
AB: Carry on love.
PB: Yes, then all the wives panic, ‘Where’s my husband gone?’ [laughs]. ‘Don’t know, haven’t the faintest idea?’ We were on our way home, safe and sound.
AB: Yes, all of us were ringing each other up, the wives, to find out, is he home yet, to [unclear], Ivor’s wife, ‘No he’s not home yet, haven’t heard from him’, 'Haven’t you heard from them?’ ‘No.’ They were in London, in their mess kit, all in one sports car, they'd stayed the night, had their breakfast with auntie and then set off to come home. Arrived home at, oh I don’t know, maybe eleven o’clock, eleven am, to irate wives as you can well imagine, having been, been one [laughs]. Go on carry on, what happened then?
PB: Well, that was it wasn’t it, young and irresponsible, absolutely, totally irresponsible.
CA: As children, we were told you’d gone to see the Queen.
AB: Yes [laughs].
PB: Especially for a mature gentleman like you, yes.
AB: Well, you were the oldest member of the crew, you were the responsible one, all the others were young.
PB: Yes exactly, yes, I was the leader, yeah, yeah.
AB: I mean what a thing to do after a dining in night, you'll know about the dining in nights and how they, raucous they can get. Let’s go to London and see the Queen.
PB: It seemed a good idea at the time, yes, yes [laughs].
AB: You can imagine them arriving in London can’t you, all in their mess kit [pause]. Auntie didn’t turn a hair, did she?
PB: No.
AB: Gave them breakfast and sent them on their way [laughs].
PB: Yes, she did have a very nice flat, in Mayfair.
AB: It’s a pity those sort of things can’t come in the thing, 'cause they are hilarious, you know, but erm, what else did you do?
PB: Oh well, I’ve always been a good fellow you know that, I haven’t done anything.
AB: What about the ones in Nottingham? Auntie, in Nottingham, and Fosco?
PB: [laughs] Yes.
AB: I think we wives could write a book.
PB: Yes, come home, all is forgiven, Mother Vallance [laughs].
AB: This was, shall I carry on with it? This was one, one of the young men was, was violently sick when they went to stay in this house in Nottingham where they all used to go if they couldn’t get home 'cause the last bus went at seven o’clock at night, I mean, ridiculous really, so they used to go and stay, and he was very sick in the bedroom and he didn’t tell any of the crew, 'til he got home, and of course, she, the landlady went up and found all this, and she, she eh, was furious obviously. They all sent her a bunch of flowers and a letter saying, you know, we are sorry about this, and she wrote a letter back saying, all is forgiven, come home, love Mother Vallance [laughter]. 'Cause, this is when they were all at Coningsby.
PB: [laughs].
AB: But there’s lots of little stories like that, you know, that don’t come under the terms of flying, you know, but I think we should do a book on what the wives remember [laughs].
PB: Yes.
AB: Anymore?
PB: No, he’s still going strong, isn’t he Fosco?
AB: Yes, the one who was sick, he must be about, they were, they were all probably five or six years younger than Phil, he was the oldest member of the crew, erm, so he will probably be in his early eighties.
PB: Yes.
AB: Still lives at Coningsby. It's funny thinking about them all now, you know, it —
PB: Yes.
AB: 'Cause, Ivor Galway, the pilot of the plane that crashed, he used to live at Woodhall Spa.
PB: Yes ah.
AB: She had an unhappy end didn't she, committed suicide, a lot of the wives couldn’t take the pressures, as they were in those days, you know, the bomb and what not, you know. You, you never knew when they were called out on a QRA, does your husband, still do, is he still in the air force?
CH: No, it’s my son.
AB: Pardon?
CH: My son.
AB: Oh son. So, he would still do QRAs, rushed out in the middle of the night.
PB: Yes, that’s right.
AB: A lot of funny stories about QRAs and being called out.
PB: We used to wait for the call, ‘Attention, attention, this is the bomber controller for Waddington QRA only, readiness zero two is now in force’, and jumped in the car and straight out to the aeroplane and fire it up and get ready. That’s what they used to do [pause].
AB: It’s alright, that’s just a little passage, from the book. They arrived at the door in their flying kit having been brought home by bus because they were all, you know, a bit shaken.
PB: The MO thought we were all shook up, he said 'Go home', yes, I said 'I’m not shook up'.
AB: And we didn’t care less anyway we were, we were too busy with our sherry [laughs].
PB: Yes.
[laughter]
PB: Yes, QRA was a bit of, bit of a, bit of a bind but eh — [interrupted].
AB: And your son will know all about that if he, do they still do QRAs?
PB: Yes, well I suppose they do really eh, sleep in your kit and er, be ready to go eh, at a moment’s notice and it was eh, sort of broken sleep, that sort of thing, mind you at the same time, the food in the aircrew feeder was excellent eh, 'cause we had our own little restaurant, yes, but , [coughs] and of course, you could probably go a couple of nights without being called at all, and then suddenly, you know ‘Attention, attention, this is the bomber controller,’ and eh, and off you’d go, but, but you took your turn, you weren’t on it all the time [pause].
AB: Can I speak [whispered]. 'Cause that’s how a lot of the wives couldn’t cope because they never knew when they were called out on QRA, where they were going and what they were going to do. They could have been called to Russia and when they've passed a certain boundary time, place, they can’t turn round and come home again, they have to keep going, and a lot of the wives, lot of the wives could not cope with this, not knowing when their husbands went out on a QRA call, whether they were coming home or not.
PB: Yes.
AB: Especially the ones who were called out on the, the last, the Falkland do.
PB: Yes.
AB: They actually all wrote letters to their wives because once they got out they wouldn't have been able to turn round and come back.
PB: I think the really serious one was the missile crisis with Russia, you know, with the ships eh, going to Cuba, and J F Kennedy was the really serious one [pause]. That’s where — where we were on full alert, ready, ready to go, actually. Not that anyone wants to 'cause you know well that, there'd be nothing to come back to, if it ever happens, that’s why we want to stop these missiles spreading, it’s very difficult to do but we must try our best.
[laughter]
CH: I shall end that there. Thank you very, very, much Phil.
PB: Yes [laughs].
CH: Thank you.
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Philip Batty
Description
An account of the resource
Philip Batty grew up in Walsall. He discusses the death of his older brother Dennis, a wireless operator with 226 Squadron, early in the Second World War. Philip volunteered for aircrew. After training, he was posted to 50 Squadron at RAF Sturgate as a wireless operator/ air gunner in May 1945. He was involved in Operation Dodge and United Nations peacekeeping in the Congo. He worked in Rhodesia and Cyprus and survived crash landings in a Vulcan and an Anson. He reminiscences about work colleagues and tells some humorous stories relating to his career in the Royal Air Force, which spanned 40 years.
Creator
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Cathie Hewitt
Date
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2016-10-14
Contributor
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Cathie Hewitt
Janet McGreevy
Format
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01:02:22 audio recording
Language
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eng
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ABattyPH161014
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
Congo (Democratic Republic)
Zimbabwe
Cyprus
Cuba
England--Lincolnshire
Temporal Coverage
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1945-05
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.
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IBCC Digital Archive
226 Squadron
50 Squadron
aircrew
Anson
B-29
Battle
Blenheim
bombing
crash
Distinguished Flying Medal
Initial Training Wing
killed in action
Lancaster
Lincoln
military living conditions
military service conditions
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operational Training Unit
RAF Bridlington
RAF Coningsby
RAF Madley
RAF Sturgate
RAF Wattisham
RAF Wyton
training
Wellington
wireless operator / air gunner
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/184/2409/PSandersDS1606.1.jpg
bcbc31c9af960e94130f17aa9a184b7b
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/184/2409/ASandersDS160305.2.mp3
a759a084fadbc2e92b6a1749462ccfd5
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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Sanders, David
D S Sanders
Description
An account of the resource
19 items. The collection contains an oral history interview with Sergeant David Stuart Sanders (1925 - 2022, 1869292 Royal Air Force), his logbook, engineering documentation, operation schedules, a personal record of all his operations, a Dalton computer, a number of target and reconnaissance photographs. David Saunders was a flight engineer on 619 Squadron and 189 Squadron at RAF Strubby and RAF Fulbeck in 1944-45.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by David Sanders and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-03-05
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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Sanders, DS
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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GC: Right. So. This is an interview being conducted on behalf of International Bomber Command. My name is Gemma Clapton. I’m here at the home of David Sanders on the 5th of March 2016. He was a flight engineer in 189 and 619 Squadrons. We’ll begin with something nice and gentle. Tell me about how you joined up for the war for Bomber Command?
DS: Well it’s very difficult because my brother was in the Air Force and I didn’t particular want to go in the army so I volunteered not knowing exactly which part of the aircraft I wanted to be in, but as I was in engineering before as a youngster I decided to go as a flight engineer . So I went to Cardigan and they did an exercise and interviews and I had to file a cube to go into a square [unclear]. I did it perfectly so they said go back home and a few months later I got accepted as a flight engineer. Um, my first thing, my dad took me to Lord’s Cricket Ground for six months, sorry six weeks, as an introducing and being uniformed and have inoculations and all these things there. And we had to march every day to the zoo for our food. [laughs] Anyway – that ok?
GC: OK. Um, where was you stationed first? What’s your first memory of life of Bomber Command itself?
DS: Of Bomber Command? Well ‘cause this came a lot later ‘cause I had a six months course in St Athan. Learning the inside and out of the Lancaster Bomber. Um, so my first actually meeting the crew was at, I can’t remember the name of the place now, but the, the rest of the crew were already joined up and I was the odd man out. So my skipper came and I joined up to the crew, that’s my first thing and we flew into Stirlings aircraft and that was on operations, I forget what they call me. You kept — just a minute, I can’t remember the name of the places now and we were there for several months and flying and then we converted on then to Lancasters. Did training and eventually we went to a squadron. OK.
GC: Can you remember the first time you was inside a Lancaster? First op in a Lancaster?
DS: Oh the first op was quite traumatic because obviously we were all nervous, ‘cause being our first one, even though the pilot’s already done as a spare introducing. Anyway we went to Blenheim [?] and the only fault ever the navigator made he got us too early there and the rest of the time he was perfect. So we had to hang around being fired at which we never experienced before in our lives. After we’d dropped our bombs, on the way out we were combed by searchlights for about seven minutes and we thought we’d never get out of it ‘cause you’re a sitting target. But fortunately the pilot, he was a wonderful Australian, a lot older than us, a lot of experience of flying, just pulled back the throttles and we fell out the sky and we lost them. So we managed to get home and that was our first [laughs] experience.
GC: OK. Tell me a bit about the crew, ‘cause you obviously had an Australian?
DS: Well the pilot, Australian from Sidney, he was in his thirties so we, we treated him as our dad. He looked after us very well. The two gunners were wonderful Canadians, my age. The navigator was more — a little bit older. He was from Nova Scotia in Canada. A little bit snootier him [laughs] but the wireless operator [unclear] came from somewhere Middle East. Unfortunately he was shot down in another plane later. My mate Matt and I were both Londoners.
GC: So you had a real mixed crew?
DS: Very mixed crew, yes.
GC: Did – What was, what was the camaraderie like?
DS: Great, yes, yes we would — generally we used to go out and have drinks together. Perhaps the pilot was a little bit more aloof than us ‘cause we were much younger. [laughs]
GC: OK let’s take this somewhere else. You were obviously quite close to the rest of the crew. Can you describe a bit about life on the station?
DS: Um.
GC: As, as a group.
DS: Yes. Well ‘cause we were, we were in Nissen huts so it was quite, quite funny really ‘cause the Canadians, if you’re from the East or the West they used to fight each other so you had to put the fighters [unclear] up by the door in case we get raided. There was always, always friendly friction between, between people. In each Nissen hut there were two crews. So you had a funny old fire and we had to try and keep warm by putting in anything we could find to keep it — to keep us warm. [laughs] It was quite fun really, you know.
GC: It, it sounds good. OK. So can you, can you — is there a raid or op that sticks out in your memory for a various reason?
DS: Um, oh yes ‘cause most of them. There was an instance possibly in every one. I did say, the — when we went to Dortmund Canal, Heinbeck [?]. We’d go there every three months ‘cause they’d build it up and we’d knock it down again for them. It’s a viaduct. And we lost seven aircraft that time. But on the way back over England we were all relaxed thinking it was good we were getting home. Then we saw an aircraft go down, we thought the poor chappie didn’t make it. And later another one came down. And we had to log them each time. When we got to our aerodrome the perimeter lights were out so we asked them to put them on. They put them on. We landed straight down and we went to the end of the runway and went through our perimeter at the end of the runway. The [unclear] was in the truck ready to pick us up when a Messerschmitt came down the runway firing bullets all the way down. Jokingly the mid-upper Canadian [laughs] he [unclear] in his arms and said ‘it was worth every minute of that’. That night we lost about twenty something aircraft ‘cause we didn’t know the fighters were in, coming in with us.
GC: Was it common for the fighters to follow the planes?
DS: Sorry.
GC: Was it common for the fighters to follow –
DS: No.
GC: Follow home?
DS: No, no it was practically unknown and we weren’t warned ‘cause we had in the aircraft friendly and foe, and you press that and on the radar it would, it would tell whether you’re friendly or not and so they should have seen these coming but they didn’t and they didn’t warn us.
GC: And it wasn’t common?
DS: No.
GC: No. When you was on an op what was more unnerving the, the lights going up or knowing that there was possibly fighters up there with you? Was there a –
DS: Oh no, it’s, it’s very mixed. Another bad raid we had. This time I wasn’t with my crew, I was just spare and I had to go and do this crew. I’d been to Harburg before and Harburg was rather flak. Harburg, which is very near Hamburg. When we went there and bombed there wasn’t any flak and we couldn’t understand it, but when we came out we could see air to air fly, firing going on and as we – all of a sudden our aircraft lit up by an aircraft put a flare beside us. Behind that a fighter came in and fired on us so we had to corkscrew right away. The [unclear] bullets were flying everywhere and the two gunners, very experienced, shot him down. Hurray [emphasis]. And later another aircraft came in we started to corkscrew but he disappeared. We got home safely. The two gunners were awarded DFNs.
GC: Oh wow.
DS: Um.
GC: So, is there, was there a difference in attitudes towards a daytime op and a night-time op?
DS: Um.
GC: Was there a difference?
DS: Well they’re totally different really ‘cause the Americans generally did the daylights and we always did the nights. I went on one daylight. A thousand-bomber raid and you don’t believe what a sight. Everywhere you see is aircraft and when you got to the target you had to look up. You see aircraft are probably opening their bomb doors [laughs] and [unclear] get out of the way skip, you know, but generally speaking apparently all my raids were at night. And, er, you’re individuals. Your navigator is on his own. Do you like one?
GC: No.
DS: OK.
GC: Do you – I’m, I’m reading here your list and it said at one stage you, you went up to Bergen.
DS: Bergen, yes.
GC: Bergen. Would you like to tell us a bit about that please?
DS: It was more or less straight forward, no problems just a bit of flak and not difficult at all. The longest raids I did was Munich into Poland, I can’t think of the names in Poland. Oh Politzs [?] and that thing — they were very long raid. Took us about ten hours and standing in the dark all that time. It’s – your eyes start to play tricks on you. You’ve got to look out all the time. So long raids were very fatiguing.
GC: So if you are doing raids say of nine hours plus. I know going out you’re going to be concentrating. How do you keep your mind sharp to concentrate for that amount of time?
DS: Well you used to take wakey wakey pills. You had little pills to keep you awake [laughs]. But I don’t know it’s very difficult because then you get – your life is at stake so you had to keep, you know keep on, keep on watch. My job being a flight engineer I had to look out a lot to – apart from looking after the engines and everything I had keep doing – and your eyes did play tricks with you sometimes looking out in the dark for so long.
GC: So I take it from that you didn’t have something to focus on it was all done by maps and –
DS: Sorry I missed that.
GC: As I say it was all done by maps rather than what we would class as modern technology?
DS: Oh Yes. Well he had – the navigator had Oboe and other radar type of improvements. Though it was up to the navigator completely. I mean the pilot was the great, he was the chauffeur, but the navigator was very important if he didn’t get us to the proper place at the right time we were in trouble.
GC: Right OK. Is there anything that sticks in your mind from serving in Bomber Command? Any incident or –
DS: Well you see. I learnt to talk about the flight engineer job he was the jack of all trades. I had, once or twice, I had when the trimming – when you trim the aircraft you had a wheel to turn and it wouldn’t, it stuck so I had to go out and put my oxygen thing. Go round the aircraft to try to see what the problem was and the wires had slipped under the little wheels, so I had to correct that for the skipper ‘cause he can’t fly with that keep trimming his aircraft. Odd jobs like that the flight engineer had. We lost an engine one time therefore balancing the fuel was very tricky. I had to switch over and the flight engineer – if one of the gunners was injured or something it was my job to get up and take over so I learnt a lot about being a gunner. So it was rather a different job. And in take off I was the pilot’s third hand in take off and we had quite a thing between the two of us and know how to take the aircraft off. So it was quite an interesting job.
GC: What was it actually like inside a Lancaster though?
DS: Well being tall, six foot odd, I had difficulty getting in the aircraft because there was a part going right across the aircraft where they hold the wings together I had to climb over. So it was very restricted. It’s much smaller inside than you think it is and I had a little portable seat to sit so I could lift it up so the bomber, bomb men could get by and get underneath. So [laughs] it was a – not the most comfortable of places.
GC: OK. I’m going to take a [unclear]
DS: Yeah.
GC: OK. Tell me a bit about the actual training for Bomber Command if you would please?
DS: Yeah. One of the interesting things was that when you fly, when you got above ten-thousand feet you had to put your oxygen mask on and to prove that it was necessary in training we went into a decompression chamber. There was a whole crew we was all in there all sitting round all happy and joking then they said would you write down this poem. So we was writing the thing, we was writing it down and then we had to take our masks off then went down – I was still writing and I just went out. Then after they put us back onto our masks and I looked and I found that after the poem was just a scribble. The other thing he asked me he says ‘what’s the time now?’ I looked at my wrist, my watch has gone. So it just shows you that you’re oblivious once you have lack of oxygen when you go to, as we had to go, up to eighteen-thousand feet.
GC: You said, you said earlier that you had an engineering background. How did they train you? What part did they train you for? I know you were a flight engineer.
DS: Well –
GC: Just want to try and find out a bit about your training.
DS: Well as it happens every fortnight we did a different part of the aircraft and had exam on each one so you could pass onto the next one. So we did the whole – the frame, the engines, the hydraulics, the pneumatics, gunnery, bombing. We did the whole lot over six months. Every, every – it was very, very –
GC: Intense?
DS: What’s the word? Very, very – what’s the word? [laughs] Very, very, um —
GC: Intense? Intense?
DS: Intensitive that’s it yes. Anyway that’s — so at the end you had to pass another, another examination completely. I had a moaning [?] engine in front of me and they asked questions one after the other about that particular engine. I just scraped through. [laughs] OK.
GC: Um. We was talking earlier as well also about your uniform about the boots and things. Was — How was —What was it like putting that on? What —
DS: I think it was no problem really. I think we got so used to it and quite pleased to put it on knowing it was going to warm us up a bit. No I think it was quite easy. I think we got quite used to it. We did it so many times. We had big boots and we had a flight engineer I used to stick something in there just in case I needed it and also I had to carry the thermos for a skipper for when he wanted a drink. [chuckles]
GC: OK. Tell me about one of the ops when —
DS: One of the most vivid things I can remember was going to Brunswick. It was an incendiary raid. Very old town and terribly on fire. When we was going to a bombing raid there was another aircraft right beside us coming in with us. And all of a sudden he was hit and a huge [emphasis] great flame came up and he held us for a little while and then went down. That could’ve been us, we were right beside him.
GC: Did your brain work like that? Did you just accept it or —
DS: Well you had to. You had to go on. Do a bombs. And after you’d dropped your bombs you had to hold, I think for about forty seconds to take a photograph. You dropped a flare and you had to wait until that photograph was taken. And another bit of a funny thing with the photographs because my second raid was on Wolfen Island off Holland. We had to go to the island to breach the fence and when we took off we couldn’t find the group we was in so we rushed over to one to try to find it. It was the wrong group. We keep doing this and all of a sudden the bomber with me said ‘Your targets coming up. Quickly!’ So we lined up, dropped our bombs, came back home. Easy raid only two and a half hours but the next day the pilot and the navigator were up to see the CO. We’d bombed the wrong island. [laughs] So it was a — we’d bombed the — [laughs]
GC: Did they make you go back?
DS: No. Well actually we did it another, another time but they were in trouble. But it’s only because we couldn’t find who we were meant to be flying with. [laughs]
GC: Did you bomb mainly Germany or were you —
DS: No, we, we — Germany, Poland, Norway. Mainly those three.
GC: OK. I’m just going to introduce that there is a third person now in the room and it’s, it’s David’s wife, it’s Daphne. So if you hear a third voice it’s Daphne. So my apologies.
DS: One raid, I tell you is — how clever the Germans were. We went to Munich which is a very long raid. We had to go down South and across Switzerland but on the way we suddenly saw an aircraft on fire and it all of sudden you saw a big explosion on the ground, but we sussed out that when the aircraft was hit it wasn’t moving. So the Germans are very crafty and trying to scare especially the new, the new, new, the ones on their first and second raids. Thinking that they — but they, they shot over a flare up in the air that looked like an aircraft. Then did an explosion on the ground thinking that’s them. It’s very very clever how they tried to trick you.
GC: I know we have spoken about, like you said, the thousand-bomber raids. What was it like being surrounded by all those planes?
DS: You don’t believe it. ‘Cause today if two aircraft go anywhere near each other they’re in trouble. There was a thousand and they were all putting out window. That’s a big strip of things — to try and, to confuse the German’s radar. And everywhere you could see there was aircraft. In fact you know you had to keep your eyes open and tell the skip to watch out, go higher, go lower. Watch out the bombs are dropping in front of you. They were everywhere. [laughs] Anyway it was a very easy raid, there was, I think, only one or two aircraft lost most probably by other, you know, own aircraft. But you can’t believe watching everywhere you see there are so many aircraft in the air.
GC: What kind of bombs did you carry? Weaponry?
DS: Well they varied. The big cookie. Funnily enough once it didn’t release properly and it was rocking about in the bomb doors so the skipper had to open up and waggle the aircraft about tremendously to release it. [laughs] and it did go but sometimes we had incendiaries for fire. Yeah it was varied but generally it was a cookie and a few smaller ones either side of it.
GC: Can you describe a cookie for us?
DS: Sorry.
GC: Can you describe the cookie for us?
DS: Well it was like a big barrel, a huge great bomb, er, nothing like the ones you have on the 617 Squadron. They had, they had huge great things, but it was quite a big one. I forget the weight of it now.
GC: Good.
DS: Quite a big one.
GC: So it was just the one you carried at any one time?
DS: We carried the cookie and we had about six either side of the smaller bombs. [pause and whispering]
GC: Right, tell me about — you was describing to me the take off for a Lancaster please?
DS: Yeah OK. This is the flight engineer’s job on take off. So we taxied round to the runway. Lined up the runway and waited for the red light to come up, or the green light, I forget what, to start. So then we keep the brakes on and the skipper puts the throttles right up, half way up to get big power. Then suddenly releases the brakes so we go off. As the pilot is pushing the throttles my hand is behind him. Then he takes his hand away. Then I take over the throttles and I push them up to what we call the gate. I hold it there. As we go down the runway he says ‘full power’. Then I push it right through the gate and lock it. We can only hold that for a few minutes because it will blow up the engines. So now we manage to take off, so then I throttle back and lock it there. Then the skipper says ‘wheels up’. So I pull the wheels up, then he asks for flaps up by a third. I put them up a little bit then I pull the flaps up. Then we should be full take off then, so now we can just throttle back to the speed we need what the navigator has taken. That’s my initial job on take off.
GC: OK. Thank you very much. You often hear referred to in rides — you often hear referred to the phrase of a corkscrew. Can you describe a corkscrew for us please?
DS: Yes. A corkscrew is a — on the radar I said before when one of the enemy aircraft lit us up and the other fighter came in on the blind side the gunner said ‘corkscrew’. So we go down, fly down, very very fast. Then pull the aircraft up into like a corkscrew, going through the sky like a corkscrew. We’d done this many times on practice so the gunners know exactly where to put their guns. The enemy has got to keep resetting his aircraft to fire upon us, so fortunately this time it worked and we shot him down. But it’s, it’s very dramatic in a sense because one minute your, your blood is pouring down your face, next minute you’re lifted up as if you’ve gone into the sky. So it’s quite a dramatical thing to do really.
GC: Thank you. We was talking earlier as well about superstitions. Did you have any lucky charms or —
DS: Well I had a threepenny bit sewed in behind my wings. And I had a funny little thing that had a little beer barrel on and you tried to pull it and it would come down and you release it and it would go back again. So as I got in the aircraft I always gave it a pull.
GC: You was also talking about you had a dog, well the squadron had a dog.
DS: It was a stray dog which we, we looked after. A big black dog. And when we went into town on our bicycles he used to come along beside us. But as we speeded up a bit he didn’t like it so he rushed in front of us and grabbed hold of our wheels to stop us. So, and also on the way we got a piece of wood and we used to throw it in the field. And on the way back we’d tell the dog ‘go and fetch it’ and believe it or not he’d find that piece of wood we’d thrown in, you know. It’s a great dog. And a stray one. [laughs]
GC: You don’t know where he came from?
DS: No.
GC: You talked about going into town, obviously as a squadron and as a crew. What were the kind of things you did on your off days?
DS: Well. Relax one thing, and the other thing we obviously went to the pubs. We went to Dirty Annie’s for our meal and she used to give us eggs and bacons and things ‘cause we did like the breakfasts you used to have. We obviously had a bit of fun. We had parties in the mess. We went to once with an urn to fill it up with beer to come back so we all had a nice drink. It’s, it’s — we went together. So it’s, it’s about being together and enjoying our company ‘cause we’re, we’re fighting together.
GC: OK. We, we, we talked earlier as well about your crew. Could you just give us a little snapshot of each crew member please? With you.
DS: Well the pilot was Australian. He was in his thirties. He was very senior to us and he was our dad. He was a great pilot. The navigator was from Nova Scotia, Canada. Very, very good, very good navigator. The two gunners, mid-upper and rear were Canadians. The rear gunner at Penrose [?] thought he had enough so he went AWL and unfortunately got the LMF, lack of moral fibre. The bomber [unclear] and myself were both Londoners. And the wireless operator was somewhere from Middle East. I’m not quite sure where but unfortunately he went on a spare trip and got shot down and died.
GC: OK. I’ve read your CV and you, you spoke about bringing the POWs home. Could you tell us a little bit about bringing the POWs home?
DS: What? Sorry.
GC: Could you tell us a bit more about bringing the prisoners of war home?
DS: Oh sorry, yes. After the war, rather a wonderful thing really. We went [clears throat] — a whole lot of aircraft went [clears throat] I think it was to Belgium to pick up the prisoners of war. They were all lined up everywhere and as we taxied we stopped and our line all came into the aircraft. Full up. One sitting — standing right behind me. We took off and on the way back we saw the Cliffs of Dover and believe it or not they were all in tears.
GC: OK. I’d just like to say thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure and an honour to have met you today.
DS: It’s my pleasure. Thank you.
GC: You’re welcome.
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with David Sanders
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Sound
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Pending review
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Gemma Clapton
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-03-05
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Format
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00:31:24 audio recording
Language
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eng
Identifier
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ASandersDS160305
Description
An account of the resource
David Sanders flew operations as a flight engineer with 189 and 619 Squadrons. He joined the Royal Air Force as a flight engineer and discusses an operation when they arrived too early over the target, being followed by a night fighter and having a bomb hang up. He also explains the role of a flight engineer.
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
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Great Britain
Wales
England--Lincolnshire
Wales--Vale of Glamorgan
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Tracy Johnson
189 Squadron
619 Squadron
aircrew
animal
bombing
flight engineer
Lancaster
military living conditions
military service conditions
Operation Exodus (1945)
RAF Fulbeck
RAF St Athan
RAF Strubby
Stirling
superstition
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/159/2504/AParkinsHW150612.2.mp3
a7b074df4b419b69687ccb1c168e6939
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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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Parkins, Harry
H W Parkins
Description
An account of the resource
Five items. Two oral history interviews with Harry Parkins (891679 Royal Air Force), his logbook, identity card and one photograph. Harry Parkins was a flight engineer with 630 Squadron and 576 Squadron and flew 30 night time and 17 daylight operations from RAF Fiskerton and RAF East Kirkby.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Harry Parkins and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-06-05
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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DE: Harry, you were going to tell me the story of being shot at.
HP: Yes it was on the 21st of the 6th ‘44, we were on operations to Wessling, and we had twelve thousand pounds worth on bombs, we succeeded in doing that but on the way back I spotted what I thought was a plane coming towards us, I shouted to the gunners ‘cause [sic] they hadn’t seen it, and as it got nearer it started firing tracer bullets which was very frightening, and the gunners spotted it and shot at it and luckily they downed it, so we were able to get back home safely but I went down to see where the tracer bullet had gone in the aircraft to see if there was any serious damage, I couldn’t see any but when we landed the ground crew actually cried because there was seventeen holes in the plane and it didn’t fly again, a shame that was, and that took us four hours twenty minutes that trip.
DE: Where were you standing when you saw this aircraft attacking you?
HP: I was just standing by the seat that’s next to the pilot, where there’s a little dome, and standing in that dome you can see all the way round, and I always liked to look all the way round when I wasn’t checking the engines because, it was your job really to spot anything, and some of the frightening aspects of it is if the Perspex wasn’t cleaned very well, in the night time, incidentally that was a night time flight, in the night time if you saw a little speck of dirt that hadn’t been cleaned it could be a fighter coming after you, so we always wanted the ground crew to make sure the Perspex was always as clean as possible.
DE: So what did an incoming eighty-eight look like then?
HP: [slight laugh] it’s hard to remember because with the tracer bullets coming at you, you practically didn’t see the plane, all you saw was these lights coming at you, which was very frightening, it’s bad enough being shot at but to see, actually see it coming at you, it was worse than ever.
DE: Did the pilot take any evasive action?
HP: Yes, he did a slight corkscrew but not too much because the gunners had got the plane, and it went down, so he really didn’t have to do a corkscrew, but that’s a frightening thing when you do a corkscrew, because at one time coming back from an operation, I forget where that was, we were caught in searchlights, and that again is another frightening thing, and it’s, it’s like being on a stage completely naked and everyone’s looking at you, and well the gunner shouted to do a corkscrew and it went really mad, it was a really violent corkscrew, you thought the wings were gonna [sic] come off, but we managed to get out of the searchlight and carry on home, again we were lucky.
DE: And when you landed, you say the ground crew were really upset, was it that obvious then that the plane had been hit?
HP: Yeah, you could see all the holes in the side, yeah, but we didn’t know until after briefing how many holes there was, seventeen all told [sic], which is quite a lot, [pause] that was our twentieth operation that one.
DE: So, you mentioned at certain points when the searchlights were on you or if you were being shot at you felt frightened, how did you feel before and during operations normally?
HP: I didn’t feel too bad because, I think half the time being a young age it was like excitement more than anything else, you didn’t really have a lot of fear at all, at least I didn’t, and I don’t think the rest of the crew did, except maybe the rear gunner because that time when we had a mid-air collision, I think that really frightened him.
DE: But he was OK?
HP: He carried on until the end yeah, and when we finished the tour of ops, they went back to their various countries, which was Australia and New Zealand.
DE: You had another story about some low flying?
HP: Oh yes, my skipper like to do low flying, and, we were low flying what we called air to sea firing where the gunners fired off their guns to make sure everything was OK and you checked various things in the plane and coming back, he decided to do a bit of low flying along Skegness and in actual fact when I looked out from my little blister, I could see the pier above us [laughs], and he still carried on and as we passed further along near to the pier there was two men in a boat, who must have thought we were coming into crash because they jumped out the boat [laughs] and we passed them and coming up to Butlins camp which at that time had been taken over by the navy, and the navy was having a parade on their parade ground and he went so low that the parade all scarpered and ducked down and we all laughed at that and carried on back to East Kirkby, but a couple of days later we were called to the group captains office and he said, ‘first of all you needn’t deny this because we’ve got people who witnessed your aircraft number from the naval station’ and he said the naval officer in charge contacted him because he knew it was from East Kirkby and said that ‘tell your crew that next time if they do that, it won’t be air to sea firing, it’ll be ground to air firing’ and he just said ‘dismissed’, I think he thought it was more of a joke as well [pause], anything else?
DE: Well anything else you can tell me?
HP: I don’t know if I told you about when Pilot Officer Jackson and I went, three, twice with him, did I tell you that?
DE: Yes you did.
HP: I’m just trying to think of the other thing.
DE: Yes you said that three was your lucky number.
HP: Yes, well I lived in 13, Churchill Walk in England, in London I should say and we had a bomb dropped on the next street and it shattered all the windows of our street, right the way along except number thirteen, never touched the windows at all, and with no explanation for that at all.
DE: Would you say you are quite a superstitious person then?
HP: In the way of three and thirteen, yes.
DE: What about any lucky charms did you have anything?
HP: No, never had lucky charms but quite a few air crew used to have lucky charms, and my opinion is that often the lucky charms cause them to do something wrong and end up being either shot down or crashed, because when you think about it, if a member of the crew had a lucky charm and he’d gone and left it before he was flying, instead of his mind being on what he should be doing, his mind was on, ‘what did I do with that lucky charm?’ and during that period something could happen, but that was only my opinion.
DE: So you think it’s more professional just to keep your mind focused on the job?
HP: Oh yes, definitely.
DE: Did you know if anybody in your crew had anything like that?
HP: No, none of them, none at all, the only thing we considered a lucky charm was our whistle and we all had a whistle it was always pinned to your coat.
DE: So the other thing I’ve read about is similar superstitions that if you associated with a certain woman she was unlucky or anything like that, do you have any stories about things like that?
HP: No, the only story I had was that one of the air crew, I don’t know who he was, I think he was a pilot, he’d got going with one of the girls in the village and after a while, whether he got fed up with her or not, she found out that he’d been seeing someone else when he said he was off flying and she happened to be in, the, it was a WAF and she happened to be in where they had the parachutes and as a revenge apparently she cut the strings of the parachute and of course nothing happened for a while but eventually they were shot up and the crew bailed out but his parachute didn’t open properly and that was the end of him, there was an enquiry about that but it was more or less hushed up because it would’ve scared other members of the crew. Whether that was a true story I don’t know but that’s the story that went round.
DE: And you heard that on, during your time on operations?
HP: Yes.
DE: Did you have any associations with any WAF’s?
HP: No, only when I was training I had a association with a land army girl who lived in Nottingham, and, I think it’s more or less after, no towards the end of the war, I was stationed at Stirgate and we got leave and I thought ‘oh I’d go into Nottingham and see if I could find this land army girl’ and as it happened, whilst I was in Nottingham I met up with some Americans and they got chatting to me and they said they had a club, would I like go into the club and having a few drinks, well a few drinks ended up to a lot of drinks and then I found out where this land army girl lived and I knocked on the door and she came out and give me a cuddle and said ‘oh lets go for a walk’, and at Nottingham there’s the Lincoln castle where you go up a sort of a hill, and we were walking up there and we got to the top, we were going to sit down and have a chat and I was dying for a leak [slight laugh] and I said ‘I’m ever so sorry, I’ve got to go and find a toilet’ and I actually run down all the hill to find somewhere, I found somewhere, when I went back up she’d gone, [slight laugh] that was the end of that ‘cause [sic] she didn’t like people drinking, and that’s about the only experience I had.
DE: Did you have a lot to do with Americans then?
HP: Not really, but we did have an American who swapped a pilots, with, he came to East Kirkby as a pilot on Lancaster’s and an English pilot went onto theirs, to go onto super fortresses , just an exchange and it appeared the American was a bit of an unruly type so that’s why they were keen to get rid of him go to the RAF, but if ever we went out together because we always get chatting together, he would go into Boston with us and instead of wearing either his American outfit or his British outfit he used to go with part aircrew American on top and part RAF at the bottom and he was always being picked up by MP’s, but being American he always got away with it, and there was one incident where, it was when a lot of prisoners made an escape and the Germans found out where they were coming up and I don’t know if you ever read about it but the Germans shot, I think it was about thirty or forty of the escapees, so at that time the group captain said that if anybody wanted to draw a gun, fifteen rounds of ammunition, he’s not saying you should do that but if you felt you wanted to you could do, so I think nearly half the air force drew guns and fifteen rounds of ammunition, and this American he’d got his gun and fifteen rounds of ammunition, and outside his nissen hut, there was a tree where a blackbird used to come every day twittering away and it upset him he didn’t like this blackbird so he went outside and fired at it but he never hit it at all until he run out of ammunition , and I can remember also, where you went for ablutions, it was in a place outside where your nissen hut was, and they used to issue you with a tin bowl, and I was walking across with this tin bowl and all of a sudden a bullet hit this tin bowl [laughing], I dropped the tin bowl and rushed into the ablution, never found out who fired it, but there was so much ridiculous firing going on round the airdrome at East Kirkby that the group captain got to know about this and he said ‘right, that is stupid of all these people’, so he wanted all the guns handed, handed in and all the ammunition handed in, well, all the guns were handed in OK but I think there was only ten rounds of ammunition, all the rest had been spent. Similar things like, in my crew a New Zealander, he didn’t like flies and we used to often play darts a lot and he saw this fly going across the dart board so out come the gun firing, [laughing] firing at the fly, so as I say there was all daft things like that going on, that’s why the group said, group captain said ‘right they’ve all got to come back in again’, he didn’t trust any of them.
DE: So, people in your crew took them, did you take one?
HP: Oh yeah, we all took one I think, as I say, I think everybody who was allowed to took one, I never fired mine, I don’t think my crew did except this New Zealander, he did at the dart board [laughs] a crazy lot.
DE: I’ve read in other people’s stories that the medical officers sometimes gave tablets to help you get through night operations, did that ever happen with you?
HP: Never heard of it, never, although once when I got a sty on my eye it was considered to be unlucky if you couldn’t go off on your routine operations one after the other all the way through, and I got such a bad sty on my eye, I thought ‘well they won’t let me fly’, so I said to the crew ‘I’m going down to sick quarters’ to see if they can do anything, and sick quarters was quite a way off the airdrome and it had a seat in there which was just concrete to sit on while you was waiting to be seen by the doctor, well when I got there there was nobody else there but the doctor wasn’t there, and while I was sat there, the dentist came out and he said ‘it must be freezing cold over there, son’ he said ‘come in, sit on the dentist chair and we’ll have a look at your teeth’ [laughs] so he had a look at me teeth and before I knew it he’d took one out and [laughs] I got blood all over me shirt and I said ‘oh I only came in for me eye’ he said ‘well it was much warmer in here wasn’t it?’, [laughs] and I said ‘yes’ and his WAF helper, she said ‘oh here’s the doctor now, so you can go in next door and see the doctor’, and he looked at me and said ‘good God, what’s all this blood all over you?’ ‘I said ‘well the dentist decided to keep me in the warm and took a tooth out’ and I’m sure, it was that one there, and I’m sure there was nothing wrong with it, and he looked at me eye and he said ‘I could lance it’ and he played around with the sty for several minutes and he said ‘if you go back and rest before you get your briefing’ he said, ‘I think you’ll be OK’ and that was it, I carried on on ops.
DE: I would’ve thought you’d need more time off for having a tooth out?
HP: Yeah [laughs]. We certainly had some funny things happening during our time in the RAF.
DE: You briefly mentioned the ablutions then, what were the living accommodations and the ablutions like there?
HP: Well it was only a nissen hut with so many beds all the way down which weren’t all that comfortable but you had plenty of blankets that you could put underneath or over the top of the mattress so it weren’t too bad and the ablutions was, well you had to take your own bowl, you didn’t get hot water, just turned the tap on and that was it, so it was very sparse, but you got on with it, you didn’t complain, if you complained nothing would happen about it [slight laugh], and another thing happened, they used to be card mad and if you weren’t on any day light trips or anything like that, you used to sit there playing pontoon or shoot, shoot pontoon, I don’t know if you knew that, it was where you had a dealer and he’d go round to everybody to see how much they’d put it the deal in the front, either to match his or over match it then as they dealt the cards round to each person you said ‘shoot’, either put a bit more money in or you left it as it was and you either lost or you won and you took something out or put something in and when it got to my turn, I had an ace and I thought its worth shooting the lot , so I shot the lot, I got a queen and the damn dealer got a king so his took preference over mine so I lost the lot and another fella next to me, weren’t member of my crew, he had an Indian motorbike and he’d done the similar thing and lost it all so he still wanted to go again so dealer said ‘what have you got?’ and he said ‘well, I’ve got no money left but I’ll put my motor bike in’ [laughs] and he put the motorbike in and he lost, so round it went and when it came to my turn again and I said ‘I’ve got no money neither but I’ll shoot the motorbike and I’ll have to pay if I lose, at a later date’, anyways I won so I won this motorbike and I had no clues what so ever how to drive a motorbike, and the fella who had originally lost it, he said ‘you lucky devil’ he said ‘I’ll show you what to do’ and we got outside the nissen hut ‘cause the card game had finished and he said ‘right, you do this, do that, and away you go’, so I did that and did that and I went straight through the ablution, straight through [laughs], straight through the covers that were on the outside and just stopped so I said ‘no I don’t want this anymore’ [laughing], I had a few bruises but the motorbike was OK, except where there was a big hole in the side of the ablution, so the next time we played I put the motorbike in purely to lose it, and I never went on a motorbike again.
DE: Probably quite right. So did you play cards with other crews?
HP: Yeah there was all sorts that used to mix in with playing cards yeah, yeah there was one time when we were due leave but the train wasn’t due till, I forget probably about half past ten or eleven and we were always up before seven, you go for your breakfast, come back and waiting to go in, get in to Boston station and you’d play cards, and I played cards and lost again, lost all me money, I went on leave purely with your leave application where you didn’t have to pay anything and when I got to London, I relied on my father to pay for the fayre to get back home, and I said what I had been doing, playing cards and he said ‘your best bet is to leave cards alone unless you’ve got a good memory for where cards turn up’, so I never played cards again [slight laugh].
DE: So just quickly going back to the nissen hut, who did you share with?
HP: Just your own crew, maybe, possibly another crew that were in a nissen hut nearby, so it weren’t too bad, bit cold in winter though, yeah [pause], but I had a cut throat razor, as where we used to live in London, we always used to go to the top of the road ‘cause there was a Jewish barber there and he was always asking about me, when I come home on leave I always used to go there to have a haircut and have a chat with him and he said, ‘you’ll soon be needing to shave, won’t you?’, I said ‘well I got a little bit of stubble coming’, he said ‘I’ve got something for you, I’ve saved this for you’ and it was a German crop razor one of the best there could be and he said, ‘there you are, that’s for you’ and eventually I had to use this, and people used to come and watch me shaving thinking that if I got the twitch from flying I’d cut myself [slight laugh] but I never did and then we went off somewhere and we came back and somehow the call up[?] seemed to go astray, went wrong and instead of landing at east Kirkby we landed at another field, airfield nearby, can’t remember what it was, it might have been Strubby or some name like that, and when we landed we had briefing and they said ‘oh you are not far from East Kirkby so you may as well stay the night, which we did, then next morning refuelled and fly back to East Kirkby, when I went into the nissen hut there was nothing of mine there, it had all gone, and I had a wallet where one of the young ladies I knew in London had given me a ten pound note and I’d always kept that in this wallet for emergencies and that had gone, ‘cause you weren’t allowed to take anything on ops with you, nothing to identify you, and what had happened, if any crews were shot down or didn’t come back, rather than send any of the stuff that the person had kept, they used to have what they called a committee of adjustments, and that was where the stuff was put in to be auctioned off and everything was auctioned and I lost all my stuff, and other members of the crew had lost their radio or maybe a bike, it was all gone, so I never ever got my razor back.
DE: Oh dear and this was because you were somewhere else for one night?
HP: Yeah, they thought we had been shot down.
DE: So for the sake of one phone call, you lost all your kit.
HP: Yeah. That was one of those things, but hardly anybody had ever heard of it, committee of adjustments, I’ve never heard of anybody who knew about it, none of the parents or lovers knew about it either, it just all sort of vanished.
DE: And over efficient as well it seems.
HP: Yeah, very efficient [laughs]
DE: You mentioned when you were talking about your razor, about the dangers of shaving if you got the twitch, could you explain a little bit about the twitch?
HP: Yeah, well that was where some air crew who had got so scared, that they were too scared to admit that they were frightened and they used to have a sort of twitch which gave them away, you know when they were walking along they would go like that somehow, do a funny little twitch with a hand or the head and we we [sic] had one fella who had got it so bad he was walking along as though he was carrying a ladder and if anybody was near him they’d shout at them ‘get out the way, can’t you see the ladder?’ and he’d got nothing, again [laughing] this is what we called the twitch.
DE: Did these people carry on flying then?
HP: Some of them did and some of them didn’t, they ended up in hospital you know having consultations and things like that, see if they could get them back to normal.
DE: Did you know anyone personally?
HP: No. I say on an airdrome or a base you’d mainly know your own crew really thoroughly but other crews you didn’t really mix a lot at all, so didn’t know many of them at all, ‘cause many a time I spoke or people have asked me about being in East Kirkby and they say, ‘do you know Jack Thompson?’, I said ‘never heard of him’, ‘oh well he was there, he was at East Kirkby’, as I say you just didn’t know these people, unless they were someone famous.
DE: So you wouldn’t talk to each other in briefing or anything like that then?
HP: Not really no, ‘cause your crew was your crew altogether and further down was their crew, all listening to what was going on.
DE: I see, what about the ground personnel and the ground crew that looked after your aircraft?
HP: They were smashing, really good blokes, yeah.
DE: Did you have more to do with them then?
HP: Not really, only when we took off and come back again, so you didn’t really mix with them in the mess because most of them were, I forgot what, LAC’s, they weren’t sergeants or anything like that, so they were in a different category.
DE: I just wondered if you chatted to them about anything out on the dispersals?
HP: You did occasionally but not very often, not unless like when we came back and we had seventeen holes and they were upset about it.
DE: Did you always fly the same aircraft then if you could?
HP: No you had several different aircrafts but in just looking at that, we flew an X, X X X X, the same Lancaster all the time there, then, after that X X, Q V, all different letters to the different Lancaster’s.
DE: I’ve read somewhere that the ground crew said that the aircraft belonged to them and the air crew only borrowed it.
HP: Yes [laughs] I think that’s true as well, because they really were good blokes, nothing wrong with them at all, they really looked after your aircraft, [pauses] in fact they should have got more praise than they ever did, ground crews.
DE: Did you have any views about what you were doing? I know it’s been a matter of debate since the war a lot.
HP: Not really, but I always thought we were doing the right thing as being a Londoner and being in the Blitz, seeing what had been happening in London and you felt you were doing the right thing to do the same thing back to them.
DE: Yes you mentioned last time we spoke how you were on your way to work and the factory wasn’t there anymore.
Hp: Yeah, so you know you had that feeling we were doing the proper thing.
DE: I can’t remember if I asked you much about your recruitment and your training?
HP: Well I think I mentioned that, two lads at the outer city trip (?-name of company) transport company where we were thinking we might get called up, we were having our lunch and we were debating should we volunteer and we decided we ought to so we got what we wanted and we went straight out after lunch, straight down to the recruiting office and both volunteered for the RAF and that was because I thought it was safer in the air than on the ground at the time.
DE: Yes you said that you didn’t want to join the navy because you couldn’t swim very well.
HP: No only across the canal because there was a big canal near us in London and we often used to go and swim across the canal, and we also used to get an old bike wheel, break all the spokes out and thread a sack round, put some string on and drop it down, pull it up and we’d got loads of sticklebacks and it reminded me of that, seeing I don’t know if you watch it, Countryfile, it was showing you about a stickleback there that was blowing its nest waiting for the little ones to come out and they called it the star of the show and it reminded me of that because we used to sell these sticklebacks then to other kids, because everybody used to like a fish in a jar, made a little bit of money doing that. [laughs]
DE: But you were expected into the RAF and then you went away?
HP: Yes we, we went first of all to the flats were film stars used to be, the RAF had accommodated those and I thought it was marvellous because the bathroom was cut glass all the way around with like fish swimming round and I thought ‘boy this is the life to be in the RAF’ but that was only temporary while we were doing the training, and also on the square we had a fella called Alva Liddel, he used to be an announcer for the news and he always used to say ‘this is the news and Alva Liddel speaking it’ and he happened to be in, I don’t know whether he volunteered or not or was called up, but he was on the square and in the papers it said ‘this is Alva Liddel on the square, bashing it’, so that was interesting and we were opposite London zoo and we had our food in the zoo, and people used to be wondering around looking at us having food in the zoo which seemed strange to them, and there used to be a place, I forget the name of the place but we used to march from the flats where the square was, down across the stop lights on Marylebone road to a swimming baths, where we used to have training for, if you came down how to turn the, not the airborne lifeboat, it was like a big circle, I can’t remember what they call that now, but often if you dropped it for you to go in to, it would turn up the wrong way so the bottom of it was on the top and there was like a suction, so you had to be able to go over the top of it, hold on just where the bottle was for blowing it up, grab hold of that and pull yourself up like that and go right the way under and re-put it right, [DE: turn the dingy the right way round] yeah dingy that was it I couldn’t remember what they were called them, yeah and I wasn’t pretty good at that even though I couldn’t swim very far, but they used to make you march in this place as well, because they put boards across and if it was raining you could go in there and do your marching up and down on these boards, when it was swimming they used to take all the boards up and you did the swimming exercise, and there was one where this sergeant he called out, I don’t know if I mentioned this before, he called out that all the crews that were there had to put on their flying suit and he said ‘I want all the swimmers this end and all the non-swimmers that end’, so I thought to myself ‘I don’t know what he’s going to do so I’m going to go to the non-swimmers’ so I was down the non-swimmers which was the least deep part of it and all the swimmers were up by the diving board, then he said ‘right I don’t want anybody to move but all the non-swimmers come up by the diving board’, all the swimmers went down to the non-deep side and the idea was you had to climb up to the top diving board and jump off with your flying suit on then swim to the side if you could, and I was that scared of having to go up that ladder I kept getting behind and behind and behind, and I was the last one and everybody was booing me and he came up to me and he said ‘I can understand you being scared but just go up to the top, I’ll come with you and just look over and you’ll be OK’, he said ‘then you can come back down’ so I believed him and I went up with him, got to the top, and he said ‘you can let go of the bars either side’, so I let go and he just pushed me and down I went and I went right down under, well I didn’t come up because where the zips on my flying suit didn’t work they just filled up with water, held me down, so there was panic on to fish me out, get me back and pump me chest to get me spilling all the water out and after a while I was OK, but I wouldn’t dive after that [slight laugh], and that was a frightening experience, and I always hoped that I would never have to jump out of an aircraft into the sea or even have to turn the dingy over, but luckily we never had to, but that was a frightening experience before I even got to flying.
DE: So what other things did they have you doing for your training to be an engineer?
HP: Oh before you was, became an engineer you had to do like army training, going through tunnels and climbing over things and that was done at Bridlington, I think I mentioned that, [DE: briefly yes], well that was where we were marching along and I looked over the side and I thought that looks like my Uncle Ernie, and I didn’t know he was in the army, he’d been called up, and I just went marching over to him, because the sergeant halted the crew, came over to me and shouted, shouted a few abusive words at me and I said ‘well that’s my Uncle Ernie’, he said ‘I don’t care if it’s the f’ing queen’ he said ‘you don’t walk out of my marching section’, so I got ten days working in the cook house cleaning dirty tins, yeah, and he got chatting to me uncle to see if it was true, he was my uncle and they got quite friendly and he used to arrange football matches between the RAF and the army, ‘cause the army didn’t get on very well with the RAF but that broke the ice down.
DE: Why didn’t the army and the RAF get on?
HP: Well we were called the ‘Brylcreem boys’ [laughs], supposed to be the aloof.
HP: Did I mention that on, when they were expecting the invasion from the Germans they put us on duty either end of Bridlington with our rifle, so many rounds of ammunition and you had to march up a little way and back just to see if there was any invaders coming and shoot them, and this particular time it was a moonlight night with the clouds suddenly going over, and I looked up at one of the hotels and I could see what I thought was somebody flashing to the enemy, so I thought ‘well I’ve got to go and investigate as I’ve seen it’, and I got my rifle ready, I went scrambling up the stairs, right to the top, and as I went along the top corridor I saw another fella coming at me with the rifle and it frightened the life out of me, I dropped my torch, dropped my rifle and ran like mad and when I got to the bottom I thought ‘that was odd, nobody shot at me and nobody come running after me’ and I couldn’t work it out so I thought I better go back, pick me gun up, rifle, and when I got up there I realised I’d saw myself in a mirror [laughs] at the end of the corridor and there was anybody there and the light that I thought was somebody signalling was as a cloud went over the moon it was flickering on the window and the window was sort of flashing, I never told anybody about that [slight laugh] so that was another funny story.
DE: Were you at Bridlington very long then?
HP: Not long, no.
DE: Where did you go after that?
HP: After Bridlington, it was to do with going down to Saint Athens where you learnt everything from the book and from me looking at the engines to find out how they all worked and that took a couple of months, so you really knew everything about the Stirling bomber, and then you eventually went flying with different people in a Stirling and that’s where I said you were dead scared seeing as you’ve never flown before and you were meeting your crew for the first time in the bar, and that’s when this Aussie, rear gunner come up to me and said ‘you sound a bit like us, mate’ I said ‘why where you from?’ because I didn’t know where he was from, he said ‘Australia, where are you from?’ I said ‘Hackney’ he said ‘where’s Hackney?’, I said ‘in London’ he said ‘that sounds good, Hackney Harry’, ‘cause I’d told him my name and that’s when he said come and meet the crew, and I think I went through that.
DE: Yeah you did, you mentioned you got put on a charge and had to work in a kitchen?
HP: Yeah that was through meeting me uncle.
DE: What did they have you doing in there?
HP: Well all the greasy tins when they fried anything or done anything, they couldn’t wash them straight away, so you had to scrub away with the brush to get all the grease off and you had to do that at breakfast time, dinner time and evening meal time, which weren’t very good [slight laugh].
DE: Was it a fitting punishment then do you think?
HP: Yeah, I didn’t think so at the time, but there in the hotel where we used to go into, there was a stairway like that coming up with a landing like that and the toilet was right in the middle, and there was no locks or anything on it, did I tell you about that? [DE: no] well there used to be a scotch fella, who always had a great big knife, always down the side of his belt and I was on the toilet and this scotch fella came out, bashed the door open and said ‘out’ [emphasis], like that and it so infuriated me, I head butted him, he’s much bigger than me, great big bloke, and he went over the banisters, landed on the floor, I, I honestly thought I’d killed him and the sergeant come over and he was still laid there, he’d been knocked out actually, ended up in sick quarters, and all the rest of the air crew that used to be training there they were really scared of this scotch men and I became his best friend because nobody had ever stood up to him and it really upset him and he looked after me from then on, [slight laugh] but it was a frightening experience.
DE: Did you keep in touch with him?
HP: No, no once we split up, went off to you know the squadron where you met your crew and started flying with them, and as I said before it was with Stirling’s to start with and then after a little while they decided Lancaster’s were coming in, so you ended up at East Kirkby on Lancaster’s and I think I told you what happened when I said that I needed more training, they put me on ops.
DE: Yeah. That’s smashing, I think we’ll call that a day unless you can think of any other amusing anecdotes? I’ve ticked all the questions I had for you.
HP: Yeah, well when I was at the end of my first tour training with, I think I said that the pilot trained a pilot and the engineer trained an engineer, and I was with a, a pilot and we’d be on a cross country or something and it was dark when we were coming back so they used to let you go round the circuit before you came in, and this particular time someone fired up a red flare which meant there was danger you couldn’t land, and the pilot carried on landing and I said to him ‘we can’t land, there’s something wrong’, I think somebody had crashed before us, so he said ‘oh, we better go round again’, so we went round again, he was a squadron leader and he’d been on a lot of ops, and as we come round again, another red flare went up and he said ‘oh good we’re ok now’, I said ‘no it’s a red flare, what’s up with you, are you blind or something?’ [laughs] and round we went again and we were called up on the intercom to keep flying round until a green flare was fired, so we did this until I spotted a green flare coming up and I said ‘it’s ok now, there’s a green flare’, so he said ‘ok, we’ll go into land’ and when we’d landed and taxied round I said to him ‘I know you are a higher rank than me but I’m wondering if you’re bloody colour blind’ and he said ‘sssh, I am’ [whispers] and he said ‘I’ve never admitted it to anyone’, he says ‘so please, please don’t report me’, I didn’t know what to do really, because he was training he wasn’t on ops anymore so I just forgot about it, and I thought well if he’d been on ops, he’s done his share so let the poor bloke carry on, but that was frightening as well ‘cause if I hadn’t had said something he would have gone in and probably have crashed into the other plane crash.
DE: Which operation training unit was this you were at then?
HP: Can’t remember where that was. It might have been at Stirgate, fifty squadron ,Stirgate, it was there and that’s where we went on to picking up the passengers in Italy.
DE: Yes, you told me about that.
HP: Oh and another time we had to go to Brussels, this was after the war, to pick up twenty four ex-prisoners of war and the first time went there, everything went through OK, we had a couple of days off and then we had to go again and as we were coming into land, my pilot was looking either side because there’d been a lot of aircraft that had crashed there, and they were just bulldozed over the side and he was looking at, ‘oh look at that, that’s an American so and so, oh look at that’, and there was a great big gulley where somebody had crashed there and they’d moved the plane out the way and we went into that and burst a tire and an American bulldozer come out, up to us, I’d got, well we’d all got out the plane and he said ‘ok, everybody out the plane, I’m bulldozing you over to the side ‘cause other planes have got to come in’, I said ‘no you daren’t, you’re not gonna [sic] bulldoze my plane’, I said ‘we’ll wait until we get a new tyre’ he said ‘no I’m gonna bull doze it’, so all the crew stood in front of him so he couldn’t do it so in the end he gave up and somebody else came out and towed us over to the side where we had to wait for somebody to bring out another wheel for us, and that was at Brussels and we ended up at Melbrook, wherever that was and then we got the tyre all sorted out and then went on to our base, that was a daylight operation.
DE: Did you bring many prisoners of war back then?
HP: Yeah there was twenty four there, another twenty four the second time and then when we went to Italy there was six where we brought twenty back at a time so [adds up out loud] so that’d be about hundred and eighty blokes coming back.
DE: How does that make you feel that you did that?
HP: It made us feel good because they couldn’t get back other than by sea and going by plane it was a couple of hours so they were really grateful to us but really scared of flying, so we went without our parachutes to prove to them that it was safe to fly [slight laugh]
DE: What state were the POW’s in?
HP: Very poor state, very poor, some of, some of them were being sick but they couldn’t help it because they’d never ever flown before and some had bandages on them where they had broken their limbs, but it felt really good fetching them back.
DE: The other thing I’ve read about, about flights at the end of the war, where you had a sort of tour of Germany and had a look at the bombing, did you do any of those?
HP: No, no I didn’t hear about it though.
DE: I think people called them cook’s tours?
HP: No never heard of it, [pauses] the only time I heard of anybody going around, looking round again is Guy Gibson, I think I told you about that didn’t I? I had a mate, air crew flight engineer, used to on the same sort of ops as we did but I had done a lot more than him, we got very friendly and if we managed to get back we’d go into the pub and exchange stories, and this particular time he was right down in the mouth, he wouldn’t have a drink and I couldn’t get him to talk and I thought he’d got lack of moral fibre and was likely to disappear, so I kept talking to him and in the end he said ‘I’ve been sworn not to say anything ‘, so I said ‘well that’s a bit daft’ I said ‘because we could be not here, on our next op so what does it matter about telling me what you’re on about?’ so he said ‘alright then’ he said ‘you know we’re the last ones to get in the plane after our inspection?’ I said ‘yeah’ he said ‘I was just going up the ladder and this bloke come up to me, pushed me out the way and before I knew it was on the plane’, he said ‘I didn’t know what to do so I pulled the ladder up and went up to my position’, he said ‘and when I got there was this bloke sat in my seat and he just said ‘bugger off down the back’ and I was just about to shout at him when the pilot said’ ‘ssh, it’s Guy Gibson’ he was a squadron leader then, so I shut up and listened to rest went on and he said ‘all the way over when we went on the op he was criticising everybody, the gunners, the navigator wasn’t doing it right, the pilot wasn’t watching this and watching that’ and he said when they got to the target, they went round, dropped the bombs and the idea was you got away quick but Guy Gibson said ‘hang on, go round I want to have a look’ and he made the pilot go round about three times before they flew off back and all on the way back he still criticised them all and he said just as we were coming into land he said ‘I wanna [sic] speak to every member of the crew, I want you to swear an oath that you never saw me in this plane’ and he said ‘it frightened the lives out of all of us’ and that was why he was like he was but anyways he got over that and carried on flying, and I never liked Guy Gibson and when I once went to, I forget where it was, somewhere near Coningsby, which was the end of the runway where they’d got a museum there of what happened with bomber command and one of the fellas there happened to mention something about Guy Gibson and I said ‘I hated him, from what he did to one of my mates’ so he said ‘you’re not the first one to say that’ I said ‘why?’, he said ‘well there was a young pilot who was just about going to take off, walking up to his plane and Guy Gibson happened to be just at the side and he called this pilot over and he said ‘don’t you ever salute your superiors and the pilot said ‘I didn’t know you did that when you’re going off flying’ and he said ‘right, when you come back, you’ll be reduced in rank’, reduced him down to sergeant from a pilot officer, he said and that’s why he didn’t like Guy Gibson, but strange nobody liked him not on the squadron he was at and there was once when we come back from ops, we went into the pub and all of a sudden there was a shout and everybody saying ‘wahey’ and I said ‘is that the end of the war, have we finished?’ and somebody said ‘no, Guy Gibson’s caught the bucket’, in other words he’d gone down and that was where he’d gone off with some, I think it was mosquitos he was flying and on the way back instead of keeping with them, he spotted a train and he decided to go down and shoot this train up, and the story we heard was that one of the guards on the train had a rifle and he fired at Guy Gibson’s plane and a million to one chance he hit the fuel tank and it blew up and he went in, but that was all hushed up, they gave another story about why he was shot down.
De: What was the other story?
HP: I forget what it was but he was coming back and he was with the two other mosquitos and he was unlucky that got a shot that hit his plane and down he went, but we believed the first story, no he was never liked at all.
DE: Why was that do you think, was that just his attitude?
HP: His attitude to everybody, he was the king and he was the one who knew everything.
DE: Was there a lot of discipline or difference between people with officers and sergeants?
HP: There was some, I wouldn’t say a lot, but often when people were sergeants and they were made up to officers, that’s when you got a bit of flack, ‘cause I always remember after the war there was something happening and all crews were going to this place, I forget where it was, and I’d been issued with medals and I’d got the air crew Europe and star, because I had actually flown before my crew had so I come under that particular section and my pilot who’d got the DFC on behalf of crew co-operation, we never got anything so we were a bit bitter about that but I happened to spot my pilot and I went up to him to shake hands and say ‘how you doing?’ and the first thing he said to me, ‘how is it you got that?’ I said ‘what?’ he said ‘the air crew Europe and star? I’ve only got the air crew Europe’, I said ‘that’s because I flew before you’ and he weren’t very pleased and just walked off, never even spoke to me, so that sort of thing did happen.
DE: Was there a difference between people who were flying before the war and people who were volunteer reserve?
HP: Not really no, they were all doing the same thing.
DE: So how long did you stay in the RAF for?
HP: I think it was about seven or eight years, all told [sic]
DE: So what did you fly after the war?
HP: It was Lancaster’s and Lincoln’s, that was at Waddington, and did I tell you about the story of taking a photo of a, a Lincoln bomber? well when the Lincoln’s come onto the squadron, I was thinking about this and I thought to myself ‘it’d be marvellous , a Lincoln bomber flying over Lincoln Cathedral’, sounded good and I said this to my pilot and he said ‘yeah that sounds good’, he said ‘if you could get it organised ‘cause I’d had more experience than this new pilot, so I said to the photographer who used to unofficially do our photographs for us, I told him about this, he said ‘that would be marvellous, if you get me on the plane’, so I spoke to another pilot and we all agreed that we’d do this, we’d be in a plane with the photographer and another plane in the Lincoln would fly over Lincoln Cathedral but he happened to be late on take-off, the Lincoln pilot, and he came in a bit late, but because he was late he went flying too low and he went below the cathedral so anyways we got the photo of this, got back on the ground and I said ‘I’m going up to the photographer’s to see how he’s getting on’, so when I got there, he said ‘oh come in’ he said ‘a fabulous picture, Lincoln bomber flying below Lincoln Cathedral’ he said ‘it’s absolutely marvellous’ and he’d put the either negatives or something on a drum which used to go round to dry these photographs and just as he was doing this the group captain came in, inspected and he said ‘what are you two up to?’, ‘nothing, sir’ saluted him and out came this picture and he looked at it, he said ‘good God are you trying to get me demoted?’ he said ‘that’s illegal [emphasis], where is the negative?’ so the photographer was dead scared gave him the negative, he ripped it up and he ripped the photograph up and he said ‘you deserve to be on a charge, you two’ and he stormed off , and just as he stormed off the second picture came out and I grabbed hold of it and put it in my battle dress and the photographer said ‘you can’t do that!’, I said ‘I’ve done it, cheers’ and I kept this right the way till the end of the war and when I came out and I got friendly with a photographer, can’t remember his name now, of the Echo and he got to hear where I was working at Thorne electrical wholesalers and he phoned me up and said could he come in and see me so I said ‘what for?’, he said ‘I’d like to have a chat with you’ and in my office ‘cause I was a manager, I had a big picture up of the Lancaster and anybody who used to come in to see me said ‘that’s a super picture, why have you got that in an electrical wholesalers?’, because I said ‘I was in them’ and I used to get in with these people who used to come flogging you things for the electrical side, so he came in and he saw this picture, he said ‘that’s marvellous’, I said ‘I got a better one than that’ and he asked me questions like you have about me war record and he said ‘can you fetch that picture in to me?’ and I said ‘yeah I can fetch it in but I don’t want to let go’ so he said ‘OK’ he said ‘I’ll have a word with the editor and see if we can publish it’, so a couple of days later he rang me up at work and said I’ve got some sad news, he said the editor said it’s on RAF paper, it’s illegal photograph and he said it couldn’t be published until say twenty five years until that time had expired so he said ‘but I’m keeping it on file’, so I said ‘Ok then’ he said ‘I’ve got a copy of it and I’ll let you have that back’ and I got a copy in the bedroom I’ll let you have a look, and I suppose about twenty years afterwards he rang me up at work and he said ‘do you get the Lincoln Echo?’, I said ‘now and again’, he said ‘well buy it today’ so I did, front page was this picture, that marvellous picture and no end of people wanted to know how I took this and I told them and as I say I can show you the actual photograph, but this group captain, did I tell you about him who lived across the way? When I got a puncture outside his house? [DE: yes you told me but it’s not on the tape] Oh I was going one Sunday to get the Sunday paper and just as I got near this group captains house, I didn’t know he was a group captain, something went wrong with the car and I got out and I found I got a puncture and I jacked the car up, tried to get the wheel off but do you think I can undo those nuts, just couldn’t do it, and this young fella come strolling over and he said ‘I can help you there, I’m a younger fella than you’ so I said ‘oh thank you’ and he did everything, put the old one in the boot and put the new one in pumped it up, I said ‘oh thanks very much’ so he said ‘I hear you was in the war, in the RAF, is that right?’ I said ‘yes, I was flight engineer’, he said ‘did you do any ops? I said ‘yeah, I did thirty nine all told [sic] and had a mid-air collision at East Kirkby’ he said ‘good God and you’re still here’ [laughs] I said ‘yeah’, then he put out his hand and said ‘well done, I’m a squadron leader’ no he was a wing commander then, ‘I’m a wing commander’ so I said ‘well fancy that, that’s a new one ain’t [sic] it?, a wing commander changing the wheel of a warrant officer [slight laugh], it’s never been known’ and he laughed and he said ‘can I come across and see you?, where do you live?’ I said ‘just across from you’ so a few days later he came over and like you he sat there and he said ‘have you still got your log book?’, because you’re not supposed to have had it really but most people did and I said ‘yeah’, he said ‘can I have a look at it’ and he went through it and he said ‘I can’t believe you’re still here’ [laughs] and he said ‘there’s going to be a do at Petwood hotel’, I forget what it’s called but I can show you what it’s called up here [pause – background noise, moves to collect something] it’s called the memorial dinner, 3rd of July 2009 and there would be all top ranking officers there and these officers either had the girlfriends or their wives there and it was a fabulous dinner because lots of companies had donated money, they didn’t have Petwood hotel chefs they had the, what do they call those top chefs?, I’ve forgotten what they call them at the moment but they did the dinner, wish I could remember the names, you see them on television sometimes, very top chefs, somebody had arranged to have all the drinks so everything was free there and it was marvellous, and half way through, a fella got up and he was a famous painter, don’t know if you’ve ever seen a big elephant, I forget the name, what it was called but he was there and he said ‘gentlemen and ladies’ he said ‘I’ve asked the squadron leader if he would auction those three paintings that I’ve donated to the RAF because my heart is felt with the RAF for what they did during the war’, so the squadron leader got up and the first two paintings went for fifteen hundred pounds each, the last one went for two and a half thousand pounds, so it was smashing all donated to the RAF, and I thought I’ll have to go up and get his signature this fella and I went up and there was a couple of people in front of me and it was funny because one of the group captains wives was there with all her gold and chains on her, and she turned round to me and she said ‘oh’, she saw me medals and she said ‘you were in the RAF were you during the war?’ I said ’yes, that’s what these are for’ she said ‘what did you do?’ I said ‘I was a flight engineer on Lancaster’s and I did thirty nine ops’ she said ‘good God can I kiss you?’ [laughs] I said ‘if you wish’ [laughs], she kissed me and she said ‘thank you very much’ she said ‘if it wasn’t for people like you we wouldn’t be here having this do’ so I said ‘oh thank you’ and they gave us one of those, [DE: the mug] also a book of Lancaster’s and spitfires in it, it’s fabulous and then I suppose a couple of months after that, he rang up here and he said ‘would you like to come over?’, so I said ‘yes’ went to his door, he said ‘come in, I want to show you this’ and he showed me his hat and his lapels on his suit and he said ‘I’ve been promoted to group captain’ so I shook his hand and said ‘well done’ and he said ‘we’re having a do at’, he said ‘I’m at bomber command headquarters at the moment now’ he said ‘but I’ve come home for the weekend to show the wife me promotion’ he said ‘so when I go back I want to take you with me to bomber command headquarters and have a big dinner there’, did I tell you about that? So he said ‘have you still got your uniform?’ I said ‘you’re joking its seventy years ago now’, he said ‘well you need to have a dress suit’ so I said ‘well I haven’t even got that’ never even thought about it, so he said ‘well I’ll leave you to it, see if you can get one quick’ and he said by such and such a date, he said ‘I’ll be taking you down with me’, so at that moment my wife wanted to go to Matalans and my son said ‘I’ll come along with you I might see something I want’ ‘cause it’s a bit cheaper buying stuff there so we walked round and my wife brought a few skirts and things, and my son said to me ‘you wanted a dress suit didn’t you?’ he said ‘come and have a look at this’, and they had some dress suits that they were selling off cheaper so I worked out my size, tried a jacket on and it fitted so I said ‘I’ll buy this’ and instead of paying a couple of hundred pound I got one for about forty five quid so I thought that was really good and, I rang him up then, I said ‘I’ve got a dress suit now’ and I said ‘do I need to have me medals put on?’ he said ‘yes’ he said ‘if you bring it across, my wife will stitch them on for you’ so that was good, so did all that, she made some sandwiches and we went all the way down to High Wycombe, when I got there I’ve never seen so many high ranking officers, because I was only a warrant officer, I didn’t really know where to put myself so he said ‘I’m going to take you round’, he said ‘cause I got to do some work’ he said ‘but I’ll come back for you at seven o’clock, be dressed up with your medals on and we’re go and have a drink first with some of the officers, then we’ll go in for the dinner’ so I thought ‘lovely’, so picked me up at seven o’clock, I was put in an officer quarters so that was nice, went down to where they had the bar, had a few drinks and a lot of these top officers had never been on ops at all and they started asking me questions so that was good, and then he said ‘it’s time now to go in to our table’, and all along the top table, group captain was there, I was sat at the side of him and a nice WAF squadron leader at the side of me and we started off with this dinner and then he said ‘we’ve got to drink to the Queen’ and what is coming round is port and there was a great big jug like that of port so I went to grab hold of this big glass to pour mine out and he ‘aaah no you mustn’t touch it, it’s only touched by the squadron leader coming round, its part of the system that we have’ so they poured these glasses out and went all the way round and it was all silver service, you never see anything like it and then, a little while through, air vice marshal got up and he said ‘Gentlemen’, [clap clap] he said ‘I’d like to tell you there’s an interesting person with us tonight and I’d like to speak about him’ and I looked round and I thought maybe the Duke of Edinburgh were there but by the time I turned back he said ‘his name’s ex warrant officer Harry Parkins’ and he said ‘he did one of the longest bombing trips in the war from East Kirkby where they had to top up at the take off point, they went all the way down to Italy to fool the Germans, came all the way back up again to bomb Munich and on the way back his gunner a New Zealander’, no an Australian said ‘Harry we’re going to lose a day of our leave or maybe more if we land down south where we’d been told to go because we might not have enough fuel to get anywhere else’ so he said ‘can you work out the fuel, Harry?’, I said ‘yes’, there was no computers in those days, and I worked it out and I said ‘if there was a sunny morning we’d just about make it’ he said ‘so all the crew said ‘go for it, Harry’ so we did and we landed at East Kirkby on a nice sunny morning and all the engines chopped at the end of the runway’ and he said ‘gentlemen that took ten hours twenty five minutes, the longest that had ever been done in a Lancaster bomber and a hundred and sixty officers got up and gave me a two minute ovation, I didn’t know where to put myself or what to say but I got up and said ‘it wasn’t me gentlemen, it was the crew’, so we carried on with the dinner, and that was really was smashing and then he brought me all the way back home, stayed there about three nights, and one lunchtime, he said ‘I’ll tell you when to come in’, went in at a particular time and there was two other pilots sat with him, we were having your dinner and you could pick almost anything you wanted and it was a Friday so I said I’ll have fish and chips and they all had the same, they all did the same [laughs] and one of these pilots said to me ‘as a flight engineer did you ever do any flying yourself?’ I said ‘oh yes, we had training in a link trainer’ and up to a point I’d never flown a Lancaster but my pilot was a sergeant and then he was promoted to a pilot officer and he went out celebrating that night, and next night we were on flying, on ops and he was still under the weather so went through the briefing, never said much but felt a bit hazy like, he said ‘I’m going to take off Harry’ and I’m sat at the side of him and he said ‘you can do the rest’ I said ‘what do you mean?’, he said ‘ well you’ve had training on the link trainer’ he said I’m going back and having a sleep and you can carry on’, so I flew I think it was about two and a half hours to the bombing target and the bit that amused me most was when they were saying ‘left a bit, left a bit, right’ ‘till we got over the target, bombs away, turn round and on the way back and on the way back, I didn’t feel like doing the landing myself ‘cause I’d never done anything like that so I went back and woke him up and he came up and did the landing, so that was my time of having, flying the Lancaster myself, I didn’t do anymore that was the only time, but I felt quite proud about it and luckily we got back OK.
DE: Well that’s amazing, you mentioned the story of your ten hours twenty five minutes, is there any significance about it being a sunny day?
HP: Yeah because if it had been dark, you might have had to go round the circuit, to get your bearings for coming in, being a sunny day you could just go straight in, no need to go round the circuit, no other plane were likely to be flying there. I told you about the group captain coming in, yeah? So that was another good story.
DE: Smashing, I’m going to press stop there, that’s another hour and a half that, thank you very much.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Harry Parkins. Two
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AParkinsHW150612
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-06-12
Creator
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Dan Ellin
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Contributor
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Emma Bonson
Sally Coulter
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Format
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01:29:35 audio recording
Language
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eng
Type
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Sound
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Civilian
Description
An account of the resource
Harry shares several memories of his time as a flight engineer in the Royal Air Force. He describes their initial accommodation in luxury London flats, and dinghy training at the local swimming pool. He recounts how in June 1944 they received 17 bullets in their aircraft on an operation to Wesseling but managed to return safely, also discussing lucky charms and superstition.
Anecdotes include a low flying incident near Skegness for which they were in trouble with the group captain, and the issue of guns and ammunition when some German prisoners escaped. They lost their possessions to the Committee of Adjustment when they were diverted to another airfield.
Harry received army-type training at RAF Bridlington and continued his flight engineering training on Stirlings at RAF St Athan. He was sent to RAF East Kirkby on Lancasters.
Harry collected prisoners of war from Italy and Brussels. He describes people’s recollections of Guy Gibson.
He stayed for seven or so years in the RAF, flying Lancasters and Lincolns at RAF Waddington. Harry relates the delayed publication of a photograph, with a Lincoln and Lincoln cathedral.
Harry outlines his encounter with a group captain who helped him to change his wheel, subsequently inviting him to dinners at the Petwood Hotel and Bomber Command headquarters. Harry received a two minute standing ovation for one of the longest bombing trips of the war.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Yorkshire
Wales--Vale of Glamorgan
Germany
Germany--Wesseling
England--Woodhall Spa
England--Lincoln
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-06
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
fear
flight engineer
Gibson, Guy Penrose (1918-1944)
Initial Training Wing
Lancaster
Lincoln
military living conditions
military service conditions
Operation Exodus (1945)
perception of bombing war
prisoner of war
RAF Bridlington
RAF East Kirkby
RAF St Athan
RAF Waddington
searchlight
Stirling
superstition
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/133/2508/ABeechH170302.2.mp3
ff294bf160397061e4a277da67f292c3
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
Beech, Harold
Harold Beech
H Beech
Description
An account of the resource
Seven items. The collection consists of three oral history interviews, three photographs and one artwork related to Harold Beech (b.1933). He was a schoolboy in Market Rasen, Lincolnshire during the war and experienced an aircraft crash.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Harold Beech and catalogued by IBCC 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
2017-03-17
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.
One item in this collection has not been published in order to comply with intellectual property law.
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound. Oral history
Still image. Photograph
Still image. Artwork
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Beech, H
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
HB: This is an interview for International Bomber Command Digital Archive with Mr Harold Beech. The interview is taking place at ****
HB: Correction H. The, Mr Beech, his birth, his date of birth is the 20th June 1933. Right, Mr Beech.
HB2: Right.
HB: Over to you.
HB2: Well as already stated my name’s Harold Beech and I lived in a village in Lincolnshire called Middle Rasen. It sat on the River Rase and a mile and a half to the east was Market Rasen and two miles to the west was West Rasen. Hence the River Rase gave them three places their name. We also sat astride the A46. It split, the village was split by, from east to west by the road, by the River Rase and by the [Bremmer Brook.] I lived on a farm. My father was a small farmer. He was one of the thirty two farms in the village. It was a mixed farm. We had arable which we grew vegetables and stuff for the house as well as the field er for the animals and we had cows that provided us with milk, cream. Mother made butter. We had poultry that provided us with birds for the table and eggs and we killed a pig for the house. So, [pause] I’ve gone blank.
HB: Don’t worry about that.
HB2: I’ve gone blank.
HB: Don’t worry about that. Sorry, just, what was the name of the village you actually lived in?
HB2: Middle Rasen.
HB: Middle Rasen.
HB2: Middle Rasen.
HB: Right. So we’re at Middle Rasen.
HB2: Yeah.
HB: And we’ve just killed the pig for the -
HB2: We’ve just killed a pig [laughs] right. Yeah. We lived in a rented farmhouse plus outbuildings, large garden, two paddocks and a farm building complex. This was in the High Street of Middle Rasen and that was my home for some time.
HB: And can you remember what the farm was actually called?
HB2: The Vines.
HB: The Vines.
HB2: The Vines.
HB: Right.
HB2: My father’s farm was under fifty acres but the complex consisted of a barn, a granary, biers for the cattle, biers for horses and smaller barns for keeping pigs and calves in and an implement hole.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And we lived off the land and we lived well. In 1938 I started school and I’d been at school for a year and was settling in nicely when 1939 war broke out and upset everything.
HB: Was that, was the school in Middle Rasen?
HB2: Yes. Middle Rasen Primary.
HB: Right.
HB2: And for some, I can remember for some time before war was declared when my gran came to the house or when my father met other people in the village it was occasionally, ‘Things are not looking too good. Things are looking black,’ and I kept asking what these things were and didn’t get an answer.
HB: Right.
HB2: So when war was declared I remember, well a gang of us asked the teacher what these things were and she just said, ‘Unfortunately Germany, people in Germany are now fighting people in England.’ Well we went home for my dinner and as I went back to school I sat on a grassy bank and I thought now where the devil are they going to get a boxing ring big enough for all these people to box, to fight in, because my, my idea of fighting was cowboys and Indians, keystone cops and robbers. And that was it.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Or boxing on the television, on the radio. So that was my idea if I, I just couldn’t understand how this fighting was going on. So anyway I do remember at a time a man called Chamberlain came back and there was pictures in the paper of him waving a piece of paper. What he, what he’d done or what he’d said went right over my head. I’d no idea. Not until many years later. When, when we got settled in the school with the teacher she did, did say again and that’s all she would say about the two countries fighting each other, people in the two countries were fighting each other but we were subdued because we didn’t understand. Now, I was a six year old and I was confused ‘cause when war was declared the government shortly afterwards put out a statement to say they’d taken some powers and I remember my dad and all the adults getting in a bit of a confused state because the powers they’d taken were like dictator powers. They could, they were going to control anything and everything, anybody and everybody and they could send a person anywhere at any time to do any job if it boosted the war effort. Well a lot of people didn’t want, didn’t think much to being shoved about the countryside and living away. Then they said that there would be rationing and that blackout would be imposed and that if you disobeyed the government orders you could get fourteen years hard labour or be locked up without a trial. Well that frit me to death ‘cause I used to look at the bobby and go around the other side of him.
HB: Right. You know at, sorry to interrupt Harold. You know at the time you started school. When you went into school -
HB2: Yeah.
HB: And the war’s been declared. The teacher’s explained it. Did you, did you have any training? Any air raid precautions training? Or was there, were there things that the teacher had to teach you about what to do?
HB2: Not that I can remember. The only thing -
HB: No.
HB2: That happened at school was the strips of brown paper stuck on the windows to stop flying glass.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: We were issued with gas masks and we were issued with ear plugs.
HB: Right.
HB2: And we, of course you had to take oh and you had to wear a luggage label with your name and address on because the ID cards hadn’t come out.
HB: Right.
HB2: So I remember going to school and watching, seeing this paper go on but there was a siren was put on the police station tower a mile and a half away and whilst we were at school we had one or two warnings but that was all and I remember one day we were all, it was a wet day and of course we all crammed in to the cloakroom and so teacher kept us in the cloakroom while the all clear sounded. Well of course there was panic then because half of us hadn’t have our gas masks with us. So anyway when we went home and told mum what had happened the parents said, ‘For goodness sake never crowd them in one place again. Let them go into the classrooms where they would have a bit better chance of survival.’ There was a big ditch between us and the farm and the next door and they said, ‘Put them in the ditch.’ Well I can imagine a gang of kids in a wet day in a ditch but that was, they weren’t very well suited but after that I’m afraid our gas masks hung on an internal door for the rest of the war and the earplugs went in a drawer and stayed there and the luggage label well it disappeared along with the identity cards and it wasn’t because of bravado but my dad said when I’m ploughing and I put the gas mask on the hedge I’m at the other end of the field and [laughs] I’m in the soup.
HB: Right.
HB2: So -
HB: Right.
HB2: That’s, that’s how they went on at the beginning of the war. It, we had preparations for the war. Now we had a big house called Willoughby house. It had got a paddock at the front and a paddock in the back and that was commandeered by a troop of cavalry and the men were in the house and outbuildings and the horses were in portable stables. Well that was an attraction for us kids. That was a magnet. We wanted to go and look at the horses in the stables but the flaming army was better at it than we were and they kept us out. We didn’t like that at all but when they went for an exercise, all these chestnut horses, they were a lovely sight. They really were but looking back we thought ruddy hell, charge of the cavalry again and on the, on the gateway they built a pillbox and it was two circles of galvanised metal. One circle bigger than the other fitted inside and the gap between the two bits was filled with concrete and one, one shell from a tank would have sent it into kingdom come. We also lost all our signposts. And as well as the tape on the windows and that was just about it. Then the blacksmith’s shop was taken over and was being turned in to an ARP cleansing station. Well us kids were nosy parkers, kept saying, ‘What are you going to do in here? What’s going to do in here.’ Anyway, nearly completion this man must have been fed up with us ‘cause he said, ‘Come in and I’ll show you.’ So he took us into this room. He said, ‘This is where if you’d been gassed this is where you come. We take all your clothes off you and then we put you through there and we hose you down with some cold water and a big scrubbing brush,’ and he’d got this ruddy great scrubbing brush and carbolic soap. He said, ‘You’re scrubbed clean and then,’ he said, ‘We get some very smelly ointment and smear it all over you, wrap you in a blanket and send you home.’
HB: Oh dear.
HB2: Well after that we weren’t interested in the ruddy cleansing station.
HB: Absolutely. Absolutely.
HB2: But that, that was, that was oh and we had an ARP warden appointed and the school teacher was in the Observer Corps. Now, he was a lovely head man, headmaster but oh dear he used to go to, go home, have his tea and at 7 o’clock he’d go and observe, he’d come back in the morning, have breakfast and a lie down and then start teaching school again. Well the first thing he did was open his desk and take out Rupert the cane and lay it on the bench. Silence reigned I’ll tell you. But he was, he was soon known as Ratty Plowright.
HB: Right.
HB2: ‘Cause he got very short tempered and we, we as kids we noticed that and we didn’t like it, you know.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. I think he had reason didn’t he?
HB2: Oh he did. He did and you know the, the, this is something which you had to experience because the change in that man over a few weeks was terrific. And then of course what upset my father and the farmers was there was going to be a War Agriculture Committee in every county that was going to advise but the farmers said no, tell us to what to do and he said they resented being told by broken down farmers who couldn’t make a go of farming and shiny assed clerks [laughs]. Oh there was, there was some opposition but again if they didn’t do as they was told they could have their land taken over by the Agricultural Committee and that would be it and one or two did unfortunately. But another thing that put panic amongst them was there was a sudden stop on all slaughtering of animals. Well that meant that everything we produced like our pig for the house and the eggs and whatever was going to be confiscated and we’d get the scrapings. So harvest was finishing, the corn harvest, the root harvest was quickly dug in and everything was put in clamps or pies or whatever you call it and stored and the corn that was, the corn was thrashed out of the stacks quick. That what was needed for feeding animals was stored well away from the stacks and the rest of it that was surplus they sold and the old pigs got killed and I mean when you got say ten or a dozen people in the village that’s killing a pig around about the same time there’s a bit of a glut but they was determined that what was produced was going to be eaten in the village so friends, relations and close relatives and friends got not only the customary fry or good plate of good cheer they also got a pork pie or some sausages or something else. The offal was quickly disposed of and then when it was time to take the bacon out of curing that was started on straightaway and they weren’t, they were intending on not letting much be confiscated but when the time come there was the biggest sigh of relief because not only was it back to normal it was better than normal because they were encouraging everybody to keep chickens, produce their own food, dig every bit of ground up there was and they even advised us where these, oh they advised us to set up pig clubs and poultry clubs, rabbit clubs and get allotment associations and they would advise us how to get the seed, the food, the coupons for the food and how to house and what have you. How to look after them. They were a real help. That’s, that’s about the only good thing they could say about the war agg. But there was, there was a glut in our village. We didn’t have a selling system. We had a barter system ‘cause somebody would have something. I mean we used to separate the milk to get the cream for the butter and we had a lot of milk spare. Well people would come up with a jar of pickled onions or something like that and say. ‘I’ll swap you. Can you let me have some - ’. ‘Yes. Go on.’ You know. And at times when the cows calved there was three days when you couldn’t use the milk. It was full of cholesterol and it used to make lovely custards so of course again a lot of swapping going on.
HB: Right. Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: And my father was out one night. It must have been winter time and the policeman met him. He said, ‘Evening George,’ he says, ‘Do you know I’ve come to the conclusion that we must have the healthiest babies in the country.’ So my dad said, ‘How do you make out?’ He said, ‘Well they don’t half like the night air.’ So my dad says, ‘Why don’t you have a look in the pram to see how rosy their cheeks are?’ He said, ‘No George, I’ve got to live like the rest of them.’ And we all knew what everybody was doing, even the policeman so why the hell they had to hide it in prams ‘cause the policeman got his goodies in a bag. A brace of pheasants here, a rabbit or whatever it was hung on his gate. He was included. I mean it was all open but so secretive. But that’s how we lived. We swapped.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And funnily enough a common vegetable like the onion soon became pretty scarce and it was, it was said in the newspaper one day that The Times had an onion a pound and a half in weight and raffled it and it raised over four quid.
HB: Oh blimey. That’s not bad.
HB2: It wasn’t was it? But yes people were very careful. I mean there was plenty of onions in the village but people were very careful. They didn’t let them go too quickly and I mean eggs, when rationing come in were, well they were like gold. You got one egg a week. I mean, we, we used to sit there and my mum used to cook me a piece of bacon or a piece of ham and an egg. Sometimes I used to get a goose egg fried.
HB: Oh right.
HB2: And I used to say, ‘How many folks are eating ham and eggs like I am mum?’ She said, ‘Not many. Not many.’
HB: Amazing.
HB2: And another thing that upset the females, the women of the village was the warden could not only go into the house and switch your lights off if there was an infringement of the blackout regulation he could check your larder to see if you’d got more than a week’s supply of food in it. Well the women went up in arms and said, ‘Well that means he’s going to summons the lot of us ‘cause we’ve all got more and when you think of it to kill a pig we had to send our ration books up to have our bacon coupons cancelled. Now, my mum, dad and me could get, on them coupons, thirty nine pounds in weight of bacon per year.
HB: Right.
HB2: And they were all cancelled. We were then supplied with a licence to kill the pig and we’d get a twenty stone, thirty stone pig killed that would produce summat like three or four hundred pounds worth of meat. We swapped it for thirty nine so we didn’t think we’d done too badly.
HB: No. No. Not a bad outcome.
HB2: No. It wasn’t. It wasn’t. But then the old pig, it was, it was a Godsend it really was and I remember many years later I attended a illustrated lecture on the home front and in fact the lecturer didn’t give us the lecture. He listened to us on the floor telling him and we went for a meal and two ladies and a gentleman were sitting at this table, ‘Come on. Sit down here my duck. Sit down here.’ And I said, ‘Oh you sound as though you come from London.’ She said, ‘Yes. We come from the East End. What was your war like?’ So I said, ‘Oh East End,’ I said, ‘I daren’t tell you.’ So she said, ‘Come on. We want to know.’ So I told her and she nudged her sister and she said, ‘This bleeding bloke’s living in bleeding paradise isn’t he?’ I said, ‘Compared to you I was,’ I said, ‘Because we never saw a bomb. Not to explode anyway.’ I said, ‘It was tranquil. We went to bed and we slept.’ So she said, ‘Well we didn’t.’ I said, ‘No. I’ve read about you and,’ I said, ‘I’ve learned about it since the war, come across people like yourself,’ and I said, ‘What the hell of a life did you lead?’ She said, ‘Well that’s true. That’s true.’ And by golly.
[pause]
HB2: Right. Now, the blackout. It was imposed very quickly and it caused the blackout material that was for sale to dry up quick so people then had to make do and mend and they made wooden frames, covered it with old cardboard cartons and then pasted wallpaper over the top of it to start with until they could get curtains and what have you properly and that the way it was imposed quickly we thought, right, bombs are soon going to rain down on us. The, the government said you should paint all the outside rim, perimeters of your panes, your glass with black paint and so we said we ain’t going to do that ‘cause we only had one window in the kitchen and if we had cut off out any more daylight off we wouldn’t have seen. So we that was that wasn’t done. That was ignored but they painted the edges the curbs black and white sections, the bottom of poles with black and white rings but as we said in the village we never had street lighting so we could find our way around quite easily. What did cause a lot of trouble there was a lot of reports of accidents going up because of the blackout. You could have, you had to block out your headlights with a circle of concrete, er concrete [laughs], with a circle of cardboard with a two inch slit in one lamp only. Well you couldn’t see where you were going and they was hitting fences and hitting everything. Even people.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: So they had to relax the thing in the end. The restrictions on lamps on vehicles. Now I’ve done, I’ve done the farmer’s harvesting.
HB: Did you, did you find at that time as, you know, with the involvement of the restrictions or, you know the change in how you were providing your food did you find that people, it drew people together or did you find the odd individuals that really didn’t want to play the game if you, if you know what I mean?
HB2: Our village turned into just one family.
HB: Right.
HB2: As I said if we were out playing as kids and we injured ourselves, skinned our knees or anything we didn’t run home we ran to the nearest house and they would bandage us up, give us a glass of lemonade and a cake and we were off you’d again or if we were misbehaving we got a clip around the ear.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Pretty sharp so yeah it was they blended well. They really blended well.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: And if anybody was sick there was always, well we had a district nurse, she was always coming around but everybody did anything and the old folk they were looked after. If an old, we had several old people who’d got large gardens well they said to somebody else come and, if you want an extra garden come and do it and they would dig their, dig that garden, grow vegetables on it and keep the old folks supplied as well.
HB: Right.
HB2: So -
HB: Yeah.
HB2: We were doing very well and the only thing that hit us really was the imported stuff. The dried fruit. We knew jolly well that would be tight but they also rationed coal and you could have a pound a month. A ton a month.
HB: That’s not much.
HB2: It wasn’t. It wasn’t. So thankfully again living in the village with trees and there wasn’t much dead wood laying about I’ll tell you. Even at sales. Farm sales or house sales all the old trash wood would be put on a heap and they’d sell that as, you know for a few bob. Yeah
HB: Amazing.
HB2: Yeah. You’d get old, at a farm sale you’d get implements, old farm implements, chicken hut, hen huts, anything and they’d sell it to you for a few bob.
HB: Amazing.
HB2: Nothing was wasted.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Nothing was wasted. Now the effects on my family. Well, my sister she was directed into munitions. My brother, like a lot of other chaps in the village was called up so from about 1940 the family was split up and I was, I was brought up as an only child. My sister never did come back home. She got married and went to live away and then my brother when he came back was only home a brief time before he too got married so as a family in the early years we never lived as a family. Now, my brother was sent abroad in ‘41 and from that day that he boarded the ship my mother started suffering from asthma, asthma attacks, and they lasted right up to the day he come back and stepped over the threshold. And some of these attacks were, well they used to scare me. And me. I had a recurring nightmare. My father had two fields on a slope. One was arable, the other was grass divided by a big high hedge. The top was full of Germans. The bottom was full of English and we, when it occurred, this dream, this nightmare there was one hell of a battle and nobody got beyond the hedge but this battle raged like hell in my mind and I always ended up in the same, doing the same thing. Running through some streets of a town, I don’t know where, chased by ruddy Germans soldiers with fixed bayonets and rifles. They never caught me but I used to wake up crying my eyes out, shaking like a leaf, probably having wet the bed and wouldn’t go to sleep again. I had, it was regular. I wouldn’t say it was nightly but it was regular and I didn’t’ get much sleep but that thing lived with me for many well if I can still if I set my mind to it I can still recall every action now but it doesn’t have the same affect.
HB: Amazing.
HB2: Now, my father, he was advised or told by the War Agricultural Committee that he’d got to plough a grass field up and he’d be paid two pound an acre to do it but he must grow sugar beet on it. Well, he, he jumped up and down and he didn’t swear but he cursed a bit under his breath because he always maintained that this damned sugar beet crop wanted attention from early spring to late autumn winter and he didn’t think much to it. Anyway, he had to grow it which he did and come November time he used to have to take it up and top it and then wait for a permit to come to tell him which factory to take it to, when he could take it so then he could organise a lorry to come and pick it up and take it off there. I used to love that because I used to go with the lorry driver when we used to get to the factory and before we got anywhere a man come with a scuttle and took a sample off. Now the result of that sample depended on how much my dad got paid because there was a deduction for dirty beet, too much soil on it, too much top or low sugar content.
HB: Right.
HB2: But he was allowed to buy a by-product which was beet pulp for the cattle. Now that come in very coarsely woven sacks and these sacks were snapped up to make snip rugs.
HB: Oh right. Yeah. Yeah. What do you call the kind of rug?
HB2: Snip.
HB: Snip rugs.
HB2: Snip. Peg rugs.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Snip rugs.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And I spent many a time in front in front of the fire snipping these, this ruddy, well we had one the size of this mat here and at the end of the winter mother put it on the line to beat and she said, ‘I’m not bothering with that, there’s more holes than a colander.’ Sparks had come from the fire and -
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Burnt a hole in it.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: But they very useful were them sacks but as soon as dad could he got, didn’t grow sugar beet. And another thing that upset him was he was advised to feed the tops to his cattle. It was very good forage. Well he did and it tainted the milk.
HB: [Ringtone] Oh I do apologise.
HB2: That’s alright.
HB: I should have turned that off. Now. Turn that off. Just make sure this is completely off. I made the same mistake yesterday. I do apologise. So. So, so the forage, the forage was good for the cattle.
HB2: Providing you didn’t sell milk.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Yeah.
HB: But it tainted obviously.
HB2: It tainted the milk.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: You could still use it but you had to realise that it wasn’t sour, bitter or anything else it was just the flavour of the tops and it wasn’t dangerous so again we had people coming with cans and, you know, carting it off.
HB: Right
HB2: So but oh no he wasn’t he wasn’t too pleased about that. Oh, we couldn’t make butter either.
HB: No. Right.
HB2: He did swear at that. Well, and then we had, another crop that farmers had to grow was flax and we had billeted on us a man who had a tractor and a special machine for pulling the flax. It had to be pulled up by the roots and then dried and it went for, I think the roots went for webbing, something like that so we’d got this chap billeted on us. He didn’t last long because he was making his way around the farms in his area doing his job so he went and that man was replaced by an Irishman who was in a gang working on the airfields laying the runways.
HB: Right.
HB2: And he stayed for quite some time ‘till the, well I think he came for a couple of years.
HB: So when you say he was billeted with you he was given a, he rented a room in the house.
HB2: No.
HB: Farmhouse.
HB2: Well he got a bed in a bedroom.
HB: Right.
HB2: And he got his food at the table.
HB: Right.
HB2: And he did, mum did his washing.
HB: Right.
HB2: So he didn’t have a room.
HB: Right.
HB2: He was one of a family.
HB: Right.
HB2: And then the third man was an engineer, an aircraft engineer in charge of fifteen other men who repaired aircraft and he went, he was working at RAF Wickenby and he was with us for some time. Well ‘till the end of the war from about ’43 so, but he, one day said to me, ‘Would you like to come to work with me?’ And I said, ‘I can’t. I’m not allowed.’ And mum said, ‘No. He’s not going if he’s going to get you and everybody into trouble.’ He said, ‘He’ll be alright. He’ll be alright.’ So after a lot of persuasion mum allowed me to go and he had a motorbike and sidecar and just before we got to the camp I had to snuggle down and he put a coat over me and in we went into the hangar and in the hangar was a Lancaster that was being stripped for bits, spares. Now, he said, ‘You go in there. Don’t show yourself. Don’t start peering out of windows and moving levers that waggle the tail or anything like that,’ but he said, ‘If we shout “hide” you go in the canopy under there and pull these old blankets over,’ well they were all stinky with oil and what have you. Anyway, yes I would. Do you know from about 8 o’clock in the morning till 5 o’clock at night I had one hell of a time in there. I flew everywhere, bombed everywhere, shot everything down but there was one thing, I said, it’s a bit crowded in here for when they run around with their, with their parachutes on and I tried getting in the rear turret but I didn’t like that. I thought my God sitting in a glass bubble here all over, nothing under you, nothing around you and then I struggled to get out. That was me. I didn’t want to go in there. So anyway I said to him, ‘Look. Where do I go if I want the loo? What do they use for the loo when they’re on the flight?’ Well I suppose they’d made arrangements for me ‘cause they’d screwed a five gallon drum with a lid off to the floor and I said, ‘Is that it then?’ So he said, ‘Yeah. Use that. That’s the loo.’ So I said, ‘Well I hope to God they don’t fly upside down very often then,’ [laughs] but I could look out, there was holes in the fuselage and I could look out and see what the men were doing and in the distance I could see trollies with bombs on them being moved about. I never saw them being loaded on to aircraft but they was there and then I were watching them repair these holes. Now a hole about the size of a tea plate this chap had some, looked like shiny paper and he did this with a spray and then he stuck it over the thing and then he got something else and sprayed it, I suppose that was the paint and then he went inside and did something else inside and I heard an airman come in and he said to this chap, ‘That’s it Ben,’ he said, ‘Put plenty of paper on it,’ he said, ‘The bullets don’t ricochet so bad.’ And I thought egads you’re running about in this confined space and there’s bullets coming through. Well of course they would be wouldn’t there? Could be.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And I thought oh my God I don’t want to fly. I’m not going to fly. I want to join the air force but I don’t want to fly. Anyway, I as I said I had this whale of a time in there and when I got home I was really dinged into me you don’t speak to anybody, dire consequences. Well by the time I could tell anybody nobody was interested.
HB: Yeah. So the chap who took you in there was, he was a civilian.
HB2: He was a civilian charge hand in charge of this gang of men that repaired the aircraft and if he said, ‘I could have three on the runway for next afternoon,’ he had to have three there. I didn’t know it until after he’d gone home but mum said he used to worry. He used to worry about sending the aircraft out and hoping to God everything worked and if they didn’t come back was it his fault. What had they done right? I said oh I didn’t know, you know. He didn’t show it because he never talked about his work.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: But you know everybody was affected differently.
HB: Yeah. That was, that was at RAF Wickenby.
HB2: Wickenby.
HB: Right. Right.
HB2: Wickenby. Nobody could, I might have said had to make radio silence but nobody could tell anybody but nobody could take the joy of that day from me.
HB: Oh no. No.
HB2: Oh and another thing that was started was the V for victory sign.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Churchill was encouraging people in occupied countries to go out and chalk up victory signs. Well we kids took that literally here and I remember somebody said that they expected it to take off in this country. Well we did our best. We sprayed everywhere. In fact the poor old police constable used to come to school and say, ‘Enough’s enough boys, you know. Don’t do it anymore.’
HB: Oh right.
HB2: So we had to limit it to the pavement [laughs] but we, we did our best.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: Now, again, in the fields, in my dad’s fields if I went to the highest point I could see aircraft leaving. They used to come up from one direction like flies, get to a certain point and then all turn and fly off and in the morning if I got up early enough I could watch aircraft come back limping and I remember getting up there one summer morning and this aircraft come in and there was a whacking great hole between the front end and the back end in the fuselage and I thought oh God that’s going to crash and I listened and listened and listened. No. There was no bump so I assumed it got down alright but to see them come back with bits hanging off and short tail, short wings.
HB: Which airfield was that that you could see?
HB2: If I went and looked in the east I could see Ludford and Binbrook. If I went we’ll say at 11 o’clock or 10 o’clock I could see Wickenby. If I come a little bit further it was Faldingworth and Waddington, Lincoln things. A bit further around to the right Hemswell and we’d got one right on the doorstep, Faldingworth and Dunholme Lodge so there were, in actual fact I think there was about I think there about were eight airfields within about ten miles of the, of my house.
HB: Right. Right.
HB2: But oh you know I used to sit there and think good God how they, where have they been and how long has it taken them to come back?
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: Then we had the military movements in the village to start with was, well it was regular. We would have lorrys loads of convoys of men, with men in towing guns and God knows what and then we’d have men march, troops of soldiers marching through the village. We couldn’t understand where the hell they’d come from ‘cause Lincoln was fifteen miles one away and there wasn’t a camp in between us and them and where they going? There was no camps between Market Rasen and Grimsby so we just wondered what the hell they were doing ‘cause if they’d got to Lincoln they could get on a train and come to Market Rasen. Anyway, we loved it because they used to have the Irish Innisskillens used to have a pipe band and of course the Scots with all their kilts and things oh man they had pipes and bands as well. We loved it and we used to we could hear them coming down Lincoln Lane and we used to rush to the junction and then march through the village with them.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Yeah. It was great but that, that didn’t last too long.
HB: Did you ever find out where they were or why they were coming?
HB2: No. No. It was a mystery. We, my mum assumed that when they went to town they marched through town to the racecourse where there was plenty for them to shelter but, well nobody camped there. There was never any official camp.
HB: Right.
HB2: So we just didn’t know where the hell, so whether it was just training. Route marching. I don’t know.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: But we didn’t think much to that if they’d walked from Lincoln.
HB: Yeah. I can see that.
HB2: Any shorter numbers like you’d probably get two or three vehicles come through. They’d pull up for a smoke or you’d get a half a dozen vehicles and they’d do the same thing. Wherever they stopped in the main street people would come out with pots of tea and sandwiches and give them a feed and if if them in the front giving their stuff away was backed up by other people in the village giving them -
HB: Right.
HB2: Stuff.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: It was, this is how they pulled together. I mean we used to, off the main road there used to be a ford where they used to sit and watch the tanks and Bren gun carriers and we used to love that because they used to let us get in to the Bren gun carriers and play around.
HB: Oh right.
HB2: The tank, the tank commanders were a bit different. They didn’t want us anywhere near.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: But yeah oh yes we used to have some fun and as I say that’s how they went on. There was, there was always something to drink and something to eat.
HB: Right.
HB2: And it’s marvellous how you can supply that when you are on ration.
HB: Yes.
HB2: But these housewives were masters in the art of making something out of nothing and stretching things. They were all damned good cooks.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And their main aim in life was to cook a meal that was tasty. Whatever else it was it had to be tasty and oh I’ve been to, I’d go to my mate’s house sometimes and go oh mum can we have some of that and Columbus discovered America at one old boy’s house. His mum said to me one Saturday morning, she said to me, ‘I’m making some potato scallops. Would you like them?’ Well, not knowing what a scallop was and not wanting to miss anything I said, ‘Yes please.’ Well they’re slices of potato dipped in batter and fried. They were lovely. They were lovely. I even do it now for my two grandsons. ‘Can we have some scallops dad, grandad.
HB: Yeah. Lovely.
HB2: Yeah. Oh it was so simple.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Mother never made chips. She always, whatever the size the potato was she sliced it and fried it.
HB: Right. Yeah.
HB2: And oh it used to go brown and crisp and oh you put your salt and vinegar on and they were heaven.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: They were heaven.
HB: Yeah. I can imagine.
HB2: Then, oh our Market Rasen station lost its roof.
HB: Right.
HB2: It was taken down to go to King’s Cross to repair the damaged roof there. Well the locals were up in arms about that.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Yeah. Yes they robbed Peter to pay Paul and the thing is Market Rasen station never got another roof back and now the signal box has gone. It’s virtually a dead station.
HB: I would, I mean I presume it was pretty busy and you know quite a busy little place.
HB2: Oh yes it was. It was. Because to start with they’d got a coal, the coal yard, the coal operators were in there and you used to have to go, you could go in there with your pram and get a bag of coke or bag of something like that. Oh there was always, always a trek. There was always people going in and out and as you say, it was easy to get on there and go to Lincoln. I think it was about a penny. One and a penny return or something like that and so you got the traffic. It was a convenience. Easy to go and easy to get there.
HB: Yeah. And did that supply the military as well? Did the military, did the military use that -
HB2: Well -
HB: Route?
HB2: Wickenby had got a station of its own.
HB: Right.
HB2: Snelland was next door to it. Langworth was Fiskerton and, yes you could. You would get them supplied by the rail but not at Market Rasen.
HB: Right.
HB2: I wouldn’t say never at Market Rasen because they would. Ludford. The Ludford and Binbrook people would come down to the station. That sort of thing but as you went up the branch the other side to Grimsby, the stations would do the local, the local stations so yes there was access there. It was busy. It was busy.
[pause].
HB2: Oh now from, from the outbreak of the war we were bombarded with information to be on guard against strangers. Now, we kids were going to do our bit because we’d, it had been dinged into us not to speak to anybody so we didn’t know anything, we didn’t know anybody, we didn’t know where anybody lived and we didn’t know which way you went to anywhere [laughs]. And if we saw one of these house to house salesman we used to go running to the post office to tell the warden. Now whilst he was very polite and we often think you lot are a pain in the bum [laughs] but he never said so.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Now, one day, I lived up a surfaced lane, a road surfaced lane but I lived off a little ash track and up above us about a half a mile was the big farmer had bought a farm so he was making use of the buildings but the house was empty. Now in the garden there was some lovely fruit trees so this particular day we decided we’d go and rescue some of this fruit. So pushed our bikes up, going down the side of the house, around the corner, we got to an open door and there was voices coming out of this door so we listened and couldn’t understand what was going on and one of, one of my mates said, ‘Ruddy Gerries,’ and we’d gone, zoom, gone on our bikes pedalled like hell back home shouting ‘Mum. Mum. Mum.’ She said, ‘What on earth’s the matter?’ ‘Oh Mrs Beech. Mrs Beech,’ he said, ‘There’s Gerries in the Naylor’s house.’ So, ‘Get off with you.’ So we said, ‘There is.’ She said, ‘What do you mean there’s Germans?’ We said, ‘Well they don’t speak our language. We can’t understand what they’re saying.’ So she said, ‘Well that’s strange.’ Now, I didn’t know it at the time but about a mile the other side of Market Rasen on the eastern side they’d commandeered a big house and used it as a prisoner of war camp. So it was the thinking then that they’d escaped. So of course she went down to the warden, post general and said to him, ‘Look this is it.’ So he got the policeman and he went to investigate and he came back. He said, ‘Now rest assured Mrs Beech the Germans haven’t invaded. These Germans are prisoners. They’re released to work on the farm and the big farmer who owns the house has let them go in there on wet days and meal times to light a fire and make a drink and what have you. So,’ he said, ‘It’s all above board.’ Well when we saw these devils come out I mean they got big yellow diamonds on their back, they’d got round patches on their hearts and legs what the hell’s all that for. Well that was if they did escape that was where to shoot at. We didn’t think much to that at all. Germans. Oh dear. No way. Well then when I got to the secondary modern school we were released from school on a blue card system to help with the harvest or help with the crops so it was potato picking time and I got time off to go potato picking so I went to pick on this big farm and lo and behold sitting in the ruddy heap of straw was three Germans. So if they come on that side we went that side, me and this other lad. We weren’t going near them.
HB: How old would you be then Harold do you think?
HB2: Eleven. Twelve. Twelve.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Twelve.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And I wasn’t going there.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Anyway come dinner time, I used to take my dinner and I sat having it there and I looked at these Germans and they were tearing a loaf of bread to pieces and I said, ‘What are they eating?’ So one of the foremen I think it was said, ‘Oh they’re having a bit of bread.’ ‘What. Dry bread?’ ‘Yeah. They’re washing it down with cold tea.’ So I said, ‘Oh all right.’ So never thought any more about it. I went home and told mum. I was full of this having to work with Germans and I said for dinner they only had this, whatever they had. Well the next morning when I went there was a pack. ‘Take that to the Germans.’ I said, ‘I’m not taking them to the Gerries.’ So I said, ‘What are they?’ She said, ‘Sandwiches.’ There was one apiece. So I said, ‘I’m not taking them.’ She said, ‘You jolly well are.’ So of course I took it up there and my mate, his mum had done the same thing. So I said, ‘Well are you going near them?’ ‘No I’m not. Get Mr Fawcett to take them. He’s the foreman.’ Well he wasn’t going to take them. You had to take them yourself. Well we wouldn’t go. In the end he got between us hand on each shoulder and said, ‘Come on I’ll take you.’ So we took them and when one lad opened his thing he wept. So it didn’t, it didn’t endear me at all that didn’t, you know, he could weep his eyes out as far as I was concerned but I went home and told mother and I said, ‘Why do you send them?’ She said, ‘Look. Your brother’s in the army and I would like to think that if he was in the same condition somebody would do the same for him.’ Well I couldn’t understand all that. Giving them. No way. But anyway I took it you know and in the end she was right. That was somebody’s son and after, after the war there was a lot of these prisoners had worked on farms, were still working on the farms and they never went back. We couldn’t understand it but we realised then they were in the Russian platoon, the Russian sector and they weren’t going back.
HB: Right. Yeah.
HB2: And they, they stayed and they married local girls. Some of them married local girls which didn’t go down to well with the lad that were coming back. On one occasion, prisoners used to walk into town and stroll in the streets. It was a regular occurrence as far as we were concerned. They didn’t do any harm you know. Well six load of Belgian soldiers come and they parked on the market square. Gordon Bennett there was riots. They were out them trucks. They were beating them up, they were chasing them back to camp. There was hell on until we could get a lot of our army lads in to quell it down but by, didn’t them lads, a spokesman give our residents a right pasting. They were disgusted that they should allow them there. ‘You want some occupation,’ he said, ‘before you allow them to do things like that.’ God they didn’t half wipe the floor with them. And the newsagent, poor chap, he could speak, what is it, Flemish or whatever it was and he had to be acting as interpreter. Well he didn’t know where to put himself because the language was a bit, a bit rough.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: But he said they got the message across and it was ages and ages before the prisoners would come out again. No way.
HB: And that was just after the war.
HB2: No. That was during the war.
HB: That was during the war.
HB2: During. Right to the latter part. But they weren’t having that. Oh dear. We were educated in warfare.
[pause]
HB2: Now, as we know rationing began in 1940 and gran was heard, when she come to visit mum one say she said, ‘Oh dear I hope it’s not as bad as last time.’ Well she wasn’t really saying about the rationing because rationing started in June and finished in November in the First World War. She was talking about the fighting but anyway I took it that she thought rationing but it wasn’t that because rationing started immediately more or less and lasted fourteen years and got worse so but she we first of all we got four ounces of butter and twelve ounces of sugar and four ounces of bacon. If it was cooked you got three and a half ounces. Why the difference I don’t know but that was it. Tea and meat come in later and meat was rationed by price. You could have one and ten pence worth per person so me, mum and dad could have five and six penny worth of meat a week which when you come to think of prices in them days you could live pretty well. I mean it topped up. We could top it up with a chicken or something like that but in them days you could get decent meat. You could get three pounds a neck of lamb and that sort of thing. Offal wasn’t rationed but it was rationed by availability.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Because you could only get so much offal off an animal and the cheap cuts but the things you never hear of now such as brains and feet, calf’s head, calf feet, cow heel, well it’s not allowed to be sold and but as I said it was, it was rationed by availability. Now, I know we used to get orders put in. Mum used to put an order in when she got one week supply she’d order another. She didn’t always get it but she got something and we used to often have bullock’s heart for Sunday dinner because that was always good meat, plenty of it and Monday washday cold meat and sliced potatoes or bubble and squeak but it was all, it was all good stuff and then I remember when we killed the pig and made sausages mum and I would have a day out at Hull market. We used to buy, she used to buy while she was there fresh marjoram to put in the sausage meat to season it and I was in, we were coming back one day down this street and we were passing a butchers shop and I went by and then I went back again and there was thrushes, starlings blackbirds and sparrows hanging on the butcher’s rail and it was hanging over this dish with something green on it, greenish, and I was shouting to mum, ‘Come and look here mum. What’s this then? What’s this?’ And another lady was coming up the street she stood to me and she said, ‘Don’t you know what it is?’ I said, ‘No. What is it?’ She said, ‘Its whale meat.’ Oh dear. It looked ghastly.
HB: Yeah. I bet.
HB2: It looked ghastly. Well after that it was being pushed as, you know, meat to eat. Well it was described as a lump of cod liver oil.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: It took ages to get the smell out the house.
HB: Did you ever eat it?
HB2: Never. Never. No.
HB: Your mother never cooked it.
HB2: Oh no there was none. I don’t think the butchers were allowed to bring any in the village. They got enough aggro.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Sausages. We used to make our own sausages when it was pig killing time and I have never seen anything like these in the war. They were salmon pink were some of them.
HB: Oh right.
HB2: And the ladies in the things, ‘What’s in these today then butcher?’ So he said, ‘What’s that?’ She said, ‘What do we call them now? We can’t call them sausages.’ So some of them would call them bread in battle dress.
HB: Oh right.
HB2: Or the butcher’s dustbins.
HB: Oh dear.
HB2: It got, it got really rich.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And I remember gran giving a basting to the butcher. She said, ‘Where the devil did you get that last bit of meat from that I had last Sunday?’ So he said, ‘What did you have?’ She said, ‘Ruddy jump dike. It had jumped every damned ditch in the country. God it was tough,’ she said.
HB: Oh dear.
HB2: That was, that was your bit of mutton. But this is it. You had to eat what you got and everything went in.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: I mean I don’t ever think, you know a cow’s stomach it’s covered by a thin bit of flesh and skin. Well that used to be cut off and they used to sell, make meat pies out of that. Oh stews and mind you it got put on the old pan on the hob from about 6 o’clock in the morning till 6 o’clock at night -
HB: Right. Yeah.
HB2: To cook it but it was cooked.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Yes. You turned it out. That was the thing about having it on the hob or put it in a stew jar in the oven. It was long and slow and it was cooked and it was tasty ‘cause I must have eaten some things, you know [laughs]. The only, the only head mum ever used was the pig’s head.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And she used to, they used to cut in to half. Top half and bottom half. Bottom half was cut in half again and that was called bathchap. They used to cure it with the salt and then cook it as bathchap and the head you just put that in a pan and boiled it until all the meat fell off. The ears you could leave in as well, chop them up, mince them up or you could cut them off having been boiled you could then slice them and fry them until they were crisp and eat them like scratchings.
HB: Right.
HB2: Oh aye. I mean you offer somebody a pig’s ear now [laughs]
HB: Well yeah.
HB2: Well.
HB: You’d get a different reaction I suppose.
HB2: Yes. I was I was in this supermarket and they’d got pig’s trotters and this well he wasn’t an old chap but he was mature and he said to his wife, ‘What they hell are they selling them for? What can you do with them?’ So I said, ‘Well if you’re like me you’d eat them and enjoy them.’ ‘Enjoy them?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ ‘Well what would you do with them?’ I said, ‘Well you’d boil them, leave them till they were cold, sprinkle them with vinegar and then eat them.’ ‘Well there’s no meat on them.’ I said, ‘No it’s all gelatine.’ ‘Oh my God,’ he said [laughs]. I said, ‘I’ve had no end of them in wintertime.’
HB: Yeah.
HB2: I said, ‘They’re lovely.’ ‘Oh hell,’ he said, ‘It’s fat.’ I said, ‘No. It’s gelatine.’ They weren’t having that. Oh yes the government come out with a thing. Lemons had gone, you’d missed all the lemons and they said that by sprinkling, by sprinkling it with vinegar and adding some sugar it was quite, quite tasty [laughs] I mean, now, my mum had been in service from school leaving in the big houses. She said, ‘We never had vinegar and sugar on pancakes before,’ she said, ‘We’re not having it now.’ ‘Course we had homemade butter didn’t we?
HB: Oh sorry. I’m with you. So that was like come Shrove Tuesday or whatever.
HB2: Yes. Yes.
HB: You’re doing pancakes.
HB2: That’s right.
HB: Instead of your lemon juice.
HB2: Vinegar and sugar.
HB: Right. And was that, did your mum get these sort of leaflets that the Ministry of Food put out and you know like they used to distribute them through the Women’s Institute or something like that.
HB2: Well I was going to say they were available.
HB: Right.
HB2: I don’t think she had many.
HB: Right.
HB2: I don’t think she had many. I don’t think many of the housewives in the village did.
HB: Right.
HB2: Because they’d been brought up on the old recipes. The stodge. Oh my mother used to make, you know how you make dumplings with suet and what have you.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Well she used to make a pudding, put it on the tea plate, put it in the steamer, and let it steam and she’d have half we’ll say with liver and onions and the other half sprinkled with jam or treacle and she used to call it her dual purpose pudding [laughs] When I was visiting my aunt once a lady across the road, a very refined lady, she came across and she said, ‘Harold, something smells very good. What is it?’ I said, ‘It’s liver and onion.’ ‘Can I have a look?’ ‘Of course you can.’ So she looked in the frying pan that was sizzling away there and then she said, ‘What’s in that pan?’ I said, ‘Oh madam that’s a secret that is. That’s my dual purpose pudding.’ And she looked at me. She said, ‘You’re kidding. What are you, what are you doing?’ I said, ‘Have a look.’ So she had a look. So she said, ‘Well it looks like a suet pudding to me.’ I said, ‘That’s what it is but it’s dual purpose.’ ‘What on earth you do you mean by that?’ So I told her. Savoury and, oh she went out giggling, ‘I must tell my husband. Dual purpose pudding.’
HB: Lovely. Lovely. I like that.
HB2: Yeah the old rations were going up and down. Milk used to be a terrible thing. At its maximum it was three and half pints a week. Well it used to go down to two pints or two and a half pints. It was always like a yoyo that was. How the hell some of them managed I don’t know. There we are having a mug for our supper and going to bed on. A mug of milk and all the milk we wanted.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Yeah. It’s fantastic really when you think back as to just how some people did live.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. You can imagine yeah. It’s difficult.
HB2: And then when they brought out dried egg. Oh dear. You could get a tin. One tin a month plus your one egg a week. Well mum tried it. Mum and gran tried it for baking. Well the Yorkshire puddings wouldn’t rise and the cakes were useless. They used to, sponge cakes were useless so they used to use that in the dishes that you could mix it in with that didn’t -
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: Didn’t show too much.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Oh no and dried milk was more of a favour than than the dried egg but one thing we did like and that was now what did they call it? It’s spam. Supply Pressed American Meat. Spam. And we used to love that dipped in batter or just plain fried. That went down a treat.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: The old spam fritters. Even in the air force we had spam fritters.
HB: Wow. Did, did you, did any of the small farms around you did they actually supply any of the airfields direct?
HB2: Not that I know of.
HB: Or it all went through the ministry I suppose.
HB2: Well I think it all went through the ministry because there was bacon factories, egg factories, potato marketing board, apple marketing board. Everything had to go through a board but I think a lot of it might have ended up there because, but it didn’t go direct from the farmer.
HB: Oh right.
HB2: Prices were fixed at what a farmer could buy and sell at.
HB: Right.
HB2: So it would be possible for them to sell it if they got sort of permission but I just don’t think many did.
HB: No. No.
HB2: Fish was never, fish was never rationed but that again was availability because the poor old trawlers used to get sunk and whilst we, whilst we got a supply of fish, the fish and chip shops were never open regularly. Only when it was available and the wet fish man on the market sometimes he was there and sometimes for weeks he wasn’t ‘cause he just couldn’t get the -
HB: Yeah
HB2: He just couldn’t get the fish but oh and we had, we had a fish in a tin called snook.
HB: Right.
HB2: Barracuda.
HB: Was it?
HB2: Now funnily enough it had got a rotten name but it didn’t taste too bad.
HB: Right.
HB2: No. We only, we had very little of it but what I had I wouldn’t turn up my nose at it again. I do remember that but we didn’t eat, we didn’t have much tinned fish. We didn’t. Mum used to, when it was available, get a bit of fresh fish, batter it and fry it herself but no, we didn’t have a lot of fish.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: As I say we stuck to the stodge which was sometimes repetitious but it was still good.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: You know if it was a case of having a dry crust and a plate of meat and potato we’d have a plate of meat and potato. You know, it was stodge.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And we ate what we had. If we’d had it yesterday it didn’t matter.
HB: Yeah. Did you ever, did you ever have evacuees in the village?
HB2: Yes. We did. We had nine.
HB: Right.
HB2: From Lower Wortley, Leeds and these were dumped at the school one dark evening and as one lady described it dished out like prizes at a whist drive ‘cause you couldn’t refuse to have a evacuee. If you did you got fined fifty quid.
HB: Blimey.
HB2: Now the nine kids that come to our village were in that school looking very bewildered, very frightened with a ruddy label attached to their coat collar and the gas mask hanging around the back of their bum. Poor little sods. And they were doled out to these people in the village who never should have had them. They were all houses that had got toilets, running water, mains water but the people that lived in them were, two of them in particular were old couples, house proud, never had any children. Now, one lived, two of them lived in a bungalow at the bottom of our lane and they crossed the road from our lane end. Now, the girl, she wasn’t too badly treated but we couldn’t go, we could go and call for her to play with but we couldn’t play in their yard, their garden. No you had to go out. The other lad, he was a saddler, this bloke that had him. He was house proud and no children and he was a sod. I remember one night we’d gone to Scouts and we was a bit late coming out and he’d come to meet him and he started going at this old boy because he was late and I said, ‘We were doing things. That’s why we were late.’ Anyway, it was none of my business and as I ran off I heard Bob shout, ‘Ouch that hurt.’ Well I run into an RAF sergeant. He said, ‘Where are you going in a hurry?’ I said, ‘I’m going home.’ He said, ‘Is somebody chasing you?’ I said, ‘No.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Who just shouted “ouch that hurt?” ’ I said, ‘Oh that’s Bob.’ So he said, ‘Well what’s Bob got to do with it?’ So I told him. He said, ‘I’d better go and see.’ Well I earwigged in a woman’s gateway in the garden and crept along the side of this hedge to listen and I heard this sergeant say, ‘I’ve a bloody good mind to give you a thrashing with that.’ What he’d done was he’d hit Bob on the back of the legs with a plaited riding crop, a leather plaited riding crop. Anyway, I run home and told mum and oh didn’t the villagers let rip but the authorities didn’t, didn’t contact mum to fetch him back again. He was there for quite some time after this incident. I mean we could go and call for him but he had to come away and he didn’t have to get dirty, he didn’t have to get dishevelled. I mean mum’s used to spruce him up. Would clean his hair, wash his face, his hands, clean his shoes before they sent him back and if he, if we’d been fishing or anything he had to leave everything with other kids. Oh this bloke. Well he was a wrong one.
HB: What sort of age would Bob have been?
HB2: He’d have been the same age as me. Ten. Twelve. But as luck would have it if and when his mum found out they fetched him back.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: But it must have been, it must have been towards the end of the ‘43 ‘44 type because the evacuees, as soon as things started to get easier I mean Leeds, Leeds was getting bombed but it was nothing like London so mum’s were fetching them back except for one lad. He came in the village with his two sisters. Now, funnily enough they got put with a family of three boys. The two sisters. They’d got a big family already what did they want, but they had a good time, they were alright. The brother, he got billeted with a farmer and his wife and he was, the three of them were brothers and sisters of Ernie Wise.
HB: Really.
HB2: And the brother, he went through agricultural college and went into farm management. So -
HB: Wow.
HB2: He did alright. Another girl called Mary she was stationed with the traction engine man. The contractor, who was an old couple. No children. But she landed on her feet. They were good to her and she, she did exceptionally well. She won a scholarship to the grammar school but for some unknown reason she finished up with me at the secondary modern and people couldn’t understand that. If she’d got a scholarship she should be there. So anyway things began to boil and they used to get on to the big farmer who’d got a finger in every pie there was, you know. He was one of these sat on every committee and got a say on everything that went on. ‘Why is it that your daughter’s gone to grammar school and she never passed a test? Why doesn’t she go?’ Anyway eventually she went to grammar school did Mary and she did well. She even stayed back with the couple until she finished her schooling.
HB: Oh right.
HB2: And then, I think she finished up in Canada.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: So she did alright and as I said the other, the two twins, well, that came they they sort of hit the chair and bounced off again ‘cause their mum couldn’t bear them being parted and came and fetched them so they’d gone but no poor old Bob got the short straw.
HB: Yeah. Sounds like it. Sounds like it.
HB2: But we had, we had a teacher come with them. Thank God we did. She was a lovely teacher. She was a granny type teacher. You know. Loved by all us kids and she acted as interpreter.
HB: Right.
HB2: And we were out in the field one day, village kids playing football this two or three lads lined up and, what do they want? So we said, ‘What do you want?’ [Can we [lay it with the casey?] ‘You what?’ [laughs]. Can we [lay it with casey]. So by using sign language they got the message across so we said, ‘Yeah come on in,’ and then when we started playing at marbles [can we lay it with the cars]. Oh my God. So again sign language, ‘Yeah come on.’ We fitted them up with marbles and away with them and they taught us a little ditty –
“we’re right down at cellars oil, with muck slats at windows, we’ve used all our coil up, we’ve started on cinders and when the bum bailiff comes he’ll never find us, ‘cause we’ve got mud splats on windows.”
HB: Oh right [laughs]
HB2: And when you’re confronted with that type of talking.
HB: Yeah and the teacher was the interpreter.
HB2: And the teacher was the interpreter oh and would they hell as get used to getting milk out of a cow? There was two of them with me one day. Dad was milking. ‘What’s he doing?’ I said, ‘Milking his cow.’ No he’s not. That’s not milk.’ ‘It is. Do you want a cup full?’ We got a cup. No way were they going to drink that. If you put it in a jug on the table they’d have it out the jug on the table yes, but not that so it took us ages before they accepted it. Once they did I mean once they were drinking milk till it was coming out of their ears.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: But it took them ages to that and then one day they would go around and collect the eggs and one hen had just squatted and dropped her egg. They wouldn’t touch it. It had come from the chickens bum. It was dirty.
HB: Oh right. Yeah. Course we don’t think of that do we?
HB2: No. And then and what they did like was we used to get a slice of bread, mother used to spread it pretty thick with butter and then we’d go out in the spring and pick the hawthorn shoots, the green buds of and stick it in there. ‘What’s that?’ ‘Its bread and cheese.’ ‘You can’t eat the hedge.’ ‘Yeah you can. Come on.’ Well when they got used to that, I mean every time they come they wanted a slice of bread and butter.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And goosegogs.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Used to top and tail the goosegogs and if they got golden drops which were sweet oh they loved that. They’d pick them up and stick them in and eat them.
HB: Brilliant.
HB2: Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: But we used to, they balked at eating carrots pulled out the ground. I mean we used to pull the carrot out of the ground, go to a bit of grass and wipe it on the grass and then rub it in your hands and [click click].
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Nothing. Or swede. We taught them how to peel a swede with your teeth. Well they thought we were absolutely filthy.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. But of course that’s, I mean their experience was totally different.
HB2: Oh God.
HB: Coming from Leeds.
HB2: I mean, the first thing we asked them was, ‘What were the Germans doing in Leeds. Have you got Germans up there?’ ‘No.’ And then we used to say, ‘Why don’t you eat that?’ Because they were amazed at the food that was presented to them. What the hell they’d eaten I don’t know. It couldn’t have been varied much but we used to say to them, ‘Well it’s food. This is what we eat.’
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: I mean bread and jam. They’d have eaten that till it come out their ears.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And cakes. I don’t think they’d ever seen a cake or pastry and because we’d got plenty of fat, I mean the old fat bacon used to get rendered down for lard and we, mum used to cook pastries as she did before but all you know they used to like the egg custards. Oh they loved them and the curd tarts.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Yeah. But in the end I mean they used to tuck in. None of them went home any lighter than they were before they come. They all went home pretty well stuffed.
HB: Yeah. And did you ever see them after the war?
HB2: No.
HB: Did any of them ever come back?
HB2: Never saw, except Gordon. The farmer. He used to be in town, he used to play cricket for the town.
HB: So that was that was Ernie, one of the Ernie Wises brothers?
HB2: That was Gordon Wise. Gordon Wiseman -
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Was his name. Ernie Wise.
[pause]
HB2: We had, just after the evacuees arrived we started school dinners and we used, at the infants, at the primary school and we used to get a third of a pint of milk a day and I think it was more or less compulsory and I used to say, ‘Mum why do I have to drink milk at school? Don’t I get enough at home?’ She said well at halfpenny a time it was tuppence halfpenny a week for the five days and then they started doing school dinners. They converted the church hut into a kitchen and that was sixpence a day. Half a crown a week. Well of course when it started I had to be in to start, you know, it was something new so I had to be in there and they were, they were nice but before they got the canteen they tried serving them up in the cloakroom and they’d got these ruddy great big oval steamers and pans on a cooker next to a Belfast sink and they used to cook nothing but parsnips and mutton and I, oh I got to the state where mum couldn’t, couldn’t have a joint of mutton because I couldn’t eat it. I used to be sick. And that lasted, that lasted until I joined the air force at seventeen and a half. Now I enjoy mutton like the rest of them.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: But oh dear. When I used to go to church on a Sunday, evensong and as the vicar was coming down the aisle to go to the pulput to sermon I was going to the vestry to be heaving. In fact mother thought I was up to something. She come out and found me there and when she saw I wasn’t she was a bit surprised.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Yeah. I was allergic to mutton. Now whilst we were at my grans one day -
HB: Sorry. That was one thing I did want to ask you. Where did your gran live?
HB2: Newton.
HB: She lived in the village of Newton.
HB2: Newton. Right next to the church near the village pond and if you went across the road through like going from here to the other side the road there, across his garden you were on the airfield.
HB: Right. Right. It was as close as that.
HB2: On the peri. Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Yeah. And one day we’d gone to see gran and we heard these, these aeroplanes in a bit of a hurry and then we heard a burst of gunfire so of course we were out and stood under a big elm tree that gran had in her garden and a chap shouted, ‘Get in your shelter.’ ‘We aint got one.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘In that case I’d better join you,’ so we stood there and the road and the ground slipped away in a dip so it was panoramic and obviously a German plane had followed one of our lads home and he got to the bottom of the valley and he’d got a bomb he didn’t want so he dropped it and demolished a little spinney. If he’d gone to the left a bit he’d have hit the searchlight unit.
HB: Oh right.
HB2: But anyway he disappeared in the distance, the next minute the pair of them came roaring back. The English plane was chasing him across and back and when this old chap who’d said get in your shelter shouted, ‘Send for the bloody Poles,’ he said, ‘They’d get the bleeder down.’ Anyway, they did get him apparently towards the east coast.
[pause]
HB2: We had, in our little cottage, we had, it faced more or less east to west and in one end was the bedroom window which overlooked Immingham and Grimsby and we could see Immingham docks getting bombed or if we looked out the other time we could witness poor old Coventry going up in smoke. It was an eerie sight. ‘Course I used to say to my mum, ‘Coventry? That’s a long way away from there.’ ‘Yeah and that’s how big the blaze is.
HB: So that was the night Coventry was bombed.
HB2: Yeah. Oh yeah. But -
HB: Well actually that is a very, yeah I suppose you would see it that far away yeah.
HB2: Well there was a glow in the sky.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: A very vivid glow in the sky and that’s what it was put down to.
HB: Ahum.
HB2: But we thought, we thought that we would be getting bombed because not only of the airfields but there was Scunthorpe Iron Company and things like that. Immingham docks and around that way but you know we didn’t really know. It was all in the distance. We never got anything locally and then we, enterprising youngsters that we were, we decided we’d do waste paper collection so we found a ruddy great big old wooden crate and I’d got some cast iron wheels off a [hen hut].
HB: Oh right.
HB2: We were only little and we put this on a piece of a wood, made, got axles on it and then we put two handles and we had to put two ropes on the front for someone to pull it ‘cause it was too heavy when we got anything in it to manipulate and we used to go around the village collecting waste paper and scrap metal and rags and anything like that and take it to the local carpenter whose yard, he’d got several little sheds and he used to have waste paper in one shed and rags in the other. Anyway, we used to go in there and we used to spend a lot of time in the waste paper sorting out comics and colour magazines like Illustrated News and Post and comics. Cor blimey. And paper that had only been written on one side ‘cause we were short of paper to draw on and the carpenter’s wife come out on many occasions. She said, ‘I’m sure you take home more than you bring in.’
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Then on another occasion we had to collect, we was asked to collect conkers to use them as a dye.
HB: Right.
HB2: And of course we, we loved that ‘cause we used to keep the big ones out for conker fights.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And that -
HB: So where did the conkers go? Did they just go to some central collection point?
HB2: Well yeah. Carpenter’s shop.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: He put them in a, in a sack in the shed. Somebody used to come and collect them. And we used to go around collecting rosehips and oh that used to give us an excuse to go on the farmer’s fields and they tolerated us. They tolerated us. Telling us not to climb on gates and makes holes in hedges but they, they tolerated and for our sins we got, we got once got a free bottle of rosehip.
HB: Wow.
HB2: We thought we’d done great guns there. Then we had news of a complaint made by the banker’s wife in town against the airmen going home from the pub singing bawdy songs. So she reported it to the sergeant, the police sergeant who said, ‘Yes Madam. I’ll come around and see you.’ So he went around there, ‘Now madam what did you say they were singing?’ ‘Bawdy songs.’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘But I can’t stand up in front of the magistrates and say these men were singing bawdy songs because he’d turn around and say, “What were they singing?’’ Anyway she stuttered out about the first verse but when she got to the chorus and they had to whip certain garments away she kicked him out and reported him to the inspector who then went around and said to the sergeant, ‘You did it all wrong. I’ll do it right this time.’ So the first thing he said was, ‘Yes madam. Before I can stand in front of the magistrate giving evidence against these brave men who risk their lives nightly,’ he said, ‘I want to know what they were singing.’ ‘Well there’s the door. Get out.’ Now for some unknown reason and we don’t think it was the fault of the sergeant or the inspector but this tale got out.
HB: Oh right.
HB2: And for many many lengths of times afterwards the locals when they left the pub serenaded the lady.
HB: Oh.
HB2: She wished she hadn’t mentioned anything.
HB: I’m just going to check the battery on this -
HB2: Right.
HB: Harold, ‘cause I’m just getting. No. No. We can keep going for a while. Keep going for a while.
HB2: Right. As I said my sister worked in munitions but she was relieved because she suffered badly from dermatitis.
HB: Right.
HB2: And she went into, into a job in a hotel, the Oxford Hotel in Lincoln as a general dogsbody and in the same hotel was a man who had a haulage business and he was managing his lorries going from local quarries to the airfields carting materials and they met and got engaged and got married in 1943 and it was, we were all determined, the village and the family were determined that she should have a proper wedding. So coupons were pooled to buy the dress for her and the bridesmaid and mum would cater for the reception. Well muggins here had to go in the washhouse and scrub the copper till it shone so that we could boil the ham.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: The whole ham.
HB: Ok.
HB2: In there. Well first of all I had to spend a week turning it, soaking it, getting the salt out. Then we put it in the copper and it had to be gently boiling so we got that done and then we lumbered it out, put it in a dish and put it in the pantry ready for the day. The next thing was I had to scrub the cart out, the old horse and cart, line it with newspaper, put sheets on it and then put the food in there to take it the half mile down the road to the church hut.
HB: Right.
HB2: Anyway, we got it all there and laid out, the wedding went off alright and then these people I think there was over twenty came into the reception. Now, all his side come from Leeds and, ‘cause I remember the best man turned up in his lorry piled with gear so I said, ‘What have you brought the gear for?’ He said, ‘Your dad wants it.’ I said, ‘Does he?’ So he said, ‘Yeah.’ Anyway, left it at that but what he’d done was he’d loaded it up with this with what dad wanted because he had to have his petrol, he had to have an excuse to do the journey.
HB: Oh right. Yes. Of course with petrol rationing.
HB2: Anyway, he come and he took his overalls off and there he was in his best suit with a button hole. And he said, ‘Have I come wedding boy?’
HB: Yeah. Oh dear.
HB2: Anyway, the wedding went off and the reception went in and when they got in and saw what was laid out ‘cause the villagers again had come with cakes, pastries, bread, butchers with potted meat and what have you, mother with her ham and the people with salads. It was April so we got salad stuff and these people from Leeds just couldn’t, just couldn’t understand how mother had put the spread on that she did. So she said, ‘Well it would take a long while to explain but just sit down and enjoy it.’ Well enjoy it they did. I mean a whole ham for twenty odd people and it went.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: What they didn’t eat they took home in doggie bags.
HB: Well yeah. Yeah.
HB2: There was, there was the cold ham, there was the salad, there was cakes, fancy cakes, there was trifles, there was jellies, there was blancmanges and there was wine. Oh and I fell out with the best man because he wouldn’t give me any, any wine.
HB: How old were you then?
HB2: I were ten. I said, ‘It’s my sister’s wedding and I can have some wine.’ Anyway, I went crying to mum and she said, ‘Oh for God’s sake give him a drop.’ Well when I tasted it I wished I hadn’t. [laughs]
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: But being a good lad and what was in my glass I had to drink.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: So I tipped it back, swallowed it back. Well I thought I was going to burn the back of my throat out.
HB: Oh dear.
HB2: Yeah. But that was, that was, that was the wedding.
HB: So boiling up the ham, the copper that’s, that’s the laundry copper that the washing used to be done in.
HB2: Oh yeah. Washday copper.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: Make sure there’s no soap in it.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Lovely job.
HB2: Laxative.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: But that, that’s the sort of thing that went on you know. For occasions like that the people in the village turned up trumps, you know. They did. They really did and you know to us the spread wasn’t, well normal run of the, it was a bit exceptional but it was things that we always had. We hadn’t given them up because of the war. I mean you could still buy jelly and we had enough milk to make custards. You could get custard powder.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: So that was a jolly good, a jolly good spread out because everybody thoroughly enjoyed it and absolutely amazed at what went on. Now gran as I said lived at Newton and she had a little cottage in which she sold, she had a bit of a shop. Sold the essentials like firelighters and plasters. The baker left his bread there, orders of bread there and she sold lemonade and one day an airman came in for a box of matches just as gran had made a pot of tea. So she said, ‘Do you want a drink of tea?’ ‘Oh yes please.’ ‘Well, here, have a cake as well,’ and they had quite a chat and she said, ‘That’s it old lad. Cheerio. Come back again when you like. Bring your mates.’ ‘Do you mean that ma?’ So she said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Well, I’ve got six more.’ So she said, ‘Well it’s not a very big cottage but bring them,’ and that’s when this crew turned up and made her, they didn’t come every night or every weekend but they come regular. Turned it in to a little oasis. They would come and first of all they wouldn’t eat or drink what gran offered them and she was a bit annoyed and she said, ‘What’s wrong with my food?’ ‘Nothing’s wrong with it.’ Ma they called her right from the start. ‘Nothing’s wrong with it ma.’ She said, ‘Yes there is and if you can’t find room to eat it then don’t bother to come.’ ‘Oh don’t be like that ma. You can’t do it. You just can’t do it. It’s rationing.’ ‘Look,’ she said, ‘if I couldn’t do it I wouldn’t offer.’ So anyway after a lot of arguing and umming and erring she won the day and she brought out the fat bacon sandwiches and whatever. Well these old boys they were amazed to think and each time they come there was tea and something to eat. Again the people in the hamlet used to come with a twist of paper with some tea in it. A twist of paper with some sugar in it or gran would put some sugar to one side and she said, ‘This is why we can give you the meat. Because we kills pigs.’ Oh right well that was alright. Well then they started coming with bags of sugar and bags of tea they’d nicked out the mess and gran got really worried. She said, ‘Don’t you lads get into bother,’ she said, ‘Because we can manage.’ No gran. ‘No ma you’re alright. You’re alright.’ And they, sometimes they’d come and have a chat, sometimes they would go in the front room and just sit around the fire on the floor leaning up against the chair going to sleep. Gran often said, ‘Look at them poor devils. Tired out.’ Anyway, when they found out she’d got a piano oh didn’t they used to have some singsongs there. Then one night gran put her foot in it. She turned around and she said, ‘Where’s Taff Lloyd tonight?’ Pregnant pause. Shoulder went around, arm went around her shoulders, ushered her outside, come back tears streaming down her face. He hadn’t made it back and they’d said, ‘Look ma if there’s a face missing don’t ask. Just don’t ask.’
HB: Yeah.
HB2: After that it was plain sailing until like I said the time come when they just didn’t appear and it was the hope and praying of the village that they’d been posted and not -
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Lost in battle but that was the one thing that -
HB: And this was just the one crew.
HB2: Just the one crew.
HB: Just the one crew.
HB2: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. And so they’d lost a crew mate.
HB2: Yes. Yes they had.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: Oh and I was dinged, I hadn’t to question them as what they did.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: I was not to question them what they did.
HB: What sort of time would this have been 44ish?
HB2: Well, it was, it was must have been 44ish and I think it was after Christmas because the nights were still dark and I can’t think that we were leading up to Christmas so it must have been after Christmas.
HB: Right.
HB2: But I know, I know the nights, the nights were dark when they arrived. I mean they didn’t stop till midnight. 10 o’clock and they’d gone.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: And they would always say, ‘Ma see you on such and such a night. We might be a bit busy.’ So once she knew what night it was then the villagers used to drop off. The butcher used to drop off potted meat. The baker used to drop off some cakes or scones or a loaf of bread.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Looking back it was, nobody asked. It was done.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. And that, and that sort of follows this supportive trend through the village -
HB2: Yes.
HB: With everything else.
HB2: Oh yes. Oh yes. Oh God yes I know gran used to benefit no end by it. The farmers used to drop her off a bag of logs or a -
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Few spuds.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: You know. She was well taken care of.
HB: And they, so they were obviously flying operationally.
HB2: Yeah.
HB: They were all English crew I presume.
HB2: Except for the Welshman.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Yeah but they were all English.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Yes.
HB: Yeah that -
HB2: And I know, I know one was a gunner ‘cause he got air gunner, AG is it? The other was a navigator because he got N and the other had got two wings so I presumed he was the pilot.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: But we didn’t, I didn’t dared ask.
HB: No. No. I understand that. I understand that.
HB2: Oh and they used to dress me in their coats, put their coats on my shoulders and their hats on. I thought I was the bee’s knees you know. My God. ‘Look at me mum. Look at me.’
HB: Yeah. Yeah I mean ten eleven year old would be.
HB2: Yeah. Oh God yes.
HB: You’d be all over that.
HB2: And in them days, yes because I was more of a child at that age then what kids are today.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. Absolutely delightful that. And then just one day.
HB2: They went home at night. Never seen again. Never seen again. Not even a word. Just gone.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Oh, that, that did grate with the villagers not knowing what had happened to them.
HB: Can you remember roughly when that would have been? Would that have been, you know what period of time they would have been visiting do you think?
HB2: Well I think, I think it must have been January to March because as I said I don’t recollect getting excited about going up to Christmas so it must have been after.
HB: Right.
HB2: And -
HB: So just two or three months then.
HB2: It was only two or three months. Three months would have been the most. But in that time they’d made several visits, regular visits, you know. Sudden bursts and there they were happy and singing and jumping about and then next minute just gone.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Another thing in the village the teenage girls. Makeup was scarce.
HB: Right.
HB2: And so were stockings. There was all sorts of substitutes sort of made up such as olive oil and bees wax for skin softener, bird cork for mascara and a mixture of soot and something else for an eyeshadow and they used to, we could get a liquorice sweet. It was a piece of liquorice soaked in like an icing that used to turn red and they used to use the red for the lipstick. Or beetroot juice.
HB: Oh right.
HB2: And we used to shout out after them, ‘sugar lips.’
HB: Oh dear.
HB2: And the best of it was we used to have to run because some of these girls could run and when they caught you they could thump and all. ‘Sugar lips’ or beetroot, ‘beetroot lips’ and then they, my sister was one of them. She used to paint her legs with gravy browning.
HB: Oh right.
HB2: And then her mate used to have to put a seam down with a big leaded pencil and we used to shout, ‘Your gravy’s gone lumpy, your gravy’s lumpy,’ or ‘Your seam’s slipping.’
HB: Oh dear.
HB2: That was it but then, then they brought out a thing, some liquid called silk toner. Liquid stockings. And there was enough in the bottle for twenty four applications. I mean. Can you imagine just painting your ruddy legs with it?
HB: Right.
HB2: And another thing is if they got the start of a ladder they nearly always carried nail varnish and they’d put a blob of nail varnish at the top of the ladder and at the bottom to stop it running.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: Stockings were treated like gold. Some of these poor women used to be darned heals and sewn up ladders. I mean patches were worn with honour.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: I mean men used to have patched knees and elbows. Oh God yes.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Now they don’t bother to patch them now do they?
HB: No. That’s true.
HB2: Yeah, poor, yeah, that was it, gravy legs. ‘You’ll be in a mess when it rains.’ [laughs] ‘Look there’s a dog following you.’ [laughs]
HB: Cruel.
HB2: And I went to school in short trousers made out of mum’s old great coats or men’s greatcoats, shirts out of her dresses. Things like that. You see these housewives were masters at needlework and cooking and what have you.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Oh yes. The old jumble sales did a roaring trade. Knitted, knitted garments were soon picked up and pulled down and recycled.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: They used to, they used to wear little woollen bibs instead of collars the men working in the fields.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Instead of scarves in the winter.
HB: Right.
HB2: Oh used to fit down front in the V of the jackets.
HB: Oh that’s, yeah.
HB2: Then then they started, the ladies started making coats out of candlewick bedspreads and out of black out material for other things because blackout material wasn’t rationed.
HB: Oh right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: Oh God and if you could get hold of a blanket, an army blanket, a coloured one oh you’d have a coat out of that as quick as lightning.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And hats weren’t rationed and there was no end of tips how to make felt hats into a pair of slippers.
HB: Yes.
HB2: Yes. And how to titivate it up to make it look more expensive.
HB: How did they find this out? Was this through newspapers or -
HB2: It was the -
HB: Leaflets?
HB2: Greatest tip provider was “Home Chat.”
HB: “Home Chat”?
HB2: A woman’s magazine. “Home Chat.”
HB: Right.
HB2: I mean nearly every magazine covered tips of some kind or other. If it wasn’t recipes for food it was how to revitalise a drab dress or something like that.
HB: Yeah. That’s, yeah, I’ve not heard of “Home Chat” before but, yeah.
HB2: It was 1940 ’41.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: When that was on. Now food on the table. I can’t recollect eating less in the war than other time.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: It remained the same. As I said my mother’s generation and grandma’s generation were masters in the art of making something out of nothing and they could cook and it was tasty.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: They used to make dumplings. Now, the variety of dumplings. There was parsley dumplings. There was dumplings with, we called green dumpling. Now these green dumpling could have little juicy spouts off the hedge, some bits of growing corn or dandelion leaves chopped up in them.
HB: Oh right. You’d pay a fortune in a posh restaurant for that now.
HB2: Yeah. You would. You would. But most of the food was provided locally. You know. It was grown locally.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: And we, my father had a house with, we moved in to a house with two large gardens so that was providing us with veg of all sorts, shapes and sizes and extra potatoes and stuff like that were grown in the fields.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: So we got plenty of that sort of thing and around two fields we had ten apple trees, crab-apple trees, all of different varieties.
HB: Right.
HB2: And in the middle hedge was Bullace trees. Little, little blue plums. So we’d plenty of fruit in season in the hedgerows.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And a big pear tree stood in the bottom field. And a Coxs. Not a Cox. An apple tree stood in the garden.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: So we, and again the apple used to be floated around. Nobody wasted an apple. It was swapped then or turned into jam or something like that.
HB: You know just taking you back a bit Harold you know you mentioned about going with the girl who stayed, the evacuee girl who stayed to go to the secondary modern school.
HB2: Yes.
HB: Obviously the war was still going on
HB2: Oh yes.
HB: When you went to the higher school.
HB2: ‘44 yes. Yes.
HB: Where was the secondary modern school?
HB2: Market Rasen.
HB: That was in Market Rasen.
HB2: Yeah.
HB: So how did you get -
HB2: Oh we had a bus.
HB: Did you?
HB2: Oh yes we had a bus.
HB: So you got from this, from Middle Rasen.
HB2: Yes. Yes.
HB: To Market Rasen.
HB2: Yes.
HB: By bus to go to school.
HB2: Yes.
HB: Right.
HB2: Mind you I think it went our as far as West Rasen.
HB: Yes. Yes.
HB2: To a catchment there but yes we went by bus.
HB: Yeah. So obviously as you move in to the secondary modern school and you meet some of the older pupils and kids obviously some of your attitudes must have to change do they?
HB2: Oh yes. Yes they did. We were a bit more grown up.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: You know. But we were governed then by female teachers when I first arrived there up till ’45. Then when the male teachers came back they didn’t mess about. They weren’t harsh but they’d got the military discipline hadn’t they?
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: And when we say jump you jump. I remember a kid at the back wasn’t paying attention and he got a board rubber thrown at him and he threw the rubber board rubber back at the teacher. Oh God.
HB: By the shirt scruff and -
HB2: He give him a dressing down in front of the class and made him stand at the side of him, at the side of his table until he said he could go and sit down. No. They weren’t, they weren’t cruel.
HB: No.
HB2: But by God they were, you know, you’ll do as you’re told and I don’t think any of them gave them the stick.
HB: No.
HB2: No. They just I mean they wouldn’t allowed it today physically yanking them out or grabbing them by the ear and pulling them out of the front. That was sufficient.
HB: Yeah. So by, by that time when you were at the secondary modern the Polish squadron would have moved into the air base, the air field. Did, did you because I think you said to me on the phone there wasn’t an awful lot of contact between the Poles and the village.
HB2: No. There wasn’t. There wasn’t.
HB: But I mean at any time did you ever go to any sort of social dos or you know invitation dos at the airfield.
HB2: Oh yeah. We had a tea party.
HB: Right.
HB2: We had a tea party. It, all the, all the scouts, local scouts, guides, brownies, cubs were invited to a tea party there and oh what a day that was. We were shown some aeroplanes and then we were taken into this long room where the table was set and we were sat down to tea. Now, on my plate in front of me was some ham cured by Polish methods, some chicken seasoned by Polish methods and then there would be if I said a spoonful, a tablespoon full of chopped tomato and cucumber with a dressing on it. There was something like curds or cheese with bits of fruit in it. There was grated carrot and grated cheese with a dressing on it. Everything had got a dressing on it. There was what we call now today potato salad and there was coleslaw and all these were on a dressing and I mean nearly everything was a first to me and my eyes used to look a bit suspicious at it and think, what’s that? What’s that? But oh and the lettuce was chopped up, sliced up thinly with a dressing on it and we ate, it was neither a biscuit nor bread but it was soft so it must have been a type of bread or bread cake to eat with it. Well we didn’t have anything on it but by gum it was good and so of course with my fork I’m there tasting this and tasting that and thinking this is not too bad and my plate was clean like the rest of, the rest of the other kids.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: It really was and then when they come out with the cookies oh our faces must have been a picture. I mean we’d never seen anything like that and as most of the kids had been told to eat what was put on their plate there wasn’t much left.
HB: No. No.
HB2: And it was all washed down with a fruit cordial.
HB: Right.
HB2: Oh that was memorable was that tea party. That was memorable.
HB: So who was serving the food? Was this the -
HB2: The WAAFs and the men.
HB: The WAAFs and the men.
HB2: Yeah.
HB: And they were English.
HB2: No. They were Polish.
HB: They were all Polish.
HB2: Yeah.
HB: Right. Right. And they, so how did, I mean obviously they could communicate.
HB2: Oh they could speak better English than we could speak Polish.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: No problem. I mean kids could speak naturally don’t they?
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And they had no difficulty. Maybe with the dialect but no, they understood what we said ‘cause we said, this was dinged in to me and dinged into the others, ‘You remember your manners. Please and thank you costs nothing,’ so it was, ‘Please’ and, ‘thank you,’ a thousand times over.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How many, did that only happen the once or -?
HB2: Just the once.
HB: Right.
HB2: Just the once.
HB: Was that early when the Poles came or was that after they’d been there a little while? Do you remember?
HB2: Oh I think they must have been a bit established a little bit there because I think it was even quieter. The war was going better than ever.
HB: Right.
HB2: You know.
HB: Right.
HB2: They was in there.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: But oh yes. But that was a day to remember that was.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: I mean I can, well it must have been for me to remember the details today.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. It’s obviously stuck in your mind.
HB2: It has and I mean even today we’ll try, you know, the Poles did it this way so we’ll chop up our tomatoes and cucumbers different. What the dressings were I don’t know. Didn’t get them out but they tasted good.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: That was the first time I’d had slices of apple, raw apple and raw pear on a salad
HB: Right. Yeah.
HB2: I thought.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: I thought oh God. Apple? With a salad. It went down.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: It went down.
[pause]
HB2: Now then we had, we got bombarded with make do and mend and waste not want not.
HB: Right.
HB2: Now, clothing, as I said, second hand clothing was turned into all sorts of things from snip rugs to short trousers. And the food. Well, nothing was wasted. It was not wasted at all.
HB: No.
HB2: And some of the things would make them stare today because, take for instance growing broad beans. The tops are nipped out.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: They weren’t thrown away. They were cooked as a vegetable.
HB: Oh right. Right.
HB2: Pea vines were nipped out and tender shoots took out and boiled out as vegetables. The tops of Brussels sprouts was always cut out and used as a veg and the tops of them newly spouted tops on swedes was done the same way and when we grew spring onions, when we grew the normal onions from a bulb or when we grew celery the tops were cut and chopped up to put in stews and soups as seasoning.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: We had, always had a row of chives to put seasoning in so there was plenty of seasoning going on and when we, when we had a leek we took the leek up out of the ground, cleaned it off, cut the mushy root off, took the pair of scissors and snipped the brown tips of the leaves off. Then we cut the blue from the white but we chopped the blue up, put it in a pan and cooked it five or ten minutes before we put the white in.
HB: Right. Yeah.
HB2: So that wasn’t wasted.
HB: No.
HB2: And when we, when we cut, cut a cabbage we used to cut it within the tops of the first set of leaves, trimmed the leaves off to about this much stalk, split the stem into a cross and then a new shoot would come out where the leaves joined the -
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: The thing. And the cauliflower, we’d always cut that off and use all the leaves around it. We’d strip all the leaves off to get the bare flower first of all and put them in to cook first.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And then we’d cut the florets off the stalk and chop that up finely and put that in.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And the top half of the Brussel plant or a cow plant, something like broccoli plant we used to cut that off ‘cause it was soft and chop that up and put it in a stew or the thing.
HB: Right. Yeah.
HB2: And I remember getting in to awful bother in the supermarket when the broad beans come in ‘cause I was picking them up about as thick as my little finger and this old boy with his wife come to me and said, ‘Why are you doing that for boy?’ ‘Because I want them.’ ‘Well they’re no damned good,’ he said. I said, ‘They’re exactly what I want.’ ‘What do you mean? What are you going to do with them?’ I said, ‘I’m going to top and tail them and cook them in the coshes.’ ‘Come on misses,’ he said, ‘This bloke’s gone mad here.’ And off he went. But we did. We used to cook the beans. Now field beans are tough old things aren’t they?
HB: Oh yes. Yeah.
HB2: Well there were so self sets up the top here. I went up there one day and they were there were just forming, the beans, I pulled them off, topped and tailed them and cooked them and I went up there one day and as they were just forming I pulled them off, topped and tailed them and cooked them and you couldn’t have better tasting beans in all my life.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And my wife’s grandfather kept a shop and he had one lady used to go in and ask for the broad bean coshes and she used to trim the edges up with the scissors and then cook the rest.
HB: Yeah but it’s a skill learned -
HB2: Oh my God, yes.
HB: In adversity.
HB2: Yeah.
HB: And it’s seen you through the rest of your life.
HB2: That’s right. And we used to cook bacon. Slice of bacon in the frying pan or a joint. Well the skin used to come off. The rind used to come off and it used to be minced up and put in a stew.
HB: Oh right.
HB2: Or a soup.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: Oh yeah. And when, when we had a carcass of a chicken or some big marrowbones when they went out and got thrown away they were white. They’d been boiled and boiled.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. So as you come, as you’re coming through now you’re sort of eleven, twelve year old, you’re heading towards the end of the war really. What, did you as a boy then, as a young boy did you notice a change in people in the village and around, in the fact that you know we’d had, I presume by then we’d had D-Day and were starting to, you know, make inroads did you notice a change in attitudes with people or were they still pretty well set, you know we haven’t done the job yet. That sort of mentality?
HB2: Yes I did because rationing hit them. Rationing in peacetime was worse than rationing in the war.
HB: Right.
HB2: I mean for instance bread was rationed in peacetime. It was never rationed in the war. And the cheese ration went down to an ounce and milk went down to two and a half pints a week or two pints a week sometimes. We had first of all there was the end of lend lease and so the food that was available had to be eaten then and it wasn’t plentiful. Then they had a world shortage of dollars and that was a thing, another thing that we had to pull our belts in, tighten our belts up and then there was, we had to, now then, meat went scarce or something because we had to feed the Germans which didn’t go down at all well so there was reasons. Oh there was a world financial crisis and that caused us again to cut down on rations. So in, all in all the feeling was that the war was over but we’re still on rationing.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: We were still paying.
HB: Did you, did you have, did, I mean you lived in a relatively small village compared to Market Rasen, did you have, did you have your own VE celebrations or -
HB2: Oh yes we had our street parties.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: We had a bigger celebration for VE day than we had for VJ day.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Because that was I’m afraid a long way away. When we was at school and Germany, Dunkirk had occurred mother met one local lad whose family she knew well and he’d just escaped with them and I remember her coming home and crying her eyes out. She said, ‘that poor devil escaped with what he stood up in,’ so that’s how it hit her and then having, having the Dunkirk thing happened that, that, that had a very gloomy effect on the village and there was little things like that that sort of reminded them that they hadn’t finished with it yet.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: They, they, they did relax at the end of the war when we had our celebrations but not completely because we had a reminder. Two lads come back having been prisoners of war of the Japs and one of them had suffered very badly. He lived in a row of little, four little cottages where we used to play marbles outside his house. Well when he went for a rest oh he used to scream his head off and he used to frighten us kids to death. How long it took him to get over it, if he ever did get over it, I don’t know.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: But he had a rough time and as I said then there was the lad from Dunkirk who presented that side of it and so we knew what was, we knew what was going on.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: I mean the gloom on the village when Dunkirk happened was, was noticeably, even me as a kid noticed what it was like.
HB: So as you come into the end of ‘45 and into 1946 what were your, what were you looking forward to? Can you remember what you were looking forward to? ‘Cause the war’s, the wars almost over but it’s not quite over. You’re heading towards, you know there must have been a point when you realised there must be some kind of peace coming. What were you, what were your expectations?
HB2: I, my one thing I was thinking about was my brother coming back.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: What he’d be like because I hadn’t seen him for five years.
HB: And I mean very early on in the interview you just said that your brother went abroad. I mean -
HB2: Yeah.
HB: Where did he go? Do you know?
HB2: He went to India to start with and then picked his way over into Egypt and up the toe of Italy to the German border.
HB: Right.
HB2: Then they sent him all the way around by sea home again to send him across the sea to finish off his service in Germany.
HB: Right. Right.
HB2: So yes and I didn’t know until I’d started my job, left school and started my job we had a relief signalman and he said to me, he says, ‘Are you the brother to Jack Beech?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘How do you know him?’ ‘In the army.’ He said, ‘I was long range desert patrol and,’ he said, ‘I come across him and a bunch of his buddies just standing in the desert.’ So I said, ‘What do you mean standing in the desert? He was a driver.’ So he said, ‘Yeah the front line had moved up and down and where it was safe before for them to go the Italians had been stood waiting for them,’ and he said, ‘They just took their vehicles and left them what they stood up in.’ He said, ‘And as luck would have it we come across them.’ I said, ‘Oh is that why he doesn’t like Itys?’ It was always those damned Itys. I could understand it but he never spoke about it. We never got to know about that.
HB: No.
HB2: No.
HB: What age were you when you actually left school Harold?
HB2: Fifteen.
HB: So, so you were there at the secondary modern through to fifteen.
HB2: Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: From ’44 to -
HB: Yeah.
HB2: ’48.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. And so, as, as the war is ended and you’ve touched on the rationing. All the guys who had been away who had survived and been away they’re come back what was happening on the airfield? Was that, did you notice that winding down or -?
HB2: When I got my job I did.
HB: Right.
HB2: I left school at fifteen in ’48 and got a job as a lad porter at Snelland Station and Snelland Station serviced Wickenby airfield.
HB: Right.
HB2: And Wickenby airfield was getting rid of all the old ordinance and scrap vehicles so they were constantly coming down to the railway station to dispatch vehicles and these ruddy great bombs and didn’t [Sabu] the crane driver get me going ‘cause there he is swinging five of these ruddy great bombs and putting them down on, in the wagons saying, ‘Be very careful when you’re nailing the chock don’t make a spark because you’ll be going up in smoke.’ [laughs]
HB: What were these? Were these like the big oil drum type bombs or -?
HB2: Yeah. We had an open wagon, railway wagon and five would get in nicely that we could scotch them.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Five in a truck and they were the width of -
HB: Scotching obviously being putting the wooden wedges in. Yeah.
HB2: It was a wooden wedge.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And don’t you cause a spark. Well me and my mate were frit to death. I remember us sitting on these bombs one day when we’d scotched them and we said how the hell could a spark set this lot off? And then we came to the conclusion they weren’t live, well live enough but you know.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: They were pretty safe.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Egads we used to have to spend so much time building a wooden frame so they wouldn’t roll because I mean if them five had hit the end of the truck they’d have been gone.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: But touch wood we never had a complaint about them being littered up on the line but they were going up to Stranraer to be dumped in the sea.
HB: Were they now?
HB2: Yeah.
HB: Right.
HB2: I think the vehicles were going to a depot to be to be scrapped and -
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Broken down as scrap.
HB: So that, so that would have been the bombs that would have been all the way to Stranraer that would be all on the railway then.
HB2: Oh yes.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Oh yes. Boxed wagons had got the smaller ammunition.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And the low, the low wagons had got the vehicles.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Oh for a fifteen year old I were busy. I was really busy.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Me and my mate from the next station.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: We really were and I mean we were both young and inexperienced and yet we’d got a responsible job of making sure nothing fell off.
HB: Absolutely. Absolutely. You wouldn’t want one of them rolling off anyway.
HB2: You wouldn’t. No.
HB: No.
HB2: And it was a, it was a real experience being working as a lad porter ‘cause as I said at fifteen I was responsible for keeping all the lights in the signals and the other little things on the line alight.
HB: Oh right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: ‘Cause when they put, well they had dollies that used to turn and I mean they had to have a light in there. They had to have lights on the gates, lights on the platform, lights in the signals.
HB: And what was, what was the source of light?
HB2: Paraffin.
HB: All paraffin lamps.
HB2: Paraffin. Oh and what did stop, when you got, I don’t know, three quarters of a mile away from the station to the distant signal and the ruddy lamp blew out and you were trying, down the bank trying to shelter it with your coat to light it again and you’d get up to the top and the damned thing had gone out again.
HB: So you’d have go up the ladder and put it in the, in the signal.
HB2: Yeah you had a lamp that was stuck on a spike -
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: And put it in and sometimes I’d go back the next morning and get down to that signal. The light’s out.
HB: Yeah
HB2: Oh dear. Primitive.
HB: Oh yeah. Yeah.
HB2: Primitive.
HB: But did it work?
HB2: Oh it worked. Yes it worked.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Yeah. And we had a pony delivered by passenger train. It come on the end of passenger. Well if you’d seen the rigmarole of that. The signaller pulled the line so the lines went over and I had to run over with a G clamp and clamp the ends so they didn’t open again.
HB: Sorry what’s a pony?
HB2: Riding pony.
HB: Oh. Riding pony. I’m with you. I’m with you.
HB2: Come in a horse box. Behind the -
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: And I had to shunt it across the line. I had to put this G clamp on the end of every section that opened.
HB: Oh right. Blimey.
HB2: There was a delay of the passenger train I’ll tell you.
HB: Yeah. I would, yeah they wouldn’t be very happy would they?
HB2: No.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Oh and you had to shout out the name of the station.
HB: Oh yeah. Yeah.
HB2: One day I was in an impish mood and I said, ‘Anyone for here. This is it.’
HB: You’d get away with that?
HB2: Yes.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. How long were you there at the, sorry what was the station I’ve forgotten?
HB2: Snelland.
HB: Snelland. That’s it.
HB2: Fifteen to seventeen and a half. Two and a half years.
HB: Oh right.
HB2: To ‘51. ‘48 to ‘51 because I’d made up my mind bringing bringing the ordinance down the RAF police would come down -
HB: Yeah.
HB2: To supervise and I used to talk to them and they said, I used to say I want to join the air force and they said oh you go in the police [you’re big and awkward?] you go in the police which I did. I got the police and I got the air force.
HB: Oh right.
HB2: So -
HB: Right.
HB2: Seventeen and a half when I was taken into the air force in 19’, February ’51. Whilst I was in the air force I got in to awful trouble at RAF Benson with this messing sergeant. I’d gone up as you usually do with your plates and they dished out the spud, the veg, the meat, pudding and the custard and I, the pomp ‘No thanks.’ The cabbage. ‘No thanks. The custard. ‘No thanks.’ And the sergeant said to me, ‘When you’re finished your meal I want to see you in my office.’ So I said, ‘Right.’ So I went in her office and there was the WAAF catering officer there who had just taken over and so catering officer there who’d just taken over and so the catering sergeant said, ‘Oh hello corporal. What do you want?’ I said, ‘I’ve been asked to attend here by the sergeant.’ ‘What’s he done wrong sergeant?’ ‘Well,’ she said, ‘He refused the potato, he refused the cabbage and he refused the custard.’ So she was a wily old cuss was this sergeant, she was lovely. She turned to me and she said, ‘Well what’s your answer?’ So I said, ‘Well first of all I was told and brought up that if I didn’t want anything and I wouldn’t eat it I didn’t have it on my plate.’ ‘Right,’ she said, ‘So what was wrong with the potato?’ I said, ‘It was pomp.’ ‘What was wrong with the cabbage?’ I said, ‘It was dehydrated.’ ‘What was wrong with the custard?’ I said, ‘It was made with water.’ Well the sergeant’s face was a picture so the sergeant stepped in, she said, ‘How do you know it was made with water?’ ‘Because it was blackish. It’s very dark and blackish.’ So the old WAAF officer she turned her head away. I think she’d had a quiet smile. So the sergeant then said, ‘Alright corporal, are you some sort of a chef? Are you in the food trade?’ I said, ‘No. I’m just a farmer’s son living on a small farm.’ ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘Well explain yourself.’ I said, ‘Well I live on a small farm that produces milk, plenty lot of it and the custard that they make is nowhere near what you’re making there so I assumed it was made of water.’ Well she didn’t say it was and didn’t say -
HB: No.
HB2: It wasn’t and I said, ‘I don’t like, I’ve tasted and don’t like the pomp and the dehydrated cabbage. So the old WAAF sergeant said, ‘Fair enough corporal. Fair enough.’ She said, ‘I can see you’re a man that’s had an upbringing that’s different to others.’ I said –
HB: Yeah.
HB2: I said, ‘Well’ –
HB: Yeah.
HB2: ‘It might be simple but,’ I said, ‘It’s good.’
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And she said, ‘Well alright. Off you go.’ Well then we used to take the swill of the messes and feed pigs ‘cause they’d got a pig farm on there and send them off to be processed for bacon and the general public. She said, ‘Stop that. They’re coming in the mess.’
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Oh we used to have some lovely dishes. Yeah.
HB: Right.
HB2: ’Cause she did say after that she used to come around, both of them used to come around the mess and say, ‘Is anything alright?’ And mean it.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: If you’d got a complain you said so and I know I said to them one day I said, Look, I do patrols through the night and I come in to the mess for a sandwich,’ I said, ‘And it’s usually the time when the joints of meat come out of the oven I said and they don’t taste anything like what we get at 1 o’clock.’ ‘Oh?’ I said, ‘Well let’s face it you’ve got a thousand odd men. How do you keep slices of meat warm from 2 o’clock in the morning till middle of the day?’ She said, ‘Well there’s the snag. What’s wrong with them?’ she said. I said, ‘Well they’re like cigarette papers aren’t they?’ I said, ‘It’s tasteless.’ Anyway, she did something about that.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And I said, and she said, ‘What about the eggs?’ I said, ‘Well they’re like rubber. They hit the wall and bounce around the camp.’
HB: Oh right.
HB2: She said -
HB: Right.
HB2: She said. ‘Well again unless we have somebody frying them and dishing them out, then we’ve got a bit of a problem there.’
HB: Yeah.
HB2: So I said, ‘I understand,’ I said, ‘It doesn’t stop me eating them.’
HB: Yeah. But it’s different.
HB2: But it’s different. So, she, she it was a, it was an ex-naval man that was the thing before, messing officer before and he just got what was easy. Of course -
HB: Yeah.
HB2: When she took over we had to eat what was in the stores.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: To clean up but after that she got it going.
HB: So what, you know as obviously we’re coming towards the end what do you think, it’s not an abiding memory that’s, that’s the wrong phrase but what, what do you think your experience of being a boy in the countryside and on a farm and near an airfield, what do you think your experience has given you for the rest of, you know, for your adult life.
HB2: It’s, I had the opportunity on occasion to see the rough side of war. I was messing about at home one day when I heard an aircraft that was making a funny noise and I saw it hit the ground. It crashed on the other side of the village and I jumped on my bike and got over there and I was going up the yard and in the implement hole was a mate of mine, Bob and I said, ‘Are you alright, Bob? What’s going on here?’ And he never answered and when I went up to him he never moved. So I said, ‘Are you alright?’ And he never answered again. Anyway, an ambulance man was going up the yard and what are you two doing in here and I said, ‘It’s my mate. I can’t get him to talk,’ so he come in and he said, ‘Oh has he been hit?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ So he picked him up and carried him out to the ambulance and he, I stood waiting and he said, ‘It’s alright. He’s suffering from shock but what he’s done I don’t know.’ So he says, ‘I’ll take him home.’ So they took him home and I wended my way into the field. Where the crater, you couldn’t get anywhere near it. There were people busying about so I went up the other side to the hedge and watched them and there was men on the corner of a blanket, four on a corner, on each corner of the blanket metal things picking and I thought what on earth are they doing? Well as they came around the outskirts of the crater it was remnants of bodies, flesh. And then I started wandering around the outskirts and I found a boot with a foot in it and I thought oh God yes they’ve been blown to bits haven’t they? Well by the time more police had arrived, more ministry people, more air force people had arrived and there was keeping us further and further away from the wreck so I went through the hedge and damn me if there wasn’t bits of body in there so I came back and the chap’s coming near me I said, You’ve got some more out here.’ ‘Oh come on then show us where.’ And I spent some time showing them where in the other field. Eventually I went home and the next day I went to school, come back home and my mother said, ‘I want a word with you.’ So I said, ‘What for?’ ‘Well what have you been up to? Where did you go yesterday?’ I said, ‘I went down to Hankins farm.’ So she said, ‘What did you do there?’ I said, ‘Walked around a field.’ So she said, ‘I’ve just had a policeman and the district nurse here.’ So I said, ‘What for?’ ‘Well they told me you were interfering.’ So I said, ‘I wasn’t. I kept out of the way.’ Course she’d suspected I’d done something wrong and they weren’t telling her the truth so I said, ‘No. I hadn’t done anything wrong.’ So she said, ‘What did they mean by asking questions of me if you’d slept alright and did you eat your breakfast this morning?’ I said, ‘I don’t know what they’re talking about.’ Anyway, it come out that Bob had been in the field at the top when the aeroplane crashed at the bottom and he saw this thing coming for him wherever he went and he just froze but eventually managed to get in to the hovel and hide. Me? I’d witnessed too much.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Which was gruesome so they wanted to know if I was fit and well. Now me and the two lads from across the road who were there as well never had any effect on us at all.
HB: No.
HB2: No. It was strange that.
HB: Never came back to visit you.
HB2: No. No. It was something that was being done and I couldn’t visualise the bodies with that in the blanket.
HB: No.
HB2: I knew what it was but I just couldn’t visualise that that’s what had happened so I saw that side of that. I saw the German prisoners of war. I saw the rationing so I, oh and I saw the Lancaster. I was in the Lancaster and saw what they had to put up with so I got a good insight, only briefly, but a good insight on the other side of the war.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: And you know watching the aircraft coming back and going out.
HB: Yeah that’s yeah I mean that obviously came through your character. Helped, you know well I wouldn’t say helped, it didn’t help but it came through your character after the war then.
HB2: Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Oh yes.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: I mean when we went, when we went to secondary modern school we were still collecting paper there. We had a baler in the girl’s things and we used to bale it up and send it off and we got something like eighty five tons in five years and we were, there was reports and letters saying how essential it was for us to do this and what was doing so I got another side of what was helping on because paper was important.
HB: Yes.
HB2: And the war effort could be made. I mean I couldn’t associate with making a shell about a piece of paper or anything like that but this is what it taught us.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And we we had a memorial service ‘cause we lost three, three old pupils. One lad come from our village and he was nineteen, an air gunner in a Lancaster and he got shot down and never returned. And another lad was a sailor and he never returned. So we lost two in the village.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And then we had the two men troubled by the Japs.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. A significant time.
HB2: Oh yes. Yes. We, I can understand there was hardship but ours wasn’t hardship it was an inconvenience.
HB: Yeah. Yeah. I see where you’re going. Yes. Yes.
HB2: I mean when, after I got out especially when I joined the air force and saw some of these lads that had come through the war and were still in the air force oh you got a different story out of that altogether.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: And I mean as I said before I just used to sit back and think what sort of men were they to do that? How could they do it?
HB: Yeah.
HB2: You know and here they are as happy as sand boys.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: They’ve weathered the storm and this is it. I mean we had one chap, a flight lieutenant and they used to say to him oh he’s a surly so and so yet he wasn’t. He’d spent six months in the jungle and survived and was now an expert in lecturing others on how to survive in the air force. He’d been shot down and survived and I used to sit there and watch him marching up and down, walking up and down and think what a chap you are. You know. God. Could I have done that?
HB: Yeah. Again towards that time you know you’ve come to the end of the war and the sort of year at the end of the war ’46 ‘47 can you have you got a memory of how your mum and dad sort of reacted when it was as it, well it was finished then. The war was finished.
HB2: Well mums best reaction with my brother.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: My father’s reaction was getting rid of the war agg.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: And being able to do what he wanted to do.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: But dad never said much about anything.
HB: No.
HB2: He, a grandfather and four uncles one of which didn’t returned had all served through the First World War. Now you couldn’t get an old soldier in the village to even mention anything.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: They wouldn’t talk to you. Especially to us kids.
HB: Yeah. So, yeah I mean your dad very pragmatic then, you know, he can get back to his normal farming as he would phrase it and mum has had chronic asthma.
HB2: Yeah. Yeah.
HB: Like you say your brother walks through the door.
HB2: That’s it. Everything was -
HB: Everything was fine.
HB2: Just like waving a magic wand.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: Oh I know she used to walk to town, a mile and a half. She’d come back she could hardly breathe sometimes.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Used to frighten me to death.
HB: Was your family much of a church going family?
HB2: Oh mother was.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: I was a choir boy.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Dad didn’t.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: He was too busy milking cows at church time.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: But he would go on special occasions.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: Like harvest festival or something like that but no he wasn’t a church or a chapel goer.
HB: No.
HB2: But as I say I was a choir boy and mum was a cleaner and stoker of the stoves in winter.
HB: Yeah. Do you think your mum got some sort of comfort?
HB2: Satisfaction out of it.
HB: Comfort from the church?
HB2: Oh yeah. I think so. Yes I think so.
HB: Yeah.
HB2: She wasn’t deeply religious.
HB: No. No.
HB2: But you know that’s she had, she had her feelings.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: But oh God how, how many times did we urge these Christian soldiers onwards and sing for them that was in peril on the sea. Oh dear.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: Well that’s just coming up to quarter to two Harold and I think that’s absolutely brilliant. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed listening to that. It puts, it puts a context on it.
HB: Yeah. So I think what we’ll do unless there’s something else you want to tell me about, something you’ve been hiding you know I would close the interview down now I think and thank you very much for what you’ve, what you’ve given us.
HB2: I don’t think I’ve missed much out. No. I think I’ve covered it pretty much.
HB: Yeah. And you’ve got the bits out that you wanted to -
HB2: Yeah.
HB: To bring out.
HB2: Oh yeah.
HB: That’s good. That’s good.
HB2: It’s, it was not all milk and honey but as a kid it was an experience.
HB: Yeah. Yeah.
HB2: At times it was frightening but at other times it was pretty interesting.
HB: Well I’m going to turn the tape off now.
HB2: Yeah right.
HB: Harold.
HB2: Right.
HB: It’s, so it’s quarter to two. Thats lovely. Thank you very much.
[machine paused]
HB: This is a continuation of the interview that we terminated at quarter to two. Mr Beech was just telling me a little bit about his experiences with the Home Guard and what was going on in the villages so I’ll let him carry this on so we’ll have this as the second part of the file for this particular interview. Right, Mr Beech, it’s running.
HB2: At the beginning of the outbreak of war there was a home, there was a look, duck and vanish brigade which was commonly known as the Local Defence Volunteers but which was later were renamed the Home Guard now, made up of locals, usually the farm labourers and these farm labourers used to meet at the pub and exercise in the two paddocks, and train in the two paddocks but they were always eager to go on night manoeuvres. Now night manoeuvres covered a multitude of sins because the biggest part of them were poachers and they used to have, used to have great coats which was usually a World War One great coat that had a big, a skirt inside that used to get sewn up into two pockets. Ferrets in one and nets in the other and off they’d go across the fields and do a bit of rabbiting and some clever devil could also get a pheasant or two but no one seemed to tumble the reason why they wanted so many night manoeuvres but it was pretty obvious. Many a good dinner was obtained through the night. But another they used to train was camouflage and they held an exercise in this farmer’s field who’d got big bushy hedges and big chestnut trees and they were hiding. Well us kids used to go around and say, ‘What are you doing down there Mr Caps?’ Or he’d start to climb a tree and somebody would tell you in no uncertain terms to clear off. ‘What are you doing up there?’ So, in one, in one instance we were ushered out the field.
HB: Oh dear.
HB2: So, [laughs], as kids I think some times in the war we were very much a pain in the backside.
HB: Right. Well, yeah thanks for that. I do think that’s worth, worth just recording particularly getting the old rabbits and pheasants for the pot so we’ll just terminate this particular one at 1.55. Thanks again Mr Beech that was really interesting.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Harold Beech. Two
Creator
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Harry Bartlett
Identifier
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ABeechH170302
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-03-02
Contributor
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Julie Williams
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Format
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02:37:39 audio recording
Coverage
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Civilian
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Conforms To
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Pending review
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
Language
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eng
Type
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Sound
Description
An account of the resource
Harold Beech could see the activity of several airfields and witnessed stricken aircraft flying back to stations near his home. He also witnessed a crash and describes how he hid in a Lancaster, with the help of the engineer who was billeted with his family and was able to watch the activity of a Bomber Command station closely. His grandmother adopted an aircrew from RAF Faldingworth, but one day they did not come for their usual visit and were never seen again. He describes how the village always pulled together and he described the make do and mend plus the effect of rationing. He also recollects the arrival of evacuees in the village.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940
1943
childhood in wartime
crash
evacuation
home front
Lancaster
military living conditions
prisoner of war
RAF Faldingworth
RAF Wickenby
-
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Marshall, Syd. Album
Identifier
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Marshall, S
Description
An account of the resource
77 items. The album contains wartime and post-war photographs, newspaper cuttings, and memorabilia assembled by Warrant Officer Sidney Charles Marshall (1924 - 2017, 1594781 Royal Air Force). Syd Marshall was a flight engineer with 103 Squadron and flew operations from RAF Elsham Wolds.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Syd Marshall and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
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IBCC Digital Archive
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Date
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2015-05-08
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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Lou Morgan and John Round
Description
An account of the resource
Two airmen, one in uniform and one topless standing by a Nissen hut. On the reverse 'Lou Morgan & John Round in Nissen hut'. On the reverse of another copy of the same photograph
'Jack and Lou
[underlined] NOTE [underlined] this was not taken
in December!!'/
Format
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Two b/w photographs
Language
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eng
Type
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Photograph
Identifier
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SMarshallS1594781v10097, SMarshallS1594781v10098, SMarshallS1594781v10101, SMarshallS1594781v10102
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
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.
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
aircrew
military living conditions
Nissen hut
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/187/2550/SMarshallS1594781v10103.1.jpg
41e7c7477e64080f091a94fb02e942a3
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
Marshall, Syd. Album
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Marshall, S
Description
An account of the resource
77 items. The album contains wartime and post-war photographs, newspaper cuttings, and memorabilia assembled by Warrant Officer Sidney Charles Marshall (1924 - 2017, 1594781 Royal Air Force). Syd Marshall was a flight engineer with 103 Squadron and flew operations from RAF Elsham Wolds.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Syd Marshall and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
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.
Date
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2015-05-08
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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Four airmen by Nissen huts
Description
An account of the resource
Three quarters length portrait of four airmen standing in front of two Nissen huts.
Format
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One b/w photograph
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Identifier
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SMarshallS1594781v10103
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.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
aircrew
military living conditions
Nissen hut
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/194/3326/PAdamsHG1704.1.jpg
980d8be504d2da9355ce447405cd8c1f
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/194/3326/AAdamsHG170215.1.mp3
041f97f2eedf07da91f07fc45cf06065
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
Adams, Herbert
Herbert Adams
H Adams
Herbert G Adams
Description
An account of the resource
88 items. Collection concerns Herbert George Adams DFC, Legion d'Honour (b. 1924, 424509 Royal Australian Air Force). He flew operations as a navigator with 467 Squadron. Collection contains an oral history interview, photographs of people and places, several memoirs about his training and bombing operations, letters to his family, his flying logbook and notes on navigation.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Herbert Adams and catalogued by Nigel Huckins and Trevor Hardcastle.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-02-15
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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Adams, HG
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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RG: This is an interview with Herbert Adams for the International Bomber Command Centre on Wednesday the 15th of February 2017 at his home in Kooringal, Wagga, New South Wales, Australia.
LD: The name of the interviewers.
RG: Interviewers are Rob Gray and Lucie Davison.
LD: Alright. All good. Ok.
RG: Off you go.
LD: So, you were born near Gulgong.
HA: That’s right.
LD: New South Wales.
HA: Yeah.
LD: Were you born in town or on a farm? Or where?
HA: No.
LD: What kind of area did you grow up in?
HA: My father had a stock and station agency and carrying business in Birriwa.
LD: Yeah.
HA: Very small. You wouldn’t see it now if you went through it [laughs] but it was a prosperous little district. I went to primary school there. One teacher school.
LD: And did you work there or did you leave?
HA: No.
LD: Leave home to go to work before you signed up?
HA: When I was old enough I went to high school at Mudgee for five years — where I boarded. And in 1938 dad sold the agency and bought a farm at Mendooran.
LD: Oh yes.
HA: And that’s where I reckoned I lived for a while because after I came back from the war they were still on the farm. And in fact, they sold the farm at the end of the 1946 drought and moved into town. And my brother and I took up share farming at Mendooran.
LD: Right.
RG: That town being Mudgee or —? That town being Mudgee or —?
HA: Not Mudgee. It was Mendooran, sort of east of Dubbo. South of Coonabarabran.
RG: Right. Ok. Yeah.
HA: We did that for three years and then I took on carrying for about a year and a half. Carting cement from Kandos to Sydney.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And then I bought a sports store in Mudgee.
LD: Oh right.
RG: Ok.
HA: Where I strung tennis rackets and fixed cricket bats, sold toys and stuff like that for seven or eight years. Got married and had three kids there. Didn’t know what to do with myself when I sold the sports store so I went to teacher’s college in Sydney for a year.
LD: Oh. Wow.
RG: Ok.
HA: Boarded with me sister. Left my family at Mudgee and got appointed to Mudgee to teach.
LD: Well that was handy wasn’t it?
HA: Well [laughs] we were asked to give preferences of where we wanted to teach and I said ‘Mudgee. Mudgee. Mudgee.’ And they said, ‘Well you’re married and an ex-serviceman and you live there. If necessary we’ll move someone.’ Which they did.
LD: Oh.
RG: Oh. yeah. Very good.
HA: They moved a first year out. A young fella.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Our From Mudgee to Muswellbrook or Maitland or somewhere over there.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And I taught junior maths and, senior and junior biology for five years.
RG: Right. Ok.
HA: At the same time, I did a degree from Armidale by correspondence.
RG: A degree in —?
HA: Just a BA degree with a major in maths and education. Tried to get a science degree out of them but they wouldn’t agree to an external student.
RG: Oh for science.
HA: Getting a science degree even though I could have had more science units.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Than what they could provide from Armidale.
RG: It’s odd isn’t it? Perhaps it required laboratory work or something at Armidale or something like that.
HA: I don’t know, just one of those regulations.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Regulations you can’t undo.
RG: Yeah. I was going to say with your service background to put down Mudgee, Mudgee Mudgee you were liable to be sent to Coonabarabran or somewhere. Anyway.
HA: Yeah. So, I taught at Mudgee there for five years and then I resigned and joined the air force a second time. Came to Wagga.
RG: Oh. Ok.
LD: Oh right.
HA: As an education officer out here at Forest Hill.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
LD: Oh excellent.
HA: Which I did for just on three years.
RG: What were you teaching in the air force?
HA: First two years — adult trainees.
RG: Yeah.
HA: It was basic maths, physics and [Electrical] tech.
RG: Yeah.
HA: In the second year I was teaching fellas who didn’t want to be instructors to be instructors [laughs]
RG: Yeah. I was one of those. Yeah.
HA: It was an experience.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And I learnt more about teaching in that year than I did at teacher college. For sure.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
LD: Yeah.
HA: And then —
LD: That must have been most interesting. Going back into the air force again after all that time.
HA: It was, yeah, because I was straight away a flight lieutenant.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And I did Anzac Day addresses and things like that.
RG: When was that? When did you go back into the air force?
HA: ’65 ‘66. ’67.
RG: Right. So, twenty years after you left.
HA: Yeah.
RG: Yeah.
LD: That would have been fascinating.
RG: Have we got — sorry. Have we got Bert’s date of birth? Anywhere?
LD: Oh. No. What’s your date of birth, Bert?
HA: 23rd of the 2nd ’24.
LD: Ok.
HA: So, I’ll be ninety three next week.
LD: Wow. So, did you work before joining the air force the first time?
HA: Yes. I worked in Sydney for a year and a half. The local government department in Bridge Street.
LD: Oh yes. Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Didn’t like it much. Didn’t get much money.
RG: This was as a clerk or —
HA: Yeah.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Junior clerk. And when they brought in compulsory service for the army I was very keen to get in because six shillings a day was big money.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Like, I was paying board in Sydney and train fares and had nothing left. I couldn’t even play hockey because I didn’t have enough money to go and play hockey every weekend.
RG: Right. Yeah. So that, what year was that that you —?
HA: 1941 and 1942.
RG: So, so you were called up in —
HA: ’42.
RG: ’42.
HA: Yeah.
LD: So, you were called up in to the army initially.
HA: Yeah. Yeah.
RG: Where did you go to?
HA: Went to Dubbo and did the infantry training for a month and then was invited, if you could drive a truck, to go to Moorebank near Liverpool and do a motor-school for a month.
RG: Right.
HA: A lot of stuff with Bren gun carriers.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And internal, whatever you call it. A written exam at the end of it. We had lectures at night and that sort of thing. Some of the fellas could barely read and write and they were in the army. I’d finished High School with good passes.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Yes.
HA: I came top of the course.
LD: Yeah.
HA: I was invited to go to Sydney Tech College for six months and come out as a warrant officer instructor.
RG: Right.
HA: At aged eighteen.
RG: Ok. That was advanced promotion.
HA: I thought about it very seriously.
RG: You would have done. We’re talking about six shillings being good money.
HA: Anyway, I was already on the reserve for aircrew so when that came up I got out of the army.
LD: Oh right.
RG: So, did you volunteer for the reserve for the aircrew? Did you do that before you joined up? Or —
HA: Yeah.
RG: Yeah.
HA: As a matter of fact, when Air Training Corps first formed, late in 1941 I think it was.
RG: Yeah.
HA: I was one of the first in.
RG: Right.
HA: And that was supposed to get you a month or two precedence on the, on the waiting list. There was a big waiting list for aircrew.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Eight months. Something like that.
RG: So did you do — we’ve read Andy, sorry, Adrian Child, sorry Ray child — Charlwood sorry.
HA: I’ve read two of his books.
RG: Yeah. And his way, he did it he came in through the ATS got assessed, got accepted, sent home and then came back later and did some training and then got sent home again and then went and did his specialist — his navigator’s training was it? Did something similar happen to you? Did you like get accepted and sent home again?
HA: No. Air Training Corps was only part time stuff up at Ashfield. Never got any uniform.
RG: Oh. This is not the ATS —this is Air Training Corps. Yeah. Ok. Sorry. Yeah. Different.
HA: Sorry. Wrong thing.
RG: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I was thinking of the ATS. Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Yeah. Where we were up to?
RG: So, Ashfield.
HA: Ashfield.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Yeah.
LD: So, which ITS did you end up going to?
HA: Bradfield.
LD: Oh right.
HA: Number 2.
LD: Oh my God. That’s where Ken was.
RG: That’s where Ken was. Yeah.
LD: I have a relative who was there.
HA: Yeah.
LD: Ken Glover.
HA: I’ve got an idea as I can remember that name. I was in 32 course for a start.
LD: I’m not sure what course he was in.
RG: No. He —
LD: I haven’t been able to find that out.
RG: He became a rear gunner. He was in 463. And he was killed on Christmas Eve ‘43 over Berlin.
LD: He started out in 207 Squadron.
RG: Yeah. He started out in 207 RAF.
HA: Yeah. He was a bit earlier at Bradfield than me if he was on Berlin raids.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Yeah. He left [pause] he left Australia like January ’42.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Yeah.
RG: ‘43. He was killed at the end of ’43.
LD: Oh, I’m getting mixed up.
RG: Yeah. Yeah. Anyway.
HA: Yeah. There may have been another Glover that I met somewhere along the way.
RG: I’m sure there were scads of them really. Yeah.
LD: Yeah.
HA: I actually had a time. I got the mumps while I was there and went out to Prince Henry Hospital. Came back and I found myself in 33 course. And then they said, ‘They need more fellas at the training places. We’re going to do a rushed course so that you can go out with 32 course again.’
RG: Yeah.
HA: ‘Providing you’re quick enough at Morse.’
RG: Yeah.
HA: And because I’d been in the Air Training Corps I was fast enough at Morse.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Yeah.
HA: So, I ended up with 32 course at Bradfield. And then came to Cootamundra.
LD: Yes.
HA: 1 AOS. I didn’t even get inside the gate. We were throwing kit bags up on to a truck and I collapsed and found myself in hospital.
RG: As a result of the mumps?
HA: Woke up the next day with terrible trouble with appendicitis.
RG: Oh, ok. Yeah.
HA: I was delirious for a few days and a bit lucky to survive I think because penicillin was, luckily, available.
LD: Yeah.
HA: In those days.
RG: Yeah. And only just available too. Yeah.
LD: Yes.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And so, I was in the hospital for a month with a hole with a rubber tube gushing out rubbish. Finally sent home, I think for Christmas, still with a hole in my belly. And —
RG: So, this is Christmas ‘41
HA: ‘42
RG: ‘42.
HA: ‘42. Yeah.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And they said, ‘By the way you will have to come back to hospital next year and have your appendix out.’
LD: What?
RG: They hadn’t done it.
HA: They didn’t take it out. All they’d done was drain all the muck out of it to treat it.
LD: Oh of course. They needed to drain everything ‘cause if they tried to operate with —
RG: The poison would have got into the bloodstream. Yeah.
LD: Yes. Yes.
RG: Lucie is an ex-nurse so.
HA: Yeah.
HA: My wife’s an ex-nurse too.
LD: We’re good people [laughs]
HA: So, I came out of hospital and did some time with 35 course and helped in the sick quarters for a while.
RG: This is filling in time before the next observers course.
HA: Yeah. Then I came down to Wagga.
RG: So, you didn’t actually get to Cootamundra at all. You were posted there but didn’t get there.
HA: Oh yes. When I come out of hospital I was put on to 35 course.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And I went to lectures and did one flight with them. And then they said but you’ve got to go and get your appendix out so I came to the RAAF hospital out here at Forest Hill which hadn’t long been opened and had my appendix out. And went back and fooled around until 38 course started.
LD: [laughs] They must have been wondering if they were ever going to get rid of you.
RG: Yeah. So instead of three months it was nine months.
LD: Oh right.
HA: At Cootamundra.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Mind you that kept you out of the worst of it.
HA: It may have kept me out of going to the islands or somewhere like that, you know.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
LD: Yes. Yeah.
RG: Or the Battle of Berlin as well. Yeah.
LD: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Anyway —
LD: Did you end up doing any of your training overseas or was it all done in Australia?
HA: Up to the wing stage — in Australia.
LD: Right.
HA: I did bomb aiming and gunnery at Evans Head for two months and then astro nav at Parkes for a month. And then after a bit of leave we got on a boat and went to San Francisco.
LD: Do you remember the name of the ship?
HA: The Mount Vernon. I think.
LD: Ok. Yeah. Did you go via New Zealand?
HA: No. Non-stop.
LD: Oh. Ok.
HA: And we got our sea legs I think because it was calm for the first week or so and then there was a big storm.
LD: Yeah.
HA: There were logs floating around in San Francisco harbour.
LD: Right.
RG: Did you leave from Sydney or Melbourne?
HA: From Sydney.
RG: Sydney. Yeah. By the way when you said you did one flight with 38 course.
HA: 35.
RG: 35. What sort of aircraft?
HA: Ansons.
RG: Ansons. Yeah. Ok.
HA: It was Fairey Battles at Evans Head and it was Ansons again at Parkes.
RG: Right. Yeah.
HA: Astro.
RG: Yeah.
LD: So were you happy to be a navigator or would you have preferred some other role? Because you said you did the gunnery course as well. Did you have any choice in this or —
HA: While we were at Bradfield park they asked us towards the end of the business which you’d like to be and nearly everybody wanted to be a pilot of course. The day that they did the coordination test I was at the dentist and so I missed that.
RG: [laughs] You had bad medical trouble there didn’t you [laughs]
HA: I had a lot of trouble with my teeth.
RG: Oh dear.
HA: And the test was to sit in a seat with rudder pedals and a joystick with a screen where somebody made a dot move around the screen at random and you had to chase it with your feet.
RG: Yeah.
HA: I knew I’d made a terrible mess of it. Partly because when I was a kid I had a flivver which you steered with your feet. If you wanted to go to the right you did that which is just the opposite.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: To what you want to do in an aeroplane.
RG: Sorry a flivver.
HA: A flivver.
RG: What’s a flivver? What —
HA: Well it had a handle on it like the trikes that they had on the railway.
RG: The ones that you cranked. Yes.
HA: Yes.
RG: Oh ok. I didn’t know they were called flivvers.
HA: Yeah. Anyway, so, I knew I made a mess of it so when they came to ask me what I wanted to do I said navigator. They said, ‘Why don’t you want to be a pilot?’ And I said, ‘Well I made a mess of the coordination test and I’m pretty good at maths and stuff.’ I didn’t tell them that a lot of fellas say, ‘I want to be a pilot,’ and they say, ‘Oh well. You can be a rear gunner.’
RG: Yeah. [laughs] Ok.
LD: Yes.
HA: So, I got in first.
RG: That was a smart move.
LD: Yes. Yeah. They were getting to be short of rear gunners, weren’t they? Very sadly.
HA: So, we got on a, oh there was only six hundred of us on the ship. Most of the people were American servicemen who were either ill or wounded. Coming back from the Pacific.
LD: Yeah.
HA: And so, when we got to San Francisco they said, ‘There’s sixty of you navigators,’ or observers as we were then. We had an O wing, ‘Who thought you were going to Canada to do a six months reconnaissance course. That’s been scrubbed. You are now going across to Britain for Bomber Command.’ So, we had to —
RG: Oh. So you might have ended up doing reconnaissance flights in Mosquitos, I presume. Or something of that nature.
HA: Probably in Liberators across the Atlantic I would think.
RG: Oh ok. Ok.
LD: Right.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Anyhow.
RG: Yeah.
HA: That was scrubbed and we got on a troop train and went across America to New York and got on a ship called the Isle de France.
RG: Ah yes. Famous vessel.
HA: On Christmas Eve.
RG: That’s Christmas Eve forty.
HA: ’43.
RG: ‘43 yeah.
LD: Oh right. Yeah.
RG: That was the night Ken was killed.
LD: Yes. Yeah.
HA: It got as far as the Statue of Liberty and broke down.
RG: [laughs] That was the French.
HA: And we thought thank goodness because we were right down below the waterline at the stern with the sides coming down like that.
RG: Oh yes. Yeah.
HA: And had to climb through round portholes all around.
RG: Hatches. Yeah.
HA: Vertical ladders to get up to the next deck.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Anyhow, they kept us there overnight. They gave us some sandwiches I think and then the next morning they said, ‘You can wait until we give you some more sandwiches and some pay. Or you can do without that. Go straight into New York where there’s likely to be people taking you home for Christmas dinner.’
LD: Well there’s an option isn’t there?
HA: So, three of us went out to a very nice double decker house in Mount Vernon for lunch. We thought Christmas lunch, you know. Christmas lunch came time and there were plenty of little nibbles and plenty of drinks. This went on all the whole afternoon until about 7 o’clock at night and they brought out the turkey. Us three all said, ‘Well yes, we wouldn’t mind a second helping,’ [laughs]. He took us to his factory the next day. He had a factory that made, amongst other things, handkerchiefs. He gave us some handkerchiefs each.
RG: You don’t happen to remember the family name by any chance, do you? A big ask I know but —
HA: Richie, I think. Richie.
RG: Richie. Ok.
HA: And took us to his club. We offered to buy a drink after he’d bought us one. Everything’s done with chips.
RG: So, you can’t possibly. That’s a polite way to do it isn’t it?
HA: Took us back to our camp at Fort McDowell or Fort Slocum or something. I’ve forgotten the name and we had a few more days in New York. Went to Madison Square Garden and saw an ice hockey match for the first time.
LD: Oh wow.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Went to Jack Dempsey’s Spaghetti Bar.
RG: Ok. Yes. Sorry. Sorry Bert, I was just going to say, I know you said it was a camp. Fort Slocum or wherever it was. Was that like a transit camp for Commonwealth personnel or was it a US army camp or —?
HA: I can’t remember.
RG: Ok.
HA: I can’t remember. It seemed to be a useful sort of a camp.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Could have been [unclear] or that sort of thing.
RG: Yeah.
LD: I have read that Australian servicemen in the States, because there were a lot of people like you who were, you know, kind of in between places who ended up staying there for a couple of weeks or something were very welcome and, you know, never had to buy a drink and so on. Is that — is that your experience?
HA: They were very generous. The Americans.
LD: Yeah.
HA: Yeah. We didn’t buy a drink the time that we were with him of course. I can’t remember other Americans shouting us drinks while we were in New York but in Denver one day, we had a couple of hours in Denver and a fellow came up to us and said, ‘You’ve strange uniforms.’ We had Australia across here. ‘I didn’t know Austria was on our side.’ [laughs]
RG: [laughs] Did you point out that Hitler was an Austrian [laughs] Anyway, yeah.
HA: So, we talked to him a bit about Australia then and [pause]
LD: I have, I’ve also read about the Australians being mistaken for German POWs. Did you, did you have that experience?
HA: I think that could happen. I got mistaken for a policeman a couple of times in London. In the blue uniform.
RG: The blue uniform, yeah. Of course.
LD: Oh of course. The darker blue.
HA: Yeah.
LD: Yes.
HA: And because we’d been to London a few times and used the Underground I knew my way around London fairly well as far as the Underground was concerned. So if somebody said, ‘How do I get to —,’ such and such. I was able to say, ‘That way.’ [laughs] Didn’t let on I wasn’t a policeman.
LD: Fair enough.
HA: Yeah.
LD: So, did you have a safe trip across to Britain after all that. Did you have any problems?
HA: No. No. On New Year’s Eve we boarded the Queen Elizabeth.
LD: Oh. Right.
HA: And it had, it had been partly furnished for passengers before the war but it hadn’t been finished.
RG: No.
HA: There were parts of it were still open hold.
RG: Yeah.
HA: With stacks of —
RG: She came straight from the shipyard. Straight in as a troopship. Yeah.
HA: We got a cabin and there was —
LD: Lucky you.
HA: Eighteen of us, I think, in a cabin, with a little toilet corner in it. Most everywhere there was six feet on a wall with three bunks.
RG: Three bunks. Yeah.
LD: Ah yes.
HA: There were six walls altogether including the corner of it.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Yeah.
HA: We had a great time there. Used to sit on the floor and play cards.
LD: Did you have to — did you have to act as lookouts on the Queen Elizabeth?
HA: No.
LD: Right.
HA: No. We did boat drill which was a bit of a hassle because there was over twenty thousand troops on it. Two or three of the top decks that were open to the weather had three bunks up the wall. Bolted on.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Americans took twelve hours on, twelve hours off on those bunks.
RG: Wow.
HA: So they could fit more people in.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
LD: Oh my goodness. Yeah. I’ve read about the hot-bunking. I didn’t realise it was to that extent.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Two meals a day because it took four hours to feed them all.
LD: Yes. Yeah.
HA: Four hours to clean up and then another one.
LD: Yeah.
RG: Yeah.
LD: I also read that the meals were more than a bit basic.
HA: They were, they were alright.
RG: This was a British, this was a British ship. Not an American one. Different. Yeah.
HA: Yeah. We had good meals on the boat. On the trains across America too. It was a bit strange. They’d ask for volunteers to go and count the stuff through the corridor sort of thing. I never had to do that. But they’d arrive with a stainless streel tray, plate, with five compartments on it. You’d put meat there and vegetables there, vegetables there, vegetables there, fruit salad there. And then they’d get a ladle and put what we reckoned was plum jam and put it all over the plate [laughs]
LD: Oh.
HA: It may have been chutney I don’t know.
LD: It sounds awful.
RG: You’re right to separate everything and then join it up with — yeah.
LD: So, did you have the Pullman carriages?
HA: Yes.
LD: Yeah.
HA: Yes. A little compartment with enough people for four. And yet they only put three in it because at night time they had a negro porter came in and made up a double bed at the bottom.
LD: Yeah.
HA: And pulled down —
LD: Yeah.
HA: One at the top which I got in. Being wintertime, each morning I’d find icicles hanging down from the ceiling where the fellas underneath would be warm because they were steam heated.
RG: Yeah. Oh right. Yeah. Yeah.
LD: Yeah. So did you get to see snow on that trip as well?
HA: Yes. For the first time. We pulled up in marshalling yards at Chicago for about an hour and a half, I suppose. Nowhere near the platform but there was railway lines forever.
RG: Yeah.
HA: We saw it was snow on the ground so, ‘Oh, we’ll get out and have a snow fight.’ So, we got out and had the snow fight for about five minutes and it was minus thirty.
RG: Yeah. Chicago in the winter.
HA: We got back in again pretty quick.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Yeah. No. That’s, that’s my relative’s experience as well. Was seeing the snow for the first time.
HA: Yeah. It was the first time I’d seen snow.
LD: Yeah.
HA: Going across the Atlantic in the Queen Elizabeth after about three days they said, ‘There’s reputed to be a U-boat pack waiting out there somewhere so we’re going to go up near Iceland somewhere and we’re going to go flat out.
RG: Yeah.
HA: So, put your warm clothes on.’ We’re not going to — we’re going to turn the heating off and go as fast as we can.’
RG: Yeah.
HA: We met some of the crew in Glasgow. Greenock. They took us for a tour of the ship later and said that they got over forty knots.
RG: Wow.
HA: That night going up.
RG: She was fast. I didn’t realise she was that fast though.
HA: Yeah.
RG: Wow.
LD: So, did you, did you land in Greenock?
HA: Yeah.
LD: Yeah. Ok. Yeah.
RG: Yes, I suppose if you’ve got the threat of U-boats you’ll find the, you’ll find the extra knots.
HA: Yeah, they put all the steam they could get in to it.
LD: So, once you arrived in the UK where did you go to then?
HA: By train to Brighton.
LD: Brighton. Ok. And were you there for long?
HA: I think about three weeks.
LD: Right. Yeah.
HA: We did a little bit of training. I think the main thing we did was learn the stars of the northern hemisphere.
RG: Oh course. Yeah.
LD: Of course. Absolutely. Yeah.
RG: They didn’t teach you that while you were here?
HA: No. No.
RG: I mean even theoretically. That’s funny. I suppose a lot of you would have ended up in the Pacific theatre so, yeah.
HA: There’s enough to learn one lot at a time.
RG: Yeah. True enough. Yeah.
LD: Yeah. No. I remember the first time I went to Europe, you know, looking up at the sky and going —
RG: It’s all different.
LD: All the bases of my life were gone. It’s quite strange and it would have been even more so for you because that’s —
RG: Your trade.
LD: Yeah . That would have been really interesting for you.
HA: At Brighton there was two big hotels. The Metropole and The Grand that were taken over by the RAAF as a holding centre. And again, when we left to come home. Same place.
LD: Oh right.
RG: They’re both on the seafront aren’t they?
HA: Yeah.
RG: Yeah. I can remember the Metropole.
HA: When I went back to Europe in ‘94 and took a trip down to Brighton and had a look at them and they’ve dolled them up. They’re both nice looking hotels.
RG: Yeah. They’re both there though. Yeah.
HA: They were very basic then.
RG: Yeah.
LD: And was Brighton all — ‘cause I know Bournemouth had all the razor wire on the beaches and things like that. Was the same sort of protections there in Brighton?
HA: Yes. One of the, I think both of the piers had a hole cut in the middle of them so that they couldn’t —
RG: Couldn’t land on the end.
HA: Get on to one end and come ashore sort of thing.
LD: Were there any air raids or anything while you were there?
HA: Yes. There were air raids while we were there.
LD: Yeah.
HA: For a start we used to go down to the basement and they didn’t seem to do much harm so after that we didn’t bother. We just stayed in our bedroom.
RG: That would have been also around the time of the V1s and V2s.
HA: Yes.
RG: Did you have any experience of those? Or —
HA: Once or twice when I was in London on leave we heard one or two come over and we actually heard one stop one night and thought oh, this is going to be a bang.
RG: Oh dear.
HA: And sure, enough there was a bang not far away.
RG: Yeah. Yeah. I’ve heard people, Londoner’s I’ve met, who said that they were far more frightened of the V1s than the V2s because of that. You’d hear. In the buildings you couldn’t see them. You could hear them and when they stopped it was, ‘Where is it going to fall?’
HA: Yeah.
RG: Whereas the V2 was the crash and if you heard the crash — well you were still alive. So that was —
HA: Yeah.
RG: Yeah.
HA: I don’t think there was any V2s ever landed when I was in London. They were frightening.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
LD: Yeah.
HA: And I don’t think there was any of the London guns landed in London when I was there either. You’ve heard about the London guns. The V3.
RG: That’s the V3. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. I have heard about it. I didn’t know they actually fired on —
HA: Yeah. They fired a few.
RG: Oh ok.
HA: But nowhere near what they wanted to.
RG: No.
HA: They were going to finish Britain off with the V2s and V3s.
RG: Well by that point they were disappearing back away from the French coast weren’t they?
HA: Yeah. That’s right.
RG: Yeah. You’re talking January ‘45.
HA: Yeah. So the London gun got bypassed.
RG: Shuffled back. Yeah. Became a Calais gun or something [laughs] as far as you could reach.
LD: So which OTU did you end up being sent to?
HA: Lichfield.
LD: Yeah.
HA: Before that we went to an AFU At Llandwrog. In North Wales.
RG: Wales.
LD: What was an AFU?
HA: They called it an Advanced Flying Unit.
LD: Oh right. Yeah.
HA: Avro Ansons again. That was mainly to familiarise navigators and bomb aimers I think with map reading in Britain.
LD: Oh right.
HA: Which was altogether different to the Riverina
LD: Just a little [laughs]
RG: [unclear]
LD: Not to mention the stars.
RG: Yeah. And at Lichfield — that was an OTU.
HA: Lichfield it was a fairly popular OTU where we crewed up and —
LD: Yeah.
HA: Flew Wellingtons.
LD: Right.
RG: For training.
HA: For training.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Yeah.
LD: So how did they crew you guys up? It seems to have been a little different in different places.
HA: They gave us two days to hang around in the hangar and hang around in the mess drinking beer and find ourselves a crew.
LD: Right.
RG: Right. But that was a five man crew wasn’t it?
HA: Six.
RG: Six. In a Wellington.
HA: Six I think.
RG: Six. Yeah. Ok.
HA: Yeah. Even though Wellingtons only had five in the crew.
RG: Yeah.
HA: You crewed up with six and the rear gunner and the mid-upper gunner took turns in the rear turret to practice.
RG: Oh ok.
LD: Oh right. Ok. Yeah.
RG: But you’re still one down from a Lancaster though ‘cause that was seven.
HA: Yeah. No engineer.
RG: No engineer. Right.
HA: So, Syd Payne and I who’d done our training in Australia together as observers and he had been a — started off as a pilot. Did Tiger Moths at Narromine and got scrubbed on Wirraways at Uranquinty I think. So, he looked like a valuable bloke to have in a crew. Somebody who could fly.
RG: Fly. Yes. Of course.
HA: And we were both navigator — bomb aimer, sort of thing and he trained.
RG: Tossed a coin to see who did what.
HA: He trained as a bomb aimer just across Anglesey from where Llandwrog was. So, we’re looking around for a pilot.
RG: Sorry. Did you two decide between yourselves who was going to be the bomb aimer and who was going to be the navigator?
HA: Before we’d even got there because he trained as a bomb aimer AFU.
RG: Yeah.
HA: I trained as a navigator AFU.
RG: Yes. Oh of course. That was before Lichfield yes. Of course. Yeah.
HA: Before Lichfield.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: So we got together and we found a pilot with a wireless op attached. And they were both Queenslanders. Both same age as us. All twenty years old. And after looking at a few others, sort of thing, I think the pilot decided that, yes, we would do him sort of thing and so we were thinking about a rear gunner. And a pair of gunners. Looking around and then a pair of gunners came and found us [emphasis] They turned out to be fellas who came first and second in their gunnery course.
RG: Nice.
HA: So, they, they had the pick of the mob sort of thing. So they picked us luckily. We got on well with them so —
RG: Both Australians. So —
HA: Yes. All Australians.
RG: Yeah.
HA: The rear gunner was from Sydney. In fact, we had a connection. I don’t know whether he’d married already a girl that I knew in Mudgee.
RG: Oh. Ok.
HA: Or married her after.
RG: After the war.
HA: One or the other. And the other fella was a farm worker from Western Australia who was elderly. He was twenty five.
RG: Oh gosh.
LD: Oh. Poor old man. You’d have to help him on with a stick.
HA: And they were both teetotallers.
RG: Oh. Ok. Ok. Maybe that’s why they came first and second in their gunnery course.
HA: And they were good shots. The bloke from Western Australia had done a bit of clay pigeon shooting, well live pigeon shooting against kangaroos and stuff.
RG: Yeah.
HA: You know. So, he knew about leading.
RG: Yeah. And they used clay pigeons to the train the gunners. Yeah.
HA: Yeah. That’s right. Yeah. So, they were good shots by the time we got together and of course we did a lot more training. One of the things we did at Lichfield in our training was do a bullseye.
RG: Yes.
HA: Several reckoned it counted as an operation. Others reckoned it counted as half an operation. Yeah. They got all the training planes together. Not only from Lichfield but a heap of them and flew up as if you were going to Wilhelmshaven or something like that. Up in the Baltic. When you got nearly there you turned around and came back while the rest of Bomber Command went to Munich or somewhere.
RG: Oh, you were the decoy force.
HA: Diversion decoy. Yeah.
RG: Diversion. Of course. Yeah.
LD: This is the first time I’ve actually been able to confirm what a command bullseye was.
RG: Yeah. Lucie’s relative, Ken mentions in his logbook about a command bullseye but they did these over London.
LD: But they did these over London. Yes.
RG: But and he just says command bullseye and we’ve asked the other veterans and none of them have known what it was. They didn’t do it. So —
LD: I’ve only found one reference to it in the research.
RG: Yeah.
LD: That’s really good. I’m really pleased [laughs]
HA: We did another one when we were on Stirlings. We did another bullseye.
RG: Oh that was still on Wellingtons wasn’t it?
HA: This was still on Wellingtons. Yeah.
RG: Yeah. And then you went over to Stirlings did you?
HA: Yes. Our next move after Lichfield was Swinderby.
RG: Oh yes.
HA: Near Lincoln. And I was on Stirlings.
RG: Yeah. Where you found an engineer at that point.
HA: Yeah. That’s where we got our engineer.
RG: Was he appointed or did you find him?
HA: He was just appointed to us and he was a man of forty four.
RG: Wow.
LD: Really.
HA: He’d been a policeman for years.
RG: Yeah.
HA: In Birmingham and Coventry.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And those sorts of places.
RG: So he was RAF.
HA: Yeah. Yeah.
LD: I didn’t realise.
HA: He was born in Scotland. His parents lived in Ireland. When we went on leave he had to change in to civvies to go over to Ireland.
RG: To go to Ireland [laughs]
HA: Yeah.
RG: Yes.
LD: So, did you do anything other than kind of like a spoof raid on the bullseye. Did you drop leaflets?
HA: No.
LD: Or anything like that?
HA: No. We just stayed over the sea all the time.
LD: Right. Ok.
RG: Ok.
HA: And the other one we did in the Stirlings I think we only went about as far as the Dutch coast. It was quite a short trip compared with the one that went nearly to Wilhelmshaven.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Yeah.
RG: So how long were you on Stirlings for? And again, this is just training isn’t it? On the Stirlings.
HA: Training. Yeah. We trained there for about a month I think.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: It was mainly circuits and bumps and that sort of thing for the pilot more than —
RG: Get used to the four engines.
HA: Probably did about a couple of cross country’s and that sort of thing.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Some bombing. Fighter affiliation for the gunners.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
LD: So, the bullseyes. Were they both at night?
HA: Yes.
LD: Yeah. So that would have been training for you as a navigator as well wouldn’t it?
HA: Oh yeah.
LD: Sort of doing the real thing. Yeah.
HA: Oh yeah. Had to find our way there and back. But when we got to Lichfield I think, on OTU, on the Wellingtons we first had Gee.
LD: Yes.
HA: Which was a tremendous help for navigators. You could get accurate fixes whenever you wanted them.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Up as far as the enemy frontier sort of thing. They jammed it after that. If we could get an hour or two when we were on an operations of good fixes before Gee gave up. And they also had APIs which you don’t seem to be in the literature much. Air Position Indicators.
RG: No.
HA: They were the best thing going for —
RG: How did that work?
HA: When we were at Cootamundra or AFU we were expected to keep a manual air plot. Every change of direction or speed or height made a difference to the air plot each time.
LD: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Then if you found a fix you could find a wind.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And that depended on the pilot sticking to the course that he was told to be on.
RG: Yeah.
HA: The speed he was told to be on and the height he was supposed —
RG: So pilot’s actually —
LD: Pilots don’t always do that.
HA: Navigation was very much a — perhaps. But with API they had a distance reading compass down the back that was half gyro and half magnetic.
RG: Yeah. Gyro magnetic compass. I know those. Yeah.
HA: And that came via the nav table through a control called a Variation Setting Control so you could set the variation on that.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And change it as you went across Europe.
RG: Yeah.
HA: From 11 around Lincoln to about 3 at Berlin or something like that.
RG: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
HA: And deviations.
RG: Yeah.
HA: They’d swing the compass every now and again on the ground. Give you a deviation card.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Generally only one or two degrees.
RG: Yeah.
HA: So the true directions would come out on the repeater compasses for the navigator and the pilot.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And the bomb aimer.
LD: Right.
HA: And the API had true directions going to it and then from the air speed indicator which didn’t give true airspeed by any means when you, as you went higher. The indicated air speed might be a hundred and sixty mile an hour and the true air speed be two hundred miles an hour.
RG: Yeah. Yeah. Thinner air. That’s going to —
HA: Thinner air. So that was accounted for as well.
RG: Wow. That’s —
HA: So the API had got true directions and true speed.
RG: Yeah. And altitude to make that variation. Yeah.
HA: Just had two knobs on it.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Two little windows.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And the normal thing we did for a start was to set the latitude and longitude of the airfield and as you flew along any time you wanted to find out where your air position was it was there. You just wrote it down. Latitude and longitude. Popped it down on your chart.
RG: And that was quite accurate.
HA: Yeah.
RG: Wow. Ok. So that were, that were in Lancs and Stirlings obviously. And Wellingtons.
HA: Yeah.
RG: Ok. So was this must have been, was this something that sort of came along later in the war? Do you know?
HA: I think it probably came in in late ’43.
RG: Yeah.
HA: I would imagine.
RG: Ok. Yeah. You’re right. I haven’t come across that either, but, yeah.
LD: Did you get — because from what I’ve read there was a lot of technology happening there around all sorts of things but, you know, including navigation.
HA: Yeah.
LD: Did you find there was a lot of changes in the equipment that you used and were you actually trained in those changes?
HA: Yes.
LD: Or did you just kind of wake up one morning and get on the aircraft and find it was new.
HA: We had — Lancasters were fitted with H2S when we got to Waddington.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And we used them in training on [pause] between — between the Stirlings and going in to the squadron we did a Lanc Finishing School. I think that’s where we first saw H2S on the planes.
RG: Yeah.
HA: All the planes had H2S at Waddington. And we used them for training exercises but we were forbidden to use them on operations because the Germans could home in on them with their fighters.
RG: Yes. Yes. Yeah.
HA: And so the only time we ever used H2S over Germany was on a daylight trip to Wilhelmshaven when they expected to have a lot of cloud over the target and so for the first time we ever got directions like this — ‘If you can’t see the target you can use H2S or you can drop your bombs when you see another one drop their bombs.’ [laughs]
RG: [laughs] Gosh.
LD: That’s precision bombing.
RG: Yeah.
LD: So you’re all sitting there going can any of us see the target? Who’s going to drop a bomb first?
HA: In our training with H2S the bomb aimer used to come and sit alongside the navigator. Both fiddled with H2S and so he came up and we were deliberating about where we were going to aim at sort of thing and we finally said, ‘Oh well, that’ll do.’ When we pressed the bombing tit two other Lancs dropped theirs.
RG: [laughs] Not sort of what you’d expect is it?
HA: We don’t know what harm we did.
LD: Might have killed a couple of sheep.
HA: Anyway, that was H2S. Gee didn’t change except as, as the allies crept up through France and so forth.
RG: Went further out.
HA: They opened up two more Gee chains besides the ones that were based in England.
RG: Yeah.
HA: One was called the Reims. One was called the Ruhr. And the other thing was after about two months, I think, Loran was fitted to the Lancs.
LD: Sorry. What was that?
RG: Loran.
HA: L O R A N long range air navigation.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Which related to Gee in that it measured time differences between the emitter and the plane. And that chart with curved lines in different colours. Same as Gee. But apparently it was only effective at night time because instead of getting direct radio signals they were bounced off the ionosphere at night time.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: It had an extremely long range. Covered all of Europe. And when they came out to the Pacific it covered all the Pacific area.
RG: Really important in the Pacific. Yeah.
HA: So we trained with Loran while we were on the squadron and actually used it about halfway through our tour. Used Loran when Gee ran out.
RG: But was it as accurate as Gee?
HA: Not as accurate.
RG: No.
HA: And a bit more cumbersome to use because you tuned into one station and got one partition line at a time and then you had to tune into a second one.
RG: Get the second position line.
HA: Get the different and then transfer further along.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Parallel ruler and muck around. So it was a bit slower. I think it was accurate enough. Good enough to find the target anyway.
RG: Yeah. Yeah. Were you mostly on, at 467, on daylight operations at that point or still mostly night time? Night operations?
HA: We got back to mostly back to night time by that time. This was September when we started and D-day was back in June.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Sorry that was September. What year?
HA: ‘44.
LD: Thank you. Just to –
HA: We finished in January ’45.
LD: Right. Yeah.
HA: So we did a few daylight trips. The first and third ones were fairly big raids on le Havre and Boulogne in daylight. Big armies.
RG: Army support. Yeah.
HA: In both those places and they had side-tracked or bypassed them with the Canadians and British armies.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And finally, they decided it was about time they cleaned them out, sort of thing. So dropped a lot of bombs on various parts.
RG: Yeah.
HA: It wasn’t area bombing like there was on towns in Britain, in Germany. It was specific things.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Like oil dumps, E-boat pens. Stuff like this.
RG: Transport links and stuff like that. Yeah. Tactical. More tactical.
HA: Tactical stuff.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: They didn’t want to kill too many Frenchmen.
RG: No. No. Exactly.
LD: No. One doesn’t.
HA: So, we did that in daylight.
LD: That’s right.
RG: So that was on your first and third trip.
HA: First and third trips. Yeah.
LD: How many ops did you complete?
HA: Twenty nine.
LD: That’s a good number.
HA: Pardon?
LD: That’s a very good number.
HA: Yeah. Well I think the bullseyes might have counted to make it thirty.
RG: I was going to say, Bert, it varied over time we noticed that the number of ops you had to do to do a, you know, to do a tour.
HA: A tour varied.
RG: Yeah. In your period it was how many?
HA: Thirty to finish.
RG: It was thirty still. Yeah. Ok.
HA: When we started it was thirty six because it had been made thirty six around D-day.
RG: Ok.
HA: With so many short trips.
RG: Of course. Yeah. Yes.
HA: And then a month or two after D-day they broke it back to thirty three.
RG: ‘Cause you were going back on the raids on Germany then.
HA: Yeah.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And then after we’d done about fifteen or twenty trips or something like that they said you only have to do thirty from now on.
RG: That was a bit of a relief.
HA: Yeah. But there was some longer trips coming up.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: We did one long trip to Trondheim in Norway.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Wow.
HA: Almost eleven hours.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And they put a smokescreen over the target and so the master bomber said, ‘Well, you can take your bombs home.’ So we did almost eleven hours with a full bomb load.
RG: Wow.
LD: Did that count as an op for you?
HA: That counted as an op. Yeah.
LD: Because you didn’t drop any bombs.
HA: You’d only to go to the target and be on the op. Yeah. We did a couple of —
RG: You said you brought the bombs home.
LD: Yeah.
RG: You didn’t land with them did you?
LD: Yes. That’s what I was thinking.
HA: Yeah.
RG: You did.
LD: Wow.
RG: I thought the standard practice was to ditch them in the sea if you were —
HA: Only if you had too much weight.
RG: So —
HA: I think earlier in the war they might have ditched them but we brought our bombs back three times I think.
RG: Ok.
LD: Oh my goodness.
RG: So when you say too much weight you had too much fuel still in and there was like a maximum weight that a Lanc could land with.
HA: Yeah. Yeah.
RG: Oh. I see.
LD: Well, you wouldn’t have had much fuel left after a trip to Norway. Would you?
RG: No. That’s right. It would have been light enough I suppose.
HA: I wrote a bit about this later one time. We were the only one to get back to Waddington with our bombs on. The others either landed in Scotland or ditched their bombs in the Atlantic.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And then got back to Waddington. But we didn’t bother. We came all the way back and had eighty gallons left.
RG: Eighty gallons. Don’t go around the circuit once or twice [laughs]
HA: It’s not really enough to go around again.
RG: No.
LD: Yeah.
RG: Wow. Ok.
LD: It doesn’t kind of sound very safe landing with the bombs but —
RG: No. No.
LD: But obviously you managed it.
HA: Yes. I believe —
LD: And the big one would have only been a cookie in that case wouldn’t it? You wouldn’t have had —
HA: Yeah. I don’t think we had a cookie even then. I think we only had about eight or ten one thousand pounders. I could find out in the logbook.
RG: Yeah for that range you would have only had a small one. You’d need more fuel and less bombs for that range.
HA: They actually, like, we were two squadrons taking off from Waddington. So there would have been about forty planes. As you turned at the end of the runway, on the perimeter track to get on to the runway they had a petrol tanker there to top up the tanks.
RG: [laughs] Fair dinkum.
LD: Oh my goodness.
HA: They knew it was going to be touch and go you see.
RG: Wow.
LD: Wow.
RG: That must have been close to one of the longest return — one of the longest return raids of the war surely.
HA: For ordinary squadrons.
RG: Yeah.
HA: But the fellas who did the Tirpitz raids —
RG: Yeah.
HA: They did thirteen, fourteen hour trips.
RG: Yeah. They had modified aircraft though too didn’t they? Yeah.
HA: They threw out the turrets.
RG: Yeah. Yes. Yeah.
LD: Because that’s what I was going to ask with these raids was the crew or the aircraft modified in any way for those, for that long trip.
HA: No. No.
RG: The standard. Still must have come close. I mean there were some squadrons, some raids I believe where they flew across, dropped their bombs in east bloc Poland and then went on and landed at Russian airfields, refuelled and came back out.
HA: Yeah. They did the same with some of the Italians targets early in the war I think.
RG: Yeah. Flew down to North Africa. Yeah. Yeah.
LD: So did you guys know, well no, you didn’t know in advance did you? About where you were going? But how did you feel when you realised you were going to Norway?
HA: We feel pretty happy about it because we thought that’s going to be a safe target.
RG: Yeah.
HA: There’s not going to be anybody shooting at you all the way.
LD: Fair enough.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Actually it was a nasty trip for navigation. There was what they called an occlusion up in the North Sea where a cold front and a warm front got together.
RG: Yeah.
HA: It was raining. And the wind was variable and we were supposed to find our way up there after Gee ran out. For about another two or three hours flying after that. The bomb aimer gave what we thought was a pinpoint crossing the coast of Norway that turned out to be wrong. And he gave another one later on and he thinks it was right. But anyway we finally found the target. Then we had to fly for two or three hours without any aids coming back because it was ten tenths cloud. Still raining.
RG: And you were over the sea the whole way.
HA: When I finally got the first Gee fix we were fifty miles north west of where we should have been.
RG: That’s not bad.
HA: The wind had changed that much.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: In four or five hours.
RG: Yeah. But you’re over the sea almost the whole way too.
HA: Over the sea most of the time.
RG: So if you ditched —
LD: You’ve got no points of reference have you?
RG: No. And if you ditched, you had to ditch you were in deep trouble.
HA: Yeah. Anyhow. We were heading, had a slight headwind at that stage which had been pushing us up that way. We increased the speed a bit because of the headwind and then after about an hour of finding Gee fixes I found the wind had changed to almost the opposite. Anyway, we said, ‘Skipper you can slow the plane down a bit now. We’ve got a bit of a tailwind.’ And so he and I and the engineer did some calculations. We’d already decided we’d land at Lossiemouth or Leuchars or somewhere. In Scotland. But after we did the calculations the skipper said, ‘I think we can give it a go to get back to base because of the tailwind.’ Maybe the other fellas didn’t do that workings. But anyhow we cut it fine.
RG: Yeah. So you started ops with 467 in September.
HA: Yeah.
RG: First and third raid. On your second raid. Where was that to?
HA: Stuttgart. Night raid. In between the skipper did a second dickie to Pforzheim. I forgotten where he went. Somewhere like Stuttgart I think.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And then the next night he went.
RG: Went out on a —
HA: Stuttgart on his own with us.
RG: What was your, how did you, what was your experience of the first raid? You know. The first German raid really. First. Stuttgart. How did you —?
HA: No problem much. The navigator stayed in his blackout curtained room with the light on and I seldom went out and looked at the target.
RG: Ok.
HA: So I left it to the rest of them to do all the looking out and so forth. Our gunners, bomb aimer and engineer all were very good at keeping a lookout.
RG: Good lookout. Yeah. I suppose the resistance from fighters and so forth was slowing down a bit by then wasn’t it? It was still there but —
HA: You’ve heard about Schrage musik.
RG: Schrage musik. Yes. Yes.
HA: That was something that took a great toll of bombers.
RG: Bombers. Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Right up to the end of the war I think. When we finished our tour. In the next two months Waddington lost both their COs and one of their flight commanders. All experienced fellas on second tours.
RG: Ok.
HA: Sort of thing and, we think, all to night fighters with their upward firing guns.
RG: The guns. Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Some of the some of the German aces were reputed to have shot down over a hundred, sort of thing.
RG: There were a few who got — yeah. Yeah.
HA: It was pretty dangerous.
RG: Yes. Yeah.
LD: I have seen — I think it was a Lanc with, there were modifications, not official ones but just ones that were done in particular squadrons with like, an observation point underneath. I remember seeing the ones with like the little round dome underneath.
RG: Yeah. Like an astrodome.
LD: Yes.
RG: But on the bottom of the fuselage.
LD: Yes, but underneath. So, I have read about you know some aircraft that had these unofficial modifications to watch out for Schrage musik. Did you have anything like that in your — ?
HA: No. We weren’t even told about it.
LD: Ah. That’s what I was wondering as well.
HA: You know, I’m sure the authorities knew about it. Probably months, maybe more, before we flew. They didn’t tell us about it. I think it was probably to keep the morale up.
RG: Morale. Yeah. Yeah.
HA: What they did tell us to do was to do banking searches and —
LD: Banking searches?
HA: Banking searches.
LD: Yes.
HA: Like earlier in the war, before Window, the searchlights and ack-ack were mostly radar controlled and so if you flew straight they would drop onto you and so the technique was to —
RG: Swerve.
HA: Just weave. Go a few — half a minute this way.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Half a minute that way. Sort of thing.
RG: So, predictors couldn’t predict in curves.
HA: Window came in and their radar wasn’t able to lock onto planes. The technique was to put up a barrage of flak and in daytime it looked pretty horrible with all these black puffs in the air. They’d hang in the air for a long time so it looked —
RG: Looked worse than it probably was. Yeah.
HA: So anyway, the technique was to straight, go straight. Don’t weave. Get through it as quick as you can. And all the time we were over enemy territory our pilot was quite religious about the banking searches. They could make the plane do that. Without it changing direction.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Yes.
HA: He’d say, ‘Down port.’ The gunners would have a good look underneath and say, ‘All clear port.’ Roll it over.
LD: Right. Yeah.
HA: ‘All clear starboard.’
RG: Ah ok.
HA: We would do that for hours.
RG: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
HA: And we never got shot at by a fighter.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: A couple or three times a gunner saw a fighter and we started corkscrewing and we weren’t chased on any of those occasions.
RG: Yeah.
HA: The general opinion was that if a German fighter saw you doing a corkscrew they’d give up and look for somebody else.
RG: Someone easier. So, you never actually got attacked by a fighter.
HA: Never. No.
LD: Were you ever hit by flak?
HA: Oh yeah. Lots and lots of times. Sometimes a lot of holes. A couple of daylight lowish level ones we got holes from machine guns from the ground.
RG: Wow. Ok.
HA: Walcheren Island. We bombed Walcheren Island three times. Short daylight raids.
RG: Sorry? Whereabout?
HA: Walcheren Island.
RG: Oh sorry. Yeah.
HA: Scheldt Estuary. The first time this was what I was going to tell you about. 617 Squadron landing with their bombs on. I think they did there. We went. 5 Group sent about a hundred planes to Walcheren Island and the aim was to break the sea wall and flood the island and we did a run at about, I think about six thousand feet or something like that and drop seven bombs in a close stick and come around again and did another seven. In the same place. Hopefully.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And a hundred planes did that and they opened it up, the front of the island. Got a picture in The Sun and the next day, sort of thing, “The RAF floods an island.” Apparently 617 Squadron was standing by with tallboy bombs.
RG: Yeah.
HA: In case.
RG: Just in case you didn’t manage it.
HA: And they brought them home.
RG: Wow.
LD: They brought home Tallboys.
HA: Twelve thousand pounds.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Wow.
RG: I’d be terrified landing with a bloody Tallboy underneath.
HA: Yeah. Well, I don’t know if they brought them home and landed with them or whether they junked them somewhere else, you know but they didn’t need to use them on Walcheren Island.
RG: Actually sorry, one of the first chaps we interviewed — Arthur. He was, he did, he finished his tour in ‘45 and then was posted to an experimental unit experimenting with a blind landing aid which he told us a bit about and he said it was very very effective. He was there when the war ended.
HA: Yeah.
RG: But he, before he left his squadron he went down to the intelligence officer’s hut and nicked some of the photographs that he had taken himself on one of those raids and he gave us the photos and you could see the bombs striking the seawall. That was in Holland though. There was another one trying to break a dyke in Holland but at low level and — yeah. Arthur’s photos. Yeah. I forget what squadron he was with now but —
HA: The next two raids we did on Walcheren Island, they were both daylight, were on the big guns that were stopping the Canadians from going along the bank.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And stopping the navy probably from coming in as well although the estuary was mined and the navy had one go at it before and said, ‘No. It’s too dangerous.’
RG: Yeah.
HA: So, we were trying to bomb these big guns and they were pretty impervious to bombs I think but it ended up being a fairly hairy sort of a thing because we would go over and they’d say, ‘Oh yes, well the weather’s not too good. You might have to fly at six thousand,’ and you’d get there and have to fly at four thousand or something like that. And so, there was a lot of anti-aircraft fire.
RG: A lot of flak. Yeah.
HA: Small arms stuff even.
RG: Yeah. Four thousand feet. You’re not very high are you?
LD: I’ve read about bomb aimers keeping some of the Window and putting the Window on the bottom of their aircraft and lying on the Window to stop —
RG: A bit of armour.
LD: Yeah.
RG: Using the Window.
LD: To protect them from the flak.
HA: I’ve never heard of that.
LD: I I guess these were kind of individual things that people —
RG: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah
LD: Systems that people developed themselves.
RG: Did you have a mascot or a, you know, a token or anything.
HA: On the side of the plane.
RG: No. A personal one. A personal one.
HA: That one of us carried? No. None of us seem to have been too superstitious.
RG: Ok.
HA: A lot of them were but —
RG: Do you know of all the chaps we’ve spoken to most of them have said that? That they didn’t do it.
HA: No.
RG: Yeah.
LD: And yet you read such a lot about it don’t you?
RG: Yeah.
HA: About the only superstitious thing we did was we’d all pee on the tail wheel before we took off.
RG: [laughs] Yeah. I believe that was a common one.
LD: Was that very easy? In those flying suits.
HA: It was not. No. I can’t, I can’t ever remember using the toilet down the back of the plane during any of our trips.
RG: The Elsan.
HA: The pilot did it once.
LD: From the sound of things, you wouldn’t have wanted to use it if you could avoid it.
HA: Yeah. Yeah. Well, if you were above ten thousand feet you’d have your oxygen on for a start. So, you’d have to disconnect that. Get a hold of a portable oxygen bottle, go down, climb over the main spar which was about this high.
RG: Yeah.
HA: The pilot went down once on a daylight trip. I forget where it was to. So, I got to fly the plane for half an hour.
RG: Oh right.
HA: Straight and level.
RG: Yeah.
LD: And what kind of, we’ve heard about the — that the meal you’d had before an op. Was that still happening for you?
HA: Yes. Yes. But one of the early things you find out about being on an op on a night somebody would have said 2154 and that would be the number of gallons that a plane would hold and you’d say, ‘Oh well, it’s a long trip.’ And then the next thing they’d announce that the flying meal would be on at 3 o’clock. Something like that. And then a briefing at about 5 o’clock. That sort of thing. It would all lead up to actually take off time.
RG: Yeah. Yeah. It was quite a long period.
LD: So how far ahead would they kind of lock down the station? You know, set the security measures in place.
HA: I’m not too sure. I think it would probably be twelve, fifteen hours. Something like that.
LD: Right.
HA: Maybe a bit longer.
LD: Yeah. Yeah.
RG: Yeah.
LD: And did you guys get the wakey wakey pills too?
HA: Yeah. They gave them to us and I never used them once I don’t think. I don’t know if anybody else in the crew ever used them. Maybe the gunners did because they’d be tested on some of the long trips for staying awake.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: In the dark.
RG: Yeah.
LD: How did they do that? Test them,
HA: They’d be stressed.
RG: And tested as in stressed.
LD: Oh right. Ok. Not examined.
HA: I used the wrong word.
LD: No. No. That’s fine. I just took it the wrong way. Yeah. Yeah. Examined. Yeah. That’s what I meant.
RG: So, your crew. You had the same crew throughout all twenty nine?
HA: Throughout. Yeah. No replacements. No.
RG: Yeah. Have you got their names and so forth?
HA: Yeah.
RG: I mean you probably almost certainly remember them.
LD: Yeah. But it’s got all this. Maybe it’s written in there.
HA: Our pilot was Peter Gray-Buchannan. With a hyphen. His elder brother had done two tours as a rear gunner earlier.
RG: Wow.
HA: Over there.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Gosh. He was a lucky man wasn’t he?
HA: Have you heard of Doubleday and Brill?
RG: No.
HA: From Ganmain. They’re both fairly famous men. They both enlisted from Ganmain early in the war. Both went over there and did at least two tours. Maybe three. Both were wing commanders with the DSO and a couple of DFCs. That sort of thing. Billy Brill was CO of our squadron when we arrived. And I’ll tell you about the DFC now.
RG: Yes. I was just about to come to that eventually.
LD: Yes, it’s on my list.
HA: When we got to the squadron Bill called all eight of the new crews that had arrived from training into his office and amongst other things said, because we were all, nearly all flight sergeants, ‘All you flight sergeants who were thinking of applying for a commission don’t bother until you’ve done twenty trips. And then if you keep your nose clean you get recommended.’ He didn’t say, ‘Most of you won’t make twenty.’ [laughs] But anyway, that was his — so when I had done twenty trips I applied for a commission and Bill — Bill had been moved on and we had a new younger CO called Douglas. And he took it upon himself to sort of decide who was officer material and who wasn’t, sort of thing. One of the questions he asked me was, ‘Are you going to be any more use to the air force with a commission?’ And I said, ‘No. I can’t say that I will.’ I didn’t give him the right answers anyway and he didn’t recommend me.
RG: Yeah.
HA: So —
RG: That’s a fair answer though Bert. I’ve got to say. I have to say.
HA: When we got towards the end of our tour. I think probably only with one trip to go. It may have been two. The group captain called me in one day and said, ‘I’ve a bit of a problem. I’ve got one CO who recommends you fellas when you’ve done twenty trips and you’ve looked after yourself. And the other fella says yes or no to some of them.’ And he said, ‘The RAAF hierarchy requires that even if the CO says no it has to come to me. It’s not final.’
RG: Yeah.
HA: ‘So that’s my problem. Are you a good navigator?’ ‘Oh, I think so. I’ve lasted this long.’
LD: You’d done at least twenty trips.
RG: Yeah.
LD: You must be good.
HA: That was the end of the interview. So apparently on that day he approved me for a commission and so sometime later I got, in the mail, a letter saying that I’d got a DFC and I was a pilot officer.
LD: Oh.
RG: So, you didn’t make pilot officer or —
HA: Yeah.
RG: Oh. Ok
HA: Yeah. So I was a pilot officer dated from the day that I saw the group captain.
RG: Because as an airman you would have got the DFM wouldn’t you?
HA: Yeah.
RG: So, maybe they were going to give you the DFM and they went, ‘Oh God, he’s a pilot officer, we have to — [laughs] Did you get the DFM DFC for any particular —
HA: No.
RG: Just —
HA: I could show you the citation but it’s just a standard one that they gave to most people. The pilot got one with the same wording apparently.
RG: Right.
[pause]
HA: That’s fairly standard I think. There’d be hundreds of those. Came in a nice little case.
LD: Oh, it’s not there anymore though.
HA: It’s there.
RG: It’s on there.
LD: Oh, it’s a beautiful box isn’t it? It’s lovely.
HA: Yeah.
RG: You’ve got the Bomber Command clasp.
HA: Yes. I only got that one last year.
RG: It’s recent isn’t it? Yeah. Yeah.
HA: It was a bit of a hassle because I filled in all the forms and so forth. Sent it to England. And they sent it back, they sent back word, ‘No. You don’t apply there. You apply at Canberra.’ So, I had to go through it all again. Copies of stuff from the logbook and all that.
LD: So how, how was it presented to you?
HA: It was just sent in the mail. It wasn’t. There was no, no ceremony at all.
LD: Right.
RG: There’s an interesting thing on the back of it I’ve just noticed. It’s got on it that it was obviously first issued in 1918 and it’s got George Rex on it and then 1945 is just stamped in at the bottom.
HA: Yeah.
RG: That’s you know, that’s interesting that they keep — yeah.
HA: Yeah.
RG: I suppose originally when they did they first design they didn’t think they’d need it again.
HA: Yeah.
[pause]
HA: A local federal MP gave out those sort of things at one stage.
RG: Oh, the sixtieth. Yeah.
HA: Yeah. Just a medal .
RG: Yeah. World War Two. Yeah.
HA: And I was sitting with some other fellas that day and they had a Bomber Command medal on their chest. And I said, I asked them, I said, ‘Where did you get that?’ And they said, ‘We bought it.’ You can’t get a Bomber Command medal. They haggled with the government over there for years about getting one and they were never approved. The best they could do was a clasp. But apparently —
RG: Did Fighter Command get one? They got one, didn’t they? Fighter Command.
HA: I don’t know. Battle of Britain got one I think.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
LD: Yeah. The Bomber Command one. That sort of — there were problems with that with the political ramifications of Bomber Command. After the war.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
LD: That became quite unpleasant.
HA: Yeah.
LD: To say the least.
HA: Yeah.
LD: I just checked out the squadron before we came.
HA: Yeah.
LD: And — yeah. So, you talked about the support of ground operations during the D-day landings at that time and so on. It said that 467 participated in the raids on Peenemunde.
HA: Yeah.
LD: Were you there then?
HA: No.
LD: Ok.
HA: It was a research station for the V2s and V1s.
RG: And V1s. Yeah.
LD: Yes. It was a fascinating raid. I’ve read a book about it. it’s pretty amazing. And were you involved in Operation Manna and bringing the POWs back from Europe?
HA: No.
LD: And dropping supplies and so on.
RG: No. You’d finished by then, hadn’t you? You finished in January.
HA: I’ll tell you why I wasn’t. As soon as I finished my tour our pilot got transferred to Transport Command and I got transferred to Training Command. And I was an instructor at a Con Unit.
RG: Whereabouts?
HA: At Wigsley. Near Waddington.
RG: Yeah. Ok.
HA: And we were getting crews ready to go to squadrons that were going to be in Tiger Force.
RG: Tiger Force. Yeah.
LD: Right. That’s what else I was going to ask about because it said 467 was involved in that.
RG: Yeah.
HA: So, I was an instructor right up until they dropped the atom bomb.
LD: Right. Right. Fair enough.
HA: Yeah.
RG: And were you still at Wigsley right to the end?
HA: Still at Wigsley.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And I stayed on at Wigsley for another couple of months after that and did a bit of ferrying. We ferried some Stirlings over to Northern Ireland and some Lancasters down to Southern Britain. Did a Cook’s Tour over some of the targets we’d been in Germany. But generally sort of loafed around.
RG: Cook’s tour.
HA: Alex talked about that. Yeah.
RG: Yeah. With a Cook’s Tour? Was that. Ok. Yeah. Well Alex was going over, he was a pilot. He’s living up at Orange. He was going over specifically to photograph the damage. Is that the same thing? Yeah.
HA: No. No. They just put a heap — a heap of interested fellas.
RG: It was literally a sightseeing tour.
HA: Like a real Cook’s Tour. I don’t know how many. A dozen or something like that in a Lancaster. I took my box brownie and took a few photographs.
RG: But did you land anywhere on the continent or just went out and came back or —?
HA: Somewhere I’ve got where we went. I think it’s probably in the logbook where we went.
RG: Oh. Bound to be. Yeah. Yeah. No. Alex said they were photographing the damage for analysis purposes. Cook’s tour. Base — Brentwood. [unclear] [ Cape Gris Nez, [ unclear] Aachen. Turin. Cologne. Krefeld, Duisberg — it was a tour wasn’t it? Ham. Munster. Wesel. Eindhoven.
LD: Ray, can you read them out loudly for the tape?
RG: Oh yes. Ok.
HA: Start at the with the ones inside Europe.
RG: Yeah. Well, Cape Gris Nez, [unclear] Maastricht. Aachen. Turin. Cologne. Krefeld. Duisburg. Essen. Ham. Munster. Wesel. Eindhoven. Turnhout. Ostende. [unclear] Calais. Cap Gris Nez,
LD: Wow.
RG: Yeah.
LD: That’s comprehensive.
HA: Yeah. It was good. Yeah.
RG: It must have been an odd feeling flying over and knowing that no one was going to shoot at you.
HA: Yeah. Oh yeah. We had a look at the Dortmund Ems Canal. I don’t know if that’s even mentioned there but —
RG: Dortmund. Not the canal itself is mentioned but no.
HA: The Dortmund Ems Canal was a place where Bomber Command did a lot of damage. I think we might have been one of the first raids where they actually breached the canal walls and let the water out and stranded the barges but there was ten attempts at it I think. Altogether. Some of them didn’t work. We did two on the Dortmund Ems Canal itself and another one the Ems Wesel Canal which was nearby. Both night-time raids. And because of its importance it was a very dangerous target to go to. The ack-ack was fierce. Had plenty of searchlights and usually we seemed to have to, for one reason or another, do orbits when we got to the target. Either because cloud was too — we had to come down through cloud to find it or one time they had trouble with the marking and so, they said, ‘Do an orbit until we can get it properly marked.’ ‘Do another orbit.’ ‘Now you can come and do it,’ sort of thing. That sort of business happened.
RG: Yeah.
HA: So, and we did, finally did a daylight one on New Year’s Day to the Dortmund Ems Canal. And I met a fella after the war, playing golf, who’d been in our same squadron and was on the same raid and they got one engine on fire for a start and I wrote in my logbook, log and chart of the day, not the logbook, I’ve got a lot of logs and charts.
RG: Oh ok.
LD: Wow.
HA: “Aircraft on the starboard beam going down on fire. “ Dot dot dot. “Gone.” That was them.
RG: Oh right. Ok.
HA: They didn’t go down. They got down to about four thousand feet and got control of the plane and started off staggering back. Then it got another engine on the same side on fire and kept going. This fella was the bomb aimer and he said he put a piece of rope around the rudder pedal to help the pilot try and keep it straight. They staggered along and got fired at repeatedly because they were on fire but they got as far as the front line. To where the Americans were. And all bailed out successfully.
RG: Wow. Ok.
HA: The pilot was last out and he managed to get out apparently and got a DSO for it. Straightaway.
RG: Well, it sounds like he deserved it too. Yeah. You also did a raid here on the Lützow the battleship?
HA: Oh yes that was probably something special.
RG: Yeah [unclear] special target.
[LD excuses herself]
RG: Well there’s a daytime raid. Bergen as well.
HA: Yeah. Bergen was an interesting one. That was one of the ones where they said, ‘Bert, you ought to come out and have a look at it.’ This target. Most targets I didn’t want to come out of my blackout curtains. But Bergen there was four thousand feet mountains.
RG: On either side.
HA: And in between there was a valley where I, as navigator, was able to get on a Gee position line and keep between the two mountains and come down because we were supposed to bomb at twelve thousand or something but they said come down to the cloud base. Four thousand. We came down to three thousand eight hundred I think before we got out of the clouds. And then we snuck up a little bit. Just skimming under the clouds to the target and they’re shooting from downstairs. They’re shooting —
RG: From above. Yeah. Wow.
HA: He said, ‘You ought to come and see this. We’re being shot at from above as well as below.’
RG: God. Return from Marston Moor. So yeah, I was going to ask that. On any of your trips did you come down somewhere else?
HA: Yeah.
RG: Come back
HA: Quite a few times. I don’t know how many. Two or three perhaps. You come back from Europe and Waddington and all the inland bases would be covered with fog.
RG: Ah ok.
HA: So, they send you somewhere on the coast to land there.
RG: Yeah.
HA: I remember one time we got in a tender then and they drove us back and got lost. And so, we wondered around. It was a really cold night. Looking for, looking for Waddington.
LD: That’s just what you need I imagine.
HA: No signs up anywhere, you know.
RG: I can just imagine some of the conversations you guys would have with the drivers of the tenders, you know. We got all the way back from Germany and you can’t find bloody [laughs] Waddington.
HA: I think one of the navigators finally got in the front with him [laughs] I remember there was a town with a five way intersection where he didn’t know which one to take and he went backwards and bumped into a lamppost and about two hours later he bumped into the same lamp post [laughs] So, we were lost.
LD: Oh dear. Might have been easier to leave it ‘til daytime.
HA: Other times you’d stay. We stayed the night at one of those places too and then just flew back the next day.
RG: Yeah. I had a friend in Canberra. He’s dead now. He was a pilot in Stirlings and then — he was a flight sergeant and his navigator was a sergeant and he said there was a notice up one day saying volunteers for special operations. Instant promotion. Up one rank and he thought, ‘This is a good idea. What do you reckon?’ It was Pathfinder force.
HA: Yeah.
RG: So he converted over to Lancs for that. But he said when he was on Stirlings they were doing a navigation exercise. And it was a daytime one and they flew over another field and one of the, one of the crew was an RAF guy. He lived in the village nearby and he said, ‘Skipper can you put us down there?’ He said. So, they did. They put him down at the airfield. Went and had lunch in the mess and went back out. Ducked off home to see his mum, you know. Came back. And he said it would have been all perfect. He said, ‘I was taxiing up the runway, got to the end to turn on to the runway and clipped his wingtip and broke the navigational knob at the end on a post at the end of the runway. So, when he got back he had to explain how he managed to break it in the air.
HA: Yeah. He was in big trouble.
RG: Did you ever do anything like that? Your —
HA: No.
RG: No.
HA: We came back from a trip one time. I forget which one it was but when we got back to Waddington you couldn’t see the circuit lights. You could see the runway. It was very bad visibility and so the pilot said, ‘I’ve got to land this like a Tiger Moth. We’ll just get around the runway and then come in like that.’
RG: Side.
HA: And the fella that was in the caravan with the green and red light, sort of thing, at the end of the runway. He said afterwards, he said, ‘You fellas almost took my caravan off. Coming down like that.’ And then they closed the, they closed the place down. After that everybody else had to go over to the coast.
RG: Bert could you explain, sorry. The circuit lights. Can you explain how that, that worked?
HA: Yeah. They would have the runway with the runway lights and then they’d have circuit lights going. I don’t know. Half a mile. A mile around or something like that.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Almost touching somebody else’s.
LD: Right.
HA: ‘Cause there were so many of them.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And when you came back wanting to land you’d come in on the right hand side, sort of thing. And you’d call up the girl on the microphone. Tell them who you were. “Mozart dog to slagwort.” They’d say, ‘Go to channel two,’ or something like that. She’d tell you to stay at four thousand. So you’d go around again. Then she’d say, ‘Prepare to land.’ You’d go around. You’d have to say, ‘Wheels,’ at a certain place and come around and then lining up with the runway. You’d say, ‘Funnel.’
RG: Funnel.
HA: Yeah. And if you got the green light from the bloke in the caravan you could land.
RG: Right. Ok. Ok. So with the circuit it was the same diameter with the aircraft stacked in the altitude?
HA: Yeah. Yeah.
RG: So, you had a whole bunch of aircraft circling.
HA: She used to stack you up at four thousand or three thousand. Something like that.
RG: Ok.
HA: So, you wouldn’t run into one other.
RG: And you were all going anti clockwise, I guess.
HA: Yeah.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
LD: Well it’s a very responsible position isn’t it?
RG: Yeah.
HA: Yeah. All done by WAAFs.
RG: Yeah. ‘Cause you would have had aircraft coming back and straggling back really wouldn’t you? All over the place.
HA: Yeah. Sometimes.
LD: And she would potentially be triaging to see who’s going to land before others because of problems.
HA: If somebody had damage they would get priority and they’d leave you stacked up there.
RG: Yeah. I heard, I heard, sorry, it was earlier in the war. I think it was about ‘42 that the Germans were using intruders raids. They tried to get in to the circuits. Get an intruder in to the circuit. A night fighter. Was that happening later in the —?
HA: Yes. When I was at Wigsley. I was duty navigator up in the tower one night and some ME110s came in with the bomber stream coming back and got across the coast without —
RG: Without being detected because they were in the stream. Yeah.
HA: And they came to Wigsley and a couple of the other Con Units. They shot down two training planes at Wigsley.
RG: Yeah.
HA: I don’t know how many they shot down altogether. Five or six I think. They went to Waddington and machine gunned the mess. Had a go at the bomb dump without [laughs] without any damage. Bomb dumps are hard to —
RG: Yeah. They’re well protected.
HA: That was some experience.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Because the people in the control tower — it was probably a duty pilot and a duty wireless op as well as a duty navigator and somebody in charge of it. A bit of a flap on. You know, what do you do with planes being shot down?
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Turn the runway lights off for a start.
RG: Yeah. And then what do you do with the stacked aircraft in the air. Redirect them?
HA: Tell them to look out.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Yeah. That was, that was a strange one.
RG: Yeah. Yeah. ‘Cause I thought later in the war I wondered whether that still happened because the Germans had lost so many aircraft.
HA: Yeah. That would have been, that would have been probably March or something like that. 1945.
RG: Yeah. It was between January and May so, yeah. Wow. So still that late.
LD: So were they using FIDO for you to land with at night?
HA: Only on certain ‘dromes. We didn’t have it on every drome.
LD: Oh right.
HA: There was only a few FIDO ‘dromes.
LD: Yeah.
HA: It was terribly expensive.
LD: Oh, that’s, that’s what I thought. Looking at it it must have been just in terms of fuel.
RG: Did Waddington? Did Waddington have it?
HA: Used up hundreds of gallons of petrol.
RG: Waddington didn’t have it?
HA: No.
RG: No.
LD: No. I sort of wondered how effective it was too. With all that petrol burning there’d be smoke and everything as well as well as, as well as the lights.
HA: Probably turbulence. I should think it’s probably very difficult for pilots to land in.
LD: Yeah.
RG: Hence what, hence what Arthur was doing. Yeah. [unclear] he said it was very accurate by the way.
LD: Yeah.
RG: He said you could land a Lancaster almost hands off at night without any trouble whatsoever.
HA: Oh well.
RG: Then the war ended.
HA: Good planes to fly apparently.
RG: I’ve heard that. Yes. The pilot. A couple of pilots we’ve spoken to have said that. Yeah. They really liked them. Arthur all this stuff. This is obviously very precious. Have they got copies in Evans Head or anywhere else? Or are there any copies of it?
LD: I think there’s a book here too Rob.
RG: Oh. Ok.
LD: Yeah.
RG: Because what I was going to say was if we can manage to get copies of all this stuff — if you’re happy to do that. Put them in the archive as well.
HA: I’ve got the other logbook here somewhere I think. Yeah. I might have it down here. I have another logbook that you could take perhaps. It’s got all the stuff in it for the operations. I copied them out. I’ll find it for you. Probably downstairs somewhere.
RG: If we could copy them. I mean we could copy them here before we go and bring them back to you today.
HA: Well you’re welcome. Yeah.
RG: Yeah. Thank you. I guess we could go to the library or somewhere.
LD: Office Works. If they’re open.
HA: That book right there.
LD: This would be fabulous.
HA: I was telling you about the crew that got shot, well they caught on fire.
RG: Yes.
HA: Their navigator produced this book afterwards about their experiences.
LD: Oh. It’s not yours. I just saw it was from a navigator. I didn’t realise it wasn’t yours.
HA: No. It’s not mine. It’s about their crew’s experience and so forth.
RG: [unclear]
LD: Oh, is this is what you were talking about?
HA: It’s got little bits. See. That’s some of —
LD: A copy of the logbook.
HA: Some stuff out of my log and charts of the day. I lent it to him and he got it put it into the book.
LD: Is that what you were talking about with the copy of the logbook?
HA: No.
LD: Ok.
HA: No. That was just to emphasise that our tour — I think twenty four out of our twenty nine trips were just with 5 Group. We only did about five trips with, big trips with seven or eight hundred of Bomber Command.
LD: Oh yes. Oh you weren’t part of those really huge bomber streams then.
HA: Not as, not as a rule. Mostly we were just 5 Group.
LD: Yeah.
HA: And on some of those little daylight trips only half of 5 Group, you know, about a hundred planes.
LD: Right. That’s a big change from earlier in the war, isn’t it?
HA: Yeah. Yes.
LD: Yeah. Arthur. Sorry Bert. That’s Rob getting the names mixed up when we arrived.
RG: Yeah. Sorry. And I just called you Arthur a minute ago. Sorry about that.
LD: Very bad of me. What sort of experience did you have with the Committee of Adjustment. Did you, within —
HA: Were they the fellas that decided on LMF and that sort of thing?
LD: Yes. Yeah.
HA: Never had any experience of it. No. I heard about it.
RG: Oh, Committee of Adjustment were the guys who cleared the crews who were missing. Cleared their possessions and stuff out.
HA: Oh yes. Yeah. We had another crew in the same room as us. Sixty on one side and sixty on the other side. Both about the same time. And the navigator of the other crew was a good friend of mine because he came from Tooraweenah and he said I’m the only fella that’s ever, he’d ever met in the air force that had ever heard of Tooraweenah let alone been there and had a drink in his father’s pub. And they got shot down on their twentieth trip. So, we got woken up a couple of hours after we went to bed by the service police coming in and asking us if we would just mind looking on when they were sorting out their belongings.
RG: Witnessing that. Yeah.
HA: If there was anything that we particularly wanted to do something with to send to their parents or something like that. But we didn’t find anything that we wanted to. They just took the lot.
RG: Ok. So they just bundled everything together and took it.
HA: In the middle of the night sort of thing. It would have been 4 o’clock in the morning or something it was.
RG: Right. Ok. ‘Cause we’ve heard different — different stations seemed to do it very differently.
HA: Yeah. They were Air Force Military Police.
RG: Yeah. Yeah. ‘Cause other stations they used just airmen and —
LD: Sometimes the chaplain.
RG: Sometimes the chaplain. Yeah. Alex Jenkins, the pilot from Orange. He got shot down and he was the sole survivor. He was in a German military hospital, a Luftwaffe military hospital. Only for a few weeks actually before the British army overran the place in Holland and so he was sent back and he said when he got back all his kit was gone and he had to go down to London.
LD: At the dead meat factory, he described it as.
RG: Yeah. The dead meat factory with all these steel boxes with all the kit in it. He said there were just thousands of them in this warehouse. He had to go in and say, ‘That’s mine. Get it out.’ Yeah.
HA: There’s a few things that I’ve put aside that might be worth your while copying if you want to.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Because you could maybe photograph.
RG: Photograph these but — yeah.
LD: Those. Yeah.
RG: [what I could do with it] actually, we will take copies of those. Thanks. Bert, this chap because this is his book not yours is he still around or is he —
HA: No. He was four or five years older than me. I played golf with him for a few years here at Wagga.
RG: Right.
HA: But he’s gone now. He’d be a hundred, I think, nearly, now. Sam Nelson.
RG: Is there family around or anybody because what would be good is if we could get a copy of the book for the archive but the other thing too for books like this and we did it for another chap at Orange who was a navigator. An RAF guy. He’d written a book about his time in a prison camp and we’re trying to get these things into the National Library because they’ll take them just like that.
HA: You can take that as long as you like.
RG: Would it be alright though ‘cause it’s not you know.
HA: I’ve read it.
RG: No. I was thinking like, if the family might object. I don’t know. Should we notify the family that it’s? Is there any way to contact?
HA: The navigator himself. I think he’s probably gone.
RG: Yeah. He’s gone but — the family —
HA: I could tell you one little snippet about them. His crew were part RAF and part Australian.
RG: Yeah.
HA: At one time they had a reunion in Australia. Went over to Canberra. At the time that the G for George had just been refurbished.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Put back in to the museum and was all roped off. And they went up and I think Sam himself said to one of the attendants, ‘This is our crew that flew in Lancasters and we’ve just had a reunion. How about letting us get in?’ And they held it up and let them get in.
RG: Yeah. Actually, this chap from, Alex from Orange. He did the same thing. It was only – we spoke to him last year and only a month or so before he’d been down to the war memorial. It was the last time he could go down because he was getting a bit frail and he got down there and they put on a lift thing to get him up to the door. He got into the fuselage and he got up to the main spar and the two young guys were in attendance, and they said, ‘Do you want to go any further?’ And he said, ‘Yeah. I want to get over that main spar just one more time.’ And he said, ‘It took quite a while,’ he said, ‘But I got over the damned thing and he got up to the cockpit.’ [And he got the gun ] in the cockpit and he stood on it but on his way out he was coming down. He looked through one of the windows on the side and there’s an ME262 over in the corner. And that was the aircraft that shot him down. Not the same aircraft obviously but yeah and he said that was a bit of an odd feeling. But he said that anybody who had ever flown in Lancasters would understand that. That he just wanted to get over the main spar just once more. They had to help him back across but if he could only get over one way. You know. Yeah.
HA: I can remember — one thing I didn’t mention before. You asked me about damage to the plane. Quite a lot of holes sometimes. If they weren’t too big they just patched them over, you know, But down where the rear gunner slid in to his turret there was a piece of, probably a piece of plywood or something like that that he sat on and then slid in to his turret. One time we came back there was a hole the size of your fist through that. It would have missed the rear gunner by that much. And another time the pilot put his ‘chute in and they inspected it. I don’t know if they always inspected it. Probably they did but anyway there was a lump of shrapnel.
RG: Wedged in the parachute.
HA: In his seat parachute.
RG: And he was sitting on that.
HA: He was sitting on it. It didn’t get through the parachute [laughs]
RG: So none of your crew was ever wounded?
HA: No.
RG: No.
HA: No.
RG: Lucky.
HA: We were lucky.
RG: Yeah. So, with your time at Training Command — because the training losses were really high weren’t they? Guys killed in training. But in, was that with, was there a squadron that you were with at Wigsley or was it a training squadron that was, or just an ATU?
HA: I don’t think they called them a squadron. It was just a unit.
RG: Yeah. Ok. But did you lose any aircraft or any people under training? Apart from the ones shot down by the ME110s?
HA: I don’t think so. When we were on Stirlings we had a hairy experience. There had been a lot of rain and dirt alongsides of the runway was soft and there was a Stirling came in trying to land in a crosswind. Put one wheel off the runway, skidded out into the mud and we went out and helped to dig the bomb aimer out of his turret which he shouldn’t have been in because the mud had pushed him up over the guns.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Like a bulldozer.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Not much space in there at the best of times is there?
HA: No. So the next day we’re doing a three engine practice landing in a Stirling with, obviously no bombs and not much petrol sort of thing. So you can understand what happened. You’re not supposed to come, once you get below a thousand feet for a three engine landing you should land. So our skipper’s coming in. Same cross wind. Knows about what happened the day before. Got down almost to the deck and said, ‘I’m going around again.’ Pushed the three throttles forward. Told the engineer to start the other engine. The navigator’s doing his usual job calling out the airspeed so he doesn’t have to worry about that.
RG: Yeah.
HA: The stalling speed is about eighty apparently and I’m calling out, ‘Sixty five.’ [laughs] ‘Sixty five.’ ‘Sixty five.’ The pilot’s hanging on.
RG: [laughs] Jesus.
HA: By the time I got to the end of the runway the other engine had started up and because we had flaps down too it took a while to get up in to the air again.
RG: To get the speed up. Yeah. Yeah.
HA: That was touch and go.
RG: Yes. I should say so. So, what about when you were — the other time in the UK between ops. On leave. Did you have any leave as such while you were there?
HA: Oh yes.
RG: On your squadron
HA: Yes. You normally got six days leave every six weeks while you were on ops.
RG: Oh ok. Yeah. Yeah.
HA: A bit less if a few others got killed because they had a waiting list, you know. It was your turn.
RG: Oh yes. I heard about that. Yes. Yes.
HA: So it might be only five weeks.
RG: Yeah. I’ve heard about that. So where did you do on your leaves? You went in to London obviously a few times.
HA: Oh I’ve been to London. Yeah. I went up to Edinburgh one time. Took a girl to the pictures one time in the middle of summer. I was thinking I might have a kiss afterwards. It was still bloody sunny. The sun was up at 9 o’clock 10 o’clock at night. They had double summer time on.
RG: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So, you’re not trying to photograph that logbook are you?
LD: Yeah.
RG: Oh it’ll take forever.
LD: No. It wouldn’t take that long but I can’t, the shadow of the camera keeps, the shadow of the phone keeps going over it.
RG: Bert, if we could borrow this stuff.
HA: Yeah sure.
RG: We’ll photograph it and or copy it and then bring it all back to you today.
HA: Ok. That’s fine. Yeah.
RG: We can do that. That’s cool.
HA: I was going to say about leave.
RG: Leave. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah.
HA: I think after about our twenty trips we had leave and by that time I had a car and the skipper had a car. His was twenty pounds. Mine, I think, was thirty or something like that.
RG: What was yours?
HA: A Morris. Morris Minor. No. A bit bigger than a Morris Minor. It was a little narrow thing but a sedan with high windows.
RG: Oh yeah. Yeah.
HA: Morris something or other.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: A Morris Ten I think it was called. He had a Ford. And we decided we would do some touring down towards Devon and that sort of thing. Together. So we found somebody. I think the engineer might have put us on to an aunt or a niece or something like that and an address we could give down there. Where you couldn’t get to it by train.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And so you could petrol coupons to go.
RG: Oh ok. I was wondering. I was going to ask you about that. Yeah.
HA: Yeah. So we took off and we stayed at places like Stow in the Wold.
LD: They have such funny names some of them don’t they?
HA: Yeah. So we had a nice tour down that way.
LD: Did you have any family in the UK or anything? That you were able to visit?
HA: No. No. Some people did. Like Charlwood.
RG: Charlwood. Yeah. He went to the town of Charlwood to look up his ancestors. Yeah.
HA: When we first got to Brighton the first lot of leave we had there from there they had a scheme called the Lady Ryder Scheme.
LD: Oh yes. I’ve heard of that.
HA: Where they would send you for a week to somebody just to let you settle in to Britain, sort of thing and so I was sent up to a place not far from Windsor to a lady’s who was Mrs Adams.
RG: There you go.
HA: That’s probably why they picked her.
RG: Yeah.
HA: When I got there she’s got this lovely two storey house and she said, ‘I’ll just show you around the house and you can look after yourself. I’ll give you the key because my daughter’s having a daughter or a son or something and I won’t be here. Just help yourself.’ I never saw her again sort of thing.
RG: A bit pointless wasn’t it really. Not helping you to settle you in but still.
HA: But she said, ‘If you go to this little village. I think it was Taplow or somewhere there’s a woman here who likes seeing Australians. Margaret Vyner. Was that the name of the, yeah that’s right. Margaret Vyner was this Australian actress who liked seeing Australians.
RG: Ah ok.
HA: So she gave me her address and I went around there and was made welcome and she was married to an English actor called Hugh Marlowe who was a big handsome fella who’d played The Saint in one of the movies.
RG: Oh ok. Yeah. Yeah.
HA: I hadn’t been there very long and in comes an army captain with a case of brandy that they knew. I can’t just pick his name out from memory now but he was a very famous English actor.
RG: Not David Niven.
HA: David Niven.
RG: You’re kidding.
LD: Oh really.
HA: Yeah.
RG: Right.
HA: Back from North Africa.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
LD: Handsomest man in the universe I think.
HA: Yeah. A big name. So they got stuck in to the brandy and started talking about acting and all this sort of stuff and I said, you know, like, you don’t want me in the way. I snuck off back to Mrs Adam’s place.
RG: Oh well. You could say you met David Niven anyway.
HA: Yeah. And then the next day I decided to go to London. Got into a carriage. David Niven and a heap of others were in the same carriage. And he was there — [laughs] I said, ‘G’day,’ and he said, ‘G’day.’ And that was it [laughs}
LD: He’d had a big night had he?
RG: Yeah.
HA: Yeah.
RG: What about demob? What happened with demob? So you were there for a couple of months. You were there right up to VJ Day you said. In Training Command.
HA: Yeah. Finally we, we got sent to Brighton to spend some time waiting for a ship to come home. Got in a game of hockey at one stage which was the first time I had a game of hockey over there. I was very keen on hockey at high school. We played at Bournemouth in snow. Sago snow or something. They used a red ball instead of a white one [laughs] But yeah we put in some time at Brighton and then finally got on the Aquitania.
RG: Oh yes. Ok.
HA: Came home around South Africa.
RG: So that was what September or something? Or October. In 1945 still though.
HA: Late 1945.
RG: Yeah.
HA: About November or December ’45 or something like that I think.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Fair bit of waiting around for a ship.
RG: Yeah. Yeah. They were pretty busy. A lot of people to move.
HA: I went home to Mendooran and somewhere on the demob business in Sydney they did aptitude tests and that sort of thing. IQ tests I suppose and said — [pause] It’s lunchtime.
Other: Yes.
HA: In a bit I suppose. Well these people are going to leave very shortly.
RG: We’ll finish this off very quickly and you can have your lunch. We’ll just finish it off very quickly now.
Other: Ok.
RG: We’ve got to the end now.
Other: That’s alright.
RG: Five — ten minutes.
RG: Yeah.
Other: He can talk.
HA: I’ve got a pretty good memory.
RG: You do actually. Yeah.
HA: Where were we up to?
RG: Aptitude tests and IQ tests.
HA: ‘Oh yes,’ they said, ‘You can go to university and do virtually what you want to. Whatever you like.’ I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to go back to the public service. That’s one thing. So I elected to do Ag Science. Which I did. And I think only forty of the one hundred or so people who lined up for it passed because half of them were ex-servicemen and the place was overcrowded and they weren’t — didn’t have the facilities for big numbers that they should have had.
RG: Whereabouts was that? Sorry. That was at —?
HA: Sydney Uni.
RG: Sydney Uni. You said you only did a year of that.
HA: Yeah.
RG: Yeah.
HA: I thought to myself it’s a four year course. I’d used up nearly all the money I’d kept from the end of the war. What am I going to do for the next three years? Talked to a couple of fellas who had just finished fourth year Ag Science. They said, ‘The best we seem to be able to do is get a job with the Agricultural Department at about eight pounds a week.’ I said, ‘No.’ Dad had just sold the farm because of the drought and he had a bit of spare money. He said, ‘I could stake you some the money to start share farming.’
RG: That’s you and your brother did that.
HA: So we went share farming and made some money.
RG: Yeah. Yeah. And that was it.
HA: That was it. I did a bit of truck driving and had a sports store and then went back to, oh, went back to uni by correspondence while I was teaching at Mudgee.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Yeah.
RG: Is there anything else you’d like to add or any questions for us?
HA: If you’d like to read through those you’ll find some interesting stuff. I’ve written some three pages in the last couple of days of things that I’ve sort of —
RG: Ok.
HA: Thought were important.
RG: Yeah. Well we’ll definitely, we’ll take copies of those definitely. But we’ll let you have your lunch now.
HA: Yeah.
RG: Thank you very much for that.
LD: Can you just sign this here. This is just to say that —
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
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AAdamsHG170215
PAdamsHG1704
Title
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Interview with Herbert Adams
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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01:53:42 audio recording
Creator
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Rob Gray
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-02-15
Description
An account of the resource
Herbert Adams grew up in New South Wales Australia and joined the Air Training Corps as soon as it was established. He later joined the Royal Australian Air Force and after training, he completed a tour of operations as a navigator with 467 Squadron. He describes crewing up, flying operations in Lancasters and his experience of avoiding aerial attack. He recalls the use of navigational aids including Gee, API and H2S. He then became an instructor at RAF Wigsley. He discusses an occasion when Me 110s attacked the airfield. He talks of a Cook's Tour over Germany when others photographed the after effects of the war. He was demobilised back to New South Wales and later taught for the RAAF.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
Spatial Coverage
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Australia
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Nottinghamshire
California--San Francisco
United States
California
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Carolyn Emery
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1943
1944
1945
467 Squadron
5 Group
aircrew
Anson
bombing
control caravan
Cook’s tour
crewing up
demobilisation
Distinguished Flying Cross
fuelling
Gee
ground personnel
H2S
Lancaster
Me 110
military living conditions
navigator
Operational Training Unit
promotion
RAF Lichfield
RAF Llandwrog
RAF Swinderby
RAF Waddington
RAF Wigsley
sanitation
service vehicle
Stirling
superstition
Tiger force
training
V-1
V-2
V-weapon
Wellington
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/205/3340/ABatesP151009.1.mp3
f5fd2ef009e496cfc1da092a451f6c89
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
Bates, Philip
Philip Bates
P Bates
Description
An account of the resource
One oral history interview with Philip Bates (1307447 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a flight engineer with 149 Squadron until his aircraft was shot down and he became a prisoner of war.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-10-09
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Bates, P
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
BW: This is Brian Wright interviewing Mr Philip Bates at home in Urmston, Greater Manchester on Friday 9th of October at 2pm. Mr Bates could you please confirm your full name?
PB: Yes. Phillip Bates.
BW: And your rank.
PB: Sergeant when I was shot down but warrant officer when I returned back from being a prisoner of war.
BW: Ok. And do you recall your service number at all?
PB: Yes 1307447.
BW: It’s surprising how that -
PB: And I can tell you my prisoner of war number as well
BW: Ok.
PB: 222803
BW: 222803
PB: Stalag 4b.
BW: Ok. And what squadron were you on, sir?
PB: 149 at Lakenheath.
BW: Ok. So if you could just give us an idea of what your life was like prior to joining the air force so where you grew up and any sort of significant movements before joining the RAF and what prompted you to join.
PB: Yeah. Well I’m a native of Burnley, Lancashire, a cotton weaving town, until I was employed as a junior clerk with a local manufacturer but once the war started I was keen to get in and immediately after the fall of France I volunteered for the air force. And -
BW: So this would be May 1940.
PB: This would be May 1940 and went to Blackpool for a fortnight square bashing.
BW: Ok.
PB: Those of us who were on that particular course were then posted to Cosford and -
BW: Ok.
PB: Nobody thought about anything in those days except the imminent invasion of Britain and we who’d been in the air force a fortnight were given the job of defending Cosford against German paratroopers which was the most farcical thing you could ever imagine so a friend and I very quickly sneaked away to the orderly room and volunteered for training as flight mechanics and we both -
BW: Ok.
PB: Trained as flight mechanics and then as fitter 2E’s and my friend was posted to 149 squadron where I met up with him in 1943. I went to 86 squadron, Coastal Command flying the Beaufort torpedo bombers and moved from there to Scotland and eventually I was sent to Sealand to a huge maintenance depot on a six month potential NCO course with the intention that when I returned back to my unit I’d be made a corporal but whilst I was at Sealand a Manchester landed and this was June 1942 and I went to look at this Manchester. I’d never seen anything bigger than a, than a Wellington before and this thing was stood there with its bomb doors open and this was a few months after Butch Harris had taken charge and I looked up into that bomb bay and I said to myself. ‘Bomber Command is no longer a joke. It’s big. It’s getting bigger. I’ve got to be part of it,’ and so the next day I volunteered for training as a flight engineer.
BW: Ok.
PB: And I trained early in 1943. Posted to a Heavy Conversion Unit at Waterbeach where I was crewed up with a crew who had just finished their OTU on Wellingtons and we went from there.
BW: And so just thinking back to your decision to join Bomber Command. You’d already had some technical training -
PB: Yes.
BW: At that stage.
PB: Yes.
BW: And so you wanted to further that as a flight engineer.
PB: Well the obvious job for a fitter 2E was to be, was to be a flight engineer.
BW: Ok.
PB: And it didn’t require a great deal of training to bridge the gap of course.
BW: And there were a number of guys who went through Halton. Did you do any training for flight engineering at Halton or not? With [?]
PB: No. St Athan.
BW: Right.
PB: St Athan.
BW: So you weren’t one of Trenchard’s brats or anything?
PB: Oh no I wasn’t a brat. I was too old to be a brat [laughs].
BW: And so it was the sight of the Manchester that prompted you to join.
PB: Yes.
BW: Properly Bomber Command.
PB: Yes, yes.
BW: Were you able, at that stage, to volunteer for flying duties or did that come later? Did you foresee that as being part of that trade as a flight engineer?
PB: Once I became a flight, once I became a flight engineer obviously I was going to go into Bomber Command.
BW: Ok. And -
PB: When I arrived at St Athan I was given choices I could train to be. I could train to be on Stirlings or Halifaxes or Lancasters or Sunderland Flying Boats or Catalina Flying Boats. Now, as a fitter I’d always worked on radial engines and so I chose this, I chose the Stirling for the reason that it was Bomber Command and it had radial engines. It perhaps wasn’t the wisest choice. I’d have been better off on Lancasters probably but I I I liked the radial engine so that’s why I chose Stirlings.
BW: Speaking as an engineer how did you find the radials then? Were there, were there particular properties about them that you liked?
PB: Yes. They, they, they were more powerful than the Merlin for starters and they were more dependable and they could take more, they could take more damage.
BW: That’s er that -
PB: When I when I was a boy very keen on aircraft now to me the inline liquid cooled engine was just a big motor car engine. The radial was a proper aeroplane engine.
BW: Ok.
PB: That’s what it was all about for me. The radial was a proper aeroplane engine. The other was just a big motor car engine.
BW: I’m sensing there there’s a difference between the aerial engine and flying. Did you have a wish to fly at an early age?
PB: Well as a fitter whenever I worked on an aircraft and a pilot came along to do a test flight I invariably asked if I could go up with him so I flew on, I flew on Lysanders, Blenheims and Oxfords as a passenger.
BW: And which of those was your favourite? Which was -
PB: Oh the Lysander.
BW: Really?
PB: Oh gorgeous. You’re going, you’re going along and there’s a slow, you heard a terrible creaking noise and the slots and slats worked and the flaps come down.
BW: Ahum.
PB: And you could practically stand still. Wonderful aeroplane. Wonderful.
BW: They used that -
PB: Aeroplane.
BW: On special duties -
PB: Yeah.
BW: Squadrons.
PB: Short take off, short landings.
BW: Yeah.
PB: Yeah.
BW: But they were, they were a lovely aircraft to be a passenger in.
PB: Oh yes.
BW: Was it?
PB: It was a marvellous aeroplane was the Lysander. I loved it.
BW: Did you get many flights in those?
PB: Yes quite a few. Yes. I was on, I was on an ackack calibration unit. We worked in concert with the defences of Edinburgh the Forth Bridge and the Rosyth dockyard and I was once in a Lysander where we did dive bombing exercises on the Forth Bridge which was fantastic.
BW: Brilliant.
PB: Absolutely fantastic. It was like being in a JU87 almost.
BW: And this was just to calibrate the ackack guns as you say.
PB: Yes.
BW: To make sure they had the right sort of -
PB: Yes.
BW: Ranging or -
PB: Yes. Yes.
BW: Distance. There were no rounds fired in these -
PB: No. No. No just -
BW: Just to make sure.
PB: Calibration yeah.
BW: Right but either way the pilot imitated a dive bombing manoeuvre on a
PB: Yeah but we had a real clapped out aircraft.
BW: So having had some experience of Lysanders, a single engine aircraft and Oxfords the twin engine.
PB: Yeah.
BW: You then -
PB: All radial engines of course.
BW: And radial engines yeah you then opted while you were at St Athan to go forward for Stirlings.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And what was the course that lead you from St Athan to your squadron? How, how did you go about getting that?
PB: Well, we, we completed our course and we got our brevies and were posted to, to Waterbeach Heavy Conversion Unit and I was introduced to a pilot, a Pilot Officer Cotterill and he was my skipper and I then met the rest of the crew and we took it from there. Did our heavy conversion training.
BW: And how long did that take? Roughly.
PB: Not very long. Maybe about eight weeks I suppose. Something like that.
BW: And was most of that or all of it daylight sorties or were there night time -
PB: No.
BW: Ops involved as well?
PB: We did, we did two four hour sessions of daylight take offs and landings, circuits and bumps. Take of twenty minutes to take off and land for four hours. And having done eight hours of that in daytime we did another eight hours at night and then after that we did, we did cross country flights.
BW: And when you met your crew at this point did you stay together from the conversion unit through to, on operational squadron as the same crew or were the members interchanged?
PB: We lost two members. We lost two members shortly after we joined the squadron.
BW: And was there a reason behind that at all?
PB: Yes. Our first, our first navigator, Geoff was a regular soldier stationed in India when the war broke out. Browned off. To escape he volunteered for training as air crew. He had a stammer which didn’t help and he was a useless navigator and we knew he was useless and our first trip was a very simple mine laying in the North Sea and he flew us straight through the balloon barrage at Norwich coming back and the next day he packed his kit bags and left us.
BW: And was that his choice or -
PB: No. No, that was forced upon him.
BW: Right ok so it wasn’t something there like a moment of self-awareness. He decided to leave.
PB: No. No, he told, he told us he said, ‘They decided I’m not suitable for Bomber Command. I’m being posted to a Coastal Command station.’ Well I think that was just a face saver on his part. I can’t imagine what happened to him but he couldn’t navigate for toffee. Even, even, even with a Gee set he was useless.
BW: Ahum.
PB: And then we did two mine laying trips. We did a lot of fighter affiliation exercises and our mid upper gunner [Bolivar?] a Londoner was brilliant during, during fighter affiliation. Now, Len, Len the wireless operator was always sick. He spewed up everywhere and I sat there and think, ‘Why don’t you crash the bloody thing and get it over with.’ That’s how bad I felt and Bob was as happy as could be but we did two mine laying trips. One in the North Sea -
BW: Ahum.
PB: And one in the river estuary at Bordeaux and then our first target was the opening night of the Battle of Hamburg. 24th of July.
BW: This would be 24th of July 1943.
PB: Yeah. The next night we went to Essen. The next day our mid upper gunner reported sick with air sickness. Now, how he suddenly became air sick overnight I do not know but that was the end of him. So we had a new navigator and a new mid upper gunner.
BW: Sometimes after raids like that men would be removed if they were felt to perhaps have broken at some stage. Do you -
PB: Oh yes.
BW: Do you think that might have been an impact?
PB: Yes. He was still, he was still on the station when we were shot down and I’ve often wondered what he made of it that morning when he woke up and found five empty beds.
BW: And so if I can just touch again on the fighter affiliation. What kind of exercises were carried out there?
PB: Well either, either a Spitfire or a, or a Hurricane would make mock attacks on us and the gunners would give instructions to the skipper as to what evasive action to take and it was quite, it was quite, because our bomb aimer was a failed pilot who could fly, fly a Stirling perfectly well and the Stirling had dual controls so him and the pilot used to work together and we could really throw it about. Really throw it about. You could never have done that on a Lancaster what we did with a Stirling,
BW: No. There was only a single set of controls.
PB: Yeah. Oh it was a wonderful aircraft. Wonderful manoeuvrability aircraft. Couldn’t get very high but by George it could, it could manoeuvre.
BW: And so you mentioned about the raid on Hamburg. That was pretty close to being your first operational sortie.
PB: That was our first target yes after two mine laying trips.
BW: And what, what do you recall about that at all because it was Operation Gomorrah, the raid on Hamburg was pretty significant.
PB: It was operational. What, what, what was most fascinated me most was the colours. The colours of the lights. Reds, greens, yellows. Searchlights, blue searchlights, tracer shells, flak it was an incredible sight. An incredible sight and when you see, when you looked down and someone had just released a string of four pound incendiaries you’d get this brilliant white light like that and then it slowly turns red as the fire gets going. An incredible sight.
BW: So you’d see a sort of a line of white which would -
PB: Yes.
BW: Presumably be the magnesium -
PB: Yeah.
BW: In the incendiaries -
PB: Yes.
BW: Setting fire to the building which was then of course -
PB: Yes.
BW: Catch turn orange and burn.
PB: Yes it was quite remarkable.
BW: And did you only make the one raid on Hamburg or did you return because there was -
PB: We, we, we -
BW: Four days I think.
PB: In ten days this was our introduction to the target. In ten days we did four Hamburgs, an Essen and a [Remshite]
BW: Wow so you flew right through the raid on, or the operation against Hamburg -
PB: Yeah.
BW: In that case.
PB: And the second night of course. The night of the firestorm oh, deary deary me, that was terrible.
BW: Were you aware at all of what was, what was going on? It seems a lot of information has come out subsequently. What were you sort of aware of the damage at that time?
PB: Well where -
BW: While flying.
PB: On the second night when we were back over the sea I went up into the astrodome and looked back and there was only one fire in Hamburg that night. It looked to be about three miles across and it came straight up white, red and black smoke thousands of feet above us and I said over the intercom, ‘those poor bastards down there.’ I couldn’t help myself. It was a terrible, terrible sight. I’ve never seen anything like it on any other target.
BW: At once it’s a spectacular sight but it’s also when you see that sort of thing -
PB: We, we, we killed forty thousand people that night.
BW: When did that, when was that made aware to you? When did you become aware of that sort of statistic? Was it pretty soon after or was it -
PB: Well the newspapers reported it a couple of days later and gave the number of dead.
BW: Right.
PB: And quite honestly I was disappointed. I thought from I saw it must have killed more than that.
BW: It sounds like they might have underestimated.
PB: Yeah. But forty thousand people were killed that night.
BW: Ahum.
PB: Compare that to how many were killed in London in the entire period of the war. There was no comparison.
BW: No. It’s different isn’t it?
PB: But we never, we never, we never achieved anything like Hamburg again until Dresden of course and in Dresden it only killed twenty odd thousand.
BW: And so Hamburg has obviously made quite an impression for that reason.
PB: Hamburg, I think was undoubtedly Bomber Command’s greatest success of the war. I’ve just, I’ve just read a book by Adolf Galland who was in charge of the German night fighters and the things he says about what the consequences of Hamburg and what it meant to the High Command and the changes it was, it shattered them. Completely shattered them.
BW: So it had, it had certainly had ramifications on the ground but it had more ramifications for the Luftwaffe High Command is what you’re saying.
PB: Yes. Yes. It terrified the German fighter defence to pieces. Terrified them.
BW: And did you see many night fighters at this stage over Hamburg? Were they active?
PB: No because it was it was the first, it was just the introduction of Window and everything was at odds.
BW: And so Window was the anti-radar -
PB: Yeah.
BW: Jamming mechanism.
PB: Yeah.
BW: Where they chucked out strips of aluminium.
PB: But they recovered, they recovered from, from Window very very quickly and they got, they got a new form of defence which was more effective they forced it out before, before Window and I’ve read the German view that Window did more harm than good for Bomber Command in the long run because it completely organised their defences.
BW: But at least on that night or on those nights that you were flying over Hamburg the fighters were ineffective because -
PB: Yeah.
BW: Of the use of Window.
PB: The first night there were eight hundred aircraft and we lost twelve.
BW: Wow.
PB: And most of those were lost because they were off course. Separated away from the protection of Window.
BW: Were there any hits from the ackack below? German anti-aircraft fire was renowned as being very accurate. Did you feel that as you were flying over there?
PB: The one thing, the one thing that fascinated me about ackack was that the smell of cordite filled the aircraft. You were flying through clouds of the stuff but when we landed the bomb aimer and I always got our torches and we searched underneath the aircraft and if there was no damage we were disappointed. We expected to have been hit.
BW: So that, that, sort of, I suppose summarises or encompasses your first few trips on operations. What happened after Hamburg? What were the next -
PB: Well we flew on -
BW: Significant raids for you.
PB: We flew on the last two raids ever carried out on Northern Italy and we flew twice to Nuremberg which we always regarded as a particularly important Nazi target and we did a few other various towns in the Ruhr and then on the 31st of August we went to Berlin and that was something else. That was an absolute complete fiasco.
BW: And this was still 1943?
PB: Yeah. Yeah.
BW: In August ’43.
PB: Yeah. The raid on Berlin on the 31st of August. Well the trouble was we’d been, we’d been to Monchengladbach the night before and we quite often did two nights, two consecutive nights. Well, you do Monchengladbach you get very little sleep, you go for briefing and you’re told its Berlin. There were howls of rage from all the air crews and that manifested itself later because that night about eighty aircraft ditched their bombs in the North Sea and returned early. Biggest number ever ‘cause people weren’t prepared to go.
BW: That, that almost sounds a bit like a mutiny in a way doesn’t it?
PB: It’s not far off.
BW: Down tools.
PB: It’s not far off really but the raid was also badly planned. All the damage to Berlin had been in the west and it was intended that this raid should do damage in the east and so we were sent to a point south of Berlin. There was Berlin on our left. We expected to fly seventy miles east. Split-arsed turn, fly seventy miles back and approach Berlin from, from the east. Now, nobody did it. The pathfinders put their markers down two miles south of where they should have been and we all approached from the south so the creepback extended miles and miles and miles. We killed less than a hundred people in Berlin. We lost over two hundred airmen killed and over a hundred prisoners of war. It was a complete and utter fiasco.
BW: Wow and that simply stemmed from, as you say, the pathfinder markers being dropped two miles south.
PB: And we’re coming from the south.
BW: Yeah.
PB: You can imagine it, practically no bombs and the Germans that night for the first time put down these parachute flares. It was like driving down the Mall with all the lights on. It was an incredible sight and it’s such a big place to get through. It takes forever.
BW: And so the gunners clearly with those parachute flares they could have a clear sight presumably of the bomber stream.
PB: And you’ve got day fighters looking down.
BW: Wow.
PB: As well as the night fighters looking up and you’ve got the schragemusik by this time as well.
BW: Which are the cannons in the back of an ME110 to fire vertically underneath the bomber yeah.
PB: Yeah or a JU88.
BW: Yeah.
PB: Or a Messerschmitt 110.
BW: Yeah.
PB: Seventy degree angle, in between the inborn engine and the fuselage hit the main tanks. All you’d see is a great big flash in the sky and that’s it. It was gone.
BW: The crews often said they didn’t know they were there.
PB: No.
BW: Those who survived didn’t see them.
PB: You could see an aircraft flying peacefully and then the next second it’s a ball of fire and you’ll see no tracer and a myth arose and the myth was that the Germans were firing a new type of bomb, a new type of shell which we called a scarecrow and it was designed not to shoot aircraft down but to explode and give the impression of an aircraft blowing up and for months navigators would log these and they weren’t scarecrows. The Germans never had a scarecrow. They were aircraft blowing up.
BW: Actually the aircraft themselves.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And -
PB: And the irony of that is that in the First World War the British had upward firing guns to attack zeppelins.
BW: Ahum Yeah.
PB: [laughs] They never learn.
BW: Because they were difficult to shoot down as well. But so ok from, from there that’s two operations on the trot really. Monchengladbach and Berlin.
PB: Yeah.
BW: You mentioned those airmen killed. Were any of those from the squadron? Did you know any of those guys at all? Were there Stirlings in that lot that were shot down?
PB: Er we there was a raid on Berlin on the 24th of August as well but we were on leave but a crew that we trained with went missing that night and a friend of mine got shot down on the night we were on. A fella called Lew Parsons. He was shot down on the 31st .
BW: Luke Parsons?
PB: Yeah. L E W, short for Lewis.
BW: Oh I see. Lew Parsons.
PB: He was a flight engineer.
BW: And he was shot down on the 31st of August.
PB: Yeah. Yeah. But it, it was a dreadful night. Anyway, the next day our skipper and our navigator were commissioned officers and so the next day we met up with the skipper and he said Johnny’s reported sick and Johnny was our navigator. Flying Officer Johnny [Turton ]. A fantastic navigator. Absolutely fantastic and he’d gone sick and later in the day we were given a replacement. Another flying officer but a New Zealander by the name of McLean and he was the exact opposite from Johnny. Johnny was a big outgoing personality who radiated confidence. This chap had no, no, no personality whatsoever. He was with us five days. We scarcely ever saw him. We scarcely ever spoke to him. We never even learned his Christian name. And he got us shot down.
BW: And that was, of course then going to be your last -
PB: Yeah.
BW: Last flight.
PB: Yeah 5th 5th of September. Mannheim.
BW: Ok. I was just going to ask a question there and it’s just gone from my memory but I’ll probably come back to it. So, oh yes how far into your tour were you at that point? It sounds -
PB: That was our fifteenth trip.
BW: So exactly halfway through.
PB: Exactly halfway. We knew with Johnny we could do, we could do the tour because he was so brilliant but without him we were lost and he finished his tour. He joined another crew, finished his tour got his DFC, survived the war. He was brilliant.
BW: It’s strange how fate goes isn’t it?
PB: Yeah. Yeah.
BW: Before we move on to your experience of being shot down I would just like to ask about what it was like for you as a flight engineer in the sort of preparation and flying out. What sort of things you would do? Perhaps if you could give us a sense of preparation you would go through to -
PB: Yes.
BW: To board the aircraft.
PB: Yes.
BW: What it was like to then go up in a Stirling.
PB: Well to begin with once we got out the aircraft there were a great many pre-flight checks to do. One of them was to go up onto the main plane with a member of the ground crew. Now, we had fourteen petrol tanks on a Stirling. Sometimes we only had the four main ones. Sometimes we had fourteen. Sometimes we had a mixture but my job was to go up on to the main plane with a member of the ground crew and he would open up the filler caps on all the tanks that were supposed to be full and I had to check visually that they were full to the, to the brim. Now, every night I’m stood on the leading edge of a Stirling. I’m twenty feet above the ground. I think when he moves to the next one and I follow, if I slip I’ll roll down the main plane I’ll fall fifteen feet to the tarmac and at the very least I’ll break an ankle and I’ll be alive tomorrow morning and I always, always considered that thought. I never did it of course. The thought was always there. It was in our own power to be alive tomorrow morning [laughs]. But once, once in the air my two main jobs was one to monitoring engine performance making sure the pressures, temperature etcetera were as they should be and that we were flying at the right airspeed and the right revs and the other was calculating every twenty minutes I had to calculate the amount of petrol used from whichever tank doing the past every twenty minutes recorded so that I always knew how much petrol remained in each tank because they weren’t over generous with their petrol allowance and people did run short very often. So that was, that was important, to keep, to know exactly how much petrol you had and where it was.
BW: So even though you’d done inspections and the ground crew had correctly filled the tanks presumably you could encounter unknown winds and like a headwind.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And use your fuel more quickly.
PB: As I understand it the calculation was made. This is your track. It’s so many miles. You’ve so much petrol. We’ll give you so much and we’ll give you another three hundred and twenty gallons as a, as a reserve.
BW: Reserve.
PB: But of course you get off track, winds are against you, anything can happen. You can’t hold height, you’ve got to get into rich mixture to climb again. All sorts of things could happen to make you use more fuel.
BW: And that would include of course having to take evasive action over the target or anything like that.
PB: Yes, evasive, any time when you had to open up the engines and go into full fuel. We were using a gallon a minute.
BW: That’s pretty significant and that’s just through one engine. A gallon a minute through an engine.
PB: No. It’s, that’s the aircraft.
BW: Oh, the aircraft. Ok.
PB: A gallon a mile through the aircraft.
BW: Oh right.
PB: A gallon a minute through each engine yes.
BW: And I think you said the Stirling was a, was a lovely aircraft to fly. What was your experience generally of the environment in which you were having to work? Was it cramped or was there enough room to do your job?
PB: I’ve only been in a Lancaster once and it horrified me. There’s no space to breathe. You could hold a dance in a Stirling. It was huge and because of the short wingspan it was so highly manoeuvrable. It was a beautiful aeroplane but it couldn’t get any height. Couldn’t get any height.
BW: A limited ceiling.
PB: We had to fight to fly at thirteen thousand. On the last night at Hamburg. The night of the big storm we did two runs over Hamburg at eight thousand feet with the bomb doors frozen up.
BW: Wow.
PB: That was a terrible night.
BW: Just out of interest the air supply gets pretty thin around ten thousand feet. Did you ever have to use oxygen?
PB: It goes on automatically at ten thousand feet.
BW: Right.
PB: Ten thousand feet, oxygen on and skipper charges into S gear.
BW: Into S gear.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And does that give you extra boost through the engines?
PB: Yeah. Yeah.
BW: Ok and were you able, in some cases crews had to stow their parachutes. Were you able to move around with your parachutes on or did you stow it?
PB: No it was always stowed. Always stowed away.
BW: How did it feel when you were actually bombed and fuelled up ready to go and you’re at the threshold of the runway and you’d got the green light. Could you just talk us through that?
PB: Well -
BW: What you were feeling there and what you were doing?
PB: I experienced three feelings. Between briefing and going out to the aircraft, absolute terror. Once we delivered the bombs and the photoflash had gone off, wonderful. Once back eating bacon and eggs very, very satisfied. Those were the three emotions that I suffered.
BW: How did it feel when you were given that that green light? Presumably as a flight engineer you followed the pilot through on the throttles.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And you feel this surge of power of the engines going.
PB: Yeah all all the while was concentrating on getting the thing up because the Stirling had a violent swing. It had this ridiculous undercarriage and because of the torque of the engines it swung to starboard and you had to correct that swing either on the throttles or the stick. Now, if you got a cross wind as well that swing could be quite dramatic and it went like that and then like that.
BW: So a violent swerve either way.
PB: The undercarriage just collapsed you don’t want an undercarriage collapsing when you’ve got a thousand -
BW: No.
PB: Incendiary bombs stuck in the belly [laughs].
BW: Were there any incidents where aircraft were unable to take off because of that? They perhaps didn’t control the swing or there was a cross wind.
PB: Oh yeah. The very first Stirling on its very first flight in the hands of a very skilled test pilot on its very first landing wrote its undercarriage off.
BW: Simply because of the swing due the power in the engines.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And the imbalance.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And yet it looks from, as you say, the size of it -
PB: Yeah.
BW: It looks a very stable beast to fly.
PB: It’s incredibly strong that way. It’s not very strong that way.
BW: So longitudinally strength.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And laterally not so good.
PB: It was a very strong undercarriage but it’s so tall it [put a side strain on it] like that.
BW: Yeah.
PB: It goes. Time and time again.
BW: And of course these are pure manual controls. They’re not power assisted in any way.
PB: Oh no. No.
BW: So, but it was generally very smooth to fly and very easy to fly once you were airborne.
PB: Oh it was a beautiful aeroplane to fly. Beautiful. It really was. It was like a [? ] You could do anything with it.
BW: How many were, were in your crew? There were normally seven in a Lancaster.
PB: Seven yeah.
BW: The same in the Stirling.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And you had initially for your first part of your tour you had Johnnie [Turton] as your navigator.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And your pilot. Who was your pilot?
PB: Pilot. When I joined him in May it was Pilot Officer Bernard Cotterell.
BW: That’s right.
PB: By the time we were shot down he was Acting Flight Lieutenant Bernard Cotterell.
BW: Is that C O T T E R -
PB: Yeah.
BW: I L L?
PB: Yeah. E L L.
BW: E L L. And so who are the, you mentioned your wireless op.
PB: Yeah.
BW: Um, who was Len -
PB: Len Smith. Bomb aimer was Alan Crowther.
BW: Alan Crowther.
PB: Yeah the rear gunner was John [Carp?] a Scotsman.
BW: John [Carp?]
PB: He was always known as Jock rather than John.
BW: Jock.
PB: And the new, the new mid upper gunner was a Newcastle lad called Ray Wall.
BW: Ray Wall.
PB: Yeah, Ray Wall. There were only five of us, as I say, left from the original crew and of those five I was the only survivor. The mid upper, the mid upper survived and this new navigator survived?
BW: And so from there we’ve looked at sort of the raids and the preparation for them. What sort of things would happen on the return to base? You’d obviously be debriefed but what form would that take?
PB: Well, we, we, we always flew at the recommended airspeeds which got you the most miles per gallon. A lot of people just simply flew back as fast as they could regardless of wasting petrol so we were invariably the last aircraft to land which meant we always had to queue up to wait to be de debriefed which was a nuisance but then of course it was the bacon and egg lark. Bacon and egg time and off to bed.
BW: And what, what was the accommodation like? You were all crewed up. Were they in nissen huts. Was there a crews either side or was it -
PB: We, we, we were in a nissen -
BW: Different.
PB: Hut and I think we shared it with two other crews and one morning, one morning you would find that half the beds are made up and all everything’s gone because they had disappeared but the thing is you never, you never associated with anybody outside your crew. There was no point to it.
BW: Really.
PB: No point to it at all. A crew was a very. very tight little, little group. We did everything together.
BW: And so even though there would be two other crews in the, in the nissen hut with you you would still socialise only with your own crew.
PB: Oh yeah we never bothered with anybody else. Very rarely spoke to anybody else even.
BW: And where did you go during your off-duty hours? Where did you socialise?
PB: Oh the village pub in Lakenheath.
BW: Do you recall the name?
PB: No, I don’t actually. No.
BW: Ah.
PB: But I do remember there was a Mrs Philips who used to provide us with suppers some times. Just across the road. She used to put on bacon and egg suppers. I don’t know where she got the bacon and eggs from but she used to put on bacon and egg suppers.
BW: Just as a special treat for you.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And the rest of the crew.
PB: But you know you sit in the village pub at night and you were surrounded by farmers and butchers and bakers and all the rest of it. People for whom the war was just something they read about in the newspapers and you were just so happy, you’re so happy. It’s wonderful. There’s nothing like a crew. Nothing. Incredible relationship. Incredible.
BW: And did you have opportunity to mix with other locals? Not just the, the tradesman there, if you like, the farmers and the bakers or whatever?
PB: No. The only time we went out, off the camp was to go in to the little pub. On the nights we weren’t flying. We were in there every night we weren’t flying.
BW: Were there station dances at all or anything like that?
PB: No. There was no station. You’d the airfield there, you’ve the mess here and your billet over there and something else over there. If you didn’t have a bicycle you couldn’t exist in Lakenheath.
BW: So quite a distance between -
PB: Distances are immense. And I’ve visited it since the war. It’s an American town now.
BW: Yeah. It’s, it’s a huge place.
PB: Oh it’s a big place and when I, when I was there talking to them they produced some information about the wartime use and they spelt Stirling as if, as if it was the bloody currency [laughs].
BW: Were there, just out of interest, were there other crews in the pub where you went or was it pretty much just you guys?
PB: Well no doubt there were.
BW: Right.
PB: But we just sat in our corner and nothing else existed.
BW: Right.
PB: Nothing else existed.
BW: So tucked away in your own -
PB: Yeah.
BW: In your own little world.
PB: And there my skipper named my first daughter.
BW: Right.
PB: My skipper. I don’t know how we got on, how the conversation got around to that actually but one evening for some reason the skipper said if my wife and I were to ever have a daughter we were going to call her Penelope. I never forgot that and so very many years later when my first daughter was born she simply had to be Penelope. I had no choice.
BW: Well. As you say it obviously comes from being a tight crew.
PB: Yes.
BW: And that connection.
PB: Yeah.
BW: Ok. You mention then about your trip to Mannheim and this New Zealand navigator.
PB: Yeah.
BW: About your, of your crew.
PB: Yeah.
BW: Who, who got you shot down?
PB: Yeah.
BW: Just talk us through that if you would, please.
PB: Well we had a full petrol load which means a minimum bomb load of course. We were briefed for Munich and when briefing had been completed the CO said there’s a Mosquito on its way to Munich at the moment because it’s feared the weather may break down there so we’re going brief you for a possible alternative for Mannheim. So we had a second briefing then. Now, we’d no idea where we were going which meant of course the navigators had two flight plans to prepare. They’d doubled the work in the limited amount of time so they were under stress from the start. So we, we, we retire to our aircraft. Do all our pre-flight checks and the CO comes around in his van and says Munich is scrubbed. You’re going to Mannheim. So off we go. Immediately we cross enemy coast we were hit by flack. Now this had never ever happened to us before. He’d taken us straight over a, straight over a gun batt. I was shocked and I thought I’m going to spend, I’m going to spend the next hour checking the fuel in the hope we were losing fuel and we could turn back. And I went and did a meticulous check on the fuel but we weren’t losing fuel of course. Now, the raid was cleverly designed. You’ve got Ludwigshafen, the Rhine, Mannheim. If you fly over Ludwigshafen into Mannheim a creepback occurs. You get two targets for the price of one. And so that was the way we were to enter. So, to make sure we got it right for each wave of the attack the pathfinders was putting down a red marker. Now if you turn on a red marker on to the right course you flew straight over Ludwigshafen straight to Mannheim. So as we, as we were approaching the point where we could expect to see the flare the navigator says, ‘Keep your eyes open now. You should be seeing a red flare any time now.’ And suddenly there’s a red flare there and another red flare over there.
BW: So one to your left and one to your right.
PB: Yeah. So which, which is, which is the correct one? Only the navigator knows which is the correct one. ‘That one,’ he says.
BW: On the left.
PB: Nearer to the target. We get to the target five minutes early. The skipper makes what I still think was the right decision. He said we’d been hit by a bomb once at Nuremberg so we knew that. You’re either the only one over the target or the bombs are coming down from Lancasters. The skipper did an orbit but unfortunately the radar picked us up and as soon as we start to go in a blue searchlight comes straight on.
BW: Which is the radar guided one.
PB: Yeah and then then the column builds up and we’re flying straight over with the bomb doors open. So we continued like that until the bomb aimer got a sight and then you let the lot go in one go and we didn’t wait for a photograph. And over a target I always went up in to the astrodome facing backwards to help the gunner search for fighters and I was up there [ and we slowly began to pull away? ] and there were only a couple of searchlights on us and I thought I’d better check on my engines cause they’re getting a terrible thrashing. You’re only allowed a few minutes on full power so I get down, I get down from the pyramid and have a very long, I have a very long lead on my intercom so I can, don’t have to keep plugging and unplugging and I get down and I’m just going over to the instrument panel and suddenly there’s a terrible screaming and Len, Len the wireless operator had been just behind the main spar pushing out pushing out the window came running up through the main spar screaming, tripped over the pyramid, fell across my lead, pulled it out so I lost all communication and he fell at my feet and then this huge fire broke out in the fuselage and I’m steeling myself to stand and step over Leonard’s body to get to the fire extinguisher and out of the corner of my eye I see the mid upper gunner get out and put his chute on. I turn around. The navigator’s already on his way down the steps so instead of going for the extinguisher I go for my parachute and follow the navigator. I get to the top of the steps, the hatch is open. The navigator’s gone. I slide down. I get my feet through. The bomb aimer had gone up in to the second pilot’s seat to help the skipper. He started to clamber down from the, from the seat as I go past. I get my legs through. I feel a pressure on my back. I turn. Alan’s got his knees pressing in my back, tap him on the knee and go and as I go I feel the aircraft break in two and Alan never got out. So the rear gunner and Len were killed by the fighter. The skipper was wounded by flak that also set the port inner on fire and the skipper and Alan never had a chance of getting out because the aircraft had broken in two. The tail unit with the rear gunner’s body in it landed a considerable distance away. The main wreck landed right on the German Grand Prix racing track at Hockenheim.
BW: Wow.
PB: I have the map. I have a map showing the exact position and I saw the fire. It was a huge. We’d over a thousand gallons of petrol on board. We had enough petrol for Munich and the three in the aircraft were completely destroyed. Only, only fragments of bone left. The air gunners body was complete and so in the cemetery now at [Bad Tolz?] there’s a, there’s the rear gunners grave there, then there’s a headstone for Len, a headstone for the skipper, a headstone for Alan but what bits of fragments of bone there were are all buried in front of the skipper I’m sure. It was just symbolic. Never, never let the relatives know that of course. Never mention fire to the relatives but those two graves were empty and what bits there were were in front of the skipper which is right and proper.
BW: And you, you must have been pretty close to the ground when you baled out yourself.
PB: No. Oh, no. I was about ten thousand feet.
BW: Oh right. It was, it was the sense I was getting that it was almost a last minute sort of thing where you were able to escape.
PB: No. No, the aircraft broke in two very quickly. It was a tremendous. What happened I think the JU88 killed the rear gunner and then from, there’s a pump on the starboard engine, and dual pipelines to the rear turret that power the turret. Now I think it hit those pipelines. You’ve got hydraulic oil pressure, high pressure, high temperature came out and that’s what caught fire. The fire then came underneath the mid upper gunner, hit Len when he was doing the window in and stopped before it reached me but it was, it was a terror, it certainly was a fire and although I didn’t know till much later virtually simultaneously flak knocked out the port engine and the port inner engine and wounded the skipper and Ray, Ray told me later that when the skipper gave the order to bail out he [signed to say] as if he was badly hurt.
BW: And then at that point, the stricken aircraft, it must be almost I guess vertical if it’s broken up at that point.
PB: It didn’t, it didn’t go like that when it hit the ground it was it just come straight down like that.
BW: Yeah.
PB: I dare say some of it is still there buried under that racetrack. Some of the engine. But later I had a friend in Germany who was, who was in Ludwigshafen. He lived in Ludwigshafen. He was a schoolboy in Ludwigshofen. He may well have been on the flak gun that night for all I know.
BW: That would have been a coincidence wouldn’t it?
PB: Well after, he worked for the postal service after the war and when he retired he set himself up as what he called an air historian and he excavated a lot of shot down bombers and he was very keen on Bomber Command and he provided me with a lot of information and he produced a woman who’d been a schoolgirl in Hockenheim and on the morning after we crashed, after we were shot down, a neighbouring woman knocked on her door and she had what they described as a Canadian airman with them. It was in fact a New Zealander and the girl’s mother gave him a drink of water and later in the day the girl’s interest was aroused and she and a girlfriend went out to look at the crash and she provided me with a map of the actual crash site just by the, so whenever the German Grand Prix comes on I always, always watch it for a few minutes. I don’t like grand prix racing but I always watch it for a few minutes.
BW: Just that particular one.
PB: Yeah. That’s where it crashed.
BW: And have you been back to Hockenheim at all?
PB: No. No, I’ve not. No, I’ve not.
BW: But the information’s come through to you.
PB: Yeah.
BW: As to what’s happened.
PB: Peter provided me with a lot of information.
BW: What’s the air historian’s name? Do you recall?
PB: Peter Mengas M E N Mengas G A S.
BW: G A S.
PB: Peter.
BW: And is he still around?
PB: I don’t know. I’ve not, I’ve not heard from him for a year or two now.
BW: So you’ve managed to get out of the aircraft yourself.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And this is night-time. About ten thousand feet over Germany.
PB: Yeah 1 o’clock. It was just about midnight on my watch. It was 1 o’clock in the morning German time.
BW: And you pulled the rip cord and -
PB: Well, no. This was the problem when I, when I first joined the squadron I got a harness which could be adjusted. Now, I moved about a lot in the Stirling. I’ve controls there, there, there and there.
BW: All around the -
PB: And I used to [bend down?] around number seven tank and the shoulder strap would fall off and I thought I’ll get this fixed but I never did of course so when I baled out I was terrified of falling out of my parachute so I daren’t open it until I got myself you know [? ] as I could.
BW: Sort of braced against the straps were they?
PB: And when I opened it and I felt oh that’s it but it wasn’t that was just the parachute pulling the pack off my chest and then bang.
BW: The snap of the canopy.
PB: And I took all the weight there. The shoulder straps were up here. I came down in agony. I don’t know why it didn’t castrate me.
BW: Because of the tight grip around the -
PB: Yeah.
BW: Groin area where the -
PB: And then when I eventually I saw the ground rushing up and I rolled myself into a ball as I’d been taught and this buckle took two ribs with it.
BW: On the left hip.
PB: Yeah. Broke, broke two, broke two of my ribs and so I, it was, it was very painful. Very painful. And this is funny really by the next day my left side had seized up and I’m walking in a westerly direction trying to get to France [laughs] and, I don’t know and there was just one house which I had to pass and I thought, I thought a girl stood in the window had spotted me. I wasn’t certain but I thought she had. Anyway, I kept going and suddenly I hear a shout and I turn around and there’s this chappy running towards me and running behind him is a woman, presumably his wife and the two things I didn’t believe. I didn’t believe that fighting men put their hands above their heads like the baddies in the cowboy films and I didn’t believe the Germans went around saying. ‘Heil Hitler,’ to each other but as this chappy approached without any conscious effort on my part my hands went up. This one went up. This one wouldn’t.
BW: Your right one.
PB: He saw me like. He stopped running [?]and, ‘Heil Hitler.’
BW: So because you can’t raise your left arm you can only raise your right arm he thinks you’re doing the salute.
PB: He thought I was a Luftwaffe chappy. ‘Heil Hitler,’ he said [laughs] Well, I just I was in a pretty perilous state by this time. I just collapsed in to hysterical laughter. I just stood there and laughed and laughed and laughed and his wife came along and she sized up the situation immediately. She put her arm around me, took my weight on her shoulder and led me towards the town and the very first house we came to she made a very, very cross old woman let me into her kitchen, sit me down and made me a cup of coffee. So this woman very unwillingly gave me a cup of coffee. I hadn’t drunk anything for twenty four hours and I took a sip and I thought, ‘Bloody hell, I can’t drink this. It’s absolutely disgusting,’ and I thought, ‘Well if I don’t drink it it’s a great insult to this woman who’s been so incredibly kind to me,’ so I had to drink it. That was my introduction to the German diet oooph [laughs].
BW: And so you managed from a rough landing in a loose parachute in God knows where -
PB: Yeah.
BW: To get yourself together. You didn’t meet any of the other crew at this point because you obviously talked about -
PB: The -
BW: Yourself.
PB: The mid upper gunner landed right next to a railway signal box and was arrested within seconds. The navigator landed in a tree and had to be rescued. So they were captured very quickly. Both of them.
BW: So there was just you on your own at this point.
PB: I was on my own.
BW: Were you knocked unconscious or, or did it take some time to come around? I mean you’ve obviously had to get rid of your chute and -
PB: No I, I, I was shocked. I was shocked obviously and I was in pain from these ribs but I said I’ve a duty to the RAF and that was to get to Gibraltar. [Laughs] It’s a long way away.
BW: Yeah.
PB: I’d got the Rhine to cross for one thing. That’s not, that’s not easy. [laughs].
BW: And so the, the people that, that met you I mean you talk about heading west towards France and Mannheim is, is quite deep in western Germany.
PB: Yeah.
BW: So you’re actually being met by Germans at this point.
PB: Yeah.
BW: But they assist you.
PB: Yeah.
BW: So what then happened? Did they, they pass you on? Or -
PB: Well this couple took me to the police station where the other two were already held although I didn’t know it and we were kept there for about three days and a couple of Luftwaffe chappies arrived to take us up to Frankfurt to Dulag Luft interrogation camp and when we left we were given a bundle of the rear gunner’s clothing and his flying suit had hundreds of holes in it. The cannon shells must have hit the turret and exploded, it was absolutely riddled and his helmet and his, his oxygen mask was soaked in blood and there were the four guns from the rear turret as well. So we had that to carry. And we had, we had an adventurous journey. We couldn’t, it, this was the most successful raid on Mannheim Ludwigshafen at that time and it was complete chaos and we had to go by train in to a big detour so we travelled that day and went to a Luftwaffe camp and stayed the night in the guard room there and the next day we go back to the railway station and it was a, it’s a station something like Victoria in Manchester. A long corridor with steps going up to the various platforms. We were on the platform and what I call a typical Daily Express German came along, feather in his hat and oh he was furious he was furious and Hitler had issued an order to all military and police units that if civilians get hold of airmen before the authorities do the authorities were not to interfere. They must leave it to the discretion of the civilians what to do with them and this one was stark raving, oh he was angry. And in the air force there’s an offence known as silent contempt. You don’t do anything but you look at an officer who’s ticking you off and look at him and make it obvious you think he’s [lowly?] and it’s a serious crime in the air force. Well Ray and I were giving this chappy the silent cont and the navigator said, ‘Stop being a bloody fool.’ He was a good deal older than we were and eventually this chap storms off and we thought, ‘Oh that’s shown him.’ A few minutes later he’s back at the head, the head of a posse and they’re obviously, obviously intent on doing us serious bodily harm but fortunately there was, there was a train on the other side of the platform. Now, whether it was a troop train or not I don’t know but half a dozen soldiers got out and ranged themselves between us and the, and this crowd and our two Luftwaffe chappies whipped us down the stairs, along the corridor and up another platform and hid us in a room that was obviously used by guards full of red and green lamps and flags and so on and we hid in there until our train arrived and then ran back as fast as we could and got put on the train. But it was, when we thought about it later we were very nearly hanged or beaten to death or kicked to death or something very near but it was only, it was only those soldiers who saved us and that was contrary to Hitler’s orders.
BW: Because the RAF crews at this time presumably were being christened terror flieger.
PB: Yeah. Oh yeah.
BW: And so the civilians were -
PB: Yeah. Yeah.
BW: Properly against them.
PB: Well there were a hundred Bomber Command people were killed by Germans and more than two hundred Americans because Americans, there were a lot more Americans. They had ten to a crew.
BW: And at this point in a station as you mention they’ve reunited you with the navigator and -
PB: Yeah. Well they were in the police station. Unknown to me at the time.
BW: Yeah.
PB: I met them when we got out of the police station. But before I left they gave me a shave. A fierce little barber came in and then he got out this razor and I thought, ‘I hope to God the air raid sirens don’t go off.’ [laughs]
BW: Yeah ‘cause he might, he might stop shaving you and decide to use the razor for something else.
[laughs]That’s the only time I’ve been shaved with a cut throat razor. I don’t want to ever experience it again. [laughs]
BW: So they’ve tidied you up and reunited you as a crew.
PB: Yeah.
BW: Presumably they didn’t interrogate you at this point even though you were in a police station. The Luftwaffe officers took you over and put you in a transport. Is that right?
PB: Yeah. We were taken, we were taken to Dulag Luft at Frankfurt and there I was put in a cell there. Quite a big cell really. It had, it had, it had a very long radiator attached to one wall and there was a bed attached to the floor alongside a radiator and there was a table and two chairs and there’s a bucket in the corner and two windows with shutters on from outside and a very dim light. No ventilation and all I could do was lie flat on my back with these ribs and although it was mid-September the heat on the radiator was turned up full. So I lay there for three days getting hotter and dirtier and stickier and the air getting fouler and fouler and then suddenly somebody opened the shutters. A very smart Luftwaffe officer walked in with a couple of files under his arm, put them on the table opened the windows wide and motioned for me to join him, poured two cups of English tea, a plate of English biscuits, a packet of English cigarettes and then the interrogation started.
BW: And at this point is there just you and this Luftwaffe officer?
PB: Yeah.
BW: In this cell?
PB: Yeah.
BW: And so he’s expected you to get up from the floor to the chair to sit in front of him. Nobody has assisted you at this point?
PB: No. No. No.
BW: So presumably your body’s quite stiff as well.
PB: Very very stiff indeed. Very stiff. I never -
BW: Well -
PB: I never had any medical attention at all. Never. I’ve got a great knob of bone there that will never heal.
BW: And so the interrogation begins and presumably, from what you’re staying, this is daytime at this point.
PB: Yeah. When he put these files down on the table there were two of them and the top one said Royal Air Force Bomber Command 149 squadron. I thought, ‘How the hell does he know 149?’ I said, ‘I wonder if the others had been forced to talk,’ and I had pictures of Humphrey Bogart being tortured by [laughs] but it was obvious the rear part of the fuselage wasn’t burned and the letters OJ. So, he gave me, he have me a great deal of information. First, generally about the air force and then specifically about 149 squadron.
BW: And because the letters on the aircraft had not burned through.
PB: No the -
BW: So the squadron’s code OJ were still visible.
PB: OJ means 149. They knew that so as I understood it he was trying to do two things. He was giving me a lot of information most of it factual but some which he picked up and he hadn’t had checked yet [or someone had corrected] and from my reaction [he got?] and then he picked up bits from me that he could put. That was the whole purpose of it. I don’t know what did affect the war effort. I don’t think very much. Anyway, eventually he finished and this was the middle of September and he said, ‘Are there any questions you want to ask me?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘What’s been happening in the war in the last few days?’ He said, ‘Italy has surrendered.’ I said, ‘Oh good. One down, one to go.’ [laughs] Well he didn’t like that [laughs] so he picked up his files and he left.
BW: You weren’t tempted to salute him either.
PB: But when we, when we were being transferred by cattle truck from Dulag Luft to Saxony to Stalag 4b we were in these cattle trucks and we had a German guard in with us and we had with us at one stage the only German I ever felt sorry for. He’d been born in Germany and when he was a very small child his people had gone to America. He’d been brought up in Brooklyn. He had a tremendous Brooklyn accent and he’d, they’d never taken American nationality and early in ‘39 or late in ‘38 they’d come to Germany on holiday and he was immediately conscripted and there he was [laughs]. Oh dear. So I’d never known anybody feel as sorry for himself as that poor fella. He said, he described his comrades, he said, ‘Bloody mother f***ing, c**k s***ng krauts,’ and those were his comrades [laughs].
BW: And they didn’t speak American -
PB: Deary, deary me,
BW: So he got away with it.
PB: Oh he did feel sorry for himself. And I’ve often wondered what happened to him because when the Ardennes offensive took place Hitler put a lot of American speaking Germans into American uniforms and of course they were shot immediately if they were captured. He was an absolutely perfect candidate for that job.
BW: Yeah. Quite possible.
PB: So I don’t know what happened to him but oh deary me he did feel sorry for himself
BW: And so it seems a fairly, alright it’s uncomfortable but it seems a fairly civil interrogation from the Luftwaffe officer before you -
PB: Oh it was very friendly. Very friendly very friendly. I mean I’d been lying in there for three days thinking about Jimmy Cagney and Humphrey Bogart and it was nothing like that [laughs]. No, he was charming. Really charming.
BW: And how soon after the interrogation ended and he stormed out did you then leave for er -
PB: Well I left the cell then went to the main part of the camp and stayed there for about a week until there was enough of us to make up a wagon load.
BW: And this was still at Dulag Luft.
PB: Yeah.
BW: In Frankfurt.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And so you’re there a little while longer transferred to Saxony.
PB: Yeah and we were lucky and we were unlucky. We were unlucky in the fact that all the luft camps run by the Luftwaffe were full and so we were sent to the biggest prison camp in Germany which was run by the army. It contained about ten thousand permanently and it had scores of working parties attached to it so that prisoners used to come in and get recorded and then sent out to work in mines or factories or quarries or whatever so there was a regular turnover. There was about ten thousand of us there permanently but a tremendous lot of Frenchmen, a couple of thousand Russians who were starving to death and various other nationalities and of course the German army didn’t have the same relationship with us that the Luftwaffe personnel would have had. In fact they hated us.
BW: Was there any, any ill will directed towards you because you were air force?
PB: They didn’t like us. They told us, they said, ‘When Germany wins the war you’ll spend the rest of your lives building the cities that you’ve destroyed but if Germany lose the war you’re soon to be shot.’ That was their attitude.
BW: And even though this was an army camp they, it sounds as though they weren’t just, were they just military personnel? The ten thousand French and Russians were they soldiers that were captured?
PB: Well I don’t know what they were.
BW: So they could have been.
PB: They were dressed in civilian, some in civilian clothes,
BW: Yeah.
PB: Some in bits of clothes. Some were in military uniform but we were lucky too because this was September. Italy had retired from the war. The Germans had taken over the Italian prison camps and they set up two new compounds in 4b. An RAF compound and an army compound. Now, a couple of thousand Desert Rats who’d been prisoners in Italy came in just as we did. Now, without them we’d have been in a right mess because the Germans gave us nothing.
BW: So you were on low rations and you were, were you made to work at this stage as well?
PB: No. No. They couldn’t make us work. Not with our ranks.
BW: Right.
PB: But you know we were put into a hut which has three tier bunks to sleep a hundred and eighty men. They gave us a sack which contained something or other which was supposed to be a mattress, two pre- First World War blankets and that was, that was all they gave us. No knife, fork, spoon, no cup, no plate. Nothing. And yet the food comes up, a great big vat of soup and all you’ve got’s your bare hands. So the army helped us a lot there.
BW: Presumably because they were allowed or brought with them their kit and they shared it.
PB: They brought with all their kit, yeah. Yeah. I mean they’d been prisoners years some of them.
BW: So they knew, they knew how it worked.
PB: They knew the ropes so yeah they knew the ropes alright but the difference between the army and the air force was, was, was incredible. The army compound was run like a barracks. There was a sergeant major in charge of each hut. Total control. And each morning at 7 o’clock there was roll calls outside in decent weather. The roll call in the army compound took fifteen minutes. The roll call in the RAF compound could take two hours. That was the difference in our attitudes. The army would say, ‘We’ll show them what real soldiers look like.’ and we’d say, ‘We’ll cause them so much bloody trouble they’ll wish they’d never been born.’ Different attitude of mind altogether.
BW: And so this is the, the British army in their compound.
PB: Yeah.
BW: Organising themselves to do their roll calls -
PB: Yeah.
BW: Like that.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And the RAF took the view well we’re there to -
PB: Yeah.
BW: Make a nuisance of ourselves.
PB: That’s it exactly. One day the Germans got so exasperated they brought the senior sergeant major and they stood him there and we’re all lined up in fives and he starts telling us we’re a disgrace to the bloody nation, we’re a disgrace to the air force and the replies he got. He’d never been spoken to like that in his life before. Never, ever, ever. He just went redder and redder and redder. Eventually, he turned on his heel and went and we never saw him again.
BW: Gave that one up as well.
PB: I know we really, we really did everything we could and we tamed the Germans eventually and it went whenever a German entered our hut whoever saw him first would shout, ‘Jerry up’ and whatever you were doing you could get away. At the end of the war the German would walk in to the hut, he’d stand at the door and shout, ‘Jerry up’ and wait two minutes before he walked in.
BW: It’s interesting you, you made a comment just before that although the Germans gave you nothing they didn’t make you work either because of your rank.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And the thinking was in the, in the early days with the RAF aircrew was that if they were all sergeants they would be treated better in prisoner of war camps.
PB: Not treated better, just treated differently in that they didn’t work.
BW: Right. So it was a case of you’re not made to work you were just -
PB: Yeah.
BW: Well you were just there and you exist, sort of thing.
PB: Yeah and the food of course was disgusting. The flour was ten percent what the Germans optimistically called wood flour. Which was sawdust. We, we, we had soup at lunchtime. A great vat of soup. We had [minute?] soup which was disgusting. We had [mara?] soup which was even more disgusting and most disgusting of all we had a soup that apparently was made from what was left of sugar beet after the beet er after the sugar had been extracted and we got a handful of boiled potatoes, usually rotten. That was the midday meal and then in the late afternoon you got a piece of bread to be divided between five people and a blob of white stuff which was supposed to be butter, it was about ninety percent water, and a spoonful of jam apparently made from beetroot or swede or some such and you’d get this piece of bread and it’s not a big piece of bread and it’s got to be shared between five people and every, every one of the five pieces had to be absolutely identical with the other four so we picked the man with the best irons and steadiest hand and he cuts the bread up and he gets last choice and the five pieces and he gets the last choice.
BW: And it went on like that for days.
PB: But we had the Red Cross parcels fortunately.
BW: How often were they delivered? Were they regular?
PB: Every Monday we got a Red Cross parcel.
BW: And were they delivered intact or were they interfered and inspected by the Germans.
PB: They were delivered intact until it was decided that they were being used in escapes and so after that they were all opened and every tin was punctured so that it had a limited lifespan. You couldn’t, you couldn’t store it up.
BW: And you see in war films, popular war films, the sort of black market operating in a prison camp and trading and bartering. Does that, did that ever happen?
PB: Oh yes, it was all, with cigarettes you could buy anything. Now in the RAF compound we had two people. We had an English and an Italian name. A chappy called [Gargini]
BW: [Gargini]
PB: Now he was, he was a skilled technician in British, in BBC television and he was an absolute wizard with the electricity. He built at least two radio sets and he also made a succession of heaters, immersion heaters, which you could put in a cup of cold water and fire up in no time at all. And we had another chap who was in fact was a civilian. Terry Hunt his name was. He worked for British Movietone news or some similar company and if you went to the cinema in England during the war from time to time to time on the newsreel you’d see shots taken from the nose of a light bomber during attacks on France. Now Terry was one of the men who took those photographs. He was given a degree of training. He was given an RAF uniform, he was given a RAF number, an RAF rank just in case he was shot down and captured and he had a camera. He had it inside a hollowed out bible with a little hole in the spine through which he took his photographs. Two quite remarkable men there.
BW: And that, that bible with the camera in he used in the aircraft and he kept with him in the prison camp did he?
PB: No. He got it whilst he was in the prisoner.
BW: Oh made it in the prison right.
PB: How he got through well cigarettes you could get anything with cigarettes. You could buy a woman for three cigarettes but there were no women.
BW: And in that case there must have been some sort of interaction with the German guards at that point -
PB: Oh yes.
BW: To be able to bribe.
PB: You waited. You waited until after dark and then you went out and found a guard and said [?] ‘Yah yah yah,’ out it came from a bag in his gas mask case gave him this bit of bread ‘[?] cigarettes?’ ‘Nein. [?]Nein. Deutschland caput’ [laughs]
BW: A piece of bread for twenty cigarettes.
PB: But you could buy anything with cigarettes.
BW: And did you partake in that yourself, did you?
PB: Oh yeah I was out most nights if I had cigarettes buying bread. It was, it was much better bread than we had. It was rotten bread but it was much better bread than we had.
BW: And did you, did you feel able to strike up a rapport or even an element of trust with some of these guards. Were you always meeting the same one or did you have to interact with others?
PB: No, whoever happened to be walking around the compound at the time. Some relationships must have been, must have been formed because big items were bought and of course if there were ever workmen in the camp all their tools were raided. They soon [? ] their tools.
BW: So there were, there were guys in the camp who were raiding the Germans’ tool sets.
PB: Yeah you see we, we had, you know, you got hundreds of air crew. You’ve got a couple of thousand senior NCOs in the army. You’ve got every talent. You’ve got architects, musicians, dancers, journalists. You got all sorts of people and it was amazing what could be done.
BW: And I believe they had classes in the prisoner of war camps as well to keep the men occupied.
PB: Oh yes. We, we had a little library in each hut. Some of them manned by professional librarians, we had lecturers. We had, we had a theatre group and a radio theatre group. We had people who went around individually giving lectures. The most popular lecturer was a chappy, an army man, who’d worked for a very prestigious London undertaking firm and the stories he had. Oh deary me. Deary, deary me. He was a popular lecturer he was.
BW: And so was your days, were your days regulated in any sense? Was there a structure put to you?
PB: No. You had a roll call in the morning, a roll call in the evening. That was it. And then you had the food arriving at mid-day and again about tea time and other than that you were on your own.
BW: So would you have about two meals a day then? Your main midday meal and a meal in the evening?
PB: I don’t think we ever had a meal at all really [laughs].
BW: Well, yeah.
PB: But yeah that’s the way it worked.
BW: Yeah.
PB: On Fridays, on Fridays, Friday was a big day. On Friday you got pea soup and pea soup was so good we didn’t get any potatoes on Friday. Well pea soup was the only soup we ever really ate. The pea soup was quite good.
BW: And do you still like it to this day or does that remind you?
PB: I like pea soup. Yes.
BW: Yeah.
PB: But we Lancastrians had a Red Rose Society. The Yorkists had a White Rose Society and there was a motoring club for people interested in cars or motorbikes. There were all sorts, all sorts of things set up. Every hut was given the name of a British football team. My hut was Wolverhampton Wanderers and a league was set up and matches were played and points scored and then in the RAF compound we formed the rugby pitch as well, I played a lot of rugby.
BW: Even, even though you’d had a bad injury from parachuting you were still able to play rugby.
PB: Eventually. It took, it took, it took about six months until I felt really free but -
BW: Did you manage to get any medical treatment from the British -
PB: No.
BW: While you were in the camp?
PB: Never. Never. I never bothered the British. By then it was healing. They even, even tried to play cricket but that didn’t work. The ground was too soft.
BW: What sort of ground was it? Was it sandy?
PB: It was sort of sandy soil, yeah.
BW: So and we’ve probably all have an image here of Sagan and the Great Escape -
PB: Yeah.
BW: And the sandy -
PB: Yeah.
BW: Sort of soil
PB: Yeah.
BW: And it was pretty much like that was it?
PB: When I played rugby every time I I got a graze and there was any blood it always went, always went rotten. I always had to go and get it, get it drugged up always, always went rotten.
BW: And what sort of drugs could they give you? Was there penicillin?
PB: Red Cross. Red Cross I don’t know what they were but the Red Cross provided drugs and we had, we had certain medical. We had a couple of army doctors as well. We had an English woman in the camp.
BW: Do you recall her name at all?
PB: Well we knew her as Mrs Barrington. She was an English woman. I don’t know whether she was divorced or widowed but sometime in the 20s or very early 30s she had a son called Winston and they had a holiday in Switzerland and met a German who got on very well with and they went back again a few months later and she married him and she and her son went to live in Germany. And then when, when 1938, ‘39 came along and war was obviously imminent she sent her son back to England to live with her parents and in due course he joined the air force in Bomber Command, got shot down, wrote to her where she was living in Vienna and she wrote back and eventually she decided she wanted to be nearer to him then that so she left Vienna and went to live in Muhlburg which was about five kilometres from the camp.
BW: Muhlberg.
PB: Muhlberg yeah and by this time her husband was a very high ranking Luftwaffe officer and when she moved to Muhlberg her husband came with her and we know that he visited the camp and we know that he met the commandant but we don’t know what happened there of course. We don’t know whether some informal arrangement was agreed between them or whatever but it was a fact that airmen were never allowed outside the camp because they’d just disappear but Barrington got outside the camp with French working parties several times, met his mother in Muhlberg and by early 1945 she was getting worried about what her fate would be when the Russians arrived and he reported that to the, to the escape committee and they decided she should be brought into the camp and the next time he went out he took some spare clothes [and met her] she came in to the camp, put in to RAF battledress and was hidden away under the stage in the theatre and stayed there for a few weeks till the end of the war. Not only until the end of the war but until we got away from the Russians but it took us a month to get away from the Russians.
BW: So you mention there about hiding her under the stage in the theatre -
PB: Yeah.
BW: In RAF battle dress uniform.
PB: Yeah.
BW: How did the, the tide of war affect you because many prisoners were forced on the long march but presumably if you were in Saxony in sort of lower -
PB: Yeah.
BW: South eastern Germany. Were you part of that of that -
PB: No.
BW: To evacuate the camps.
PB: No we weren’t in Poland. We were in Germany. Now, by this time the air was full of British and American fighter bombers. Everything that moved was attacked and the commandant gave us the opportunity, ‘If you want to be marched west across the Elbe we’ll take you,’ and the Poles of course jumped at that chance. They didn’t want to be with the Russians. And we said, ‘No. We’ll stay where we are until our allies arrive.’ [Laughs] Our allies.
BW: So you all managed to stay in the camp without being evacuated.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And so this Mrs Barrington stayed in the -
PB: Yeah.
BW: Theatre at this time.
PB: Yeah.
BW: Under your protection.
PB: Yeah she kept hidden. Eventually, when the, when the Russians arrived they made no arrangements whatever for us and so all we could do was break down this perimeter fence and stream out into the countryside to search for food and that went on for about three days and then the Russians got themselves organised and clamped down on it. We came and got a bargaining counter. They held thousands of British and Americans and there were tens of hundreds of thousands of Russians in the west and the Russians wanted them back. Many, many of them even wore German uniforms and they knew if they went back they knew what their fate would be so they didn’t want to go back so there was a lot of bargaining and we were part of the Russians strong hand and then they marched us out of the camp, marched quite a considerable distance and they put us into what was obviously a big maintenance depot full of huge workshops and we were billeted there and still nothing was happening so we began to drift off in twos and threes and tried to make our way across the river on our own which eventually we did. We, we were relieved by the Russians on St George’s Day, the 23rd of April and I reached the American lines on my 24th birthday. The 23rd of May. Exactly one month later. And then it was like moving from hell in to heaven. I lived for a week on steak and ice cream.
BW: You didn’t, you’d been on such bad rations there was no problem moving to that sort of -
PB: No. No. Never had any -
BW: High protein diet.
PB: A lot of people spent a lot of time sat down with their trousers around their ankles [laughs]
BW: You obviously had a tougher constitution.
PB: Yeah -
BW: So it didn’t affect you.
PB: It didn’t affect me. But oh it was great with the Americans. Even went to the cinema. They had a mobile cinema. I saw a film about a book which I’d read whilst in Germany. And then, then we were flown by Dakota to Brussels and handed over to the British. We arrived in Brussels on a Saturday afternoon. The British gave us a ten shilling note and a handful of Belgian coins and turned us loose on Brussels for a Saturday night [laughs]. And the next day we climbed on board a Stirling and flew back to Kent and from Kent we went up to Cosford which was a receiving centre and Cosford had been my first station in 1940.
BW: So this was almost a reverse of your trip out there because you’d gone out on a Stirling.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And then you were flown back from Brussels to Kent in a Stirling.
PB: In a Stirling.
BW: How did it feel to be back on your old sort of type of plane again?
PB: Oh it was funny really. About, about four Stirlings and one Lancaster landed and everybody but me and two other fellas ran for the one Lancaster. [laughs] I was more than happy to get into a Stirling.
BW: And that, that night in Brussels when you’d got a ten shilling note in your hand.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And a few Belgian pennies that must have been pretty memorable. How did it, how did it feel?
PB: I had a terrible emotional shock. There was a great big underground convenience and I was stood in there weeing away and in walked two women cleaners [laughs] and that rather set me back. I don’t remember much about what happened that night actually. I know I’d no money left at the end of it.
BW: Justifiably lost in celebration I think.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And so you were only twenty four at that stage.
PB: I’d just had my twenty fourth birthday, yes.
BW: And you, I guess you got, in retrospect, you got back to the UK pretty quick. I mean the war had only been over sort of three weeks when you were then passed over to the, to the British.
PB: Yeah.
BW: In May.
PB: Yeah.
BW: ‘Cause obviously some guys in service had to wait a long time to be repatriated.
PB: Oh some didn’t get back until well after the September.
BW: And so when you get back to Cosford.
PB: Yeah.
BW: What happened then? Were you able to, I mean, were you still in touch with your other crewmates at this point in your -
PB: No. No. Long lost them somewhere along the way. We were, first of all we were made to give a written description of how we were shot down which seemed to me to be to be a waste of time and then we were medically examined and bathed and haircuts and kitted out with new uniform and then we were sent on six weeks leave on double rations and by this time of course I’d been, I’d been qualified long enough to have become a warrant officer. And I had a lot of back pay. Got paid all the time.
BW: And how, how did they pay you? ‘Cause now it goes straight into your bank account but then did they give you cash?
PB: Cash.
BW: Or did they give you a cheque?
PB: I can’t remember. I can’t remember. I didn’t have a bank account so I don’t, I don’t really know. I know I had a lot of money to come. Several hundred pounds. I’d earned it. [laughs]
BW: Absolutely.
PB: I’d done more damage to German morale as a prisoner than I ever did as - [laughs]
BW: If I can, if I can just hop back to a point you made in the camp. You said there was an escape committee.
PB: Yes.
BW: And as I say they’re sort of impressions of, of “The Great Escape” come to mind. Were there any escape attempts made there?
PB: Oh yes there were people escaping all the time.
BW: Successfully?
PB: A couple of hours, two days. Maybe a week if you were lucky.
BW: So there was quite an active escape -
PB: Oh yes, yes.
BW: Committee from the RAF there.
PB: Oh yes there was a lot of escaping. What, what, what was a popular thing from time to time a British soldiers would come through the camp to be registered and recorded and photographed etcetera and then sent out on working parties and some airmen got the idea it would be easier to escape from a working party then from the camp and so they exchanged identities and this in the end caused tremendous confusion to the Germans because there was a New Zealand soldier, a Desert Rat who’d been captured and held in prison in Italy and he’d escaped and got in with a with a group of partisans and as he was the only professional as it were amongst the partisans he soon became their leader and he carried out minor acts of sabotage and he became a sort of Robin Hood and rumours were circulated about this new Zealander who was doing this, that and the other and the Germans got to learn of this and eventually they captured him and they decided to send him to Germany for trial but it wasn’t known whether he was to go to Berlin or to Leipzig so as 4b was about halfway between the two he came to 4b and was locked up in the [straflagge] and there he made contact with French working parties. French used to work in there regularly and the French notified the British and it was known that if he went to either Berlin or Leipzig and was put on trial he’d be found guilty and he’d be shot and so they decided that he had to be rescued and a plot was formed and the French removed a window from the room where the showers were in the [straflagge] and put it back in a temporary position and he was briefed that when it was known that he was going to leave he was to insist upon having a shower and he was to go in to the shower room and escape from this window and be smuggled in to the camp and one day quite out of the blue we were all told to get over to the French compound as quickly as we could and to start a riot and we all got there and started fighting and jostling and messing and shouting and all the German cars were rushing to the French compound and this chappie escaped and he was hidden above a ceiling in a hut up in the dark, in the rafters and remained hidden until the end of the war. And the gestapo arrived and they made our lives hell for a week and they tore the camp to pieces and eventually we put about the rumour that he’d now left the camp and was on a train going to Switzerland so they all moved out to Switzerland [laughs] to the railway lines then and we were left in peace but he remained in the camp until the end of the war and eventually got back to New Zealand.
BW: Wow.
PB: Remarkable story.
BW: I mean yeah he was -
PB: I’ve got his name somewhere in a book but I can’t remember it off hand.
BW: It would be interesting to, to find his name and look him up.
PB: Well I can get it for you.
BW: Doesn’t, doesn’t need to be straightaway. We can get that afterwards.
PB: I can get it for you in a flash.
BW: Ok well just pause the recording for a moment.
PB: So we’re just looking at a book here called “Survival In Stalag Luft 4b”
BW: Yeah.
PB: And his name is Tony Hunt.
BW: Terry.
PB: Terry.
BW: Terry Hunt.
[pause]
PB: 136
[pause]
PB: Frederick William Ward he’s called.
BW: Frederick William Ward.
PB: Yeah. Born in February 1912. Captured in North Africa in July ‘42. [pause] That will tell you about him there.
BW: Yeah.
PB: Fred Ward and this is, this is in the book by Tony Vercoe um which I’ll look up.
PB: Yeah.
BW: Um it says that he, he was captured and then interrogated and then will go into more detail about the activities with the French workers as you say. There’s a description there.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And then this lady you mentioned is called Florence Barrington.
PB: That’s right. Mrs Barrington.
BW: With a thirteen year old son, married a German photographer and that also gives us the correct name of, just so that I’ve got it right, Muhlberg M U H L B E R G so that helps identify -
PB: Yeah. Muhlberg.
BW: The camp.
PB: Muhlberg on the Elbe.
BW: Yeah. What I’ll do if you don’t mind I’ll have a look at this separately and sort of off air of the recording.
PB: Yeah.
BW: But that, that’s great that is good information.
PB: Yes. You’ve got the full story there.
BW: So we were talking just briefly before about some of the escape attempts and how you’d helped to rescue this New Zealander from, from being shot.
PB: Yeah.
BW: Were there any other memorable attempts at all?
PB: Yes. Yes, there was one other memorable one. I had a friend, Fred Heathfield, who was a Halifax pilot with 51 squadron. He’d been shot, he’d crashed landed a Halifax on three engines in the pitch dark in Belgium and lived to tell the tale and I think the only thing that kept him alive was that he had his parachute on his chest and that took the main force of the impact. He got two black eyes and a broken nose. He was eventually captured in an hotel in Paris but he was, he was a pilot. I was a flight engineer. There was a Luftwaffe field a few kilometres away from the camp and Fred and I decided that if we could steal a JU88 we could fly at low level to Sweden and we, we started to try to get some information about German aircraft but by this time the Germans had issued a warning to all prison camps saying that because of the seriousness of the war situation there were certain areas of Germany which could not be identified but which were of importance to the, to the safety of the country and anybody caught in such an area without authority would be shot out of hand so we decided not to bother and we gave what information we had to an Australian pilot. What was his name? I’ve got a book by him in there. Anyway, this Australian pilot had a Canadian bomb aimer in his crew and I think he’d been brought up in the French speaking part of Canada because he spoke French like a native and also had quite a good knowledge of German and they decided that they would put this plan into operation but instead of flying to Sweden they would fly east and land behind Russian lines and give themselves over which to me sounded like a suicide note. And they left the camp. They went they went out with a work, we agreed to provide cover for three days so for three days the Germans wouldn’t know they were missing and they went out with a working party and disappeared and it was the night of Dresden. The night they went out was the night of Dresden and they, they, they walked. They were stopped several times and were able to convince whoever stopped them that they were French volunteers who were being moved from one job to another job and were on their way there and they got to this airfield and they lay up in the woods surrounding the airfield to watch what was going on and a JU88 landed and it was refuelled and they thought that’s it. So they find a log of wood and they picked it up and put it on their shoulders and marched to the edge of the airfield, put it down, got inside the JU and, what was his name? Anyway, he sat in the cockpit looking at the instruments and the controls and sorting out what’s what and the ground crew come back and said, ‘What are you doing in here? Foreign workers aren’t allowed in German aircraft. Clear off.’ And they got out, they picked up their log of wood. They walked back to the camp and I remember it plainly I was stood at one end of the hut and the door was at the far end and suddenly, Geoff his name was, Geoff and his bomb aimer Smith come walking down the hut and the Germans never knew they’d been away. Never knew they’d been away. And they’d been sat in a JU88.
BW: And they’d nearly got away with it.
PB: If they’d landed. I mean the Russians didn’t ask questions. If you got out of a German aircraft they shot you.
BW: Yeah.
PB: It was the daftest idea I’ve ever come across in my life but that’s what they’d decided on. Geoff Taylor. He was, he was, he was a journalist in Australia and he wrote a book called “Piece of Cake” which had a forward by Butch Harris of all people. I’ve got a copy in there and that was the most audacious escape but of course like all other escapes it came to nothing in the end.
BW: And were there quite a few others who tried and -
PB: Oh yes. It was sport.
BW: Captured.
PB: It was sport. This notice that the Germans issued said escaping is no longer a sport but that’s what it had been. When you read about people who spend all their time organising an escape they’re just a bloody nuisance to everybody. They ruin life in the camp. Everybody has to give way to them. They’re not going anywhere. They might be out for a week but they’re back.
BW: And in the meantime everybody else is perhaps suffering.
PB: Everybody’s inconvenienced, yeah.
BW: Yeah but they’re getting more inspections presumably.
PB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. To have a fella like Bader in your camp must have been hell. Absolute hell.
BW: That’s why they decided to put him in Colditz.
[pause]
BW: And you hadn’t been tempted to try yourself. You were making yourself a nuisance in the camp you made life -
PB: Only this -
BW: Miserable for the Germans.
PB: Mad plan we had to fly to Sweden which we gave up on. It was impossible. But we had an Australian pilot killed in the camp in a flying accident. This Luftwaffe camp was only a few kilometres away and once the airmen there realised that there were now airmen in 4b occasionally they’d come over and give us a bit of a, a bit of a thrill. They did and they’d come across in a JU86 which was an obsolete bomber based on a, on a civil aircraft. It was a bit like a Hudson it was and it were coming over the camp in a shallow dive right along the full length of the French compound which was the biggest and climb away and all the airmen in the compound would be going like this.
BW: Waving.
PB: And the army went mad. The army said, ‘You’re going to kill us all the way you’re going.’ You know, these lads know what they’re doing. Anyway, one came over one day and it wasn’t an 86 it was an 88 a powerful, big, powerful machine and he came perhaps a bit steeper than usual and when he pulled up his tail mushed in and his tail went into a wire fence and it dragged about twenty feet of wire and two or three fence posts with it. The tail plane hit this, hit this Canadian pilot who was walking around the compound. Killed him instantly. One of the posts hit his companion and badly injured him and I was in our own compound and I could see through the French huts and I saw this thing. It was no higher than that. I don’t know why the airstream wasn’t tucked in the ground and eventually it climbed away with all this wire streaming behind him and the Luftwaffe gave a splendid funeral to this Australian and we were told that the pilot had been stripped of his brevvy, stripped of his rank, and posted to the eastern front as a common foot soldier. I think, it think they just told us that to pacify us. I can’t believe for a moment that that’s what happened but that’s the story they gave us but to be killed in a flying accident walking around a prison compound it’s a bit much isn’t it?
BW: Yeah and as you say there’s got to be some for the tail wheel to be that close to the ground that there’s got to be the plane itself has got to be very, very low.
PB: It was no higher -
BW: Ten feet or less
PB: Than that. I don’t know why the airstream wasn’t hitting the ground.
BW: And that you’re indicating’s about two foot -
PB: Yeah.
BW: Three foot.
PB: Yeah I just saw it go I could see it between the huts.
BW: Wow.
PB: And then it just climbed away with all the stuff just trailing behind it. Beautiful piece of flying. Wonderful skilled bit of flying.
BW: Just unfortunate consequence.
PB: Yeah. So we did get excitement from time to time.
BW: How did it feel when the Russians came to liberate? I mean -
PB: Oh -
BW: You must have had a pretty limited amount of information getting through and an impression of what the Russian forces were like. How did it feel when they -
PB: Well -
BW: Came into the camp?
PB: Well the first thing on the newsreels I’d seen pictures of refugees in France and suddenly early in April we got German refugees going past the camp and it was, it was an incredible sightseeing German refugees like that and they were streaming past the camp to get over the Elbe. And then we could -
BW: The Elbe must have been quite close to the camp
PB: Oh it was only about five kilometres and then we heard gunfire and then on St George ’s day early in the morning someone rushed into our hut shouting, ‘The Cossacks are here,’ and we went out and on the main road there were four of the scruffiest most dreadful looking men I’ve ever seen in my life. On horseback. Oh they did, they looked murderous, every one and they were loaded down with sandbags full of food and ammunition and God knows what and they just sat there and later in the day the infantry arrived and they made no provision for us whatsoever. Nothing. So we just broke out of the camp to steal food and steal drink as well and steal women as well no doubt but the Russians clamped on that and then they started to register us and they were going to send us to a Black Sea port, Odessa or some sort of place, and sail us home from there they said. When the Americans are only five miles away. The other side of the river. And they started to register us and they had great big women, great big fat women, tables outside, taking the records, and they got some funny ones. There was a Micky Mouse and James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart and it became chaotic and eventually we just said oh blow this and they packed it in and then they moved us, as I say, out of the camp and up into this maintenance depot.
BW: So they realised you were giving them some spoof names -
PB: Yeah.
BW: And not helping at all
PB: We sat in this maintenance depot about five of us who were all together and suddenly the most horrible screaming and I said the Russians have either got a woman or they’ve got a pig let’s go and to find out which it is. So we followed the noise and we came to a place and there were two Russians. There was one dead pig lying down and there’s another Russian with a pig like a cello with his hand way inside of it and the pig screaming away and we sit and we watch all this and we’re thinking they’ll give us something and we watch and we wait and eventually they killed it and they cut off the ears and gave us the ears. They took two pigs and gave us the bloody ears off one of pig.
BW: And kept the rest for themselves. And in general when they, as you put it, got their act together in terms of organising the camp presumably they re-erected the fence post that had been torn down.
PB: It became a far, far, far worse place than it had ever been.
BW: Yeah.
PB: They turned it into a punishment camp for German civilians. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of Germans died in that camp over the next five years and so the natives at Muelburg are attached to us really. We both suffered in that camp. It was a dreadful place. What it must have been like when it was dreadful when we were there. What it must have been like.
BW: And they weren’t bringing the civilians in while you were there?
PB: No, no.
BW: They presumably -
PB: No. It was after, after they’d repaired it and repaired all the damage we’d done.
BW: Yeah.
PB: And I think it was about five years they had it as a punishment camp. Must have been hell on earth. Hell on earth. Hundreds if not thousands died and this was just because of complaining about some regulation or other that the Russians had imposed. Anything at all, straight in there. Shocking that.
BW: But they didn’t, did they impose a regime on you as RAF crew waiting to be repatriated during that sort of interim period of April, May.
PB: Well it was all chaos. It was all chaos. I had quite an experience on VE day. They had their VE day a day later than ours because apparently they weren’t satisfied with the arrangements that the west had made so they decided to have their own, their own VE day the next day and I was, I was walking in the German town. Why I was alone and not with any of my friends I don’t know but I was alone and I was walking through this town and suddenly two Russian officers grabbed me and took me to their mess and gave me a huge meal. All, all looted German property of course. Animals, vegetables. The lot. And a particular sweet which I learned later was made from sour milk and it was absolutely gorgeous and after the meal they took me to a public hall where there was to be an address by a general followed by a concert and it was full of full of Russian soldiers, men and women, in all sorts of different uniforms and this general came onto the stage and I got, I got an example of what it was it was like being in a totalitarian state. He made a speech and the only words I heard were Churchill and Roosevelt every now and again he’d pause and somewhere at the very back of the, of the gallery [clapping sound] and immediately everybody’s clapping and immediately they all stopped like that.
BW: As if somebody was coordinating it.
PB: Someone’s coordinating. The whole thing was coordinated and eventually the speech finishes and we had this concert and it was absolutely fantastic. Oh the music and the dancing and the singing unbelievable. Unbelievable concert. It was terrific. Now what happened when it finished I’ve no idea. I haven’t a clue what happened to me that night. Not a clue. Not the slightest idea. I know I joined up with my friends the next day but what happened that night I don’t, I’ve no idea but I’ve never seen anything like the performance that these women who seemed to just move like that.
BW: Gracefully across -
PB: No, no leg movement at all.
BW: The stage yeah.
PB: And the Cossacks down on their heels kicking. Oh it was a fantastic concert and the singing and the balalaika playing. A night to remember that was. And that was VE day. VE day Russian version.
BW: How had you managed to celebrate it in the camp at all? You mentioned it was quite different to our celebration were there any –
PB: Well we didn’t know. We didn’t know it was VE day.
BW: So the only indication you got was from the Russians when they -
PB: Yeah.
BW: Held their celebrations.
PB: And as I say by this time we weren’t in the camp and in fact we’d broken and were trying to get across to the Americans on our own.
BW: And you mention you were in the town at this stage in Muhlberg.
PB: Ahum.
BW: What, what was it like what was your sense of being in the town? Were there, firstly, was it damaged but also were there German civilians who might be hostile.
PB: No.
BW: To the RAF at all.
PB: The civilians couldn’t get us in to their houses fast enough. We were never we were never short of somewhere to sleep or somewhere to wash.
BW: Right.
PB: Because I think the theory was if ten drunken Russians hammered on the door at midnight looking for women we would go to the door and say it was under British occupation you’ll have to go next door. It never worked out in practice [thank God] but that was the theory I think. They couldn’t get us into their houses fast enough.
BW: So a bit I suppose a bit of a protection there for them if the -
PB: Yeah.
BW: If the Russians had seen western RAF aircrew in a house -
PB: Yeah.
BW: They would be less likely -
PB: Yeah. Yeah.
BW: To interfere with it.
PB: And we slept we slept on a feather bed with a feather bed on top of us with a great big bed oh it was wonderful.
BW: And the Germans managed to put you up in the sense that they would feed you as well.
PB: Yes. Yes,
BW: Even though they would have probably been rationed at this stage and -
PB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they couldn’t do enough for us.
BW: And did you get to go back to Muhlberg in the intervening years?
PB: No, because I don’t know where we were. I don’t know where the Russians had moved us to.
BW: Right.
PB: The, the Stalag 4b Association organised trips to Muhlberg later and they became very popular because the Muhlberg people themselves were in the same boat but I never went. In fact they had a trip this year starting off in Berlin and moving down to Muhlberg.
BW: And when you came back to the UK we picked up the story at Cosford and we picked up the extra pay that you’d been awarded.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And you were washed and brushed up. What then happened to you sort of post war from Cosford?
PB: Well I was given three options. I could come out immediately or I could go to oh what’s the Yorkshire town, the spa town?
BW: Harrogate.
PB: Harrogate. On a rehabilitation course and then come out or I could opt to stay in until my normal release date. Well I thought there was still a chance of getting back on flying and getting out east and bombing Japan so I opted to stay in and I got posted to a, to a Mosquito squadron near, near Newcastle and there, there I became in effect the squadron warrant officer. I sat in an office all day doing nothing but we had a very, very good rugby team. Our sports, our sports officer was a first class scrub half and we had a very good rugby team and we won the group cup without any difficulty and we got drawn in for the semi-final of the national cup and we got drawn away against Ringway and we came down to Ringway and we found that although paratroopers are army the people who trained them were airmen and practically every one of them was a rugby league professional. So, we turned out on a rugby pitch at Ringway about six hundred red cap paratroopers lying around the pitch cheering their side on. We were up against these great hulking fellas who were fit like butchers dogs. Oh they murdered us. Absolutely murdered us.
BW: And do you still retain an interest in rugby league despite that? Do you follow -
PB: Not rugby league. I don’t like rugby league but we were, they were playing rugby union but they were rugby league professionals.
BW: Right.
PB: But when we got back, when we got back to Acklington I thought that’s it. There’s nothing, nothing doing for me now so I asked to be released and I was released within days.
BW: And was that in 1945?
PB: That would, no, it would be 1946.
BW: ’46.
PB: Yeah.
BW: From Acklington and from then on what happened in your civilian life?
PB: Well, I couldn’t settle.
BW: Your post war life.
PB: I couldn’t settle. I got I got a job as a clerk with a, with a big chemical manufacturing company and I was in this office with about six other people who were as dull as ditchwater, been there forever and all I was doing was calculating lorry loads [eight car loads used to go there and six car loads to go there?] making up that and oh it was absolutely soul destroying. I stuck it I think for three months and then I thought I can’t, I can’t, I can’t settle to this so I then decided I thought the only way to get some companionship again, get some comradeship again was if I joined the police force so I went to, I went to the police station in Burnley and they said, ‘We’ve no, we’ve no vacancies but we can put you in touch with our central organisation.’ So they did and I was called for interview at Wallasey and got into the Wallasey force with three other people and when we went to the police training school we found that three people on the course were Burnley recruits. Burnley. But this gave me my first insight into the police they were recruiting people but they wouldn’t recruit Burnley people. They wouldn’t have anybody who lived in the town going into the police force. So that was the first lie from the police. I worked hard. I came out top of the class and we got to Wallasey and for the first fortnight I was sent out on patrol with another policeman who’d been on patrol for years and I learned how to, I learned which cafes you could sit in the back rooms of and drink coffee and I learned all sort of tricks that really you shouldn’t be doing and it was a complete and utter waste of time and in a small force like Wallasey the opportunity for promotion were very, very few and far between. You had people who had been pounding the beat for fifteen years. They’d passed their sergeants examinations, they passed their inspectors examinations and they were still pounding the beat and the only way you could get on was to curry favour. Start oozing up to some officers and telling tales. It was the exact opposite of comradeship. Everybody’s telling tales about everybody. I thought I can’t stick this so I resigned from that and I was playing rugby in Burnley then and one of the team was a cotton mill owner and he said, ‘If you ever want a proper job I’ll give you a job in a cotton mill,’ so I went to work in his cotton mill and that was no good. And all the time I’m in touch with my bomb aimer’s father. Had regular correspondence and I said to him, ‘I can’t settle I’m going to go back into the air force.’ And he said, ‘Well don’t do anything for the next fortnight,’ and I received a letter -
[interview transmission interrupted]
BW: Alright, so we’re only, we’re only a couple of minutes from the end and I was just asking Mr Phillip Bates that after the end of the war in conclusion he’d said that he’d had a good war but it had had its moments um that were not entirely enjoyable but that overall he’d enjoyed it, his service in the RAF but I was asking just about the commemorations and the national, now centre, at Lincoln and you mentioned that you’d been down to London for the unveiling of the memorial there.
PB: Yeah.
BW: At Green Park.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And you got to meet Camilla as well did you say?
PB: Yes Camilla and the Prince of Wales. I got to shake both their hands. The Prince of Wales surprised me really. It was probably, it was probably the hottest day of the year and everybody had taken his blazer off and I was wearing my Raf Ex-Pow Association tie and the Prince of Wales came along and immediately recognised my tie which surprised me. And as he shook my hand he said, ‘Where did they keep you?’ I said, ‘Stalag 4b, sir.’ He said, ‘Were you a digger?’ I said, ‘Oh no I wasn’t a digger, sir. No. I left that to other people,’ and he was quite jovial and then of course he moved on and made his way down the line but I was amazed that he recognised my tie instantly.
BW: That’s a very nice point that, you know, he’s identified you by that.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And spoke to you particularly because of it.
PB: And part of the Royal Air Force. I’ve got photographs of it all.
BW: And how about now that there’s a centre for Bomber Command in Lincoln?
PB: Well yes he’s lost his football again. I was due to go there and a friend of mine, Dominic was taking me but when it came to it I wasn’t fit to go. I couldn’t have sat in a car for three hours. I just couldn’t. And then another three hours coming back. And Dominic also had a cold so we were ashamed to admit it and then again it’s Lincoln. It’s Lancasters. Bugger the Lancasters I say.
BW: Well perhaps it didn’t prove as reliable as the Stirling because it didn’t fly. They were trying to get the Lancaster flying for the Friday unveiling but they didn’t and I think it may have flown -
PB: Yeah.
BW: The day after but -
PB: What annoys me they chopped up every Stirling. Now, you think they could, it was the first four engine aircraft we had. You’d think they could have had two or three for museums wouldn’t you?
BW: Ahum.
PB: But no they chopped up the lot and that really does grieve me.
BW: And even now they’ve got a Halifax in Elvington.
PB: Oh I’ve seen that.
BW: Which is nicely renovated and so on.
PB: Yeah.
BW: Doesn’t fly.
PB: And it’s got, it’s got the Stirling’s engines in it as well. It hasn’t got Rolls Royce in it it’s got Hercules. It’s a mark iii. It’s that one. The mark iii.
BW: That’s the picture on the wall yeah. And there is a Halifax that they dug out or pulled out of a Norwegian fjord in 1973.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And that is in the Royal Air Force Museum in London.
PB: Yeah. Well for years we hoped that they’d would find a Stirling somewhere but er somewhere in Holland but they never did.
BW: Ahum ahum.
PB: A great shame because it was a beautiful aeroplane.
BW: Could take, from what you were saying, could take a fair bit of punishment and keep flying.
PB: Yeah it was a lot bigger than a Lancaster of course but it had some disadvantages you see. It couldn’t fly high and it couldn’t carry big bombs. It didn’t have a bomb bay. It had three separate ones which gave immense strength to the fuselage because you had these girders running the full length but you could only get a two thousand pound bomb in it so we mostly carried incendiaries.
BW: So just thinking in brief terms about the structure of a bomber formation in that case because you’d see that the pathfinders were going first to mark the target.
PB: Yeah.
BW: Presumably the Stirlings would then go in with the incendiaries.
PB: No. No, we were our main raid was either five or sometimes six waves.
BW: Right.
PB: And the Stirlings were always in the third wave. We got some protection from the first two waves going out and some protection from the last two waves coming back because we were a bit slower than they were. So we were always in the third wave.
BW: Right.
PB: Except, except Peenemunde. Now, that, that’s a terrible story. The night before Peenemunde we went to, we went to Turin and somewhere our radio packed in and we didn’t get the message telling us that East Anglia was fogged up and we had to land in Kent or Sussex. Wherever we could. We didn’t get that message so we arrived back at Lakenheath and asked for instructions to land and they said. ‘You can’t land here. It’s totally fogbound but if you get over to Oakington you might just get down.’ Well, we got over to Oakington, the other side of Cambridge and we just landed. They closed the, closed the airfield immediately we landed and they debriefed us and fed us and provided us with beds and in the early afternoon we went down to the airfield and the Lancasters of seven group were being bombed up and we knew we were on again that night and we were going on leave the so next day so we weren’t anxious to go bombing that night. Anyway, we’d no choice we started the port outer. Come to the port inner, nothing. The starter motor was dead. The starter motors they had in Oakington would fit a Lancaster, it wouldn’t have fit us so we rang Lakenheath to tell them. Eventually a lorry arrives with some fitters and a new starter motor and we landed at Lakenheath just as the squadron is taxiing out for take-off and we were very, very happy because we were going on leave the next day and then I discover we’d missed bloody Peenemunde and at Peenemunde the Stirlings went in first at five thousand feet in brilliant moonlight and all the fighters were circling in Berlin because Mosquitos were dropping target indicators on Berlin. The Germans got away scot free. Eventually the Germans twigged what was happening and got the fighters over and shoot down forty Lancasters and Halifaxes. Stirlings, scot free.
BW: And because you, they’d have been in the first wave.
PB: Yeah.
BW: They got away with it.
PB: There were three, there were three targets. The first one was at the very southern end was all the housing and the Stirlings destroyed that and then the next waves destroyed the science laboratories and then the assembly works and we missed it and it’s grieved me the rest of my life. I’d have given anything to have been on that raid and we were so happy that we weren’t. Oh, a friend of mine got shot down that night. No. I’d have loved to have been on Peenemunde.
BW: I mean that was, that was announced at fairly short notice. It was, you know sometimes a raid has to be planned quite well in advance.
PB: Yeah.
BW: But this was because of the intelligence about the weapons.
PB: Yeah.
BW: They were developing their short notice.
PB: The crews weren’t told, they were told that they were attacking an experimental place for new radar [and the better job of the radar they’d better defend themselves because they destroy all the latest airborne radar] that was the story that was given to aircrews.
BW: Interesting.
PB: Oh I’d have given anything to have been on that raid. Anything. Five thousand feet, brilliant moonlight and you were the first in.
BW: As you say it’s how fate goes isn’t it?
PB: Yeah.
BW: But -
PB: I’ve just been to the funeral of a friend of mine. George. He trained in Canada as a navigator. As a Mosquito navigator which is a specialised navigation job. He qualifies, he gets his brevvy, he’s ready to join the squadron and the war stops. They never even, he never even saw a Mosquito. Oh what a terrible thing to have happen to you. Terrible.
BW: Gone through all that. Well, I was reading in the prep really that they launched a raid on Peenemunde.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And just looking here at some of this um yeah it says here that 149 squadron took part in the early offensive against Germany.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And took part in the first thousand bomber raids with Stirlings.
PB: Yeah.
BW: Made a significant contribution to the battle of the Ruhr, Battle of Hamburg and the raid against the V weapons experimental station at Peenemunde.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And then between February and July ‘44 and in addition to dropping high explosives on the enemy the squadron helped supply the French maquis with supplies, arms and ammunition by parachute.
PB: Yeah.
BW: Of course that would be after you’d been shot down.
PB: About eight weeks after we were shot down Stirlings were taken off German targets completely. Some of them converted to Lancasters. Those that kept their Stirlings were used to drop supplies in France and to do mine laying and later to tow, to tow gliders but they never went to Germany again. The loss rate was unsustainable. I’d been on raids where we lost one in every five Stirlings. You can’t, you can’t keep that up for very long.
BW: No. No. Not at all. Do you think there was a particular weakness perhaps in the Stirling that the losses were so high or was it just good -
PB: You couldn’t get any altitude.
BW: Just because they were restricted to -
PB: Yeah, yeah.
BW: Low ceiling.
PB: Altitude. I mean, I had friends who flew at twenty two thousand feet. On a good night we would get thirteen. On a poor night we would get eleven. Everything that was thrown up reached the Stirlings and everything that was coming down reached the Stirling as well [laughs].
BW: I think you mentioned at one point a bomb hit your aircraft. A bomb -
PB: Yeah.
BW: Dropped from the aircraft above.
PB: This was the Nuremberg. I think it must have been a thirty pound incendiary because it went straight through. If it had been a four pound I think it would have stayed in the wing and burned. If it had been [eighty] it would have taken the wing off. Left quite a sizable hole.
BW: I would just like to show you this. There’s a photo here of a Stirling crew of 149 squadron based at Lakenheath.
PB: Oh.
BW: And I just wonder whether you might recognise any of the names. It’s only a longshot.
PB: Oh.
BW: But there’s -
PB: As I say we never bothered with other crews really.
BW: No.
PB: Except the ones we trained with at -
BW: But it looks like it’s outside the mess at Lakenheath that picture.
PB: Yeah I don’t recognise the photograph. Crowe, that’s a familiar name, Crowe. Oh he was a POW that’s why I know him. Was he a flight engineer? I knew a Tweedy in prison but he was a soldier. I don’t recognise the faces at all. Don’t know why their wearing uniform instead of battledress but there we are. Battledress were far more comfortable. That’s interesting. 27th of September. Oh well they would have been newcomers on the squadron when we were there. The average life expectancy was only six weeks. I had two friends, both on Halifaxes -
BW: Thank you.
PB: Both shot down on their first trip and my friend who were in training, a flight engineer on 15 squadron did four operations and got shot down twice.
BW: Right. I think that sort of brings us to the end as I say unless there is anything else you want to say.
PB: Well I hope I haven’t bored you.
BW: Not at all sir. No not at all there’s plenty of information. Some really interesting and diverse experiences. It’s been very kind of you to share those with me.
PB: It’s a pleasure.
BW: So thank you very much -
PB: A pleasure.
BW: For your time um what I’ll do is I’ll come to the signing of the release form now and a couple of photos so I’ll end the recording there and we’ll sort out the paperwork.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
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ABatesP151009
Title
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Interview with Philip Bates
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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02:13:03 audio recording
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending OH summary. Allocated S Coulter
Creator
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Brian Wright
Date
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2015-10-09
Description
An account of the resource
Philip Bates grew up in Lancashire and joined the Royal Air Force in 1940. He served as ground crew with Coastal Command before remustering as aircrew. He flew operations as a flight engineer with 149 Squadron until his aircraft was shot down and he became a prisoner of war.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Air Force. Coastal Command
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
Poland
England--Lancashire
England--Suffolk
Poland--Tychowo
Germany
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Nuremberg
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1943
1944
1945
Contributor
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Julie Williams
149 Squadron
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bomb struck
bombing
bombing of Hamburg (24-31 July 1943)
Bombing of Peenemünde (17/18 August 1943)
displaced person
Dulag Luft
entertainment
fear
final resting place
flight engineer
ground crew
ground personnel
Heavy Conversion Unit
home front
incendiary device
Ju 88
Lysander
Manchester
Me 110
military living conditions
military service conditions
mine laying
Nissen hut
prisoner of war
RAF Lakenheath
RAF St Athan
RAF Waterbeach
Resistance
Scarecrow
searchlight
shot down
Stirling
training
Window
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/208/3347/ABellJ151127.1.mp3
7b483681ed81283f499c2686831f3ef9
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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Bell, Joyce
Joyce Bell
J Bell
Description
An account of the resource
12 items. An oral history interview with Joyce Edna Bell nee Langdon (b. 1921 Royal Air Force), Jim Taylor's RAF Memoirs 1932-1939, documents, clippings, correspondence and photographs. Joyce Bell served served as a clerk in 1 Group Bomber Command and Married <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/17">Oliver Bell</a>. <br /><br />The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Joyce Bell and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Date
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2015-11-27
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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Bell, J
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
JG: The date is the 27th November 2015 I'm James Greenhalgh from the University of Lincoln, I'm here with Mrs Joyce Bell at her home in Ranskill and she is going to us about some of her memories from World War Two.
JB: My name is Joyce Bell and I will be 94 on the 21st December 2015, I was born in Hoddesdon in Hertfordshire I was Joyce Langdon when I joined the WAAF in December 1940 aged nineteen I did my training at Harrogate the Grand Hotel and Pannal Ash College. My first posting was to Hucknall, Nottinghamshire in January 1941. No.1 Group Bomber Command, I worked in central registry and later in the transport department, my soon to be husband Oliver having a ride back from Aiden at the fall of France from the German Army was stationed in Lincolnshire No.1 Group Bomber Command when his friend was posted to Hucknall but having just married I asked Oliver if he would take the posting in his place which he did, on arrival at Hucknall I processed Oliver's documents and I noticed he was single and I told the clerks 'he's mine' [laughs]. During the summer of 1941 I accompanied several officers and went to assess Bawtry Hall near Doncaster South Yorkshire with a view to moving No.1 Group there I was deemed imminently suitable and the whole head quarters moved there after it was vacated by the Army. I worked in an office near the gatehouse at the side entrance of Harworth Road checking vehicles in and out, we were billeted in huts in a field near by and our commanding officer kept a donkey for his children in the area where our ablutions huts were cited, in the middle of the night in pitch black we would hear often the donkey bray and know that someone had bumped into him on their way to the facilities. Thursday nights were make do and mend nights we had to sit in and mend our clothes however we were allowed off camp occasionally I remember standing with three other WAAFs on Bawtry Road waiting for a bus to Doncaster to go to see a film at the cinema when a man driving a horsebox pulled up and asked if we would like a lift as he was on his way to Doncaster we gladly accepted his offer and with that he jumped out of the cab and went to the rear of the vehicle so to let the back door down, inside was a horse standing in a stall and we four girls jumped in beside the horse the driver dropped us off right outside the cinema where people were queuing the expression on their faces when the driver lowered that back door and four WAAFs jumped out was hilarious. I used to see Oliver each day for signing various documents and we started our courtship in September 1941 by December the 21st we were engaged and on May the 21st 1942 we married at Harworth church after one month of marriage Oliver was sent to Moncton New Brunswick Canada where soon after he was made a Warrant officer highest of the ranks I left the RAF on the 12th December 1942 as by now I was expecting our eldest daughter Josephine I went back to live with my parents in Stortford Road Hoddesdon Hertfordshire and Jo was born on the 18th March 1943, when Jo was three months old I went out to St George New Brunswick to join Oliver taking our new baby with me I travelled by ship on the Andes a fivesome banana boat leaving from Liverpool my parents travelling with me to see me go, by the end of that year Oliver took his commission and was a Pilot Officer the lowest rank of the officers he was then transferred to Middleton Nova Scotia in December 1943 where baby number two Maureen was born in June 1944. I recall meeting up with several airmen and sailors on that journey by train between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia who assisted me in getting a first class ticket and then helped looked after Jo while I went for a meal. Oliver and I lived in an apartment which belonged to Mr and Mrs Finney at the bottom of Mrs Finney's garden was a cemetery where RAF personnel were buried how I wish I could write to the relatives of these young men and say I had witnessed their burials. I would send food parcels back to my parents particularly dried fruit to make a Christmas cake as food was in short supply. I’ve got the right page now...in short oh yes it's here in supply back in Britain. Oliver and I left Canada in December 1944 we separately but in a flotilla of sixty ships I had to pay £100 for this journey as by now I was an officer's wife for this amount I was given a cabin to myself and the children whereas I had shared a cabin with three other women and children on the way out. I remember the convoy being halted just off the coast of Ireland and depth charges being dropped as it was suspected that were submarines in the area. Oliver disembarked at Liverpool I left separately in the south where Oliver's father came to meet me he travelled with me back to London and I was taken to my own parents in Hoddesdon the following day. I spent the next few months with my parents we were highly amused by my toddler Jo's Canadian accent especially her words "liberty parties’ [in a Canadian accent]. Oliver was sent to RAF Binbrook where he was promoted to Flying officer he was then posted to Lindhome at the same time as one of my Aunt and Uncle's were due to leave the ROF bungalow at Mattersey Thorpe to return to Waltham Abbey . Oliver applied to the ROF to see if we would be allowed to move 10 Bader Rise Mattersey Thorpe which we were. It was close enough for Oliver to travel each day and life was wonderful . I moved up from Hoddesdon on the Friday and on the Monday Oliver was sent to Barrea in Italy September 1945, oh dear. Oliver was promoted to Flight Lieutenant whilst in Italy November 1945. After six months apart Oliver finally left the RAF in 1946 last day of service 13th of June 1946. Now neither Jo nor Maureen recognised this stranger bearing gifts when he returned home and Oliver had to win them over for a final time. Err do you want this other on here or just up to there?
JG: Please continue.
JB: I can not remember children having identity cards but of course you did need ration books for food, food was scarce but we didn't starve people swapped rations with each other. I would swap tea for margarine etcetera. So we never had bananas only home produced fruit, couldn't cook chips, wait a minute, we couldn’t cook chips , we had no fat. I kept Bantams for eggs as rations were one egg per week but it was difficult to find hen food. Rationing was worst after the war for about five years also fuel was scarce hence me always out collecting wood. Oliver left the Wimbledon Century school aged sixteen and joined the RAF he was sent to Cranwell Lincolnshire for training date of enlisting 12th of the first 1932 failed his Pilot's training because he was colourblind did a gunners course in 1936, he was a wireless electrical mechanic by trade after training at Cranwell he was sent to Aden 4th of the tenth '35', 12th Squadron where he flew in a Scopwick Camel aircraft as a gunner he came back to England 1939 and was on one of the last boat loads to leave France when the German invasion was imminent, his brother Ken was at home when Oliver walked in minus his cap and sleeve and jacket ripped but Oliver never said how it happened after four years away his mother said 'hello when are you going back?' [laughter]. Oliver finally left the RAF in 1946 to begin a new life working as a post office engineer based at Gainsborough, we never returned to the south of the country but spent many happy years in North Nottinghamshire and went on to have a family of five. That’s it.
JG: Marvellous.
JB: What you say, you have heard enough? Don't say anymore!
JG: No no...so I was just wondering what you did when you were in the WAAF?
JB: Well I was clerical, I was er...everybody that came to the camp had to report to me first because I used to have to take all the particulars, where they came from where they were going to, what they were doing, so that’s what I did.
JG: And, what are your best memories of the WAAF then?
JB: Happy days, they were happy days we all enjoyed each other you know, it was very good not nice that the war was on but there you are we made the best of it.
JG: And what sort of things did you do for fun? You mentioned going to see...going to the pictures and things.
JB: Well, that was about it we didn't do a lot we used to have a camp dance once a week, of which I don't dance so I used to sit there like nothing so anyway my husband took a chance on me and he said would you care to dance and i said ' Well I'd love to but I don't.' He said 'Well neither do I so that makes two of us.' So off we went jogging round [laughs] oh dear. Yes.
JG : So what did Oliver do? Obviously he was on the planes, but what specifically did he do?
JB: Come on help me....
Daughter: Was he a Wireless operator mum?
JB: Yes, yes, ummm and then just trying to think when he took his commission what he was still doing electrical, well he was an Electrical mechanical engineer in the RAF that's what he was.
JG: And can you remember what sort of planes he flew, what sort of missions he did? Can you remember any of that?
JB: He flew, he used to fly on what they call the Sopwith Camel aircraft
Daughter: And, there was another one I think .
JB: Of course I didn't know him then
Daughter: Hawker Hart?
JG: Oh yes..
Daughter: I think that's what it means it says Hart.
JG: Yes, it certainly looks like it doesn't it.
Daughter: We have got photographs of him on the plane
JG: Right, so what were his duties then when he was in Canada, what did he do while he was in
New Brunswick do we know?
Daughter: I don't know , I don't know.
JB: No, he was, I don't know what he did out there, I think he was just sort of putting his knowledge generally to help the flying community out there.
JG: Ok, so was he responsible for training and things like that?
JB: Yes I think he was up to a point, he did a bit of that he used to teach the young apprentices you know.
Daughter: I don't know whether any of that tells you anything?
JG: Ok so this was his logbook, oh I see this will be some really useful stuff to have a look at for the guys who do the scanning. Oh wow.
Daughter: You'll see on the back it says he's 'the handsome young man on the wing'.
JB: : 'except to his mother' [laughs]
JG: That's marvellous, modest as well.
Daughter: Yes, and there you are it said 'Oliver Bell flew in this aircraft in Aden 1938.
Jg: Oh yeah. Wow this is something .
JB: Was that the old Sopwith Camel as they called it?
Daughter: One was the Hawker Hart....yours truly in the rear cockpit
JB: Oh just his hair...[laughter]
JG: Oh that's brilliant
JB: Those were the days before I knew his of course.
JG: Sure, yes is he wearing a Pith helmet? He looks like he's got a pith helmet on oh wow. Right actually I had no idea there was so much stuff actually, if you take that for me so we don't get them mixed up so I'm going to potentially have to get someone to take a look at it so we can get some of this scanned in so I'll have a word with Pete about that. So I'm just interested you talked about rationing and I just wondered if you had anything more to say about rationing? You said about you didn't have bananas but I'm quite interested in it.
JB: Well everything was rationed, you didn't put any of that on here did you?
Daughter: No.
JB: One egg per week if you were lucky.
Daughter: Oranges? Were there any oranges mum?
JB; No, no oranges but it was worse after the war the rationing. It was just a bit of margarine, no butter a bit of margarine you had to make do, you know we were starved half the time to be perfectly honest yes so.
JG: So did it stay, did it stay...when you said it was worse after the war did it stay bad for a long time after the war?
JB: Do you know, I can't remember about five years I think, umm as I can recall yes we had a ration of one egg per week so of course you talk about you couldn't even do a bit of baking cause you needed eggs and oh it was dreadful yes.
JG: And what sort of things did you make then, what sort of stuff could you have then? I'm fascinated by it.
JB: [Laughs] Oh dear, I'd hoped I'd put it all out of my mind. Oh I don't know.
Daughter: Did you grow things in the garden Mum?
JB: Oh yes we grew our own, we did have a garden and we did grow vegetables which helped alot yes we certainly did but as we've got here the rationing was worse after the war than when the war was on and fuel of course was very scarce. You got one bag of fuel to last you you goodness knows how long donkeys years you know.
JG: So when you were at home then and you were sort of like trying to keep warm did you do things differently? What did you do differently?
JB: Well I used to go collecting wood.
Jg; Right.
JB: Of course we lived in Mattersey so the woods were near, I used to go everyday with a big bag and collect all the big chunky bits of wood I could find that's what we used to do to you know keep us going I tell you.
JG: And even though you were not in one of the big cities did you still have to blackout?
JB: Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes you daren't show a crack of curtain they'd be down on you rattling on your door 'lights showing' you know [laughs] yes it wasn't fun times really although we made what we could of it.
JG: So if you were, when you were blacking out did you have...what sort of things did you have in the home? What sort of things kept yourself entertained?
JB: Well there was always something when you’ve got children.
Daughter: You had a radio though
JB; Oh yes we had a radio, yes.
Daughter: You used to listen to plays on the radio….
JB: Yes.
Daughter: I remember that.
JB: But as soon as it was getting dusk we had to put the blackout curtains up and not be a light if they saw a light one of the wardens walking round would be rattling on your door and tell you you have a so and so light shining oh it was murder.
Daughter: You used to bath...I was born in 1951 I was number three daughter and was we always bathed in a tin bath in front of an open fire weren't we?
JB: Yes, oh yes you were.
Daughter: When we were little all the rest of the house was freezing cold frost on the inside of the windows and everything.
JB: Yes those were the days [laughs].
JG: I'm just fascinated, I'm actually fascinated by what it was like living with things like the blackout and the rationing
JB: That's right, well like I say we had a garden so we used to try and grow as much as you could to help you know, I mean it was ...
Daughter: What about the days Mum when you were on the poultry farm? Didn't you go in one morning and find that all the poultry….
JB: Oh yes a bomb had fallen out, they were all in cages battery type in these big sheds and I used to work there . I went one morning and i could see this huge shed it was on a skew-whiff as they call it and thought what on earth's wrong here and when I looked the chickens were creating and there was the biggest hole right near the chicken shed it must have frightened those chickens to death they were squawking their heads off. Anyway I used to use it for cleaning them out and filling it up but honestly it was so I suppose from the air to a foreign thing it was a long building you know have ago at bombing that.
JG: So do you have....do you remember bombing raid?
JB: Oh yes, yes yes.
Daughter: What about back in Hoddesdon Mum when you were at home with your Mum when you could see across to London?
JG: Oh yes that used to be dreadful when there was a raid on London, oh we used to stand at my mother's back door you could see the flames used to light the sky up the sirens used to go on, we said 'there's a raid on London' poor people it used to be shocking it was like one huge big fire you know you used to stand and watch poor people. You were half starved ‘cause you didn't have much to eat and then you had to put up with things like that. Oh it was dreadful.
Daughter: Where did you used to hide Mum? Where did you used to hide?
JB: Oh in the cupboard under the stairs [laughs] it was as safe a place as any my Mum was a real panicker with anything you know and as soon as the siren went 'come on come in here' you know so.
JG: So did you always shelter underneath the stairs or they had hadn't given you a Anderson or an Morrison shelter or anything like that ?
JB: No, no no no we didn't have you see London people did more but I suppose living in the country they won't bother you know people in the country so we make do our own safety devices
Daughter: Did you not shelter under the table the kitchen table?
J: Oh yes, my eldest daughter that lives in Australia was i remember about two years old at the time and we used to say you know when the siren went, she used to know really that we were going under the table and when we used to get under she used to 'shhh don't make a sound’ [laughs] I don't know if she thought the pilots could here us .
JG: And where did any of the ...obviously the chickens shed got hit but did they ever accidently bomb near you when you were living near London?
JB: When I was what?
JG: When you were living near London?
JB: Yes
JG: Did you get any bombers that came close?
JB: Oh yes yes we used to hear them and see them going over you know, and you could always tell because they had a different sound to the engine from the English you could always tell a German bomber from a English one .
Daughter: I think Grandad mentioned walking along the new river and somewhere had been bombed one of the houses or something didn't he?
JB: Yes
Daughter: And there was all stuff up in the trees, clothes in the trees I think Grandad spoke about that.
JB: Yes, they weren't fun times not at all, let's hope we never have anymore wars
JG: Yes absolutely, crikey
JB: Well I'm not saying you know, I enjoyed it apart from it being what it was I enjoyed my days in the WAAF you know it was quite nice to mix to get out with people i'd been an only child I quite enjoyed the company.
JG: So what had you done before the war then?
JB; Well I worked on this poultry farm
Daughter: You also worked in the Home and Colonial
JB: Oh yes to start with I worked in a shop the Home and Colonial shop .
JG: Oh right
JB: It wasn't my cup of tea I never wanted to but you had to have a job and that was it and then someone said about this farm this chicken farm and I said that’d suit me be err and I went to see and I got the job I enjoyed it, not everyone would have liked it but I did ,yes.
JG: So I was er I was also going to ask er hang on I've completely lost my train of thought
JB: Oh it's alright I'm taken you back have I?
Daughter: Were you going to ask about the ROF bungalow ?
JG: Oh yes it's one of the things I've got written down here.
Daughter: I thought you were the Royal Ordnance Factory it belonged to the Royal Ordnance factory
JG: Ah right
Daughter: And my Uncle who had come from the south was sent, he was sent up here to work at this local Royal Ordnance factory at Torworth.
JG: Right
Daughter: And at the same time that he was being sent back down home which was about two years after he came that’s when mum and dad were looking to find a place up here so they asked if they could take on the bungalow that auntie and Uncle had lived in and the ROF agreed because Dad belonged to the RAF and they said yes he could have it.
JG: So er I'm also interested in you talked about sailing to and from Canada and I'm just wondering what that was like really?
JB: Well...
Daughter: How did you cope for nappies Mum for the babies ?
JB: Oh I saved up before i went all the material, cotton wool and I cut up sheets and all sorts and make do you know and when I got to Canada belive me it was a different world from what I'd left oh it was lovely to be in a bit of peace gorgeous out of London and it was lovely yes it wasn't fun days believe me, ye.s
Daughter: You got a very modern pram in Canada didn't you for your babies?
JB: Oh yes, absolutely.
Daughter: A bit different to back at home.
JB: Yes
Daughter: Just looking for those photographs? I don't know what we did with those....
Jg: Oh nice picture.
JB: Oh[laughs].
JG: When's that...oh 1942?
Daughter: Yes the year they got married.
JG: Oh apparently that’s the week after you got married.
Daughter: Yes yes that was 1935 that Dad's friend sent that.
JG: Oh i see ye.s
Daughter: Right these are the ones in Canada, so they had a fairly modern pram there.
JG: Oh nice [laughter][ it looks cold
JB: It was cold but it was lovely not the cold we get here it was nice and crisp you know not that sort of wet cold that we get here.
JG: Yeah, oh look at the pines yeah,. lovely to look at yeah
Daughter: That says St.George New Brunswick on the back.
JB: Oh yeah St George New Brunswick .
Daughter: So that gives you some idea...oh this was oh that was part you can see the house in the background.
Jg: Oh that is nice.
JB: Lovely veranda all around, ooh the houses out there they cater for cold and hot weather you know in the summer i remember .you can sit out on the veranda and oh lovely
Daughter: They were kind of centrally heating weren't they mum in Canada.
JB: Yes sort of underground, underfloor heating yes.
JG: And you presumably hadn't had central heating at home had you not?
JB: No no
JG: Very few houses had...
JB: No get up on frosty mornings scrape the snow ice off the window [laughs].
Daughter:That was a street party at the end of the war in Hoddesdon in Hertfordshire.
JG: Oh yeah look at the houses they are absolutely classic 1930's houses.
Daughter: Well that's where my Grandma and Grandad lived in one of those.
JG: Right oh. that's marvellous there's some great stuff there
Daughter: Yes and a lot more of Dad you know a lot more of his Squadrons and all sorts of things.
JG: Did he often talk about his time in the RAF?
Daughter: No he didn't and I wish now you see Dad died eighteen years ago.
JG: Right.
Daughter: And I wish I'd would have asked 'cause if you look in the distance you'll see what I've done this year I've been I have sat in a Lancaster for a taxi ride in the position that Dad would probably have been in.
JG: Well I have, you see that radio that's just behind that picture you're holding I have one of those
Daughter: Oh yes.
JG: My Grandad pulled it out of the back of a Short Stirling at the end of the Second World War.
Daughter: Wow, well this year I really wanted wished Dad could have been here but Mum's done her best she's told us a lot and look at this Dad saw these operas in Rome whilst in Italy 1945 -46.
JG: That's a hard life that must have been hard living in Italy and watching operas
Daughter: There you are Dad went and saw three operas
JB: Rigoletto and La Boheme oh wow...crikey i bet that was nice the thing that's amazing about that is it would not have been the thing you really got the chance to do would it.
Daughter: No, absolutely not .
JG: It must have been amazing
Daughter: Yes I mean he travelled all over the place he certainly did.
JG: You'd be amazed for various reasons I've interviewed lots of veterans widows because I'm quite interested in other aspects of it not just the Bomber Command stuff and you'd be amazed how little a lot of the lads talked about their time in...
Daughter: No my Dad didn't he never to talk he never used to say
JG: It's quite fascinating how little people have spoken about it and when we've interviewed veterans how glad they are to be able to tell us about it actually at last
Daughter: Yes
JG: They feel like somebody's interested.
Daughter: Interested yes, I think this is absolutely wonderful Wimbledon Education Committee Wimbledon central school for boys 'Oliver Herbert Bell entered this school by examination in September….
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ABellJ151127
Title
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Interview with Joyce Bell
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
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Sound
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eng
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00:35:25 audio recording
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Pending review
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Jim Greenhalgh
Date
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2015-11-27
Description
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Joyce Bell grew up in Hertfordshire and joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force in 1940. She served as a clerk in 1 Group Bomber Command where she met her husband and she travelled with him to Canada where he was posted.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
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Canada
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Nottinghamshire
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1940
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
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Carmel Dammes
1 Group
ground personnel
love and romance
military living conditions
military service conditions
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/212/3351/ABlackhamCP161023.1.mp3
41156d573a080b43ea5fb588daf52a1f
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Title
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Blackham, Charles Philip
Charles Philip Blackham
Charles P Blackham
Charles Blackham
C P Blackham
C Blackham
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Flight Lieutenant Charles Philip Blackham (1923 - 2019, 1624693 Royal Air Force). He flew operations with 550 Squadron.
The was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-10-23
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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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Blackham, CP
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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JM: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Julian Maslin, the interviewee is Mister Philip Blackham. The interview is taking place at [deleted] Cheshire, on the 23rd of October 2016. Philip, good afternoon.
PB: Good afternoon.
JM: Could I ask you to tell us a little bit about your family background, where you were born and brought up and where you went to school?
PB: Well, I went to Stockport School, which is a well-known secondary school in Stockport on the main Wellington road going south out of the town and I was there for four years and I rose from being seventeenth in the class to top of the class. Amazing because they decided to honour my parents who’d paid for me to go to the school, I hadn’t won a scholarship so I went on to be top of the class to my absolute amazement, sharing that top position with another young man in the class of twenty or thirty cadets and pupils and I got my school certificate with a distinction in art, believe it or not, and physics.
JM: So you have some science and maths in your background.
PB: Yes, I was a hopeless failure at chemistry. Otherwise I passed in everything.
JM: And what had you thought you would do with your life, had you got a choice of career in mind?
PB: I thought I was gonna be a priest at one stage but it didn’t happen, it didn’t go on in that direction. I became an apprentice in mechanical engineering at a very big and famous diesel engine company called Mirrlees, Bickerton & Day, a very, very wonderful firm which I had greatly admired and it’s just been dismantled in the last twelve months.
JM: And had you started your apprenticeship before the war began?
PB: No, the war was already starting, I think. I hope I’m right about that because I can’t be absolutely certain.
JM: Had you got any experience of flying? Had you ever thought of joining the Royal Air Force when you were at school?
PB: No, no, I hadn’t, no. I just wanted to get into the services cause there was a war on and my father had fought in the Great War and become very lame so I had to stand for [unclear] his good example, he was still alive and hobbling from war wounds in his legs.
JM: So you perhaps didn’t feel to join the Army but perhaps the RAF was a choice.
PB: Well, I had no interest in the Army whatsoever. The Air Force interested me because it was aeroplanes and petrol engines where of tremendous interest to me.
JM: So, your interest in engineering was really a factor of perhaps you becoming a flight engineer
PB: Oh yes, yes. I also became an engineer, I took the engineering qualifications at Barry, South Wales.
JM: Right. When you were in the RAF.
PB: Yeah, qualifying, after qualifying as a pilot, took the engineering degree as well.
JM: Right.
PB: And I still got the certificates.
JM: Let’s go back a bit. What age were you when you joined the RAF?
PB: About seventeen or eighteen.
JM: Seventeen or eighteen. Had you seen anything of the air raids against Manchester or Liverpool?
PB: Yes, yes, we had a bomb in our own garden in Stockport, a district known as Edgeley and this was a plane that was dumping its bombs I think and the neighbour tried to throw a sandbag on a firebomb and while he went to fetch another sandbag because the first one burst, a high explosive bomb dropped, about as near as that wall there.
JM: That must have done a lot of damage.
PB: And I had me motorbike, I was, I must have been seventeen cause the motorcycle at the time had been inverted so I could fit a bicycle dynamo to it, cause it wasn’t an electrical motorbike, it had an acetylene light, 1929 model, I was very fond of it, it was a lovely thing and I got it going extremely well, used to take people out on it, going horse riding in the country in Cheshire. All over the place on a 1929 Raleigh motorbike so I was fond of engines.
JM: Right.
PB: And I had totally rebuild that engine myself. So I was going to be an engineer and I was and in due course became the chief, something, the title for my position in Mirrlees, Bickerton & Day, [pauses] I’ve forgotten the title.
JM: Doesn’t matter.
PB: I had a big title for the whole of Europe at London office, they moved me from Hazel Grove, Stockport to the west side of London.
JM: I imagine you could probably have stayed in that company during the war as a reserved occupation.
PB: Yes, they were trying to reserve me and I wanted to get out to it and get into the services.
JM: Why did you think so strongly to, that you wanted to join up?
PB: I wanted to be in the action because the war was at its worst at the time, at the time of the Blitz and the bombing.
JM: So, we’re in 1940, the summer and the autumn of 1940.
PB: Yes, I can’t see you very clearly by the way, there is a very bright light behind you. I don’t know whether the curtains could be closed, could they, just to reduce the strength of the light, that’s a good idea, thank you.
JM: What did your family say when you told them that you were going to sign up?
PB: Nothing. They just, they accepted it, there was a war.
JM: Did you have brothers perhaps, at all, older brothers?
PB: Yes, my brother came with me into the Air Force, my older brother and he was recruited, conscripted, I volunteered, so I could be with him,that was how it happened.
JM: Right. Do you remember where you went to enrol?
PB: Oh, I’d been in the Home Guard already, by the way, I had no interest in the Army, I had been a Dad’s Army member, a very happy one too and I used to walk home down our road from the Headquarters of the Home Guard to my house carrying a rifle and ammunition. That wouldn’t be allowed now, would it?
JM: No, it wouldn’t.
PB: At my young age and I had the amazing experience of being told, if you don’t stop asking stupid questions you’re gonna be thrown out of this lecture room. That was what the Commanding Officer said to me.
JM: And what were the stupid questions you were asking?
PB: Oh, just quizzing him about things he was lecturing us on, I’m sorry, I can’t tell you exactly.
JM: Well, they weren’t stupid questions if you were, seeking clarification.
PB: They weren’t stupid questions, they were questions about six rounds, rapid fire between yonder bushy top trees,that was the sort of terminology. And I became a Home Guard driver eventually, that’s another thing that levered me towards being a motorist. I knew how to drive but hadn’t driven, so I got myself into headquarters where the, there’s an Armoury in Stockport, a major building for military purposes called the Armoury, and I got myself recruited there as a driver and took a party of Great War veterans with their respirators and tin hats to a village nearby, name was Marple, in snow and ice, and I’d never driven before ever [emphasises] on the roads, but I had a motorbike, so I knew what the rules of the roads were, this 1929 Raleigh which was my pride and joy incidentally and got myself to Marple which is a very, very hilly area and I was stupid enough to get the passengers to get out and push instead of bouncing as I should have done up the steep hill called Brabyns Brow.
JM: Let’s go on with your time with the Royal Air Force. Do you remember where you went to enrol and what happened to you once you joined?
PB: I went to Manchester to enrol, was immediately accepted, I was fit and well and very thrilled about going into the Air Force.
JM: And where did you receive your initial training?
PB: Cambridge University.
JM: Was it?
PB: Would you believe that? Wasn’t I lucky? In St John’s College, Cambridge, which is a very famous college
JM: It is.
PB: And had a very famous choir.
JM: It has.
PB: And I was there in the ancient buildings on the river Cam.
JM: And were you receiving basic military training there or was this aircrew?
PB: Yes, Air Force engineering and stars and sky and [glider]
JM: How long were you there for, do you remember?
PB: Twelve months.
JM: Twelve months.
PB: And I was living in the college building and even got, for some silly reason a friend & I decided we would sleep out in the quadrangle one night and we were, some students were also in the college, they carted us off into a far corner of the quadrangle where we couldn’t easily get back into our quarters and the rain came and the [unclear – could be “sirens”] went all at the same time.
JM: I imagine there were plenty of examinations, weren’t there, as you were being trained?
PB: Oh yes, they were.
JM: And how did you do with those examinations?
PB: Probably still got the books if the truth be known.
JM: Really? Yes?
PB: I’ve certainly got my brother’s books.
JM: Did you pass the examinations well?
PB: Oh yes, I had to do that.
JM: And what happened to you when that course of training was complete? Where did you go next?
PB: Uh, got to think about that. I can’t remember.
JM: Do you remember if you went for flying training?
PB: Not till I got to Cambridge.
JM: Right.
PB: That was my first flying where I went to Marshalls Airport, Cambridge.
JM: Yes, it’s still there.
PB: And eventually, much later still, I became the Manager of the Marshalls Airport.
JM: Right. How did you get on?
PB: [unclear]
JM: Do you remember what you flew first of all?
PB: Tiger Moths.
JM: Tiger Moths. How did you get on flying with Tiger Moths?
PB: I loved them, beautiful little plane. And I was not taught to look out behind me and look for trouble and I was criticised for that but that was the teacher’s fault, he hadn’t taught me to look round.
JM: Do you remember?
PB: There is a chimney there called Joe’s something or other, it a brickwork
JM: Yes.
PB: On the other edge of Cambridge Airport, do you know it?
JM: I don’t know.
PB: Cambridge Airport, Smokey Joe it was called
JM: Right.
PB: And we used that to tell the direction of the wind.
JM: And do you remember how many hours before you went solo?
PB: I didn’t actually succeed in going solo until I got to Canada.
JM: Right.
PB: In a plane very similar to a Chipmunk, it was a Canadian built two seater, [pauses] just like a Chipmunk to look at
JM: Yes.
PB: You wouldn’t even tell the difference but it was in fact a six cylinder engine, whereas the Tiger Moth and the Chipmunk had just four cylinder engines.
JM: So you were sent from Cambridge by sea to Canada to complete your training.
PB: That’s right.
JM: And that was in 1941, was it?
PB: Yeah.
JM: Yeah. And what was it like? What were your impressions of Canada, a young man arriving in Canada?
PB: Terribly impressed, was a big thing cause I’d crossed the Atlantic by sea in the submarine chase.
JM: Do you remember the ship that you travelled on?
PB: Yes, the Aquitania.
JM: Right.
PB: Let me think about this, yes. That’s it.
JM: Yes.
PB: I was hoping for the Queen Mary.
JM: [laughs]
PB: Cause it was in use in those days but I didn’t have the luck to go in the Queen Mary, I went in the Aquitania.
JM: Well that was a big ship, was it?
PB: Was a huge liner, built in 1914.
JM: And do you remember whereabouts in Canada you went to?
PB: Yes. First of all, De Winton near, what’s the big city in the far west?
JM: Vancouver?
PB: No, not as far as that.
JM: Calgary?
PB: Calgary.
JM: Right.
PB: De Winton is the airport for Calgary.
JM: So you went to Calgary.
PB: It’s straining my memory trying to remember these answers for you.
JM: Well, you’re doing very well but I mean, I think people will be interested in what it was like to be living in Canada and flying there
PB: Oh.
JM: So, anything you can remember,
PB: I can remember all that.
JM: Please tell us a bit.
PB: We had a first posting was the eastern part of Canada, a place I can’t remember the name of, where my cousin has just gone to live now to look for work in the building industry. I have not told you about that, have I? He’s gone to live there, looking for work as a builder.
JM: But what was it like for you in 1941 being in Canada? What was the food like?
PB: Oh, everything was perfect. It was very cold, I remember that, we had to be careful not to get frozen. And when we eventually got out to the prairies. And then we went from eastern Canada and I’m sorry I can’t name the exact spot, we were there for say a week or ten days and we went by rail right across Canada. And if you want a silly joke, the attendant in the steam train said that “you want to hurry up, if you hurry enough you’ll see Lake Winnipeg”. And we did, we hurried down for breakfast to make sure to being ready to see Lake Winnipeg and we were passing it for a day and a half.
JM: [laughs]
PB: That is a fact.
JM: So, that’s a big lake.
PB: A day and a half by a slow steam train, which was very dirty and dusty. And they had to come round with a brush all day long sweeping up the soot. And we eventually got via intermediate cities across Canada to Vancouver, no, sorry, not Vancouver, Calgary. And there I was for six months learning to fly a little plane, very similar to a Chipmunk.
JM: Yes. So, you were flying single engine aircraft at that stage.
PB: Yes.
JM: And did you want to continue as a fighter pilot on single engine aircraft or?
PB: Yes.
JM: You did.
PB: I did.
JM: And how come you were selected then to fly bombers?
PB: Well, I think they were short of bomber pilots and they had to convert me to a four engine pilot.
JM: Do you remember what, what large airplanes you flew first of all? Once you’d qualified.
PB: Just those. We flew Chipmunks of course, for 190 hours on Chipmunks learning to fly to get our wings.
JM: Yes. You must have been very proud when you got your wings.
PB: Oh, I was. Still got one.
JM: [laughs] Good for you.
PB: I’ve never worn them for [unclear] have I?
JM: No.
PB: I got a pair of Air Force wings which is my pride and joy. Best thing I’ve ever done in my life. And we were graduated in the middle of the Canadian desert, as it were, it was a wild and windy place with cold weather.
JM: I was wondering.
PB: It was the 21st of April, I can remember that too. I always remember the graduation date.
JM: I was wondering if you ever flew the Oxford out there.
PB: Only as a navigation exercise.
JM: Right.
PB: Just once or twice.
JM: Yes.
PB: Navigation with about three of us on board, taking turns to navigate it.
JM: Yeah.
PB: Yes.
JM: And how did you find navigation? Was that a skill you could master?
PB: Oh yeah. I was qualified as a navigator.
JM: Right.
PB: I got a certificate to say so.
JM: Did you do observation of the stars as part of your navigation?
PB: Yes, all that lot. And I frightened one of my instructors by doing a violent evasive action when what I was avoiding was Saturn.
JM: [laughs]
PB: This is a fact, it frightened me to death. I still dived out of the route I was supposed to be taking, when doing some low flying over the Bow River in Calgary area.
JM: Did you meet the Canadian people very much? Did you go to their homes?
PB: Yes, one or two were very good to us and kind and we got friends with the family, doctors and such like. And we even were allowed to drive their cars and we got petrol for them. They had English cars with American tyres on them that were below standard, they were some wartime grade of tyres they were allowed to use in wartime. And we had a “meatless Tuesday”, I’ve never forgotten, “meatless Tuesday”, as a feature of Canadian life.
JM: A number of airmen who trained there and came back to Britain remarked as how they’d grown when they were living in America and Canada and eating all the steaks and the fine food that wasn’t available in Britain. Do you have that sort of?
PB: No, I don’t recall that at all. Just had good food I know
JM: And exercise.
PB: Very satisfactory.
JM: Yeah. Where did you go when you were off duty?
PB: To the local cinema [laughs]. That’s all.
JM: Did you have dances or it was just the cinema?
PB: Oh yes, we had dances and invited the local villagers from another, yeah, the next aerodrome I went to after De Winton was another one which I have forgotten the name of, if you could switch off for a minute I could.
JM: Now, Phillip, I gather you have a story about a motorbike tyre.
PB: Well, I was running an Ariel Square Four motorbike by then and I’d graduated from the 1929 Raleigh 250 to a 1939 Ariel Square Four and it needed a tyre and I bought a tyre in Stockport, my local town. But it proved to have a fault, it was a crack in the side of the tyre or something undesirable, so I took it out to Italy because I knew they put up with any tyres they were short of anything at all that goes on their cars and motorbikes. They didn’t realise it was a tyre of an undesirable size, unsuitable for a Fiat or any other sort of small car. But they gladly gave me quite a lot of money for it and put it under the seat of the Lancaster [laughs], carried it to Italy and disposed of it there for a good price.
JM: [laughs]
PB: Was quite amazed. And what’s the other story?
JM: The other story is about the picture at the reunion at North Killingholme for Operation Manna and.
PB: Well, I can’t remember a reunion, there’s something that-
US: Each year the reunion that the Dutch come to [unclear]
PB: They come and join in our parties and the prayers at the memorial, there is a beautiful memorial being built at North Killingholme [sighs] probably before the end of this talk we shall remember where I was trained for the Lancaster, I’m sorry I can’t think of it.
JM: It’ll come to you. I’m interested to hear about the reunion and the story of the painting of the Lancaster. Can you tell us a bit more about that?
PB: I’ve got a print of it, that’s all, just a print of the Lancaster with a title on it, forgotten what the title is, it’s gone, I’m sorry.
JM: Now, Phillip, we are looking at a lovely copy of a painting of Lancasters flying over Holland dropping food. Can you tell us a little bit more about the story of this painting?
PB: Not of this painting, I’m sorry. Because I don’t remember ever seeing a windmill in Holland.
JM: That might be a bit of artist license, mind you.
PB: I think they substituted that. But it’s a lovely painting, isn’t it? These are the bankings around the water, I think. Here, drainage areas, but I can’t add anything to that except there are three, five Lancasters, I don’t remember seeing it, can I look at the other side of it for a minute? I don’t know why I wasn’t aware of this. There’s the Phantom of the Ruhr.
JM: Yes, there is another painting here showing the Phantom, the Lancaster PA474.
PB: I got a print of this.
JM: Yes. Wearing the colours of the Phantom of the Ruhr 550 Squadron aircraft.
PB: I’ve got a print of that one but that one is new to me.
JM: Philip, at the top of this print of the Lancaster there are a number of signatures. Do you see these here?
PB: Can I look? Cause I may have signed this, Jack Harris, who is a well-known organiser of the meetings.
US: He’s the other pilot.
PB: Can you see any other names? Can I bring it nearer to you? There I am. [unclear]
JM: [unclear].
PB: It’s very indistinct. Yes, I’m there. How did you get this? Cause I haven’t got one with my signature on it. Do you notice we have aerials spreading from the cockpit to the tops of the rudders?
JM: Yes.
PB: Spitfires had a rather similar arrangement with aerials trailing to the top of the rudder.
US: I think a couple of these chaps are now dead.
PB: I wouldn’t be surprised, Jack Harris was the organiser of our meetings at North Killingholme.
JM: Who is that, Philip, can you read that one?
PB: Let me try and see that. It’s not clear in my sight at all.
JM: Ok.
PB: He’s the navigator.
JM: It doesn’t matter-
PB: Chaz somebody. I might be able to recognise his name if time comes. By the way, I continued flying right up to the Squadron being closed down in the Royal Auxiliary Air Force.
JM: I was going to ask you about that.
PB: I will come to that later if you like.
JM: Well, please tell us now while it’s in your mind.
PB: Alright, well, I went and joined the Royal Auxiliary Air Force while I was earning my living in Manchester and working as an engineer and representative and I [pauses] what did I do?
JM: What was it like in the Royal Auxiliary Air Force?
PB: Wonderful, a real life and the CO used to organise motor rallies.
JM: Did you fly with the Royal Auxiliary Air Force?
PB: Oh yes.
JM: What did you fly?
PB: Meteor jets.
JM: Did you?
PB: Phew
JM: So you were a jet pilot as well as a Lancaster pilot.
PB: Yes, that was the big thing in my life. Every weekend I was zooming about in Meteor jets twin engine, at all levels and in all kinds of formation aerobatic and I survived it, two, three of my friends were killed.
JM: Very sad.
PB: Three of them,
JM: Yes.
PB: For various reasons. One who I’d just taken home on leave and he was killed the next weekend.
JM: And I believe you also had time with the Air Training Corps, I believe you were an officer with the Air Training Corps, will you tell us about that?
PB: Yes, I’ve been a civilian and
JM: Civilian.
PB: Everything in the committee that you can be,
JM: Yeah.
PB: All the small positions right, leading right up to the top position as the manager, civilian manager of the Air Training Corps.
JM: So I expect you flew with them.
PB: Two or three different squadrons in Manchester and Stockport area, so.
JM: I expect you must have flown an aircraft in the ATC.
PB: Yes, to this day I am still the Superintendent of an Air Training Corps squadron.
JM: Right.
PB: Still active although I’m immobilised as you will have noticed, I still do that work.
JM: When you look back now from where you are in your life now to your wartime experiences, what feelings do you have? What did it do for you?
PB: Well, it’s a long distant past now, it’s just the past and it’s gone by, that’s how I feel about it. The happiest days were at Cambridge, there’s no doubt about that, but I also continued in Cambridge as Manager of Marshalls Airport, on another job for the Air Force.
JM: Yes, yes. So when you left the Air Force, what year was it you left, do you remember?
PB: No, I couldn’t recall
JM: No, no. But you
PB: I’m sorry.
JM: Your life after leaving the airport was very much involved with engineering?
PB: I was a chief sales manager of the Marine Division of Mirrlees, Bickerton & Day and National Gas & Oil Engine Company which were associated with each other, they were related, two factories eight miles apart.
JM: And you were telling me that you had a job as a journalist working on a magazine to do with steam trains.
PB: Yeah. That’s right.
JM: Tell us about that, would you?
PB: Well, I, the publisher was, the name of the publisher, has just escaped me, who was right near the, [pauses] there was a famous cathedral.
JM: Here in Manchester or? No, in London?
PB: No, in London. Can you name a cathedral?
JM: St [unclear]
PB: A famous cathedral?
JM: Saint Paul’s Cathedral?
PB: No, no, further south than that.
JM: Uhm, Southwark Cathedral?
PB: No.
JM: Westminster?
PB: Westminster Cathedral.
JM: Right.
PB: We were just outside the doors of that.
JM: Were you? Yeah. And you were producing.
PB: I was writing and checking and working with them and I learnt the art of editing a railway gazette and writing nearly the whole of the articles sometimes, the whole of the magazine was my responsibility. I even went to the publishers, which was Odhams Press, to put it to bed as they call it.
JM: So, your whole life really had a theme of engineering in it from when you left school, through the flying and in your life after that, your working life after that was, engineering was a common thread, wasn’t it?
PB: Yes, absolutely. And I, huge engines in, were as tall as this room, massive marine engines
JM: yeah.
PB: And I’m very proud of one or two jobs I had to do. One was this City of Victoria, a huge passenger liner with four engines sailing from Vancouver to Victoria Island across the water
JM: Yes.
PB: Do you know that area at all?
JM: I’ve been there once, yeah. But I wanted to ask you about your, you told me that you had kept in touch with your crew members.
PB: Yeah.
JM: I gather you were quite involved with the veterans, the members of 550 Squadron.
PB: Oh yes, yes. Still go.
JM: Are there many left now?
PB: There’s dozens, but only a few go.
JM: Right.
PB: Cause a lot of ground staff go.
JM: Did you have much to do with the ground engineers when you were on the squadron?
PB: No, nothing.
JM: You just kept yourselves as a crew flying.
PB: We were flyers.
JM: Yeah.
PB: And we had, one of the nicest thing was one Sunday, I was minding my own business with my Ariel Square Four tucked away in safekeeping while I was overhauling the cylinder head, I was always working on these motorbikes, as well as using them to come to Stockport at the weekends and the Flight Commander arrived in my hut right across the fields from church parade where he had been. You know the church we go to? Well, I found myself sitting close to the Wing Commanders and people in charge of the squadron and one of them suddenly turned up at my, in my Nissen hut, and asked to see my Ariel Square Four, well, I think, get out of bed and take him out to the Gents toilet where I kept it [laughs] across a muddy field and he was in his best outfit, cause the church parade was medals, in all his fancy regalia in uniform and his flat hat on, a top man in the squadron, not the Commanding Officer but one of the very, very senior flight commanders. I used to fly in the RAFVR. RAFVR
JM: Yes.
PB: After the war, after my full-time service. Oh, I stayed on with the Air Force because I loved it and it meant everything to me. So what, did I say I’d done?
JM: In the African desert.
PB: I had a job of repairing the engine of a York, which is identical to the engine of a Lancaster by the way, but the wings are higher up the body, they’re down here in a Lancaster and they’re up there on a York and I had to be on the scaffolding doing the repairs myself cause I was qualified to do that sort of thing and repair the fuel feed pump, something that had to be changed and everyone else was having the afternoon in bed on a very, very hot sunny afternoon and I was working on the scaffolding on the aircraft, which was a terrific, terrific privilege to me to be allowed to tinker with the engine on a York aircraft. I’d never tinkered with one before by the way.
JM: And you were successful.
PB: Oh yes, it flew away to Singapore. And I should have been going with it but this delayed my departure so that I wouldn’t have been back in England in time to report back to work. So therefore I had to get off this York and then get me baggage and rubbish and go back with another plane back to England and guess what I came back in? A Sunderland flying boat.
JM: Tell us about that.
PB: That was a wonderful experience to me. This beautiful Sunderland flying boat was gently resting on the waves at Valletta harbour and they took me on board to give me a lift home and said, would I like to fly it? And apart from the act of take-off and the landing, I did all the flying all the way back to England.
JM: Was it an easy aeroplane to fly?
PB: Beautiful, amazing experience and something I’ve always remembered. And the crew went to bed in the back of the plane. Honestly.
JM: Oh yes, a big aeroplane.
PB: With little round windows all way along the side. And I’ve since met an Air Training Corps officer, very senior one called Cross, who was in charge of the whole of the Air Training Corps, and he said, his father was an Imperial Airways pilot that what set him up as a pilot in the first place. So he knew what I was talking about with regards to flying a Sunderland, huge plane but beautiful.
JM: And this would have been presumably in the late 1940s?
PB: They did the take off and the landing by the way, I didn’t do that but we found out where we were, we got lost over France cause we weren’t expecting to be very precise with our navigation over France. I’d done numerous jet’s trooping between England and Italy, England, Italy, England, Italy, Italy, England, from Milano to this aerodrome that I couldn’t name in Southampton area, I’m sorry I can’t remember the name of it, it’s a very well known, it’s where they fly American transport planes to this day.
JM: Well, we’ll come back to that. Are there any other stories that are in your mind from your RAF time either during the war or after that you’d like to tell us?
PB: Certain funny ones. One in particular was when I was driving back from Grimsby on a motorbike and only a 350 and we found an Australian crew of a Morris Minor, now I don’t mean the modern Morris Minor, I mean the wartime Morris Minor which is a very square [unclear] sort of, very sluggish sort of aeroplane, eh, car I mean sorry, and they’d broken down by the roadside so I offered to tow them back to the aerodrome, they were members of my crew. And we got going you know, slowly gathering speed up a very gradual incline up to the aerodrome about five miles and they had about five people in this tiny little car and they had to get out on the running boards to accommodate them all, including my crew member as well, my navigator in this case or my, uhm, not the bomb aimer, yes, it was the bomb aimer, a man whose name I could tell you later on, he may still be alive too. Uhm, he was an expert on Robbie Burns, and that was, he was, he loved reciting to me, taught me all about Robbie Burns, he was my bomb aimer and we carried on until I felt the back of the motor bike was squirming like this, and I looked round and it was going from curb to curb [laughs] we got up such speed and although it was only a 350 motorbike with all these Australian crew plus my bomb aimer hanging on the running boards not in it but on it, we got out of control so I had to slow down and I got them back to the aerodrome.
JM: It’s a story of young men enjoying themselves for the moment.
PB: Well, they’ve been out enjoying themselves in Grimsby and, or some pub on the way to Grimsby. I had the great joy of escorting them back on the end of a rope from a motorbike. It must have been their rope by the way.
JM: You wouldn’t have one of those on your bike, would you?
PB: I wouldn’t have had a rope on it, no. But this was only a little 350 Triumph. A powerful one by the way. Before I graduated onto an Ariel Square Four.
JM: Are there any other stories that you’d like to tell us? About your wartime service, your flying time?
PB: Well, only that we were chased by Spitfires for practice for them, that was quite an interesting experience.
JM: Tell us about that, please.
PB: Well, I just took photographs of the Spitfires that were honing in on us, homing in on us, to take photos I suppose.
JM: I think that was called fighter affiliation.
PB: That’s right, that’s exactly what it was called.
JM: And that was giving them a chance to practice intercepting and you a chance to practice evading.
PB: That’s right. And they were probably from an aerodrome which I subsequently flew at myself on Spitfires and the name’s escaped me just at the moment, uhm, [pauses] sorry, the name’s gone, it’ll come back, cause I used to be there for months after my demob, well, towards my demob and they were a nice crowd till the Flight Commander was killed while I was there.
JM: In a flying accident?
PB: Yes, he made a mistake doing a roll over the runway and just dived straight into the ground and he had just given me leave, was very sad about that. The name of the aerodrome I shall easily find in my memory because of having difficulty with remembering it in the past. I’m sorry it’s gone. You want to switch off while I’m thinking that name? I will do in a minute. I want to tell to them ‘cos it’s so funny.
JM: Tell us the story then.
PB: Well, I’ll tell you about Lyneham being a landing point back in the United Kingdom near Southampton and they now have American transport planes landing there.
JM: And this was when you were bringing the prisoners of war home.
PB: Troops, not prisoners.
JM: Well, ex-prisoners of war.
PB: Yes. Or servicemen who couldn’t wait for a boat.
JM: Ok. Oh, I see, so they were any servicemen.
PB: Not just prisoners.
JM: Right.
PB: A story about life on North Killingholme aerodrome, was near Grimsby, we had a Warrant Officer called Warrant Officer Yardley and he stopped my navigator and said to him, Warrant Officer, well, forgotten his surname at the minute, “what are you doing out on your motorbike without your hat on”? Which is how he expressed himself, he was a very brusque Warrant Officer in charge of the discipline on the Air Force bomber station, “what are you doing without, your, riding your motorbike without your hat on”? And “Warrant Officer” the man at fault said, “but Sir”, very polite to this Warrant Officer cause he was very firm, “you can’t ride a motorbike in a strong wind”. Forget exactly how he expressed it, “you can’t” and the Warrant Officer looked round at the sky and said, “but there ain’t no wind today” [laughs]. It was a calm day that particular day.
JM: Was a calm day.
PB: But he still had to wear his hat and of course he’d generated a certain amount of that wind himself.
JM: yeah.
PB: I had a nasty smash on that same motorbike and finished up in hospital for a week.
JM: Oh dear.
PB: When I should have been doing some bombing runs.
JM: Philip, you’ve told us many lovely stories, you’ve really described the life of a young man here in England and in Canada and on operations at the end of the war. Thank you very much for your interview. It’s very important, thank you.
PB: It’s been a pleasure- And I’ll tell you the name of.
JM: Just as an afterthought, you’ve told us that you were commissioned as a Flight Lieutenant and I’m going to conclude this interview by thanking Flight Lieutenant Blackham for his interview. Thank you very much.
PB: Thank you.
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ABlackhamCP161023
Title
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Interview with Charles Philip Blackham
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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00:46:52 audio recording
Creator
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Julian Maslin
Date
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2016-10-23
Description
An account of the resource
Philip Blackham became an apprentice engineer at Diesel engine company Mirrlees, Bickerton & Day, of which he became a sales manager post war. He served in the Home Guard becoming a driver, then he enrolled in summer 1940 with initial training at Cambridge University, St John’s College, for engineering. After that he went to Marshalls Airport, Cambridge for flying training. Eventually he became a flight engineer at Barry, South Wales.
In 1941 Charles was posted to Canada to complete training at RAF De Winton, learning to fly a Chipmunk and then converted to four engine aircraft: 'I got a pair of Air Force wings which is my pride and joy. Best thing I’ve ever done in my life'. Canada was described as being nice, vast, and cold, inhabited by friendly people, with plenty of fine food that wasn’t available in Britain. Very few details are given about wartime service. After the end of war, he went on to serve in the Royal Auxiliary Air Force as an engineer and representative of Meteor jets, which he also flown. Charles also became an Air Training Corps superintendent. Describes his involvement in one of the 550 Squadron reunions at RAF North Killingholme where they discussed Operation Manna. Talks about PA474 Phantom, a 550 Squadron aircraft.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Civilian
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
Wales--Vale of Glamorgan
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Cambridge
Canada
Alberta--Calgary
Alberta--De Winton
Alberta
Temporal Coverage
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1941
Contributor
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Jean Massie
550 Squadron
aircrew
civil defence
flight engineer
Home Guard
Lancaster
memorial
Meteor
military ethos
military living conditions
navigator
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
pilot
RAF North Killingholme
recruitment
Sunderland
Tiger Moth
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/218/3358/PBruhnKC1601.2.jpg
b0c77fbb6618767952dab43db30881d6
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/218/3358/ABruhnCK160430.2.mp3
321d7a40559b9dbb0b3d5005882da99b
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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Bruhn, Clarence Keith
Clarence Keith Bruhn
Clarence K Bruhn
Clarence Bruhn
Keith Bruhn
C K Bruhn
C Bruhn
Description
An account of the resource
Nine items. An oral history interview with Flying Officer Clarence Keith Bruhn (437927 Royal Australian Air Force) documents, photographs and his log book. He flew operations as a navigator with 463 Squadron.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Keith Bruhn and catalogued by Trevor Hardcastle.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-04-30
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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Bruhn, CK
Access Rights
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Permission granted for commercial projects
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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AP: This interview for the International Bomber Command Centre is with Keith Bruhn who was a 463 Squadron navigator during the Second World War. It’s the 30th of April 2016. My name’s Adam Purcell. We’re in Novar Gardens in the suburbs of Adelaide. That’s, that’s the spiel. Let’s begin. Can you tell me something Keith of your early life? What you were doing growing up and how you came to join the air force?
CKB: Well, I attended Unley High School and quite a few, the other, you know in older classes had been joining the air force. So when the, when I turned eighteen, I left high school at seventeen and studied accountancy for the interim before joining up and then having turned eighteen they sent you a letter that you had to report to so and so and so. So I thought — oh I will. There was quite a few of the blokes I knew were joining the air force so I decided that rather than join the army they were supposed to travel on their stomachs weren’t they? The army or something. And the navy had a girlfriend in every port and I didn’t think I could handle that [laughs]. Anyway, and also a few of the people in our area we lived at Hawthorn and you’re a Melbournite are you?
AP: I am.
CKB: Yeah. So you wouldn’t know our Hawthorn. You’d know your Hawthorn. Anyway, I decided to join the air force. I think I was about seventeen and a half then. I applied and we did, went along to the [pause] you know went along at night school to study a bit in preparation. And then the call up came and we, I was picked to go to Somers. You know Somers? Down there on the Mornington Peninsula is it?. Yeah. That’s where we did our ITS. From then we, well at the selection committee I sort of thought everyone wanted to be a pilot so I thought if you were refused that you sort of automatically became a air gunner or, or a wireless operator perhaps. And I was pretty good at maths so I decided I think I’d like to be a navigator. So I mentioned that to the selection committee and I was made a navigator. So that worked out all right. [laughs] From ITS at Somers we went down to the Air Observer’s School at Mount Gambier. That would have been probably three or four months. You don’t really want to know what happened at some of these? It might take —
AP: Oh definitely — tell me everything. Tell me the whole story.
CKB: Anyway. Oh nothing much. Yeah. Well, well actually I can remember one thing at Mount Gambier. The staff pilots at a lot of these places were a bit [pause] what did they used to call it? Well, they were daredevils anyway. Some of them. Anyway, we were on a navigation trip somewhere up to Northern Victoria there where we had a do, write down what we saw, you know. And coming home this pilot decided he’d give, there were three or four navigators. There was an Avro Anson and he decided to give us all a bit of a thrill. So we came back via the Glenelg River and he came down to below tree top height. I can still remember there were ducks flying all over the place and I thought [laughs] and anyway that was — I can still remember that because I think that would have been our probably first or second flight in a — and we thought ooohh you know.
AP: First or second flight ever you mean?
CKB: Well, yes in the air force anyway. I had been. That’s another story I won’t —
AP: That’s alright.
CKB: We won’t go into —
AP: I’ll ask about that later.
CKB: I had flown before and yeah it would have been probably — I can’t exactly remember. First, second or third flight. So that was a story at Mount Gambier. From there we went to — there was a Bombing and Gunnery School at Port Pirie and that’s where we got our wings. That was [pause] oh end of ’43. Yeah. 1943. From there we ended up, we went over to Melbourne and we were stationed on the MCG. Now, I’m going to brag here. That was sort of a holding place where you moved on from and the curator there decided he’d prepare a pitch for us and we got a bit of sort of scratch team together. I think we, everyone bowled one over and batted one over. And I thought well the cricket pitch was a crossways on the MCG. As you probably know. And that’s the shortest boundary. And I thought I reckon I can hit a six on this. So first ball I had a swing and missed, I think. And I think it was the second ball I managed to collect. It just cleared the fence. So I can brag and say I hit a six on the MCG.
AP: Excellent.
CKB: Anyway, the next ball I had another swing and got clean bowled I think. So that was a bit of fun there.
AP: Where at the MCG did you actually stay?
CKB: Yes.
AP: [unclear]
CKB: That was a staging camp before you moved on. You know.
AP: So while you were, while you were at this staging camp where did you sleep? Like where was your accommodation?
CKB: [laughs] Under the grandstand. Yeah. They had you know a big open area as you went up through the, yeah, and they just had stretchers there and I don’t know how many. It would have been a hundred. A hundred, I suppose, of us. And the, and the bars we all had. Where the bars were set up that was our mess and I think we were there probably a fortnight. And then we had entrained we had no, oh the funny part about it was we were issued with tropical gear. Uniforms. As well as a normal winter uniform. And then we were entrained and headed north. So we thought oh we were issued with tropical uniforms so we thought we were going up somewhere up New Guinea or somewhere. Or the islands or somewhere. So we ended up in Sydney and once again went to the staging area camp. At Bradfield Park I think it was. For probably a week again and hopped on a train up, further up north and ended up in Brisbane at Indooroopilly I think it was. There was a camp. A tented camp there. Stayed there a week and still wondering. We didn’t know any idea where we were going. No one told you anything. So there, we were there for probably a week and the next minute we were told that we’d get all our gear together. We were heading for a boat. So we ended up down, I can’t remember whether it was a victory ship or a [pause] what was the other ships they made? Anyway it was a Yankee. American boat. And there were a lot of Americans, injured Americans were going back to the US. So about a hundred of us logged on there with about a few hundred American servicemen who had been injured. And a story — we took off. The story about that. There was one bloke. An American. I remember this. He couldn’t go down to the mess. He had, he was missing both legs and one arm. So the whole journey they set him up on the deck and he sat there the whole journey. They brought food to him and he played [pause] what are they? Craps I think they call it. And he just sat there with the dice and that’s what he did the whole journey. The poor beggar. And I can still remember that. Anyway, so we ended up, we still didn’t know, well we sort of knew, because each day they had a map on the side of the boat and we could guess how many miles, daily miles they did. They showed us where we were going so that would have taken, I don’t know, probably about a week or a fortnight. So we ended up in San Francisco. And then over there we went to another staging camp where all the Americans went before they were choofed off to the Pacific. Angel Island I think it was called. In the San Francisco Bay. And an interesting thing there, Angel Island was there and as we caught the ferry in to San Francisco we passed Alcatraz. That was a bit of an interesting point. So we were there about a week and then entrained. Headed off [pause] well we knew we were going eastwards. You can’t go westwards. Yeah. Well, that was Pullman carriages. This was all knew to us, you know. The negroes were, they’d pull our beds down at night and I mean these sort of things didn’t happen in Australia. That was all new to eighteen year olds, you know. And that was quite enjoyable I suppose because these negroes attendants were happy blokes. They were very, you know, laughing all the time and carry on. So eventually we went, well on the way I woke up one morning and looked out the window of the train and, ‘You are now passing,’ — it was all snow outside, ‘You are now passing the highest railway point in America.’ I think it was fourteen thousand feet. I think it was. Over the Rockies. That was just a thing you notice. And we ended up in Chicago, in these cattle yards because there were trains going all over America during the war and you had to stop sometimes. We’d stop overnight, and it we could hardly sleep because the cattle bellowed all night. You could hear this bellowing of cattle right in the middle of the stockyards. So then we eventually ended up in New York. Crossed the river to another staging camp I suppose it was. And we stayed there another week and had a few days in New York. We were looked after. I think they were Jewish people. We stayed a few nights and had breakfast. And that was the first time I’d ever heard of, ‘How would you like your eggs? Sunny side up?’ [laughs] That’s the first time, the first time I’d ever heard that expression. So we were there a couple of nights and then went back to the camp a few more nights and then back again. And we were, I can remember looking across the other side of the river where the liners were and there were big boats everywhere. We still didn’t know what boat we were going on. Anyway, it turned out to be the Queen Elizabeth so — I don’t know whether you know the story. When that was built it was never fixed out as a liner. The war came so they made it, turned it into a troop ship virtually. So there were about a hundred of us and seventeen thousand Americans got on board. And, you know on the trip over to England we never saw one American. We saw where they slept. You know, like the decks. And on the side of the decks — one, two, three, I think there were about four layers of stretchers and I don’t know how many decks would have been on there. There would have been six or seven and you know, there was about two hundred yards. So they were up and gone and they had their stations to go to during the day. By the time we, we were camped in, I don’t know there were rooms. What they would have been I don’t know, and there were about a dozen of us in each of these. In sort of decks too. And the meal times were twenty four hour meal times. You had your time to go down to the meal. It was just twenty four hours of serving meals to serve everyone. So eventually we ended up in [pause] Gourock. That’s the Glasgow port and got off the boat there and a bit of a story there. We all lined up on the railway station and there were Scottish — I think they were church, some church ladies. Guild or whatever they were called were serving morning tea or whatever it was. They were asking us what we’d like, and we couldn’t understand a word they were saying in their broad [laughs] Scotch accent. Like, you know, ‘Do you want milk in your tea?’ Or things like that. It took a while. Mind you going back, going through or go back to San Francisco it was almost the same story. Their accents were, I can remember we went into a restaurant, had a meal and there were three or four of us and this gum chewing waitress came along. ‘Where are you all from?’ And we said, ‘Australia.’ She stood there. It was ticking over. ‘Oh where’s that state?’ As much as to say, you know what, in America, what? That’s just a side thing. Yeah. Well I’m back to Glasgow and the next minute we’re down at Brighton. Well, originally, before us they used to go to Bournemouth but that got a bit dangerous apparently. They were bombing that before we got there. So we went to Brighton for about a week or two. Then we, by this time we got over there the attrition rate had dropped fairly well and there was a bit of a backlog of, you know, so they chooked us off to an aerodrome just outside Guildford. A grass aerodrome for the pilots and navigators to get used to the countryside. We flew Tiger Moths. Map reading and all this sort of thing in Tiger Moths. And I even learned, being a navigator, to fly a Tiger Moth because there were English pilots learning to be instructors they, so I got to take off and land, but I didn’t do solo or anything like that. That was a bit of fun. We used to take off, you know a couple of hour journeys every now and then and that was for another week or two I guess that was. Now, where did we go next? Oh we went up to Navigation School up in Scotland. Can’t think what that was called. Anyway, up on the west side of, west coast of Scotland and when we went on leave we could catch a bus up the west coast up, and we used to do a pub crawl. We’d drop off at every town, have a couple of drinks and then catch the next bus up to the next [laughs] and there were about six towns, so I think we had a pint or two in each. Not that that was much because English beer wasn’t like our beer, so. I mean they’re the sort of things, I mean, oh I’ll get back to the fun side of it before we got in to the nitty gritty. You know, you, well you had to have a lot of fun. At this stage we didn’t know what was ahead of us anyway. So that’s what we used to do up there. And then we went to the Operational Training Unit at Lichfield. That’s right. Yeah. We were getting nearer and nearer now to operations on Wellington bombers. And while we’re there we did quite a few, dropping Window raids, to get us used to, you know the Window. Yeah. We’d go out over the English Channel and into France a bit and drop these before the other bombers. To confuse the enemy I suppose. We did quite a few of those and then later on we did a few in Wellingtons. A few decoy raids further into France to get us all used to it. And finally we did our OTU and finished that. Then we were posted to a Conversion Unit for pilots. A lot of the pilots had only been flying twin engines, so they had to convert to four engines. So we converted there to Lancasters then, and I don’t know how long we were there. Probably a month but that was mostly for the pilots anyway and the navigators didn’t do much really there. So eventually from there we got posted to Waddington. This is early February ’45 so we were getting, you know, within three months to the end of the war virtually. That’s how long. It took us almost a year by the time we arrived in England to get to a squadron. So we were there a while before. Then we did our first op. And then the last op which was the third to last op that the squadron did on April, oh it must have been April the 16th I think it was — we were shot down over Stuttgart I think it was. Anyway, I’ve got the report of that raid here. That’s the [pause] that’s our report. That great big report there. I’ve looked through all the reports and we got the biggest mention. I don’t know whether that means anything. But we — this was after D Day so the emergency ‘drome that night was Juvincourt. That was just north east of Paris a bit. Or near Reims. So we headed for there and we had trouble maintaining height so we dropped all the bombs. Everything we could drop. We still couldn’t actually — we were shot at twice and the first time we were shot at as far as the powers can be can — would all what we said and what clues they had they worked out that an aircraft from Skellingthorpe was the ones that had shot at us. So we were virtually, well they suggested that we were probably shot at from friendly fire and that put an engine out. But about another quarter of an hour later we were shot at with one of those upward firing ME210s, I think they were. Anyway, that was a quarter of an hour later. That put another engine out. We were down to two engines at this stage. So we were on, we were going to bomb a roller bearing works at Pilsen in Czechoslovakia. So we only really got to Stuttgart. And that’s where we were shot at. So the pilot was down to two engines and he couldn’t maintain height so he decided we’d turn around and head for Juvincourt. So all the navigation aids were gone so all we were back to was the P6. The pilot’s P6 compass. That was the only aids we had as far as [unclear] I thought I’d look approximately where we were, and I thought I’d get the directions to Juvincourt and I looked at my star maps and I found a star that was approximately on the course we were supposed to take. So I said to the pilot, ‘Well head for that star and get your course on the compass.’ And I had my fingers crossed. Anyway, blow me down, about, oh I don’t know how long it took us but we eventually got to Juvincourt. They said they could see. This was about 6 o’clock in the morning I think. ‘We can see the lights. The lights of the runway.’ So I thought thank goodness for that because there was no way we would have made even the English Channel. We were losing height all the time. Anyway, we were down to about seventeen hundred feet at this time and the pilot, he had his left rudder roped up because he couldn’t, something had broken, you know. Had broken. But he had to do a right hand turn in order to land, I think it was and he found he couldn’t do it. And according to, I’ve just read it before but I’ve forgotten a lot of it. I can’t remember which— the right wing, or [pause] was still on fire. And near where one of the tanks and the pilot, there was flames, and he said, ‘She’s going to go up any minute. The whole thing.’ So we all, he told us to get out smartly. So we all managed to jump out. I’m the last one out. I looked at the pilot. I said, ‘Are you ok?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I’m ok.’ So I went. And he got out and busted his leg a bit. Eventually we all, we all ended up headed for the [pause] most of us landed within oh, I don’t know, 5ks of the Juvincourt I think. And I remember coming down. We were, I looked down, I could see, oh before this we were supposed to count to three before we pulled our rip cord. I counted to one and a half I think and pulled mine and anyway my chute opened and I was floating down. I looked down and there was a canal and I thought this will be good I’m going to land right in the middle of the canal. And we were told that if we want to move we pull on something. I’ve forgotten what you do but I pulled the rip cord somehow and managed to miss the canal by about fifty yards anyway. But in the meantime I’m doing this there was a bit of ground mist and you couldn’t really see the ground and I’m sort of doing this. And the next minute whoop we’d hit the I’d hit the ground [laughs] and being no wind that’s the worst, that’s the worst landing you can make. If there’s a breeze you can almost run with the [laughs] anyway I remember my kneecaps went past my ears I think. So we got down and eventually everyone dribbled, dribbled in. The pilot — he’d done his leg in. The flight engineer — he was a nervous wreck I think. They had to sedate him. He ended up in hospital. I can remember going to see him. They’d sedated him because he was a shaking mess. It affected him a fair bit apparently. Oh, what happened we were about five Ks from the aerodrome and this was 6 o’clock in the morning and they were all warming up to go and do their strafing or whatever they did and I headed for the noise and I’m walking along. Out of the corner of my eye I see a negro standing there. About six foot six tall with a carbine in his hand. He was on guard duty you know. There was an American transport company on the outskirts of the aerodrome. And I thought I’d better go over to him otherwise I might get a [unclear]. So I went over and introduced myself, ‘I’ve just been shot down. I’m an Australian.’ And he looked at me. I think he thought now is it Austrian or what? Anyway, I said, ‘Oh will you take me to someone in charge?’ Yeah. So we walked along and I noticed he kept walking a bit behind me. He wasn’t quite sure who I was, and he had this carbine sort of [pause] Anyway, he eventually got back to the camp, where they were all camped and he took me to the officers where they were having breakfast and here they were. You know they hadn’t that long gone, probably a few months they’d taken over the airfield and here were all these Americans sitting down to bacon and eggs. You have it. Where probably the English were having bully beef or something. And he said, ‘Oh you’d like some breakfast.’ And I said, ‘No.’ I was a bit churned up myself, you know with all this going on, and I said, ‘No, I’m not —' And eventually they took us to this aerodrome. There was an RAF representative there. Like I said all the crew eventually dribbled in from wherever they’d landed. I think one of— the mid upper gunner had landed in a tree I think, so he’d had a bit of fun. But most of us were not too badly hurt. So we were there a couple of days and there was a flight sergeant in charge of whatever — for the RAF there and he took us, drove us to where the aircraft had crashed. And apparently it had come down reasonably level like this, right across a Frenchman’s potato patch. And apparently, according to this flight sergeant he wasn’t very happy. There was a great swathe of, you know, he’d only, he’d probably only just planted it all. No it was up. What I remember they were up about that high. But there were bits and pieces lying everywhere. Bits of my maps lying everywhere. And there was no sign of any engines or anything. They’d apparently dug in to the ground because it was fairly soft, the ground I think. So that was alright. So the next the next thing this bloke took us on a Cook’s Tour around the area and there was a village, I forget the name of it and he was, he had a girlfriend whose father owned one of the — what do they call these drinking places. Bars. The French call their bars. I don’t know. I forget. Anyway, he took us there. The French owner was very happy to see us and he went down the stairs and came up with a clay pot of Cognac. Cognac. And he said, ‘Oh we kept this down here especially, you know for when the war was over,’ sort of thing. I thought, I remember afterwards saying to myself I bet the Germans had a bit of that too. Who knows? You don’t know. But I think but this flight sergeant was on with the daughter. Oh and another thing that happened. Parachutes. I hope the powers that be aren’t listening. I’ll be up for a charge or something. He went around to collect all the parachutes and we were supposed to bring them [pause] well supposed to bring them back. Anyway, we eventually found ours and this flight sergeant, he was on a good thing. He knew all the [lerks?] he was, he said, ‘Leave it with me. I can —,’ You don’t have to, you know, I forget the words he said but he ended up with it but what he was doing was making money out of. They were making shirts or whatever out of these. So I had to claim that I couldn’t find my parachute. Which some of the others did too and they couldn’t find their parachutes so that was all right. But he was on this, he was on a good thing this bloke. And another thing he took us down to, we were about twenty k’s from Reims which was Eisenhower’s headquarters. General Eisenhower’s headquarters. So we went for a trip down there. And that that’s where I first came into contact with their, what we call them [unclear] They were just toilets, you know, in a park. All they were, were for men, all they were sort of a grill sort of thing. You could see their feet underneath and a bit of a trough and [laughs] in the middle. We’d never struck anything like that before. So eventually we ended back at the aerodrome and I think it was about three days later they came and came and got us from a squadron in a Lancaster. Took us back home. And by the time we’d reported all the accident and all the, whatever went on we went on leave for about ten days I think it was. By this time the war was nearly over so we didn’t do any more trips. The war finished. And all those who’d done their tours, probably they were alright. All those who hadn’t finished a tour — we went on to Tiger Force. Changed from 463 to 467 Squadron. So we were there. We shifted to Metheringham which was only about ten k’s from Waddington. One thing about that — I had a photo. I don’t know what happened to it. When we shifted all the ground staff had bicycles that they used to drive around and there were about twenty of them. So when we shifted they put all their bikes in the bomb bay. And I had a photo of the bomb bay full of bicycles. And it was only a five minute trip virtually. By the time you’d taken off you were there. So we shifted our Tiger Force training there for — by that we were on so called embarkation leave in August. In August. I think they knew the war was going to end. We went down to Newquay in, in Devon I think it is. Newquay. The Australians, it was good surf down there. All the Australians used to go down there to surf. So we ended up down there and the war with Japan finished so we did the town over that night. I can remember one chap had a motor vehicle and we were, there was about a dozen of us hanging from a motor vehicle screaming up and down the main street of Newquay. And the locals must have thought we were all nuts because their war had been over for six months and they thought what’s going on here? I can still remember that. But we were due to transfer — what they called them — long range Lancasters. That was the pre-runner of the, I forget the name. Lincoln bomber. That’ right. Yeah. And we were due to fly them out to Okinawa. Or not Okinawa. There was an island fifty miles, fifty k’s east of Okinawa that the RAF were going to operate from and the Americans were going to operate from Okinawa. That was the story anyway. I think that’s right. But thankfully that never happen. I wasn’t looking forward to bombing Japan. I think it would have been a different story to bombing Germany if you’d baled out. I don’t think that would have been much fun. So that’s probably my story in the air force I suppose. Eventually we went back down to Brighton waiting for the boats. Which boat to. This was about October ’45. I can remember there was one bloke. He liked to do seances. He liked to get us all together to work out what boat we were going to go home on. So we had the seance. There were only about four boats I think, operating, and he knew the names of them all. So here we were with this and he’d been putting our hands towards whichever side [laughs] if you believe in seance. But he was dinkum about them. He sort of — but no. We had a quite I think we were there for about a month waiting for a boat and we used to go up and play a few golf links up east of Brighton. We used to go up there and play golf. That was good fun for about a month. And eventually we got on the Athlone Castle which was a South African boat, headed off through the Mediterranean. Through the Suez. Ended up in Bombay where we picked up [pause] there was quite a few, you know servicemen coming in from Burma and all around. One of them was Vic Richardson. Do you know Vic Richardson? Vic Richardson the cricketer.
AP: Yeah.
CKB: The Chappell brothers’ uncle.
AP: Oh.
CKB: [laughs] Yeah. He was one of them. We knew Vic very well reasonably well. We lived near him at Hawthorn. He was one bloke who came on board. An interesting thing in Bombay those days all the beggars from I don’t know how far around in India knew that all these boats were coming in with servicemen. And they’d apparently come into Bombay, and anyway we had a day to go and look around Bombay. But we had to walk of course, and it was about a two kilometre walk I suppose, and I reckon it took us two or three hours to walk through this wall to wall beggars that were lining the road with their hands out like this. But eventually we got back to I suppose was the main part of Bombay. But we had an hour or two there and then we decided we’d go back a different way. So we took some back streets and I can remember the bloke’s everywhere you went there were these little droppings everywhere apparently. All over the — there was a park area and apparently, they just used to go over to the park area. Do their business. In various stages of the dryness, some were quite dry [laughs] and that was another shock that you know, you don’t see that every day of the year. So that was an interesting little episode there. Eventually we got back to Perth. This was about December the [pause] about four days before Christmas I think we arrived in Perth. And a few of the, got rid of a few of the chaps, were offloaded in Perth. We had Christmas Day in the great Australian Bight heading for Melbourne. We didn’t call in to Adelaide. There weren’t enough getting off I don’t think. Called in to Melbourne and we were home. Then I had to catch the Melbourne Express back here. So virtually when you think about I had an around the world trip. Went, went that way and came home that way. So, you know, you think about it we were eighteen year olds who probably hadn’t been out of the state or, you know. It was all, sort of, you know, something to do. It was an experience. And I mean it had its moments but I often think three years in the air force I reckon I aged ten years. You know. With that experience. So in the end went on leave when we got back. Eventually we were called in to find out what was going to happen. Wanted to keep in the air force. ‘Do you want to stay in the air force?’ ‘No. No I don’t want to stay in the air force,’ [laughs] and then we were demobbed so, and that was the end. Oh going back to when the war ended over in England it’s a funny feeling that there was a mixture of [pause] a mixture of relief and disappointment if you know what I mean. You’re doing something and all of a sudden you’re not doing it. And I can remember, I suppose all the others were the same but at least we had, we continued on in the Tiger Force so it wasn’t so bad. But I can remember even when we got in to the Tiger Force I thought do we have to be doing this. Everything was dropped. But it was an interesting time doing Tiger Force because it was very relaxed and most of the time we played cricket or, or football. I can remember we’d got one football match arranged but they didn’t get enough for AFL type football so there were probably a third of them were rugby players. I can still remember going for the ball and the next minute whoosh [laughs] these blokes came at you and you’re flat on the ground [laughs]. That was, that was, I mean you can imagine a game of football. A mixture of rugby and Australian rules. Crazy. Oh dear. Yeah. And then we played quite a few cricket matches. What’s the name of the RAF station? Their headquarters virtually. Down there. I forget the name of it now. Two or three times we went down there and played matches. But in between we went on training. Mostly the training was, all they did was, navigation wise because we were going to go overseas. Mostly away from where we were to be stationed. We took off from Metheringham. Went straight out the Bay of Biscay for approximately the same time it would have taken us from the island to Japan. About four hours I think it was. Only using dead reckoning navigation and you had to fly back doing the same thing and hope that you were near where your base was because that’s what it was going to be like where we were going. So that’s all our training consisted of virtually and [pause] but that’s about it I think.
AP: Alright. We might go and fill in a few gaps.
CKB: Yeah.
AP: If you’re alright with that.
CKB: Yeah.
AP: Going back to the beginning where were you when you first heard the war had been declared and what did you think at that time?
CKB: 1939, I was in [pause] ’37 — third year at high school, Unley High School. Yeah. I can remember it. When was that? September wasn’t it? Was it September?
AP: Yes, September the 3rd
CKB: Yeah. I can remember it. I can even remember sort of discussing, you know, discussing it with your fellow pupils, but I don’t know. I think it’s sort of we might have said, ‘Oh well,’ and the funny thing about that was, leading up to the war, just going back with my name. I can remember the history teacher. I got praise for being a very good speller. And he said, ‘Oh you’ll, where did your parents come from?’ And I’m sitting there and war’s imminent. My mother I think came from East Prussia somewhere. My father’s, no, not he. They didn’t come but their parents came. And my father’s parents came from somewhere in North Berlin. Mecklenburg. There I am sitting in this class where [pause] but, you know there were a lot of people of German, German names in the war. When you think of it half the Americans were of German descent. So I mean I could have been, we could have been bombing some of my people I’m related to or something way back or something. But I mean that’s war. I mean I had no compunction in joining up. You’re living here. I was Australian. My parents were Australian. So I mean you’re that. Yeah as far, as far as that goes, at school, I can’t remember. We just talked about it I suppose. But I can’t ever remember like the teachers saying much about it. You just went on with school. That was ’39. ’40. I was leaving. ’41 leaving honours. Yeah. Life just seemed to go on when we were kids. But I knew then, you know, as I said the ones ahead of us like David Lester was two years. He went to Unley High too. He was two years ahead of me. We knew he’d joined up and there were a few others that were already joined up in the air force. Yes. One of those things.
AP: Can you remember much about the actual process of enlisting?
CKB: Sorry?
AP: Can you remember much about the actual process of enlisting? So where you had to go to do the interviews or to sign up. Or the actual process.
CKB: Oh well that’s a bit of a story. When I, you had a form to fill out when I enlisted, and I listed — I knew my mother had diabetes. Somehow I’d written down that both parents had had diabetes and when I went for my medical without even — they just, because both parents I’d put down. They didn’t even carry on with the interview. And then I thought [pause] no. No. No that’s not right. I think they, I think I did take a urine sample. Gave them a urine sample. But they didn’t even bother with it, they just, because I’d put down both parents and I was rejected. Course I was a bit disappointed so I complained about it. They said, but they said both your parents. ‘No,’ I said, ‘No.’ There was only my mother. I had to talk a bit, fairly well out of that. I eventually talked them into having a urine sample and that was clear. So I was alright. So I nearly didn’t make it because of that. But like I said I was only about seventeen and a half then I think. And then a couple of nights a weeks we had to go to the teacher’s college to these lectures and the funny thing about it one of the lecturers was our physics teacher at Unley High. So we just carried on, you know. Virtually they were just talking about what flying was about and the navigation side of it and I mean it wasn’t — but there were a lot of, probably lads who weren’t as educated as I was perhaps or had probably had only done kind of intermediate grade or something like that. So I suppose they just had to, probably needed more [pause] you know a little bit more training but that was for about six months. I can remember we used to go in, I used to go in with — I don’t know whether you’ve ever heard of Bonds tours. No. You wouldn’t. He was on the air board actually Bert Bond. And they lived just up the road from us and Max Bond who joined up with me he, he his father was Bert Bond who owned this, and he was on the Air Board and he — I’m getting back to my first flight now. While we were waiting to be called up there was, on South Road there was what they called Castle Plaza Shopping Centre. It was named after, there was a castle, a castle like residence there and a bit up the road was a box thorn covered paddock and Bert had carved out a bit of an airstrip there and he had a Fairchild. He’d imported a Fairchild plane out. And so when we used to, every weekend when the first trip, Max said, ‘Oh come on, we’ll, my father’s going to go up for a bit. He’s going to shoot up some friends we know in the Adelaide Hills.’ I thought oh, shoot up? That’s a bit of a worry this shooting up business. So anyway, we hopped in and away we went, and I’m a bit apprehensive about the shooting up business. And anyway all he did was a few tight circles and waggled his wings and that’s all it was [laughs] I sort of imagined that he was going to go down and that sort of carry on. So we did that two or three times. That was my first trip in an aircraft. So I had been in an aircraft before I actually joined up. But I’ve even got a photo of that aircraft. It’s now over in Temora.
AP: Oh fantastic.
CKB: It had been kept here for quite a few years. And then it was a bit of a wreck I think apparently. And this bloke [pause] Temora is a [pause] what is it? It’s a sort of, I think they have — I’m not sure. Anyway, it ended up over there and they put a new engine in it and it’s flying. So that after how long? Seventy years. Yeah. I can show you if you’re interested.
AP: Oh yeah.
CKB: I can show you that. I think it’s, I think it’s in here somewhere.
AP: I’d like to have a look at that.
[pause]
CKB: It’s the first time I’ve looked at some of this stuff for a while.
[pause]
CKB: This is some of the stuff that happened while we were over in London for that Memorial a couple of years ago.
[pause]
AP: You can have a closer search through it in a little while perhaps.
[pause]
KB: Hey? I’m sure it was in.
[pause]
CKB: Oh well maybe it wasn’t. No. Can’t see it.
AP: That’s alright.
[pause]
CKB: Yeah. Oh well. Yeah. I’ve got all this stuff about that Memorial. That Annette had sent over.
AP: Oh yes. Yeah. That’s what this whole project’s for.
CKB: Yeah.
AP: Yeah. She’s making the initial approach to people.
CKB: Yeah.
AP: So can you tell me something of, as an Australian in England, particularly a young Australian in England, what did you think of wartime restrictions of the civilian population of just generally life in England?
CKB: Well, it took us, yeah well see the point is there were no restrictions on us like there were the local population. We were eating food that they wouldn’t, wouldn’t see so much of especially when we were flying on ops. We used to get, you know, like fresh eggs and things like that which the local population — but I mean there were restrictions here when we left so that side of it, you know like meat rationing and whatever, but I don’t know we seemed to take it. Going into London you’d see all the buildings sandbagged up. I mean by the time we’d sort of got over there anyway all the mess from the blitz had virtually been cleaned up. There were, there were like empty blocks overgrown with grass and things like that. But I know when we first arrived in Brighton there were still a few odd raids coming over. We could hear the crump crump of the bombs in London from down at Brighton. And occasionally an odd plane or two would fly over. A German plane and things like that but most times we were on, on the camps you know, and we, it’s only when we were on leave that you’d mix with the — apart from going to the local pub perhaps wherever we were stationed. I don’t know. We just sort of took it all in our stride I suppose. I can’t [pause] I think we were [pause] we as far as I was concerned what I liked most wherever we were was just hopping on a bike and going to a local pub or something and having a pint or two or something like that. And we were, we were only eighteen. When we were at home we weren’t allowed to drink so I mean these things were all, you know, that’s what I’m saying. Aging, you know from eighteen you’re doing all these worldly things sort of that you wouldn’t have done if you were at home and there wasn’t a war on and things like that. So, no, there was part of growing up during wartime I suppose. No. In a sense it was all, you know, exciting. I suppose it was to other, you know, eighteen, nineteen, twenty year olds but like I said once you got to the squadron you sort of [pause] you knew that there was always a few who didn’t get back. But by the time we got there it was a lot better than whereas they were losing perhaps anything from five to ten percent a raid they’d only lose the odd plane occasionally towards the end of the war. But we were unlucky. I mean the last weeks of the war, you know but I don’t know how far, with all this going on that we mightn’t have made it. It was pretty iffy there for a while. But it was over my head to a certain extent because I was too busy navigating if you know, that was one reason why I even picked being a navigator. I thought well at least you had, you were working all the time and you’re not, you know, whereas if you’re an air gunner you’re sitting there and you’re looking around you. You’re doing your job but you know. And the wireless operator — the same thing. He had his job, but it wasn’t all the time but a pilot was. His job was, you know, full on. And my job was to, head down and make sure you’re, you’re getting there alright and you but even the navigation later on was totally different to the navigation earlier in the war. What they used to do they’d just say you’re going to bomb somewhere and the navigators or each individual plane used to work out how they were going to get there. You know, they just, but in my time, it was all, you know you had your times were strictly put down that you took off at a certain time. You timed that point was you had to reach by a certain time over target was that time. Not that you could always do it dead on time, but it was all strict because there were that many planes in the air. You could take anything from five hundred to six hundred planes flying to the one target it had to be regulated to a certain extent. But early in the war it was just Rafferty’s rules. They had no idea and the navigation aids weren’t available like they had later on.
AP: Apart from the last one that you’ve already told me about do any of your other operations stick out in your memory in particular?
CKB: Now, we [pause] when we before we did this raid our only operations were virtually limited to even leaflet dropping raids over Holland to get used to — this raid was virtually our first.
AP: Was it? Wow.
CKB: Yeah [laughs] Well, first full raid. Yeah. But we’d, even at OTU we’d done quite a few. We were lucky we didn’t have to do it when they called a thousand bombing raid earlier. They brought them in from training just to build the numbers up. But we didn’t take part in any of those, thankfully. We took part in Window dropping raids to get you used to get you flying in to France and that. No. We were, I was lucky. Who knows if I’d got there another month or two earlier I mightn’t be here now. I mightn’t have got back. So I mean that was what the war — we had a bloke who, I forget his name [pause] put it all on computer. Every raid that 463 and 467 did and there were some, some did their full thirty trips without one incident. You know, they went over, didn’t strike any fighters they, you know they went through the searchlights. A bit of anti-aircraft fire and but they didn’t report in these, didn’t report. They just went, came back, nothing happened. And yet you get someone else. See, what happened — I think once the, once, by the time we’d flown much of France had been, so all the fighters that the Germans had spread over France were concentrated in a smaller area. So even though they might have been a smaller, smaller lot but they were more concentrated so in effect it wasn’t getting any easier I would imagine and they were starting to get desperate I suppose. So that’s what happened. But I mean that was all experience. And even that, when I think back of it you know I — you did everything automatically. You’d think just jumping out of the plane like that. I mean you just, don’t — no panic. We’d been trained what to do so I mean you just do it. But I mean just how close you were to I can remember looking down when the upward firing things came up. There was a big hole in there and there was a big hole up there. Well that hole was only that far from [pause] sort of thing. And I also remember looking down when the pilot was trying to land the floor of the aircraft was awash with glycol fuel which was the fuel for the hydraulics. And I sort of thought then well, even with the you can probably put the wheels down, but would they lock properly, or —? So I mean all these things. If he tried to land and the undercarriage might have collapsed and who knows what. So you don’t sort of think. We did the best thing by jumping out of the aircraft because a lot of things [pause] as a matter of fact in my own mind I thought we should have jumped earlier. What was being fed to me. What was going on I thought well I think we should be [laughs] —
AP: Getting out.
CKB: Getting out. Now I mean, my biggest fear was what if we get to the — we’re losing height and what if we get to the English Channel. That was my biggest fear was crossing the English Channel. I didn’t want to [laughs] even ditching is not a nice thing but having to bale out over water I thought, I think we were better off. But anyway, but I mean the pilot, that’s their decision as to what to do so —
AP: How far inside the allied lines was Juvincourt?
CKB: Sorry?
AP: How far inside the allied lines was Juvincourt? Like how far away was the front line at this point. Or were you already well and truly over nominally friendly territory for like for a while before the aircraft crashed?
CKB: Probably — I’m just trying to think. Juvincourt. I think they’d got to the Rhine. So virtually nearly all of France was [pause] by this, oh yeah well it would have been I think. Yeah. I think [pause] I can’t — I don’t really know. You see the Americans were mostly down south. The British were doing the push mostly up north. I know, Montgomery, he wanted to, he got to the Rhine and he wanted to push into Northern Germany. He wanted to but the Americans held him back. They said no. But they were doing mostly their push. You see what, I think what happened they were trying to beat the Russians, or do.
AP: Right.
CKB: Trying to get as much territory before the Russians. I mean that — there was a lot of funny business went on behind closed doors when you think of it which has come out after the war that you didn’t know then. You knew nothing then about what was going on. But you get the feeling that it was all to do with they knew Russia was, you know, coming over. Yeah it was it’s like the bombing of [pause] you know that last raid they did in February.
AP: Dresden.
CKB: Dresden yeah. Apparently, that was only because Russia, they were forced into it because Russia wanting it to happen apparently. I mean really when you think in hindsight but you don’t know. They could have stopped bombing months before the end of the war. But you don’t know do you? It’s easy in hindsight to work these things out but, and even the good that the bombing did there’s big arguments over that. Whether they did any, shortened the war or what it did. You know, killed so many civilians and all this going, you know but they forget that the Germans did the same to England. So I mean they started out by bombing the wharves but then it gradually [pause] It’s like the, when we used to go on leave in London there was a place in Gloucester Road that was for the Australians to go and stay. It was about a four storey building I think. Anyway, in the event of air raids you’re supposed to go down. There were cellars down below. We used to go out on to the roof to watch when the V1s were coming across. The doodlebugs. And we’d have bets as to where, where they were going to land. You’d see the flash. You’d hear the sound of like chaff cutters coming over, you know. And it would be probably half a dozen a night you’d see. And we’d have bets. Is it going to go there? Is it going to there? And we’d sit up there. That was the poor beggars are underneath the when we dropped. That would be a frightening thing. You’d hear this noise coming over and then they’d cut off and you’d think where was that going to land? But yeah, I never saw any damage from those because they were very – it wasn’t like a bombing raid. They were spread out all over the, you know. It wasn’t sort of like a very accurate sort of —
AP: Fairly, fairly localised as well because there was only one. One sort of small bomb load dropped in one spot. That’s it.
CKB: Yeah.
AP: You could be in the next street and not know.
CKB: Could have been. Yeah. I mean the accuracy of it wasn’t very, very great. I mean they couldn’t pinpoint a target in any way. They just put enough fuel in to cover a certain distance and then it cut out.
AP: Did you encounter any V2s that you know of?
CKB: No. No. No, we were, I don’t think I was ever in London when, they were sort of, after the V1s weren’t they? I can’t [pause] no I don’t think we, I don’t think we went down to London on leave when they were I don’t think they were that many of them anyway. They’d attack there fairly heavy and the fighter bombers they really got stuck into the you know where they took off from. They knew quite a few of the places. They could pick them out where they were, but they didn’t do anywhere near the damage that they thought they were going to do. Thankfully. But I know they had thousands of them ready to go. I mean Hitler thought he could win the war with those.
AP: We’re talking about London. What sort of things did you do on leave in London. What did you do to relax I guess?
CKB: Well, it was, as far as I was concerned we used to, two or three of us always used to get together and it depended who you went with. What their ideas were. Mostly it was just taking in the sights of London and like I suppose we — there was a lot of, you know, we’d call in to a pub and have a few beers. By this time a lot of the places were opening too. Like places, you know, there were cinemas. Cinemas. More of them were opening. I can remember going to a few shows. I can’t quite remember what they were now. But I remember one thing in England. They were allowed to smoke inside their cinemas and I can remember we went somewhere — you could hardly see what was going on. Getting back to that — when we landed in Fremantle in Perth coming home. That night a lot of them went to the pictures. As soon as they got in they lit up. I wasn’t smoking at this time. I used to smoke a bit. Only because we were issued, virtually issued with them. They lit up and they were smartly told to put their cigarettes out. Yeah. I can remember they used to smoke. Well everyone in those days over in England used to smoke. It was, it was, I don’t know, like I said, I remember trying. We used to get issued with so many cigarettes. They were mostly American origin, you know. Lucky Strikes or whatever they were. And I thought — I got one of these cheroots. These big cigars. I thought I’d try those, and I forget where we were. Anyway, I lit up and laid down on the bunk and smoked for about, smoked half of it I think for about ten minutes and I thought it’s alright so I stubbed it out. Went to get up off the bunk and fell over. They were, you know these great, they were about that thick these, you know these big cheroots that the Yanks used to suck on. Because I wasn’t, I didn’t, no I didn’t used to smoke before I joined the air force at all. It was only the fact that I occasionally I’d [pause] even when we were issued with them. I used to have, when we were on leave mostly I used to take a packet of cigarettes with me. It never got to me.
AP: So if you didn’t smoke them what did you do with them?
CKB: Pardon?
AP: What did you do with them if you didn’t smoke them?
CKB: Gave them to someone else I suppose.
AP: I’ve heard, I’ve heard about other people using them as a sort of a currency.
CKB: Yes. Yes. I believe that. Oh yeah. That would have happened I’m sure.
AP: Put a packet on the bar and the drink would for free all night.
CKB: Yeah. Yes. That would happen. But there were a lot of things I didn’t get into. Like that. I mean, I remember when we went on leave there would always be a packet of contraceptive on your bed before you went out. Half the blokes used to blow them up on the train and hang them out the window [laughs] and let them go. But some of them, it’s a funny thing what I can remember. It was always the unmarried ones who used to brag about what they used to do and it was the married ones that kept very silent. So, I don’t know what they got up to. I don’t know [laughs] The married ones were married back home not the ones that were married [laughs]
AP: Yeah.
CKB: No. I wasn’t, I wasn’t in the least interested in the female side of things. I was more interested in being over there in England and you know, taking in the, you know the country itself. Yeah. And when we’d go on leave we’d go all over the shop. I think we saw more of England than most the locals would have seen.
AP: In the same way that when they come over here and see more of Australia than I’ve ever seen.
CKB: Yeah. Yeah.
AP: [unclear] years. Very much so.
CKB: Yeah.
AP: Alright. Getting towards the end of my list here how did you find re-adjusting to civilian life after three years of being in the air force?
CKB: Yeah. I think I found it a bit hard. Mainly because I hadn’t thought about it much if you know what I mean. I thought, ‘What am I going to do now?’ So what I did was — nothing. You know, I had a, we got back in January. New Year’s Eve pretty well. And I just relaxed for a couple of weeks and then two or three weeks and sat about not thinking about much and then my sister was working in the office of Yalumba Wines and they needed — I was studying accountancy and I was going to three nights a week that’s what I was studying at the School of Mines or whatever it is. And, you know relaxing. That was at night time study. And my sister said, oh we need a office, or virtually an accountant, to keep the girls in check. There were about four typists and receptionists. So I thought oh well I’ll go there. So, I ended up there for about four years. In Yalumba Wines. And my wife, Margaret was the receptionist so that’s where I met her. So we got married and then yeah, I got into that job and still kept studying accountancy. And I gave that job up. I thought couldn’t see much future there so I thought I’d give the banks a go so, to get a bit of experience in banking. So I joined the Commercial Bank for about three or four years I think I was there and anyway in this meantime we had farming property up, just up north at Saddleworth and it had share farmers on it. So the share farming agreement had finished so in the end I decided I would go up there and do the farm, on the farm because I would have been involved in it anyway once dad, he got to old so we decided to go up there and we were up there for thirty years. Retired. We’ve been down, retired for thirty years now. My years have been in thirty years. Thirty years living in the city. Had the war. Thirty years up in the farm. And thirty years retired virtually so that’s I’ve had a fairly varied life I suppose which I enjoy. And I can’t envision working in one job. I was probably after the war you were, I think a lot were like that. A bit unsettled. They probably couldn’t settle down to one, you know. Your whole lifetime doing one jobs. I like to vary things. Even on the farm when we were up there I liked to do things in a different way just to find out if they worked better. You know, it’s something like that. Try something different. Didn’t always work out but it was —
AP: So you’ve told me that the three years that you spent in Bomber Command you felt you aged almost ten years. What’s the legacy, do you think, of Bomber Command? For you personally and overall. And how do you want to see it remembered?
CKB: So [pause] what was that again?
AP: So what, what’s the legacy of Bomber Command, both for your personally and overall?.
CKB: Well I know it’s going to — see even I can remember when there used to be I’m going to talk about Adelaide there used to be Bomber Command dinners besides squadron dinners. As a matter of fact I went to Bomber Command dinners before I went to squadron dinners but then we moved to the country and that sort of stopped but the — I can remember at one of the Bomber Command dinners there was someone, they got someone from the air force to talk about like there’s no longer Bomber Command. It’s, you know, that’s gone. That’s finished. ‘There’s no longer bombers that are, you know doing what you chaps did,’ but I think it’s like as we all pass on what will happen to it? It’ll all just go won’t it? It’ll disappear.
AP: I hope it doesn’t disappear entirely which is one reason why we’re here collecting these interviews now, I can assure you.
CKB: Yeah. I’m just thinking that it’s a good thing that Annette and that lot. She does a good job I think to keep it running over in New South Wales isn’t it? Is she’s in Sydney.
AP: Yeah.
CKB: So I think, you see it’s a bit like the RSL. I know that the Vietnam lot it’s all the Vietnam war now rather than the Second World War of course but it would be nice to, you know, as far as I’m concerned get involved in it as much as we can but like I said age but if it’s going to keep going in any form it’s up to younger people though isn’t it? Like you, you know. So if that’s the case — good. Yeah. I’d like to see it you know kept in front of peoples. You take Anzac Day there. They’re thrashing that and that was a mistake. And I don’t know whether Bomber Command was a mistake like some like to say it shouldn’t have happened the way it did but it would be interesting to know what the outcome of the Second World War would have been in Europe if it hadn’t been for Bomber Command. I mean Fighter Command they probably saved Britain in 1940 sort of thing. The fighters. Oh well it’s, c’est la guerre. It’s part of the war. No. I’d like to see it carry on in some form and I’m sort of on the younger edge of [pause] there will be a lot more gone before I’m, I’m the younger group of them and the majority of them will be in their middle nineties now. I’m only ninety one.
AP: Only ninety one.
CKB: Yeah [laughs] and I consider myself reasonably fit but I have my problems. My old legs give out occasionally. My back gives out occasionally. But I, you know, getting back to the war like I said how luck played a part in Bomber Command. Like I said there were blokes did a whole tour without one incident and I can’t understand why that can happen. We, we’ve got in 463 Squadron Peter Giles used to come along to our meetings and, I forget — oh it was a Berlin raid. That’s right. And they were I don’t know whether it was flak or what happened, but the plane exploded, and he was blown out of the rear gun [pause] he can’t even remember putting his parachute on. Anyway, he, he ended up on the ground. His parachute had opened. He ended up in a snowdrift. It was in January or February I think. He was the only one who got out of that and he just died a couple of years ago. He was in one of the Stalags out east and they were released when the Russians were coming. And he, he would have a story to tell because even when they were released and there were hordes of them were moving west and in the middle of winter. And they were even strafed by our own planes because they thought that they were all the enemy sort of, you know. And he would have had a story to tell. And they hardly had anything to eat. They started off with guards with them. Eventually they, as the Russians kept coming and they just disappeared, and they were on their own. Just eventually made it back to [pause] I don’t know whether it was the American lines or somewhere. I know of quite a few instances where planes had blown up and they had no idea what happened. You know.
AP: Yeah. Luck is —
CKB: Luck comes into it an awful lot.
AP: One of my interview subjects wrote a book about his war service. He was actually a liberator pilot, but he called it the survival of the fortunate.
CKB: Oh yeah.
AP: For exactly that reason. He managed to avoid Bomber Command. That was one piece of good luck. There were a couple of others that happened. So, yeah, very much.
CKB: Yeah.
AP: And there was joy that people in the same raid, same operation who had completely different experiences on that raid.
CKB: Yeah. Yeah.
AP: Some ran into heavy flak and fighters and some floated through.
CKB: Yeah. Yeah.
AP: So –
CKB: Yeah, it’s got nothing to do with how a good a crew you are or what —
AP: Might have something to do with that. But –
CKB: It’s just, yeah. Oh there’s lots of stories of, you know the books I read that spare crews had gone and one chap’s even done two tours so he was a high ranking bloke thought he’d like to do one more trip or something and that’s the end of him. I mean how long do you test your luck anyway?
AP: Yeah.
CKB: If I’d one tour I don’t think I’d be worried too much about volunteering to another. I’d think my luck had swung my way for long enough.
AP: Yeah [laughs]
CKB: Yeah. Oh I can remember even at OTU we had a few close calls that weren’t that bad but, you know. I was surprised. I was reading somewhere where how many were killed in training. It was tens of thousands in aircrew. I mean your luck’s there all the time but once you start flying but when you think it’s an unusual thing to be doing anyway up there, and you’re reliant on your ground crew as well. How good they do their job with the aircraft and all that. As a matter of fact they’ve got probably they should be complemented more probably than the people who flew the planes. I don’t know. The ground crew. The jobs they did to keep the planes flying. When you consider the state that some of the planes used to come back in. They’d fix them up. Keep going. I know there would have been a lot of accidents through, you know, people killed through bad things that happened on the ground. Ground staff. Ground crew. But that’s just part of it. That’s another thing where luck comes into it I guess. It’s all. I suppose it’s the same with any, whether you’re in the army or the navy. The same thing. Luck comes into it. You take the navy. The Atlantic. Coming over where the U-boats were, or [pause] luck came in there a fair bit too. Yeah. It was all — luck came into it. I mean you go back and whatever happened previously your time frame of what you were doing where you were determined what happened in the future doesn’t it? If this hadn’t happened or that hadn’t happened, what would have happened? It would have been totally different. So that’s — yeah.
AP: Very nice. Alright. Do we have any, any final thoughts?
CKB: I don’t know. I think. I just hope oh one thing I think is that they go on about the atomic bomb but I’m sure if it wasn’t for the atomic bomb there would have been another world war with Russia or whoever. I think that’s the only thing that stopped it. The threat of the atomic bomb. I know it’s a bad thing but I think it stopped, you know, a world wide war. I mean who’d want to start an atomic bomb war or an atomic war. The whole world would be wiped out. I think they’re used, countries only use it for their own to stop, you know they used it as a blackmail threat, ‘If you do this I’ll do that,’ or something like that and stop these little things from growing into big things I guess. And that’s my thought on the atomic bomb anyway. Well, what is it now? Hydrogen bombs is it or —? I mean who wants to load themselves up. In that you know that’d be a stupid thing to do I mean. Any country now that — the only trouble with that is if it gets into the hands of a crazy person that’s where a threat could be that they don’t care what they do. They just go ahead and — don’t know [laughs]
AP: Absolutely. Certainly saved you guys from Tiger Force as well.
CKB: Sorry?
AP: Certainly saved you guys from Tiger Force.
CKB: Yeah.
AP: Right.
CKB: Yeah. I think it is I don’t often talk that much about it at all but it’s good to talk about it I suppose.
AP: I’m very glad you have for the benefit.
CKB: I was a bit worried about whether I’d have anything interesting to say.
AP: Plenty of interesting. I think we’d got about five minutes in and I went oh that’s interesting already.
CKB: Yeah [laughs] but as far as the war goes you’ll find David Lester’s a lot more probably interesting. I don’t know what he state of health is now. I think he’d probably still alright. He can remember most things. Frank as I said he’s his eyesight’s his main worry.
[background chat with visitor]
AP: I think we’re just about to finish off here with the recording so thank you very much.
CKB: Yeah. No. That’s fine. Yeah.
AP: It’s been an absolute pleasure.
CKB: Yeah. Good yeah.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
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ABruhnCK160430
PBruhnKC1601
Title
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Interview with Clarence Keith Bruhn
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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01:48:55 audio recording
Conforms To
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Pending review
Creator
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Adam Purcell
Date
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2016-04-30
Description
An account of the resource
Clarence Keith Bruhn's parents were of German descent. He grew up in Australia and joined the Royal Australian Air Force. After training, he flew operations as a navigator with 463 Squadron. On one operation his aircraft was hit by friendly fire from another Lancaster and by a Me 210 with upward firing guns. He navigated the captain to Juvincourt and baled out over liberated territory.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Australia
France
Great Britain
United States
England--Lincolnshire
France--Juvincourt-et-Damary
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
1945
463 Squadron
467 Squadron
aircrew
bale out
bombing
entertainment
Lancaster
military living conditions
navigator
Operational Training Unit
perception of bombing war
RAF Lichfield
RAF Metheringham
RAF Waddington
recruitment
shot down
Tiger force
training
V-1
V-weapon
Wellington
Window
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/221/3363/PCampbellKWP1601.1.jpg
46f4ce48d53bda56bbcf7a7e51feba7b
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/221/3363/ACampbellKW160604.2.mp3
4ec1a402c3e766446124357837dccd8a
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
Campbell, Keith William
Keith William Campbell
Keith W Campbell
Keith Campbell
K W Campbell
K Campbell
Description
An account of the resource
Two oral history interviews with Keith William Campbell (1923 - 2019, 423220 Royal Australian Air Force) and a diary he kept as a prisoner of war.<br /><br /> A further collection about Keith Campbell <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2083">here.</a><br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Keith William Campbell and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-06-04
2016-05-18
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Campbell, KW
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AP: This interview for the International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archive is with Keith Campbell, a 466 Squadron Halifax bomb aimer during World War Two. The interview is taking place at the War Memorial’s theatre in Canberra. We’re here at the War Memorial for a Bomber Command Commemoration that will take place tomorrow. It is the 4th of June 2016. My name’s Adam Purcell. Keith, we’ll start from the beginning if you don’t mind. Can you tell me something of your early life and what you were doing before the war?
KC: Before the war I went to school [laughs] Silly question. I finished my leaving certificate at school. And in 1939 the war had just broken out and like all youngsters of sixteen I couldn’t get in the Air Force soon enough. I wanted to get in the Air Force because my father had been in the Australian Flying Corps in the First War. So obviously I had to follow his footsteps. And when I became seventeen [pause while coughing] Excuse me. Sorry about that. At seventeen I applied to join the Air Force Reserve, which I did and for the next, oh six or eight months myself and [coughing] excuse me, got a sore throat. Six or eight others learned aircraft recognition, basic trigonometry which was all done at school anyway. And Morse. Somehow or other, we had to get up to ten words a minute in Morse. Initially it seemed an impossible task. The lines seemed to be a collection of dots and dashes. Every sign you saw you reduced it to Morse. However, in due course we obtained proficiency in Morse and the other things like the aircraft recognition. In May 1942 I was duly called up for service at Number 2 ITS at Bradfield Park, Sydney. ITS was an Initial Training School where all raw recruits came to be sorted out and hopefully made into something resembling an Air Force type. There’s also [pause] also the categorisation as to what you were going to be. Pilot, navigator, bomb aimer or whatever. I was selected to be a pilot and was looking forward to going to initial, Elementary Training School. And one morning in the end of, I think it was July or August [coughing] Oh dear. I’m sorry about that.
AP: That’s alright. Have another drink if you like.
KC: On parade the CO came out and said, ‘There’s a shortage of observers in the Canadian schools. Anyone that likes to volunteer will be off to Canada within a week.’ The temptation was too great so I volunteered and we were off to Canada in a couple of weeks. Went down to Hobart where we went aboard the French liner Ile de France which had been converted to a troop ship and sailed across the Pacific to New Zealand where we picked up some more Air Force people. And then our next stop was at Pearl Harbour where we stopped for a day. We weren’t allowed off the ship but we could see the devastation that the Japanese raid had caused to the American fleet. Things had recovered to a great extent but we could imagine just how great the attack was. There was one battleship upside down and it wasn’t a happy sight. Our next call was at San Francisco where [coughing] Oh dear.
[pause]
Where we caught the train from ‘Frisco to Vancouver. As it happened the train we took up was on Thanksgiving Day and on the buffet in the train we were entertained to a turkey dinner. Thanksgiving dinner. Which was a major occasion after the food in the, on the ship which was adequate but quite basic. Arrived in Vancouver and had three or four days to have a look around that beautiful city. Then off to Edmonton, over the Rockies. Caught the train and about four of us got on the back carriage where there was an observation platform. I think we spent most of the thirty six hours going to Edmonton just watching the magnificence of the Canadian Rockies.
AP: I’m just going to stop there for a minute.
[pause]
AP: Now. We were in San Francisco, I think. Catching a train.
KC: Going over the Rockies was a magnificent experience. Bright moonlight night and to see all that snow which we’d never, most of us had never seen before. It was a wonderful introduction to Canada. We arrived at the RCAF station at Edmonton where we spent another week being sorted out and see just where we were going. Who was going to be a navigator and who was going to be a bomb aimer? And subsequently I was categorised as a bomb aimer. And there were others, along with myself caught a train to Lethbridge in southern Alberta where the RCAF training station was situated. Lethbridge was quite a small Canadian town. Very pleasant. And we spent about five or six months there, I think it was, flying Ansons, and Battles, and whatever, bomb aiming and doing a bit of gunnery to fit us for the trials of squadron life. Having spent, finished the course at Lethbridge we were posted back. Back to Edmonton where the navigation school was. We spent another couple of months there flying over the vast expanse of Canadian prairies. If you got lost you just went down and the nearest railway station you read the sign and you knew where you were. We had a wonderful experience at Edmonton. It was a big Canadian city and the Canadian people were wonderful to us. The hospitality was outstanding and we made a lot of friends in Edmonton. After the, finishing our course we went to a Wings Parade. Apparently, this particular Wings Parade was quite an occasion publicity wise. An American colonel had been brought in to present our wings and we all duly lined up at the, in the sports centre. And after much ceremony we were all, each called out and given an Observer’s wing which we subsequently sewed on our uniform. Or if you had a girlfriend, she got the task. The next port of call was to be Halifax in eastern Canada. We had two weeks to get there and what we did in those two weeks was entirely up to ourselves. We had a leave pass, a pocketful of money, comparatively and myself and two or three others decided to go to New York. And we had a ball there. In Australian uniform it was impossible to buy a drink. If you went to a night club you were entertained by the top brass and it was a quite weary [laughs] After a week in New York we thought we’d better start going to Halifax. And on the way, we went to Niagara Falls and had the opportunity to see the Falls and go on the ride on the, oh, Lady of the Lake or whatever the steamer was called. And subsequently arrived at Halifax. Halifax was a very major port for Atlantic convoys and we had to wait there until a ship came that could take us to England. Spent about two weeks in Halifax and the people were very good to us but it was very much a service town. After a couple of weeks we were put on the French liner the Louis Pasteur which had been converted from a luxury liner to a troop ship and set sail for England. Having got out of the harbour I think they just pointed the ship at England, full speed ahead and off we went. Supposedly, and I’m sure it was, too fast for the submarines and we did a very rapid trip and arrived at Liverpool where we got off the ship and onto a train. It was evening. The contrast was dramatic. After the bright lights and plenty of everything in Canada here we were in England. It was dark, wet, foggy and crowded. And dark. Blackout was on. And we subsequently boarded a train and after many hours arrived at Brighton on the south coast where the RAAF had their accommodation for aircrew. Spent a couple of weeks in [pause] at Brighton waiting for a posting to the Advanced Flying Unit which gave us an opportunity to explore the countryside that’s around Brighton which was a very, very pleasant spot. And we availed ourselves of the opportunities to enjoy ourselves. And after a couple of weeks we ended up in a place called Pwhelli in North Wales where we did an advanced training course. Another pleasant spot. Quite a small town. And I think we were flying Ansons there. In due course we finished our training there and went to an OTU at Lichfield which was more, mainly an Australian OTU. They had a satellite station at Church Broughton which was quite nearby. And our course was posted to Church Broughton where we were to do our Operational Training Unit on Wellingtons. As a Wellington crew was five people and we were all bomb aimers a course of bomb aimers, roughly the equivalent number of pilots, navigators, wireless operators and gunners were put in this huge hangar and told go to it. Crew yourselves up. And fortunately, I happened to know one person there so we became a two, two part crew and within half an hour of talking to the other people we subsequently formed a crew. Seems a very haphazard way of selecting a crew for operations but oddly enough it worked out very well. Very few crews proved to be incompatible. We were very fortunate that we were all Australians and we had similar interests so we didn’t have problems. Spent some months at OTU and in our spare time we used to go to, the nearest city was Derby and patronized the local hostelries there. In due course we graduated and posted to the Conversion Unit where we converted from twin-engined Wellingtons to four-engined Halifax Mark 2s. And we spent about six weeks there and did a lot of flying around England which we found a very great difference to flying in Canada. There was fog. There was hundreds of other aircraft. There were, all over the countryside were aerodromes. And we just had to make sure we dodged the aircraft, found where we were and got back to base. Subsequently we did duly finish our training there and were posted to Number 466 Australian Squadron at Leconfield. Well, while we were at Conversion Unit the Halifax, being a four engine bomber, required an engineer and another gunner. The one, the engineer was a twenty four year old English chap and the gunner was a thirty three year old chap from Birmingham. He was the real grandfather of the crew. However, we all got on very well and went to Leconfield where we were allocated accommodation. We were very fortunate, Leconfield being a peacetime squadron and all the amenities that went with it. After living in Nissen huts for a considerable time it was pleasant to be in regular barracks. New Year in, at that stage it was New Year 1944 and we were the new ones on the squadron. We were flying, at that stage, the new Halifax Mark 3 with the radial motors and the rear designed tail plan which had eliminated a lot of the problems which the Mark 2 Halifax had. And after flying in the Mark 3s they were a magnificent aircraft from all points of view. From the pilot and the rest of the crew was very, well, not exactly comfortable but a lot, a lot less crowded than the previous ones we had.
AP: What was your position in the aircraft like? What did it look like? Can you, can you describe the bomb aimers area?
KC: Coming in the entrance to the aircraft near the tail you walked through the fuselage. There was a rest area. Bunks on both sides and two or three stairs up to the pilot’s deck where the pilot sat and there was a second dickie seat which we folded up and allowed us to go down four or five steps where the navigator sat, you know. Compartment. The, rather the wireless operator sat in a compartment just under the pilot. Next to him was the navigator and the bomb aimer was next to him. All the bombsights and everything else, the bomb panel was right at the front and that was my domain. The Mark 2 Halifaxes had a front turret which had been considered superfluous and in place of that there was a plastic front which gave a much better vision and also a Vickers guns which was really only a pop gun. On the squadron the navigational aids were the Gee and we also had H2S and between the navigator and myself he worked, had the Gee and did the navigation and I did the H2S. Which was a very compatible way of doing things. After a lot of local flying and getting used to operational conditions we finally did our first operation. I think it was the end of February, on a, on the first of what were called the French targets in France. This one happened to be at Trappes which was the rail junction outside of Paris. Subsequent operations consisted of quite a lot of trips like that to disable the communications such as bridges, rail junctions, road junctions and any other ways that would impede the ability of the German armies to get supplies both before and after D-Day. My first trip to Germany was to Stuttgart in southern Germany and we went, duly went to briefing and navigators and bomb aimers went off to a separate briefing to do their navigation. Draw up their charts and get things like that underway. And operational meal. Bacon and eggs. Then up with the rest of the crew and waited for the, drew our parachutes and waited for the trucks to take us out to the aircraft. Going to Germany for the first time was quite an adventure. We managed to keep on track and on time and in due course the target was a quarter of an hour away and I went down to the bombsight and set it up with the height, speed and did the bomb drop panel and got ready to direct the pilot. PFF had laid flares which we saw and I directed the aircraft through the bombsight to the flares. And a little to the left, a little to the right and we finally got on course, dropped our bombs and spent the next ten seconds, the longest ten seconds you’ll ever spend flying straight and level and waiting for the camera. As soon as that happened set course for home. And we had a fighter come in to say hello to us. Fortunately, the rear gunner saw him and we went off in a corkscrew and that discouraged him. He had easier ones to find. And we subsequently set course for England and the engineer said that we’d been using too much petrol. So we had to decide just what we were going to do. And when we got over the channel we decided it was much safer to land at one of the coastal aerodromes. So, we landed at, I think it was Ford, where we spent the night. Between us I think we had seven shillings so we went off for one round of drinks at the local pub. We went there and found everyone drinking cider at sixpence a pint. So that was wonderful. We had two or three drinks of cider decided to go home and we found out cider was a very powerful drink. However, we finally made it. We got, went back to the squadron and started on our trips together. I think there were two or three, without my logbook I don’t know who or what, just where we went but we did some more French targets. I think we did a trip to Happy Valley. Another one up to Kiel. And by that time it was the, in March and we were briefed for Nuremberg. And this was our first really major target. Well, Stuttgart was but Nuremberg was further. Further east. And it was, the briefing there was it was cloudy but the target would be clear and we were flying straight to the target from our crossing the coast which was most unusual and a lot of the navigators queried it because we were being too close to the German fighter ‘dromes. However, that was it and on. We pressed on and shortly over France we had a fighter attack and escaped from it but we found we were losing petrol at a very rapid rate. So, we had a conference and decided to turn back which we did and subsequently landed back at base with not a lot of petrol. Waited four or five hours until the rest of the aircraft came back and found what a disaster the night had been. The cloud cover that we were promised hadn’t eventuated. It was a bright moonlight night and all the fighters were up waiting. Flak was just aimed at us and subsequently it was a loss. I think it was ninety seven aircraft over Germany. Plus, the ones that were damaged and managed to stagger home. Fortunately, we did survive that one and I think the next one was to Happy Valley and more French trips and then where was it? Without my log book I don’t remember. But went to a Berlin trip but got to within ten or fifteen miles to Berlin and we were hit by a fighter and got badly damaged. So, we decided to, we decided to go home and, on the way back we lost an engine from fighter attack and we staggered back to base and lived to tell another day. That was another disaster raid. I think we lost seventy one aircraft on that one. That was [pause] but between there and June I did two or three trips a week. And with our six week, we got leave every six weeks which we enjoyed very much. And eventually came the big day. We didn’t, at the time we didn’t know it was D-Day but we were programmed to bomb a target fairly close inside the French coast. Coming back there was an armada of ships on the Channel. You could have jumped out of the aircraft in a parachute and not got your feet wet. There were battleships, row boats, destroyers, paddle steamers. Anything that could float was on its way to the beaches of Normandy. It was a [pause] we did fly over the same place again a few days later when the beach head had been established but it was a very major effort. After that we just continued on our tour. We had about twenty five trips up by then and looking forward to finishing. And on the 25th of July, 24th of July we were booked for a return trip to Stuttgart. So, all the usual briefings and instructions. Had a very uneventful trip into Stuttgart and did our bombing run successfully and kept our ten seconds to get the camera and set course for home. After about ten minutes we were happily flying on, anticipating a, an uneventful trip home when suddenly there was an explosion. At the time I thought it was a flak shell. Subsequently I found out that an aircraft had run into the back of us and the aircraft just exploded. I was in the front, in the bomb aimers position still. Doing the bombing check and as it happened, I had my parachute on. I always used to lean on my parachute but this night I was leaning on it and had inadvertently clicked on with the wriggling around. The next thing I knew I was flying, descending at about ten thousand feet with a parachute above me. And I have no recollection whatsoever of opening the parachute. I didn’t have the handle so somehow the explosion must have opened it and I landed in a field about twenty miles west of Stuttgart [pause] And took off my parachute harness and hid it under a tree with a parachute and took stock of things. I had all my usual escape kit and similar things and waited around to see if I could hear any, any of the other crew. But there was no sign of them at all. Seeing the way I got out I doubt very much if there would be any survivors. As it happened there weren’t [pause] It was about 3 o’clock in the morning. I could hear the other, the rest of the aircraft flying home and to a nice warm bed and a bacon and egg meal. Here was I stuck in a wheat field in, in the west of Stuttgart. Far from home. I spent the night in a forest and the next morning I checked up where I was on the map, or as near as I could. And the only nearest frontier was the Swiss border which was seventy or eighty mile away. So, I made for that. So, I spent the day in the forest and when the evening came I started walking and went through a village and there was a village pump. So I filled up my water bag and had a wash which was very acceptable and had a few Horlicks tablets from my escape kit. I walked. Walked all night and at dawn I found another wood and subsequently spent the day there having a sleep and working out what I was going to do next. I was fortunate in having the new flying boots that had been issued which were detachable leggings on a shoe which was much easier to walk with than the old flying boot. So, I removed all badges of rank and brevet and set off again. I think I covered about 20K that day. Not a long way but I wasn’t hurrying. Trying to keep out of everyone’s way. Even, even though it was night there was, there was still a few people around and the villages which I tried to walk around but sometimes it was much easier to walk through them. The next day I spent hiding up and set off again at nightfall and passed through a village. And a mile past the village a truck came along and passed me and stopped. And he came back and said, obviously he was going to give me a ride. Asked what I was doing there. Anyway, I tried to make out that I was, I was a French worker but he could speak far better French than I could. At that stage I was feeling well down on very little to eat and water bag was empty so I wasn’t too unhappy to be taken into custody. I had three or four bits of chocolate over from the, that I hadn’t eaten and in the truck was his, another man and his little daughter. So I gave this kid a couple of bits of, pieces of chocolate and he was most impressed. When we came through the village he stopped, went to the local pub and bought us all a bottle of beer. So, it was a very good investment with two or three blocks of chocolate. Subsequently I was handed over to the local police and they called in the army and I was officially a POW.
AP: Alright. That’s, we got up to that stage. Can we maybe backtrack a little bit? You were talking about an escape kit. You were talking about an escape kit that you had.
KC: Yes.
AP: Obviously when you found yourself ejected from the aeroplane it was with you. Whereabouts did you actually have it?
KC: Oh you just carried it in your battle dress pocket.
AP: Oh ok. So, it was only a little thing.
KC: Little.
AP: Yeah.
KC: Well, a box about five by seven inches and about an inch deep and, which fitted inside your battle dress.
AP: And what sort of things were in it?
KC: Horlicks tablets [pause] very basic food stuffs. Some chocolate, not to enjoy but to [laughs] to survive on. And [pause] I’ve forgotten now. It’s so long ago.
AP: Maps and things like that as well.
KC: Oh, maps and a compass.
AP: Yeah. Did you have one of those special compasses that were hidden in a button or hidden somewhere or — ?
KC: Had a button compass.
AP: Yeah.
KC: I also had a little hand compass which I always carried.
AP: Very cool. You were saying as well you, about fifteen minutes before the target you’d go down into where the bombsight was and set it up.
KC: Set it up.
AP: And all that sort of thing. What did you do for the rest of the flight?
KC: I worked the H2S machine.
AP: Where was that physically?
KC: That was next to the navigator.
AP: Ah.
KC: And as I had not a lot to do it was a lot more practical that I did the H2S and he did the navigation. Getting all the fixes. It worked out very well.
AP: What did you, what did you think? Can you remember much about the H2S and what it looked like? And —
KC: All the H2S was, it was a machine, a dial about eight or nine inches diameter and it gave a profile of what was underneath. It had a long range and a short range and once you learned how to read it, it was a very desirable navigation tool. Especially on coastal areas, of course. It had a very sharp delineation between the sea and the land. Flying over land such as southern Germany it could pick up any lakes. It also picked up cities and towns as a darker green on the lighter green of the screen. Once you learned how to interpret it, it was a very useful tool.
AP: You also mentioned a couple, or there was at least three times there you mentioned being attacked by fighters. What does a corkscrew feel like for a bomb aimer?
KC: A corkscrew, in a four engine bomber you’re thinking of a Spitfire. It just goes high, right or left as the case might be, nose straight down, and round and round and pull out and go the other way and hope you’ve lost him. And if you haven’t lost him keep on doing it.
AP: Keep doing it [laughs] It would be quite, quite strenuous for the pilot I imagine.
KC: Oh, it was. The [pause] where they was over the target area if you, if you saw the fighter and went into a corkscrew he’d go and find someone who hadn’t, or hopefully hadn’t seen him.
AP: They were looking for, for easier prey. How did you cope with the stress of flying on operations? What did you do to relax?
KC: It was stressful. I think I coped very well.
AP: What sort of things did you do to, to handle that, or to deal with the pressure? If anything.
KC: Went to the local. And the local dances. The theatre. The pictures. And any entertainment that was on at the squadron when we weren’t flying.
AP: Alright. You’ve mentioned pubs and the local a few times. What, for Leconfield let’s just say, or any other pub that you can remember what did the pub look like and what was in there? What sort of things went on?
KC: Well, the nearest town was Beverley which was a market town and it was quite a big town. We got to know a few of the locals and we used to go to the, the Beverley Arms. Found ourselves a corner and some compatible people. Had a few drinks. Sang a few squadron songs and enjoyed ourselves. At that stage most of us had bikes so it was quite an adventure getting from the local back to the squadron. Fortunately, we made it.
AP: Very good.
KC: A few spills here and there.
AP: Very nice. Were there any superstitions or hoodoos amongst your crew or amongst your squadron that you knew about?
KC: We had a thing about our little, one of us had a little fluffy rabbit. About six or eight inches high and every operation we took the rabbit. And every operation we marked it on the, on the rabbit. And our ambition was to cover the rabbit. We didn’t, [pause] Stuttgart was our thirty third operation so we were looking forward to finishing but unfortunately, we didn’t.
AP: What, how many operations did you need to do for a tour at that period?
KC: Well normally it was thirty.
AP: Yeah.
KC: But with the French targets being shorter and supposedly easier they increased it to up to forty. The first two or three French targets were quite easy. But as soon as the Luftwaffe found out what we were doing they moved their fighter squadrons in.
AP: They did. Yes. I think at one point I think a French target counted as one third of a trip.
KC: Initially it did.
AP: Yeah.
KC: But subsequently they scrubbed it .
AP: There was a 467 Squadron man who said you can’t go for one third of a burton. That’s the way he put it. What sort of things happened in the, in the mess at the airfield?
KC: We were fed. And again had a few drinks and played cards or sat around and talked and had a sing song. There was no shortage of suitable songs [pause] I’m just wondering where Fiona was.
AP: Behind you.
KC: Oh, she’s there is she.
AP: She’s been there for about forty minutes, I think. She’s crept in nice and quietly. Alright. Can we, can we talk a bit about your prisoner of war experience? What — where were you taken after you were, were captured?
KC: Well from the army camp where we were assembled with about another ten people from a Lancaster crew, or two Lancasters that had been shot down in the area and there were about ten survivors. And we were taken from there to Stuttgart and subsequently to be taken to the interrogation centre at Frankfurt. We got to Stuttgart under heavy army guard and put on the platform waiting for a train. It was about midnight and the RAF came over again in force. Sirens went and people started running for shelters, saw us there and [laughs] we were, we were not popular. But the German army protected us, fortunately, and we were taken down to the cells until the train came which was Stuttgart to Frankfurt where the interrogation centre was at Oberursel. Spent the first three or four days there in solitary and then was taken to an interrogation room where the German officer started off with cigarettes and, ‘How are you?’ And all the welcoming. ‘Welcome to the Third Reich,’ He could speak perfect English. He’d apparently spent four or five years in the early thirties in England. And he said, ‘What’s your name?’ So, I gave it to him. ‘Your rank?’ So I gave it to him. ‘Your number?’ I gave it to him. ‘What aircraft were you flying?’ ‘You know I can’t answer that.’ Five or six more questions and he said, ‘Well I know you’re going to say no but we know it anyway.’ So he pressed the button and a girl came in. He spoke some German to her. She came back with a file. A file on 466 Squadron. And he told us the CO’s name, the flight commander’s name, most of the other people. The group captain. What the, how the aircraft, or how many aircraft there were. The fact that we’d transferred from Wellington’s to Halifaxes in 1943. And he knew the name of the barmaid at the local pub. There was nothing I could tell him. So, he gave me permission to have a shave and a shower which was very acceptable. Then back to solitary again and after that three or four days there were enough POWs to make a contingent to go to a POW camp which we subsequently caught a train and three or four, about three days later we arrived at a place called Bankau which was near Breslau in Poland. A very uncomfortable train trip but we finally made it. We were taken in to the camp and searched, interrogated again and duly given our quarters. All the people in the camp welcomed us, wanting us, wanting to know the latest situation on, on the second front. And being new people gave us a welcome dinner. The camp at that stage was very very basic. It was just huts on a dirt floor and bunks. There was a new camp being built just next door and we were looking forward to moving into that which we did after about four or five weeks. They finished the, enough of the camp to move us in which was a very pleasant change and there were rooms rather than huts. A big, big, a big area converted into about eight rooms with a toilet block at the end which was a much more pleasant life than going on, getting in the huts which were very crowded. The Red Cross there were marvellous to us. Before we left the interrogation centre, they fitted us out with warm clothing, boots and any other supplies that we needed. At the camp we were getting, at that stage we were getting a Red Cross parcel every fortnight which was the difference between existing and surviving. The Red Cross did a fantastic job in Germany for the POW’s. And [pause] and when were we there? That was about the end of August, I think. September. October. We used to fill in our time there with games which the Red Cross supplied. And they supplied us with a good library. And we walked around the compound for our exercise. We had to discuss trying to escape but at that stage of the war we were advised not to because they thought it would be over by Christmas. How wrong they were. In due course there was a Russian advance to the westward and the Germans wanted to keep us so we were told we were going to move camp and in January ’45 we were turfed out of our comfortable quarters into the coldest winter that, in Germany for about forty years. Four or five feet of snow on the ground. Cold. About five or six hundred people heading eastwards. We were supposedly to be marching but it soon very, very soon developed into a straggle. Everyone had found they were carrying far too much kit so the non-essentials were abandoned and whatever you could carry was what you had. We marched all day and stopped for a cup of lukewarm soup about mid-day and came to a suitable village at night and found a farm and were billeted in the farm buildings and hopefully had something to eat, which was problematical. We did have a Red Cross parcel each before we started which we tried to ration. We didn’t know how long we’d be marching so we tried to keep as much as possible of that intact. That went on for about two or three weeks. Marching by day and hopefully finding a barn or somewhere covered at night. Fortunately, on most occasions we slept in the farmers barn and threw out his livestock. Food was a very basic problem then and with, with the German army rations and what we had from the Red Cross parcels we managed to survive. And after how long? Three weeks? We were told we were going to be put on a train to our next destination. We were put on a train, about sixty five people to a four wheel cattle truck and there was room to stand up. You had to take it in turns to lie down. We spent three days in that. It was not a happy trip. After about a day we decided we would have been far better, far happier, marching. We eventually arrived at a place called Luckenwalde, about fifty miles south of Berlin and were taken to some barracks there which had originally been barracks for the German army in the Franco-Prussian war. They were in a very decrepit condition. It was a very large camp. All, a lot of POWs had been transferred there and many other, other nationalities. Thousands of Russian prisoners. And conditions were very basic. We used to sit there with nothing, nothing to do. Watched the Americans come over Berlin in the daytime and at night Mosquitoes came over Berlin at night. Subsequently the Russian army overran the camp and we were under the control of the Russians. Initially they were very good. The army people. A couple of thousand Russian prisoners were given a rifle, they said, ‘Come with us which they did. They were very keen to get their own back on the Germans for the appalling treatment that the Russians had had. We stayed in the camp there and the Russian army moved on and the administration took over. And it was a very different story. We were under Russian control and we were so close to the American lines and couldn’t do anything about it. Subsequently an American war correspondent and about six trucks came along and, to take the American survivors out but they wouldn’t, a few got away but the Russians wouldn’t let us go. But the, we were told that if we could possibly get out the trucks would be at a certain position until about 4 o’clock that afternoon. Another four or five of us managed to escape from the Russians, literally, through a hole in the wire and we found our way to the American trucks where two or three trucks had already filled. And at about 4 o’clock in the afternoon they said, ‘Well we can’t wait any further,’ and off we went. And after about an hour or so crossing an emergency bridge over the Elbe to the American army camp which was the front lines. They gave us accommodation and apologised profusely because the ice cream machine hadn’t caught up. From there we made our way to [pause] well the Americans gave us any kit we needed and fed us well and we went to an aerodrome where we were subsequently flown back to England.
AP: And that was the end of it.
KC: So, taken back to Brighton. Re-kitted. Met all our, well a lot of the people that we’d known before but also had been in Germany and given a leave pass for two weeks, a year’s pay, said, ‘Come back when you’re ready.’ So, I was a survivor fortunately. I subsequently found out years later that what had happened was another aircraft, also from our squadron had collided with us and it must have been a collision in our tail because the, our rear gunner, mid-upper gunner and the engineer were never found. The front of the aircraft, the bodies were found. And all the other aircraft were lost. So that was it. And I endured a mid-air collision and I happened to be the lucky one.
AP: How did you find readjusting to civilian life after going through all of that?
KC: Oh, coming back to Australia we were, came through The Heads which was a magnificent sight. Taken off the ship, put on a bus, taken to Bradfield Park. Not interrogated but put on record again and given a leave pass and, ‘Come back in two weeks.’ No ticker tape parade. No marching through, through George Street. Back home and out which suited us fine. It was quite a readjustment getting back to civilian life after the discipline of service life but I went back to my old job and started off life again.
AP: My final question for you. What is Bomber Command’s legacy and how do you want to see it remembered?
KC: Seventy one years later. Well sixty eight years later in Canberra it was decided to build a Bomber Command Memorial which was subsequently unveiled. I think in 2007 or eight, something like that. And it was the first Bomber Command Memorial, as far as we know, that was ever made. And it still stands in the sculpture garden of the Australian War Memorial. We were going to have our ceremony there tomorrow but unfortunately due to the inclement weather we have to have our ceremony inside. But subsequent to that, in England there was a movement to have a Bomber Command Memorial constructed and it was taken up officially and very enthusiastically supported and in 2009 I was one of the fortunate official members of the Air Force, RAAF delegation that went to the opening of the Air Force Bomber Command Memorial in Green Park in London. That is a magnificent Memorial. It took seventy one years but it was worth it. We were one of the fortunate thirty people in the official delegation that were at the dedication.
AP: Any final words? Any last thoughts for the, for the tape?
KC: Well here we are today on what was the 4th of July.
AP: 4th of June. 4th of June.
KC: June rather.
AP: Yeah.
KC: For our annual Bomber Command Commemoration Day Foundation. Remembrance of Bomber Command. It’s a very major event.
AP: It certainly is.
KC: The War Memorial have done a lot of the organisation for us. Made the, made the ANZAC Hall available and the Hall of Remembrance for our ceremony tomorrow and we’re quite looking forward to that.
AP: Here’s to that. Well, thank you very much Keith. It’s been an absolute pleasure hearing your story properly for the first time.
KC: Sorry I was so —
AP: I very much enjoyed it.
KC: The coughing
AP: No. That’s gone, that’s gone really well I think. It’s good.
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Identifier
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ACampbellKW160604
PCampbellKW1601
Title
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Interview with Keith Campbell. Two
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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01:11:55 audio recording
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Pending review
Creator
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Adam Purcell
Date
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2016-06-04
Description
An account of the resource
Keith Campbell grew up in New South Wales and joined the Royal Australian Air Force when he was old enough. He flew 35 operations as a bomb aimer with 466 Squadron from RAF Leconfield and RAF Driffield when, on their thirty first operation another aircraft from their squadron collided with them. All other crew were killed but Keith was thrown from the aircraft and parachuted in to a wheat field. He began to walk towards the Swiss border but was caught and became a poisoner of war.He was first sent to Stalag Luft 7 at Bankau but then was ordered on to the Long March and ended up at Stalag 3A at Luckenwalde from where he escaped the Russians and joined up with the Americans who sent him home.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
Spatial Coverage
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Australia
Germany
Great Britain
Poland
England--Yorkshire
Poland--Opole (Voivodeship)
Temporal Coverage
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1939
1942-05
1943
1944-01
Contributor
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Julie Williams
466 Squadron
aircrew
bale out
bomb aimer
bombing
bombing of Nuremberg (30 / 31 March 1944)
coping mechanism
crewing up
Gee
H2S
Halifax
memorial
mid-air collision
military living conditions
military service conditions
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
Operational Training Unit
prisoner of war
RAF Church Broughton
RAF Driffield
RAF Leconfield
Red Cross
Stalag 3A
Stalag Luft 7
superstition
the long march
training
-
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050ec2c145fb98c267b86c32860b5151
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/227/3372/PCharltonR1602.1.jpg
722c20116026475658f51dc3399f87dd
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/227/3372/ACharltonR160720.1.mp3
3341eead56faa2593f39be1ed6a64a1f
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Charlton, Raymond
Raymond Charlton
Ray Charlton
R Charlton
Description
An account of the resource
Two items. An oral history interview with Raymond "Ray" Charlton (1815764 and 201593 Royal Air Force) and a memoir. He completed a tour of operations as a flight engineer with Squadron 57, from RAF East Kirkby.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-08-05
2016-07-20
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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Charlton, R
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
PL: Hello, it’s Pam Locker and I’m in the home of Mr Ray Charlton of ****. So, if I can just start Ray by saying an enormous ‘thank you’ on behalf of the International Bomber Command Memorial Trust for agreeing to talk to us today, and I thought we’d perhaps start by talking a bit about your family and how you got involved with Bomber Command in the first place.
RC: I am one of five children to the Charlton family. I am the middle one. At the time of the war I’d just turned fifteen and then as it crept along to seventeen and a bit I wanted to join up in Bomber Command. My mother was absolutely [emphasis] against it and would not sign the admittance form, agreement form, so she said ‘You can wait’. So I had to wait ‘til I was eighteen and then I went in. I was sent along to London, Lords (Lords Hill I think it is called), flats there that had just been completed for upgrading. And then I was selected to go to Paignton in Devon and enjoyed that from the start, by the sea, living in a bed and breakfast apartment, run by the RAF of course, not by [unclear] the cooks and everything. But the main hotel in the town, in the village, was used as the headquarters where we dined and everything else, meetings. I found my initial test of weather. I could not for the life of me remember one set of clouds so they sent me off to be re-mustered. I finished up at the Isle of Sheppey, just outside London as you know, and then we had interviews one after another and I decided I’d train as a flight engineer and then from there I was posted up to ‒ now I’ve got it down somewhere ‒ and finished up at Bridlington and then from there it was down the west coast, east [emphasis] coast, to, er , ‒ until we passed out. And then, just to make things easy for everyone, I fell ill with pneumonia, about a fortnight before the exams so they had to keep me back until I recovered. After that I had to wait until the next intake to take the exams, which I had to join, to join with them to do the same exam. And we finished up being selected as trainee flight engineers and we were shipped off to South Wales, St Athans, to do a six months course. Twenty-six weeks of subject, each one taking one week except for the engines which was two weeks and, er, now ‒.
PL: So, did any of your other siblings go into the Forces?
RC: Yes. On one of the evenings attending the NAAFI a Canadian recruit who joined the RAF pulled out a roll of notes and in the queue next to us was a chappie with his eyeballs hanging down, so absolutely flustered. There was over one hundred pounds in a roll of notes. Apparently his father sent him ninety pounds a month to help him to live. Anyway, that night we’d all gone to bed the Military Police walked in, shut all the blinds up, and turned all the lights on and said, ‘Stand by your bed and your lockers’ and I said to the young Mo who stood near me, ‘What the matter?’. He said, ‘Shut up’ and in the end he said, ‘There’s been a robbery’. So I said, ‘Oh dear’ so I said, ‘Well. I don’t want to be funny but think of this as my bed, go into the next billet in the same position as this is’ (‘course they’re all in lines). I said [unclear]. Anyway they disappeared and then we were told we could go to sleep. Next morning I was sent for by the station commander, ‘How did you know that chappie was responsible?’ I said, ‘I didn’t’. So he [?] said, ‘I just didn’t like his absolute horror at seeing so much money, sheer delight to hold it’. So, he says, ‘Well, that was the money that was stolen’. So I said, ‘Oh thank goodness’. He said ‘Well, I’ll tell you this, you know the ruling here, if you get 70% you’ll be recommended for a commission. If you get 65% you will have [emphasis] a commission. So, I said, ‘I don’t want one, various personal reasons’. Anyway, he came out at the end of the exams and I’d got 64 ½ % because the day before was the final exam, oral, and the sergeant said to me, ‘You’re a devil. You know the answers and you’ve given me some wrong ones’. He said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘That’s my reason’. So he said, ‘Well, I don’t know what to give you, so many marks or so many marks’ and I chose the lower, the lower, number he mentioned and that was put on a piece of paper one and a half inches square which I had to take to the station commander’s office and hand it in and I put it on his desk after the normal salute. He said, ‘Is that all you’ve got? Who did this?’ I said, ‘Sergeant So-and-so’ and he bawled down the telephone, ‘Sergeant So-and-so here now’ and he came in and he says, ‘Why did you give this man so many marks?’ He says, ‘Well, that’s what he asked for’ [laughs]. He said, ‘I wanted to give him far more but’ he says, ‘I know he knew the answers but he gave wrong answers deliberately’. Anyway, he says, ‘I want you to alter it. I says, ‘He’s not to’ and refused to let him alter the figure. So I was left and I was ‒, I finished up, as Sergeant.
PL: Can you explain why you made that decision? Or if it’s personal that’s fine.
RC: My family was going through a very financial tight period. My father had lost his farm and prices for what he’d got fetched the lowest you could ever get and he refused to be made a bankrupt. He didn’t want the indignity of being a bankrupt, silly old devil. But anyway, he said he’d pay back every penny he owed and one of his brothers, he owed about £100 and he was the worst one to pay back. He demanded [unclear] until every penny was paid back. Anyway, it stuck and I was posted off to a bomber command, first of all at Swinderby on Stirlings (horrible tumbly things) but then on to East Kirkby where we started our bombing trips.
PL: I’m recommencing with Raymond Charlton.
RC: I’m Raymond Charlton. Now I’ve forgotten where I was. No, I can’t pick it up.
PL: You’ve just gone to East Kirkby.
RC: Well, before I got there I was asked, no, I’m jumping ahead. No, we went to East Kirkby and we were crewed up. Four Australians, the pilot, navigator, bomb aimer, and wireless operator were from different parts of Australia and the mid upper gunner came from Loughborough and the rear gunner came from Norfolk. I can’t tell you no more else. He was the baby of the crew. He was only nineteen. I was an old man of twenty. It was three weeks after I finished flying I became an old man of twenty-one. And then the fun starts. I was sent along to be re-graded for a job but being a VR, not many people know about this, the Air Force could not post you anywhere without your permission or change your job without permission of you. Er, it’s not flowing.
PL: So, tell me about East Kirkby. What was it like there?
RC: East Kirkby was very flat, typical flat Lincolnshire field. When the wind blew there was nothing to stop it. The snow came. The only thing that stopped it was your buildings. Our Nissan hut was completely blocked in one end. We had to use the back end and the floor was lino covered and in the winter months it used to be awash. So how we survived that I’ve no idea. And then of course they decided a very good frost put the kybosh on it. One tap only worked and that was in the cookhouse. Taps all over the camp wash rooms and such like were all frozen. So it was back to ‒
PL: Very uncomfortable.
RC: Very uncomfortable, yes.
PL: And did you share with the rest of your ‒ the rest of your group you were with or with others?
RC: Only the crew. We were put in a Nissan hut which housed two crews. Fourteen of you. And then, unfortunately, it appeared the other crew didn’t come back from a trip and then that happened on one or two occasions so they decided, as the bomb aimer put it, we’ve given everybody the jinx. So they wouldn’t let another crew come back in. They filled that bed up with the instrument repairer. He was a funny chap. Every time an aircraft went out and we were at home he was on his own but when the aircraft ‒, when we were not flying we had to sit up while all of them came back and landed. Well we’d never heard that noise before but he didn’t wake up at all. Then suddenly a tinkle bell went and it was an alarm clock in his kit bag and he woke up. So I says, ‘He never hears the aircraft, only tinkle bells’ but he was a nice chap to work with and did well. Then, of course, when we finished flying, I was posted off to a recruitment camp and they were trying to find us with jobs. First of all it was a young pilot officer still wet behind the ears, then a flight lieutenant, flying officer then a flight lieutnent , then a squadron leader. Then a wing commander came in and says, ‘You are causing trouble’. I says, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘You won’t make up your mind’. I said, ‘I will. I will not take a clerk’s job’. ‘Not even a clerk SD (Special Duties)? ‘No’ I says, ‘I’ll be a clerk when I’m demobbed. I don’t want to be a clerk now’. He says, he went on, ‘Well, the RAF regiment is recruiting officers. Would you be interested?’ I says, ‘Well, I could be’. He says, ‘You’re a funny chap. Three times you’ve refused to have a commission. Now you’re saying you don’t mind’. ‘Well, it’s a different situation isn’t it? When I was flying I didn’t want a commission’. I said, ‘How would I have gone from St Athans as a trainee flight engineer to join a crew, all of them sergeants. How would I feel as a pilot officer?’ I said, ‘That’s one of the reasons why I refused to do it.’ The there was another occasion when three of us were invited to the adjutant’s office to fill in a form. When we finished it I said, ‘Can I have my form back?’ He said, ‘The CO’s not signed it yet. He’s not back ‘til four o’clock’. I said, ‘I’ll have the form now’. So he gave me the form, the adjutant came into the room and I tore it up. I said, ‘This is for a commission and I don’t want it’. Then, of course, oh I forget. What was it? Yes, yes, the pilot said to me one day after muster (while we were flying this is). He says, ‘Can we go for a walk round the perimeter?’ He said, ‘I want to talk to you’. I said, ‘Am I in trouble?’ He said, ‘No, no, no. The CO wants you to change crews and go fly with him, the wing commander.’ I said, ‘Like hell!’ He said, ‘What’ll I tell him?’ I said, ‘Tell him to go to hell!’ Well, apparently he did [laughs]. ‘Cause I met him thirty-odd years later and I says, ‘I don’t expect you remember me’. He said, ‘I do. You’re the one who refused to fly with me. Go to hell!’ He said, ‘Why didn’t you want to?’ I said, ‘I just didn’t want to’. And then I said, ‘I’ve now taken it and come back in the RAF regiment as a Flight Lieutenant so now I’m happy’. I said, ‘Things are straight at home and everything else.’
PL: So, tell me about the relationship you had with your crew.
RC: It was a very, very, very friendly, easy to get along with crowd. Never any trouble. The only trouble we ever had was with the mid upper gunner. He called out one day, ‘My [?] heel was on fire’. His electrically heated suit had set fire at the heel. The connection had so the pilot said, ‘Go and sort him out’. Of course, being dogs body I went down to the mid upper gunner, took his shoe off, his sock off, put a dressing on his heel, ‘cause it was a horrible smell. Burning flesh is not very pleasant. Anyway I put his shoes back on and socks, put him in his perch and I says, ‘Get on with it and shut up’. Anyway, I hadn’t been back many minutes in my position when he said ‘It isn’t half draughty here’. So the pilot in very sharp terms and in terms I’d never heard before, ‘Go and sort him out once and for all and shut him up’. So, I went back and said, ‘What a matter?’ He said, ‘Well, when I sit under this I get a draught on my neck’. So I put my fingers up behind his head and they went straight through a hole. It could only be a bullet hole but I wasn’t going to tell anybody. Anyway, I said, ‘Don’t turn side wards unless you have to, you know, need to move, turn side wards, and you won’t feel it.’ When I got back to the pilot’s position he said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘Shush’, he said, ‘I want to know’. So I went back and said, ‘Bullet in the dome, bullet hole in the dome. Just one in the back’. And then when we landed the bomb aimer knew. He heard me say to the ground crew, ‘You need a new canopy. It’s gone.’ So he says, ‘We’d better go straight back to the hospital ‘cause he’s that bloomin’ thick the bullet’s probably still in his head’. We were really nice to each other normally but that was the worst remark I’d heard about any of them. And we just didn’t bother. But anyway, they changed the thing and, of course, just before then he’d insisted on doing one of my jobs, which was to dipstick the petrol tanks, but on a frosty morning I told him where to walk on the wing. I said, ‘Don’t go to the right or to the left. Keep on that line’. What did he do? He stepped over to the right and then you saw him sliding down the wing. It’s only fifteen feet high and when we got in the aircraft he says, ‘My left wrist hurts’ and I put it in a splint, sat him in a turret and said, ‘Work your right hand and keep your left hand steady’ and I said, ‘You’re all right’. Anyway when we landed we said, ‘We’d better go back to hospital with him’ and they took him there and the wing commander came in and said, ‘You’d better find a new gunner’. He said, ‘We’re a three months repair job - compound fracture’. Now of course sitting there working the turret wouldn’t do any good at all but he had no option. But he was an ex-boxer so you know how intelligent they are [laughs].
PL: So, what about your missions. Tell me a little bit about your tours.
RC: Well, most tours are, most of the tour, were without any remark you can pass. One to Munich once, after climbing Mont Blanc, which is twenty-four thousand feet, we couldn’t go over the top. We had to go round it. While we were getting near to the target the bomb aimer, bomb leader, who controlled where we dropped bombs said, ‘Hold back chaps. Do not drop yet. My boys are down posting the letters in the letter boxes. If anyone drops a bomb you’ll kill one or two of them’. Anyway, in the end he says, ‘Right chaps, boys’. But to get there we’d have to turn out and then back in the crowd. Well you know what it’s like trying to cross a busy road from a side road. You’ve got to wait for a space and that’s what we had to do, wait for a space between all the aircraft going in to the target. We got there, did the necessary, and went home. And then, on another occasion, oh dear, that’s gone.
PL: What did he mean, ‘putting the letters in the letter box’?
RC: They were flying that low to put markers down and to cover any not right, not in the right position to put colour on to cancel it. But they were flying at about fifty feet above house tops. The Lancaster going round and round directing them what to do, where to drop one and he controlled the rest of us. Now, what was another occasion? I had three occasions when the ‒ No, won’t come.
PL: Can you remember where you were sent on your missions?
RC: Well, that was to Munich. And then one day waking up in the morning the bomb aimer said ‘Oh dear, we’ve had it tonight, chop [?] We’re going to chopper [?]. We were shot down over the target.’ Now, funnily enough I’d had a dream myself and it was his remarks that reminded me of it. They always said unless you have a remark, a remarkable namesake you don’t know it, know what the target was, dream was. And I’d had a dream. In fact when we were over the English Channel I pointed to the navigator on his map where we would cross on the way out and on the way back. I said, ‘We shall cross there on the way back’ and I saw every river, every railway line and every forest area in this trip and then when we got over, over the target, I suddenly saw a black spot at, what we’d call ten past two. Look at your watch and look at ten past two. And I said, ‘Now watch it’ and all of us were watching that (the pilot was too busy). All six of us were watching that black spot area and it became closer and I said, ‘Well, that’s it’ and we did the necessary cork screw dive and with that he, this object just flew away. It was a German night fighter, realised we’d spotted him and turned away to look for someone else. But I can’t think ‒ there was three occasions. Never mind, they won’t come.
PL: So, you stayed with the same crew throughout your time?
RC: The crew was with us until we lost the mid upper gunner and then we swapped to Bob, Bob Mott, and he fitted in absolutely marvellous. The pilot and I selected him from the initial conversation ‘cause I said to Tommy, ‘This is the one’. We’d seen one but didn’t like him and then we saw another and then we told the third to go back to duties. And he fitted in as if he’d been with us all the time. We didn’t even realise it was a different man. Just the fact he just had a slightly different voice but the same attitude. We were all keen on doing a job. I’ll always remember one new crew came in to fill up a space, the other space on our billet, and they went out on fighter ‒, fighter affiliation. That’s where a Spitfire armed with a camera attacks you to see what reaction you had. And the mid upper gunner said, ‘He sat on his rest bed telling the pilot what to do’, and I said to our pilot, ‘What do you think of that?’ He said, ‘Not much’ and I said, ‘I think even less of it. How many do we give him?’ And we both agreed one or two trips and then the next night I was put on to fly in his place on their first trip because their engineer had fallen sick and I said, ‘I’m not going to go’ so they threatened me with a court martial.
PL: Why was that?
PL: Lack of moral fibre and I said I’d rather die a coward than live, rather live a coward than die as a stupid idiot and anyway they went off ‒ nobody thing. The next night we were sent on this trip with this same crew to go together in a thing. They didn’t come back. On their first trip they didn’t came back. But what do you expect with an attitude like that in training? We said they didn’t deserve to live but apparently the bomb aimer said we had got a name, putting a jinx on people, because the pilot and I used to say, ‘Give them five trips’, ‘Give them four trips’, and they never went beyond it. You knew by just how they behaved what chance they had.
PL: Was there a lot of superstition?
RC: I think there was a lot of ‒, yes, a lot of people carried things in their pockets, mementos from the family to cover, to guard them. It’s like, we were sent off one day to some oil fields in Poland. Now, on the way out from England all our instruments failed. Of the six main instruments only two worked. We’d got height and speed but not for wing movement or height to ground and we struggled on. The cloud was very heavy. We didn’t see where we were going. When we crossed the ‒, Norway and what not, what do you call that area? I can’t think of the area. Denmark and what not. When we crossed over there not one visible sign of any coastline so we didn’t know where we were. Poor old navigator had to do everything by dead reckoning and we flew off and after a while, flying ages (it was a nine hour trip), the pilot, navigator, said, ‘We must be somewhere near’ and we looked down and we saw some flares about fifty miles behind us. I said, ‘We’ve come too far’. So, of course, we turned back and what we saw my heart jumped because the flak was so dense, looking at a wall of flak, and we had to go in a circle and turn and believe it or not it was an arch like that and we flew under the arch and they said, when we were debriefed, ‘No bullet holes?’ No, not one. He said, ‘You’re the only one’. He said, ‘Have you been on the same trip?’ We said, ‘Well, we’ll prove that when the air camera shot of where the bombs dropped’ and it did give a very clear shot. We were over the target, the oil fields in Poland. Of course Gerry was very short of oil so it was necessary to keep it away from him. But, er, its, we never did, never did solve why the instruments failed. They blamed me, thinking I’d not put on, or removed, the protection of the tube letting the air in. It’s like just a hole in a pipe which told the instruments what to do, air pressure, and everything was registered. It was the six, and there’s two of them, instruments just like those. There was six of them in a block in every aircraft you could see, still is, and everybody accused me of not removing the protection which was on [unclear] the ground. Take it when you go flying, put it in your bag, just a plastic canvas tube cover. But no, that was alright, when we got there, and that was it. Never did find out why it failed. Then there was one funny trip, coming back, just after we’d left the target, I said to the pilot, ‘My oil drum, oil tank, petrol tank, on the wing, starboard side, looks a bit low’. ‘Double check and give me your readings’, so I sat and did all my calculations again. I said, ‘No, I’m fifty gallons short on starboard’. Well, he said, ‘We’ll press on’. Now, we didn’t know what it was. It could have been a hole in the tank and it sealed itself. They did that, they sealed themselves if there was just a small damage, or not. Anyway, I did a ten minute reading every time from then until we landed and as we came into land they didn’t want us to land, they wanted us to go away to some crash ‘drome. The pilot refused flat, ‘Not going, land here or else’. Anyhow, they allowed us in but we had to park somewhere way over, way away from where we normally parked. So, what did they do then? Put an armed escort on it until everything was checked. They recharged the tanks with some petrol and proved that I was very low. I’d only got twenty-six gallons left in both two tanks, which was just about enough to land on. Anyway ‒.
PL: Did they ever find out what the problem was?
RC: No, I still say they didn’t put it in but the petrol boys had a knack, a knack of filling their forms in that nobody could understand. But I don’t think they would do it deliberately. But it never did resolve itself. But the wing commander was very cross over it ‘cause we’d landed that much earlier than we should‘ve done and also not having the petrol right and my form which was normally within fifteen gallons of what it should be was way out. But still there we are.
PL: What was a crash drum? Did you say crash drum?
RC: Crash ‘drome [emphasis]. Aircraft ‒. There’s one in Norfolk. Eight aircraft could land at the same time on the wet. It was a special ‘drome built for crashing on. No aircraft normally use it. You landed and then they pulled you inbetween the trees out of the way so nobody could land at the same spot and it was about six or seven that could land at the same time. It was fantastic really. But he wanted us to go to another ‘drome that was prepared to let us aircraft land if they were not busy. But he refused to even consider it. But having got back it all blew over, but no ‒.
PL: Tell me a little about your job as flight engineer.
RC: Well, it just, my job was to make sure the engines were absolutely lined up with each other, to synchronise all four engines along with the pilot’s help. He’d do two and I’d do two and then we’d join the two inners to make sure they were together and naturally without any [unclear] he was shorter than me. He couldn’t reach all the levers. So if he wanted to, er, put some exhaust, acceleration [emphasis], on he’d have to go down, I’d [emphasis] have to go down and lift it up and hand it over to him to use, to ‒. ‘Cause when we first met he wanted to control all the engine’s controls, but I said, ‘No you don’t. I control those. That’s how I’d been trained’ and after a while he accepted it ‘cause he realised we couldn’t reach half of them. He was too low for him to reach but we never did fall out. My job, well you could say it was getting boring [unclear] ‘cause nothing happened. We never had any false alarms, never any fuses, we just went and we came back and we used to hand the aircraft over to the ground crews. Nothing to report, just clean it up, you know, just check it over. The only time we had any trouble we had to land at an aerodrome called Tarrant Rushton and I said to the ground crew there that had been allocated to our aircraft, ‘I’ll see you in the morning at eight o’clock. Don’t touch a thing’. Well, I got there at eight o’clock and he said, ‘I’ve done it Sergeant’. I said, ‘Have you?’ He said, ‘Yes’. All he had to do was to top up the oil, coolant and make sure the petrol level was right but he said he’d done it all and had checked, it was alright. We took off and I said to the pilot, ‘I don’t like the sound of our outer engine’. I said, ‘She keeps surging and easing off and surge again’. He said, ‘If you want to switch it off I’ll let you switch it off and we’ll go home on three’. I said, ‘No, we’ll keep it running and I’ll keep my eye on it’ and we did. Oh, ah [background noises] and we did, damn you [addressed to a pet?]. Yes, I says, when we got out, I says to the ground crew, our ground crew, he was a sergeant, Corporal Scott. The other one was an aircraft man, he was English, and much younger but he was very keen and very careful. But the engineer, Scott, was absolutely brilliant. I said to him, I said, ‘I don’t like the sound of that engine. She’s surging’. He said, ‘I’ll look at it’. ‘Course, when we went to be looked after he would start up the engine and I went back to him after my breakfast and the engine was out and he was working on the connections of the [unclear]. I said, ‘What’s the matter?’ He said, ‘Some bloody fool has put oil in the coolant and coolant in the oil’. I said, ‘Oh, has he?’ So I went straight back to the wing commander, I said, ‘I want that (and I got his name you see), I want this bloody idiot’. Shh shut up [addressed to a pet in the room?]. ‘I want this idiot. (I called him a bloody idiot.) Charge him’. I said, ‘He could have killed us’. He said, ‘He what?’ I said, ‘He filled up the [unclear] one engine. He put oil in the coolant and coolant in the oil.’ And yet on their lids they’ve got [unclear] of that size and right across it was these letters OIL or coolant CLT. So how [unclear] I wouldn’t know, lack of brain. So he says to me, ‘He’s been suitably dealt with’ and then the wing commander started to celebrate. He wanted to try out a new scheme of what they called formation flying. So, he chose our pilot, my pilot, to fly in the out of position, right on the edge of starboard so, naturally, when you went round right you had to run but when you went to the left you had to put your brake on. Anyway, we were flying out one day over the Wash and another Lancaster, obviously a trainee, a trainee crowd, ‘cause you could tell by the markings was a trainee crew and he circled in closer than what we were to the one [unlear]. We tried to shoo him away but there was no such thing as radio ‘cause we were on a different wave band, see, we had our own special wave band, and all they did was just smile and wave. ‘Go away’ [emphasis]. And suddenly we were flying off and the wing commander said, ‘Start to turn right’ [laughs]. I looked at the pilot and he did nothing. I think he was oblivious to the thing. He hadn’t realised this aircraft was as close as it was but we ‒, I pressed my button, I said ‘Straight ahead please’. The wing commander came back on , he says, ‘Would the person who cancelled my order give his name, his crew, his pilot’s name and aircraft number and the reason why he cancelled my order’. So I briefly explained. He said, ‘I’ll see you in my office afterwards’. Well, of course he finished off his training. He decided not to do any more formation flying and it was the idea of the Americans. You formed a formation from the front and the rest trailed behind. So it gave greater safety. But anyway I went to his office afterwards, ‘The information you gave me was enough to locate who the idiot was.’ He said, ‘You’ll be pleased to know he will not fly another aircraft. He’s been taken off’. He was completely irresponsible so what good was he as a pilot if he was irresponsible. But he circled in that close if we’d moved a foot or two we’d be within an inch of him ‘cause he didn’t know we were going to turn unless I ‒. We couldn’t tell him. But they said afterwards ‘Thank God you were sitting on top fully alert’. I said ‘Somebody has to be’ [laughs]. But I think that’s why we survived, all of us was of the same category of mind. You train to the extent we were still training when we finished and I still say that’s why so many went down. They thought it was a holiday.
PL: Is there anything else that you want to tell me?
RC: I can’t think of anything else.
PL: Just very briefly then tell me about what happened after the war?
RC: After the war?
PL: So the war ended and then what did you do?
RC: Yes, The war ended so when we ‒, when we finished flying we were sent on demob leave. Then when we were on demob leave Germany had had enough, finished. I got letter ‘cause up ‘til then we had seven days indefinite leave, seven days indefinite leave, and every week that was renewed. So I had a month’s holiday at the end of when we were flying and we ‒, then after four weeks, I had a notice to go to um ‒ I went then up in Scotland, just where the RAF regiment is now, funnily enough, it was there. Anyway, he said, ‘We’ve posted you to Grantham for a commissioning course. We’ve accepted your commission. This is your commission. Go!’ He said, ‘If you’d signed when you were on the flying side, all you had to do was sign a sheet and you’d get a uniform. Now you’ve got to prove you’re good enough.’ I said, ‘Good show, I’m another three months in England’. Anyway, I did my training, became a flying officer, no pilot officer, pilot officer. I was posted to Iraq, the Middle East. Iraq in the Iraq levies. I got out there. We had to see the colonel first. We had an army colonel in charge, Colonel Loose [?] and he said ‘I’m putting you with the transport. You can help out on the transport to start with but you may have another ‒, another drop’. Anyway I went to this transport office. There was about thirty or forty lorries or cars and, er, we were sitting one day in the office. This flight lieutenant in charge, he was taking a charge sheet of one of his drivers for some misdemeanour and the phone bell went and all he kept saying was, ‘Yes Sir, I’ll tell him Sir. Yes Sir, he will be Sir’. When he finished he said, ‘The Colonel wants to see you in his office after breakfast’. This was at six o’clock in the morning. He said after breakfast, which was half past seven. Anyway, I went to the office as per appointed and he said, ‘You are the Adjutant as from next week, of No. 1 Squadron’, number one wing, the first top wing, and yet I knew the adjutant of the number two and thought he was a much better chap at the job than me. But anyway he said, ‘I think you’ll be alright’ and four or five weeks after I’d been in the office he was walking up under this shade of the building, and he stopped outside the door, you know, this insect door. He flung that open. He said, ‘I knew I hadn’t made a mistake. You’re doing very well’ and walked on. I didn’t even have a chance to say, ‘Thank you.’ Anyway, things progressed and as I said the other adjutant was better than me. He said, ‘Well, he was here before you. If he’d been my adjutant I would have sacked him a fortnight after he’d started.’ He says, ‘I’m keeping you for months’ [laughs]. So I says, ‘That’s nice to know’ I says, ‘Why?’ He says, ‘You fit in. You get on with your job’ and I progressed very well.
Pl: So did you stay and make a career in the Air Force after the war?
RC: They wanted me to. They offered me extended service for seven years and give me nine thousand pounds at the end. I said, ‘Like hell! I’m not prepared to’. And they thought I was foolish so I often said to Jean I never knew what I would have been if I’d stayed flying with the wing commander or staying on the ground in the ground staff job. It could have been a complete change of life for me but I’ve never regretted it, ‘cause I couldn’t stand the petty indifference and intelligence of the generations of officers coming along. They were petty. They fiddled. They, er, mesmerized you. They didn’t give you a straightforward answer or anything. Yet I’d had to deal with them when I knew nothing. I mean, the person who followed me on had only been sent on a three months course on how to be one, I had one hour. But I fitted in just like that and yet it was absolutely new to me. But I’d see a stack of paper that high every morning but it was mostly, you know, discipline and what not. I had one funny case where there’d been a sergeant shot in the leg and a corporal was up on the charge of shooting him and after I had all the interviews, they’d all ‒, all the people had been sent to the Air Force Ministry in London, came back, no good whatever, please retake, all the questions, you know, all the examinations. So I did it myself and this corporal I says, ‘You’re a fool taking the blame and everybody’s blaming you. You did nothing wrong. It’s the others, the more senior officers, native [?] officers.’ They were commissioned by the CO Middle East. But it rounded off. In the end he got away. Oh yes, ‘cause of course the papers I sent in, they said charge him with about six charges and I looked through the legal book and I found another six, so I put twelve charges on his sheet, went across to his room where he was being held and said, ‘I still say you’ve a fool and you’re being charged with so-and-so and so-and-so so’. I said, ‘You’ll be here for years if you’ve not careful’. Anyway, then I got a phone call, ‘He wants to see you back again’ and the chief native [?] officer, who was a Russian by birth, who had been in the Russian Tsar’s army as a major, he was our senior native [?] officer, said to me, ‘He wants you in the cell again’. So I went to the cell. I said, ‘What do you want?’ He said, ‘I want ‒ ‘. I put a hand on his mouth. I said, ‘Shut up. You’re not going to say a word. You’re not going to blub out what you want to say now. You’ll do it officially.’ I put my hand on his mouth and shut him up. I couldn’t catch a word he said. He wanted to confess what had happened and in the end the AOC Middle East came in and saw the Colonel. The next thing I know the corporal was released. The officer who I thought had been the cause of the trouble had been quietly dismissed. No show, no nothing, political, it was all mixed up with politics, politics from the Iraq people and joining in with the British. The Embassy was hopeless. I’d always got on well with the Embassy but they faded away when that came up. They didn’t want to know. But anyway ‒
PL: Talking about politics then, something I need to ask you, your feelings about how Bomber Command has been treated over the years. Do you have a view on that?
RC: Shockingly. I still say the ‒, what you call it, the clasp [?] it’s a bit of tin painted in gold paint. I say after seventy years it’s disgusting, totally disgusting. As the bomb aimer used to say, ‘They give the pilot the big medal. Why can’t they make a miniature one for each of us? We’re all together in the same crew’. No, just the pilot had to have a big, big, medal thing. We got nothing. And that was the attitude. We were all just the workers, get on with it, and yet he couldn’t do it without us, any of us. We used to say the mid upper and the rear gunner were probably more important than we were. Who could have navigated, dead reckoning navigation over a cloud filled sky all the way to the bottom of Poland and back, and back? And he finished up on the same stretch, when we looked out and saw the state of the coastline and we were going over it. I says, ‘That’s where I’d pointed out, isn’t it?’ He says, ‘Yes, you were spot on within two miles.’ He said, ‘And that was only a dream’. I said, ‘Yes, but we did live, didn’t we?’ I said, ‘Tommy said we’d not, we’d not make it from the trip but we did make it’. And they were the factors that kept you going. Much obliged. I’m going to finish, sorry.
PL: Well, can I say thank you so much. That was a fascinating interview.
RC: I hope that was as good as you want.
PL: Thank you very much for being so generous with your time. So, recommencing with Ray Charlton. So we’ve just been talking about a fascinating story about Wesel ‒ . Would you like to share that with us Ray?
RC: Yes, I just recalled the trip to Wesel, which was on the edge of the river and Montgomery had moved his troops back three thousand yards. And I said to our CO, ‘Tell him as an insult to go back three thousand yards that’s allowing us to make all that much mistake.’ Anyway we were flying over about twelve thousand feet and the flak in front of us was quite heavy. Anyway we pressed on. And suddenly underneath us we heard a rush of noise, a heavy wind noise, and we were looking out watching and we could see anti-aircraft guns being shot out of action. They’d been firing one minute and nothing the next and that’s what had happened. Every time one fired the artillery boys pinpointed the site and aimed [?] it out. Well on one of my initial visits to Salisbury [other], Salisbury, we’d got a packed lunch with us, and we saw Philip ‒, Prince Philips’ regiment. Well I said, ‘We ought to go in here’ (‘course it’s not the present Prince Philip. It’s the previous one). And we had ‒, we were enjoying our lunch on the lawn, and obviously one of their men came and joined us, ‘Were you in the regiment?’ I said, ‘No, no, no, only the RAF regiment’. ‘Oh, I don’t know about those’. I said, ‘We’re all aircrew’, He said, ‘I don’t know much about them’. I said ‘Well, we did bomb Wesel. ‘Did you? You must meet our sergeant’. I said ‒. He went to find the sergeant but he couldn’t leave his post, he was on the door. Oh, he asked us to go to him and when I went to approach him he grabbed my hand and shook it so hard it hurt. I said, ‘What’s this for?’ He said we were told about you boys coming to raid it to help us. We were told to expect to lose two thousand men in crossing the river. He says, ‘And I was to lead the men over and establish and put the machine guns out of action’. He said, ‘When we got there not a single shot was fired at us. We never saw a single German, only dead ones, and he says, ‘How on earth did you do it?’ I says, ‘Just bombed’. ‘How did you get through all that flak?’ I said, ‘You ignore it’. I said to the sergeant, ‘We ignored it. Had to do. It was heavy to start with but it dwindled off to nothing. It was just one gun firing in one spot positon and that kept firing. He must have had a load in and we just thought nothing of it. To us we’d done a job.’ He said, ‘Well I shall never forget it. You saved two thousand men from this company, this regiment.’ He says, ‘That’s something to do’.
Pl: Wonderful.
RC: But he said, ‘And we achieved our objective. We never saw anything. They must have cleared all out, they must have moved out. ‘Cause they expected you’d have to go through every house and route out snipers but there wasn’t one to be found anywhere. The survivors said the bombing was so accurate and so intense that nobody could live through it, so we were quite happy. We did an easy job and that was it.’ And there we are.
Pl. Thank you Ray.
PL: This is Pam Locker and I’m in the house of Mrs Jean Mary Charlton, who was also ‒. Her first husband was called Robert Mott and her maiden name was Gilliatt [?]. And this forms a complement to another interview, with Mr Ray Charlton, about his experiences in Bomber Command. So, Jean, would you like to stat by telling us a little bit about what you were doing at the start of the war perhaps?
JC: I was in training for Nottingham City Hospital. D Day I was at training school [unclear]. Very little idea about what we were going to face. We saw the most horrific things, soldiers coming in still in uniform, covered in blood, just bound up, legless, armless. It was a horrible thing to have to remember really. But on the Saturday at the Goose Fair in Nottingham we decided we’d all go to the Goose Fair, so four of us went together. Four airmen came up and said ‘Come on girls, come and have a ride’. Of course, I was left with the old man, wasn’t I? Which was Bob. That was 1954, as far as I can remember. I think that’s right.
[Other]: ’44.
RC: No, ’45.
JC: ’45, sorry, I had it the wrong way round. We did a tour of Nottingham Castle and left and [unclear] ‘Will we see you next weekend?’ Then when they turned up there was Bob. We married a year later, came to Southampton to live, ‘cause I brought up seven children, that’s the youngest, and I decided to go back to nursing, went to the local children’s hospital and fourteen years in the district [unclear]. In the meantime Ray came down to Southampton and said, ‘Oh, I know someone who lives here and in that road ’ as he passed it, ‘I’ll go and look him up’, knocked on the door, ‘cause I was at work [unclear] and then he opened it, ‘Who are you then?’ He said ‘I’m Ray Charlton, the Flight Engineer’. Anyway, he stayed the night and went off again. A month later we were celebrating Christmas, my eldest daughter was home from Saudi Arabia, and we were going to have a special weekend, and Bob suddenly became ill and he died twenty-four hours later, a heart problem. And so I phoned Ray [unclear] and then, of course, I went on and moved into a flat, didn’t I, on my own? ‘Cause we gave up our house [unclear].
PL: So you moved house?
JL: I went to a flat. I was working for the district, it was this side of town, you see, and I kept in touch with Ray, wrote Christmas cards and things, and my granddaughter, she was at college, I was house-sitting for my son and Ray phoned up, could he pop in and see us, as he was at an RAF meeting in Bournemouth? And he came in, drove round Southampton, and from then on he started phoning me, to go to Leicester for the weekend, and they used to say, ‘We never know where you ae mum’ [laugh], and then we married, it took about ten years to make our minds up, didn’t it? To marry. We’ve been married twenty-three years. So we moved, now, as I say, he married me for my pension fund [laugh]. But we’ve been up to Lincolnshire, to East Kirkby, every year, haven’t we?
RC: Yes, every year.
JC: I used to drive up but in recent years the family would take us. We would miss it, wouldn’t we?
PL: It’s a very romantic story. So, just to be clear for the tape, one of the most extraordinary things about this story is that you were married to two men from the same crew.
JC: Yes, the first one was with me since I was eighteen.
RC: Do you remember when I Bob says to me, ‘Who are you?’
JC: Yes, I mentioned that. I think that’s me finished.
PL: Do you want to add any stories ‒. Have you got any memories that Bob shared with you about his experiences in the war?
JC: Well, not a lot, because he used to say, ‘We never had any problems’. They were all such a good crew together. Had little jokes between them but nothing that was [unclear]. Sorry, my voice isn’t clear.
RC: I think that was the trouble, there was never any ‒
JC: Friction between you, was there?
RC: No friction and no crystal to shine. We just ‒, just went smoothly on.
[Other]: Two crews.
JC: Yes, Bob flew with two crews. The first crew he was going for the aircraft and his knee gave way, so he had to go and have a cartilage operation.
PL: Right.
JC: And that’s how he came to join Ray’s crew, when he came back. We did meet one member of the crew at East Kirkby didn’t we? And I think we were chatting all day long to him [unclear].
[Other]: He thought dad had died. He thought dad had died.
RC: Well, that’s how we feel about the Pantons, isn’t it?
JC: Yes
RC: At East Kirkby. I’ve had some lovely letters from both of them and their wives.
JC: Yes. I miss Sharon [unclear].
PL: So Jean, is there anything else that you want to ‒.recorded for either Bob or Ray you would like included?
JL: I can’t think of anything.
[Other]: He used to say how tired he was mum, how he used to fall asleep standing up on the train.
JC: On the train. He used to come down to Southampton and, of course, he could never get a seat, and he would be stood there sound asleep. You’ve said the same thing about being on the, um, trains coming home and being asleep.
RC: When the parson and four of his parishioners, they wanted me to give up my seat, and he said, ’You leave him where he is’, and he says, ‘Every time you wake up your eyes span the whole window’. So he says, ‘Open your overcoat’ and I did, you see, he said, I knew you were aircrew’, he says, ‘As soon as you open your eyes that window’s searched.’ He said, ‘You do it automatically’. I said, ‘That’s how we lived’, but these women, they were with him, his parishioners, thought I was terribly rude not offering my seat up.
[Other]: What about getting the bacon mum? They used to go into the mess of the sergeants and pinch what was left of the breakfast.
JC: Yes.
{Other}: Do you want to tell that one?
JC: You can tell it.
PL: So, the next person to speak is Vanessa ‒
[Other]: Standley [?]
PL: Standley, who is Jean’s youngest daughter.
VS: Dad used to have supper in the evenings and the one thing that always made us laugh was dad liked everything with brown sauce and he loved cheese. We went to a reunion at East Kirkby a few years ago and bumped into someone who remembered dad from flying at East Kirkby and started to tell us some stories and one of them was that dad and someone else, I don’t know the name, used to sneak into ‒ I think it was the sergeants’ quarters when it was empty in the evening, and if there was some cheese left, ‘cause obviously they were on rations, they used to toast the bits of bread on the electric fire and put cheese on and brown sauce and they’d sneak back, you know, it was their secret. And I thought that was great ‘cause all through my childhood the one thing my dad always had was bread, cheese and everything came with brown sauce.
PL: So, is there anything else anybody would like to add for the record before we close?
JL: No.
PL: Well, thank you all very much. Your family has an extraordinary story with extraordinary connections, so thank you very much for sharing it with us.
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ACharltonR160720
PCharltonR1602
PCharltonR1603
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Interview with Ray Charlton
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
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eng
Format
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01:19:22 audio recording
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Pam Locker
Date
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2016-07-20
Description
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Ray wanted to join Bomber Command but after going to RAF Paignton, he was re-mustered and went to RAF Eastchurch on the Isle of Sheppey where he decided to train as a flight engineer. He was posted to Bridlington and this was followed by a six-month course at RAF St Athan. He explains why he refused commissions at various times.
Ray was posted to Bomber Command, initially on Stirlings at RAF Swinderby and then RAF East Kirkby. He crewed up with four Australians and two other English men. He mentions the difficult conditions and crews who did not return. The mid-upper gunner faced several issues before being replaced due to injury.
Ray does describe some of the events on his tour: going round Mont Blanc; an encounter with a German fighter plane; instrument failure, going to the oil fields in Poland; insufficient petrol; the ground crew mixing up oil and coolant when diverted to RAF Tarrant Rushton; almost being hit by a trainer Lancaster crew when trying formation flying. He did, however, later find out that they had saved the lives of 2,000 troops crossing the river at Wesel.
When Germany surrendered, Ray was sent on leave, and then Scotland and Grantham for a commissioning course. He became a pilot officer and was posted to Iraq where he was made adjutant of 1 Squadron.
Ray explains how he felt about the treatment of Bomber Command.
Before his death, Ray’s wife, Jean, was married to another crew member, whom she met while training as a nurse.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
Wales
England--Lincolnshire
Wales--Vale of Glamorgan
Germany
Poland
Europe--Mont Blanc
Germany--Wesel (North Rhine-Westphalia)
Iraq
Contributor
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Christine Kavanagh
Sally Coulter
57 Squadron
630 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
crewing up
flight engineer
love and romance
military living conditions
military service conditions
Nissen hut
RAF East Kirkby
RAF Eastchurch
RAF St Athan
RAF Tarrant Rushton
superstition
training
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/233/3376/AColensoF170522.1.mp3
62f276f7578995b81676e568202f437e
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Title
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Colenso, Frank
Frank Colenso
F Colenso
Description
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One oral history interview with Frank Colenso.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-05-22
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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Colenso, F
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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PL: Hello and, and first of all an enormous thank you. My name is Pam Locker I’m in the home of Mr Frank Colenso of [redacted]. Frank it’s wonderful that you have agreed to talk to us today and so a big thank you on behalf of the Bomber Command digital archive.
FC: Thank you for inviting me.
PL: It’s a pleasure.
FC: To do that.
PL: So, I guess what I, where I’d like to start Frank is to ask you a little bit about your family and, you know, a little bit about your childhood.
FC: Oh yeah, yeah. Well, I come from a very old Cornish family. There’s a lot of names with ‘o’ on the end but we’re not Italian. My, I was brought up in Falmouth in Cornwall. My dad was a boiler maker in the Falmouth docks. So, I was a young lad at school, in the scouts, a choir boy in the Parish church. A boy scout for many years and then when I started work at fourteen it was as a recovery porter on the Falmouth Packet weekly newspaper. So, the, the reporter there was Alan, doesn’t matter, he was, I, I started the job in February 1939, when I was fourteen and a half and left school. So, on the newspaper, Alan the reporter was showing me the ropes and he was in the territorial associate, the territorial army so as we went through 1939 and the war was imminent in the UK and Alan was off to war so for, for the next two years I was on my own as a, but it was a wartime rationing of paper we had not a lot of space for much news mostly it was funerals and whist drives and things like this, council meetings and such. So, then when the war broke out that year and Dunkirk happened with all the rescue allied forces from the Dunkirk area, scores of ships came into Falmouth Bay and they off loaded and the soldiers, and they were processed and given some clean clothes I guess and put on the train. So constant trains going up country from Falmouth. And my mother was a red cross nurse at the time and she was nursing these survivors from that awful time. Very much a, upset by the soldiers especially those who had swallowed fuel oil in sea water, in a bad way. So, here we are 1940 and Falmouth was bombed. The town was bombed, people killed and because the Germans were on our doorstep almost the reaction the day afterwards for hundreds and hundreds of men to join the local defence volunteers along with us young lads. Not quite sixteen some of us, so but they took us all on into the local defence volunteers and started to give us something to do. In the initial few days we were cycle patrol with an old vicar with his automatic from World War 1 which only had about eight rounds. He was our leader, so we drove, rode around the high ground round Falmouth at night, especially at night. Watching out for people setting up lights to align a bomber with say Falmouth harbour or the town or whatever. But I think the Germans wouldn’t possibly not wrecked Falmouth all the dock and repair facilities so they aimed for the town. Because they wanted a deep-water harbour and that Falmouth is the only one down that way. So that was background. We were well trained. We immediately had the sergeants all had tommy guns. The officers had side arms, the revolvers or automatics. We had American Springfield 300 calibre rifles with fifty rounds of ammunition in, in a cloth round our ear and we were well trained. We were always at the range shooting regularly and when we were kitted out gradually with uniform, boots and everything a soldier has. Well almost everything. We were well trained we was parade nights twice a week. Firing on a range Saturday afternoon. They formed us into platoons and they started at night guards around six different parts around the town from the looking across the bay to the high ground and along the low ground on the little Penryn river. So that was a pattern of my Home Guard thing was every six nights night guard. Along with that we would do with the Army exercises with the Army which got us used to the whole area around Falmouth because we drove to all the little paths and by ways and short cuts and where the high hedges were. So, you could form an ambush then. Throw all the stuff you had on with a few little turnips from the field and then just disappear because that’s the point about you really you don’t stand and fight. You get them worried that wherever they go there’s a shadow that might be us or somebody else. So that was the pattern of it. But we were well armed, we had, we had grenades and [unclear] bombs. We had mortars, spigot mortars that could fire twelve pound or eighteen pound bomb. We had what we called Vickers machine guns. The newest guns which was like an aircraft type gun, 300 calibre. We had something like phosphorus bombs. One of the bombs had five-pound weight of gelignite in it in a glass sphere. There was sticky bombs which you threw and if you threw them hard enough you took the covering off to stick on things and explode. We’d have done ourselves no favours using these things, but this was desperate times. The Germans had come right through across into France, all up as far as Norway and down towards the whole French Coast. And we were next, they were unstoppable except they had to defeat the Air Force before they could think of crossing the Chanel. So that was the pattern of the first bombing of Falmouth started the Battle of Britain, early July 1940. So that was the bombing in Falmouth. We got used to it. You were, took notice of the, the air raid warning the warbly siren and you dressed, undressed very tidily because we only had candles in the bedrooms and of course in air raid you don’t light up candles you’d got to be able to put your clothes on in the dark. So, you took your clothes off and laid them out in the right order and you were the worse and we got dressed. We had a little attaché case with odds and things in case you were blown out of your house and we took shelter next door in Cliff Roberts’ house. We were a terrace house, he’d built a huge air raid shelter in his garden. Being a deep-sea diver from the docks he’d brought a great lorry load of wood home, dug a big hole in the garden, lined it and covered it over with massive beams and that’s — Dad sawed through the fence to make a little gate. So, air raid meant we dressed, took our little attaché cases, went downstairs, through the gate into the shelter and the next-door below us was a tug boat skipper, one of the Falmouth harbour tugs. He dug a big hole, helped by his two sons and cleverly when they got a bit tired, I suppose, Mr White would find a half crown, so that made the boys do a bit more digging. And I realised, I didn’t think about it, I thought that was real treasure they were finding but I think the crafty Dad he wanted to [laughs] keep them shovelling. So, he was — that was the pattern of bombing. We weren’t allowed to write up about things like that in the newspaper but inevitably wrote about the funerals. One occasion which I didn’t put in my diary, if you imagine a stick of bombs, a stick of four bombs, one landing, I think on the boards, boarding house school. Anyway, it wrecked that school. One was in the quarry. The next one was, we were exactly in line, the next one was a hundred yards away which flattened a house and killed the occupants. So that was a narrow escape. In the early bombing as well in Falmouth my pal who was in the scouts with me and at school, Jeff Maynard. He was in Lister Street with, along with two relations who had come down from London to escape the bombing and that particular raid, parts of the town, his house was completely blown apart and collapsed on them. They were under the stairs which was a strong point, recommended to be and the gas main had been fractured. The water system pipes were broken, so they were faced with the water and gas leaking. They were dug out by the rescue, volunteer rescue parties and luckily not requiring hospital treatment. They were found a house in the, in the country about three or four miles away in Constantine and now Jeff was due to start work in — where my brother worked in Burts the electricians which was only three hundred yards from his house, so when this happened, he had to get the bike out. But we were all cyclists. We cycled patrol. Only lasted a few, a few weeks to give us something to do. But we were well trained. We had Army instructors, we had all these weapons that we learnt. We did grenade throwing and mortar usage, using mortar. So then and along with this night exercises perhaps which meant we’d just come off night guard because of six nights, each day was different and there was an exercise that started Saturday afternoon with the Army and ran all through the night until Sunday morning when they hoped to finish it, so we could get home for our Sunday dinner. That was the pattern of it. So, you were very tired at times but that was it, that’s normal to be quite — and you were cold sometimes on guard because, it was before we had greatcoats, we would have a blanket round our shoulders, patrolling along the cliffs. With these little glow worms sometimes but for the first bit of a town boy your night sky is just a few stars here and there but when you are out in the country and there is no other light from anything else that big ball in the sky is something you’ve never seen before. So, this was the pattern. Along with this was all the newspaper work, meetings, council meetings all sorts of evening affairs. I had to write about court cases and I was getting half a crown a week. I, I started as an apprentice you see, and I was bringing myself up really. Well I was on my own. So, this was six pence a day but I was never broke. I think I gave my money, my mother something as well and we were lucky. The Cornish Echo was the paper that operated from Falmouth and I was very friendly with Bill Ward their reporter and of course typically we worked together. We always met at court cases and things. In fact, for court cases, if I sent my copy up to the Western Morning News by putting it on the train I was paid a penny a line and I was often getting more with my, whatever you call it, sending my material up to them than I was [laughing] but then that was [unclear] no [unclear] really. So, with the, with the shooting I became quite expert. I was a sniper, we were snipers in the, in my platoon, and so that when — later on it was time to decide what I wanted to do because conscription was looming and if you could volunteer before then you went where you chose to go. So, my pal Bill had — older than I, he was a grammar school boy, so better suited to be training as a reporter really, than a young lad with me like I was. Now, he was a bomb aimer on 50 Squadron later on. My other pal, Nick, whose father was in the Bristol Aeroplane Company a roaming repair and modifications man, he was down on — working on [unclear]. On a Beaufighter. And he said if you come down to the Lizard Peninsular where the big scanners are now, you come down and I’ll show you round the Beaufighter. And whatever else is there so. These, these places weren’t fenced. So, you just came across and of course it’s a treat for young lads of fifteen or sixteen to get inside an aircraft like the Beaufighter for instance. Anyway, he showed us around the, also Vulcan and Hurricane which was another fleet. So, later on Nick’s dad said I’m going to take you up to London, he said I’ll ensure you get on the train I shall meet you at Exeter where you change, and we’ll go to the Windmill Theatre, there’s something to somebody, somewhere we can stay so that then this happened. We went to the Windmill Theatre which was a, we never close was the motto. And the attraction there was the nude, the nudes on the stage. So [laughs] but they weren’t moving, they weren’t allowed to move just graceful poses. So, you can imagine that with the gauzy screens, I suppose, in front. I can’t remember quite but no doubt a clever way of screening the fine detail of them and then when there was a little interval and people were leaving in the rows of seats. If there was an empty seat in front of you the men would clamber over to get into it because when they had a few intervals they got nearer and nearer the action [laughs] or the inaction [laughs]. So that was one episode and my memory I took away of all things, not about the nudes but about Vic Oliver, who’s the son in law of Churchill who was a comedian and played a violin and he could do most marvellous things with that violin. He could make it laugh [laughs] which had us in hysterics really to hear himself. This was the world of darkness it was then during the war. So back home again it wasn’t long before Mick’s dad said you get a job in the, in the Bristol Aeroplane Company because with all you do your in work, you’re in your workshop all the time making things. Because I made a half scale tommy gun for Nick’s nephew and in fact, because I could copy the detail in, I was obviously capable of making it from scraps of things. I made myself early on a practice rifle. The right weight of ten or eleven pounds to strengthen up my old muscles because I was a little weedy eight and a half stone when the, in 1939. Later on, when I went to join the Air Force I was well over, well about ten stone plus. So, I did volunteer, no I did go to Weston-super-Mare for an interview and of all things to show how nimble and clever I was with my fingers I brought a cigarette lighter that I’d made, not really knowing that this was a joke. Everybody around the country would say all they do is make cigarette lighters in the factories so anyway the, then I had a letter to take me on and then I had another letter. The, all our recruiting has been taken over by the government so that agreement is not valid now. So that’s when I joined, I volunteered to be an air gunner. Went to the normal medical at Plymouth and then later on went to Oxford for an aircrew medical when they discovered that my left eye was below standard and my right ear. So, thinking back all these seventy odd years later really, that, that saved my life, that bad eye saved my life really because as we know half of the Bomber Command people never came back. So that was, so as I was unfit for aircrew and so stamped on my document, I believe, then I could have a choice of what I wanted to do. What trade for instance. And I chose to be airframe. Airframe mechanic to start with because Nick’s dad said if you’re an airframe fitter, it’s a use, such a useful thing to know and after the war you can turn your hand to anything. And, in fact, it proved right really. So that was my time when I was called up go to Padgate up around Manchester way, I believe, as a recruit to be kitted out and do a bit of marching about, I guess and, so that was the first time that I was in a hut with about twenty odd others. But really as I had been in the Home Guard with sleeping in a guard room every six nights with the noise that goes on and the bustle that happens at times, it’s no big deal. Same as being shouted at on the parade ground, that was nothing new. Whereas it was bit of a great culture shock for a lot of chaps first coming into it. So, I took all that in my stride. So, the recruits then, new recruits were off to Blackpool, billeted in the landladies houses, you would first of all when you arrived and got, got into a situation where you marched down these streets. They would halt and right fourteen of you in here. That’s how they set you off in the different houses and the landladies were I’m sure occupied all through the war. Which is why they were after the war able to have so many marvellous changes, I would guess that happened. So that was it, but you see Blackpool was marvellous it was the only place, one of the seaside places that civilians could come to. The aircrew chose Torquay as their initial training and Torquay itself was barred from anybody coming, the beaches were all mined, mined here and there. Well a lot of mines and they had big obstacles to prevent ships landing, landing ships coming in. So, but Blackpool with all its electric trams going up and down the long, long coast sparkling away at night, must have been a great giveaway. But often the Germans didn’t get across that far. So that was a marvellous place, four shillings a day was our pay, I think, but beer was I think, maybe went up to nearly a shilling a pint. Anyway, imagine the tower, Blackpool Tower, now inside the marvellous ballroom and we couldn’t dance but there were nine bars there and they were so busy, if you, when you wanted to get a drink you were, there was two deep in front of you at least and close packed, trying to catch a barmaid’s eye. Anyway,but it was such a friendly place and when Christmas came and New Year this was a great place where a lot of kissing went on and hugging and kissing so good for us young lads it was a real eye opener really ‘cause we weren’t into girls before then, we had boys’ things to do. We had the Home Guard to keep us busy. So, this was an adventure then. So, one of these girls was from Bury in Lancashire, an ATS girl. Yes, we palled up and I saw her a few times. Only kissing and cuddling, nothing beyond that. And then later on, a year later on in Burma when I found this tower, Blackpool Tower beer label and on the back, she’d written her address. So, I started corresponding and we had lovely exchange of letters and she was a great poet. She would write marvellous poetry. And then another girl that I was also friendly with later on, in Wellington, I wrote her, and that was a nice little friendly exchange of letters but that’s digressing really. This early recruit training, stamping of feet around the [unclear] whereas out on the parade ground there was a lot of swearing went on. In Blackpool ‘cause you’d march around the streets and did your square bashing there the, the one in command had to watch his, watch his language. But he often marched us to a particular café for the break time, so that meant he would have his free, free [unclear] and we paid a tuppenny of course. We had to have a bath Fridays, Fridays and Mondays because they would march us to the big communal baths there with a swimming pool of course, that was a great attraction. Derby Baths, I think. So, we did our training there, the assault courses. We were shooting, we were running around, which was making us fit. Basically, it was keeping us fit. And also, when you think, stop to think about it on a parade ground when you respond to every order immediately that sets you up for the pattern of the future when you do, you respond to what your asked to do without question. That’s the point of it I think. And then from there I went to Western-super-Mare where Locking is the training, one of the schools of technical training. So that was in the summer of forty-three I suppose. Yes, it was. And we were in huts there and in the mornings when we woke up and had breakfast we marched to the, where the school was with a band in front of us. So, this was a great place for being a seaside place, a lot of people there. It was in the summer especially but we spent a lot of money on the dodgem cars. It eats up your money really when you don’t get much a day [laughs]. Cuts down your money for beer or cider and then one time coming from a local village, walking back west to Locking I kept wanting to take my greatcoat off, lay it on the white line on the road and lie down on it. So that was, I had to be dissuaded of that was not a good idea. Because all the vehicles headlights were havoc, were completely masked except for a narrow slit which was guarded from going upwards by a, like a peak of a cap.
PL: Um.
FC: So, they didn’t produce much light so that was I’ll explain why it’s there, I would do as I was told. But the cider was a powerful drink [laughs]. So, from there a group of us, we were all airframe mechanics, we went, we were sent up to, to, to Shropshire, to Peplow. An airfield which was half way between Wellington and Market Drayton. Wellington is now Telford. The big city of Telford since we were there. And this was, we were, we went there as part of 83 Operation Training Unit, because Wellington twin engine bombers but we hadn’t got any. So those early weeks we were, I suppose, the advance, in advance of the advanced party, really, ‘cause they were recycling themselves from Wales where they were based to there so we were getting things ready. Did meet my old friend who, when I got, I can see his face now, the morning after I got the worse for wear I can see that disgust on his face now. So that’s a reminder that I shouldn’t, couldn’t, shouldn’t drink too much [laughs]. So that was a, a waiting time, working and waiting. We only had one Wellington there in a hangar with both wings off so and that wasn’t anything to learn from. Anyway, they did come and we settled in to some work then with the flying, daily inspections before flight, before flight the inspections turn round inspections and after flight inspections. Flying night time as well because they were doing navigation and working the crew up to a, to work together as part of it. So, but we only had a few other visiting aircraft come so it was only the Wellingtons and about time when they came back, we had all the engines had to be covered every night with a big, like an aluminium cover, balloon fabric with asbestos patches where it would come over the hot exhaust pipes. So that was a task at night in the wind trying to get these covers on.
PL: What was that for Frank?
FC: The reason for covering them over was to keep the moisture out of the engine otherwise the electrics, I think that was a good reason and they wouldn’t — the oil wouldn’t be, wouldn’t be as cold because turning over, if the oil is thick and cold it takes more effort to turn it over by the starter motor so there’s a reason for it. So really, we didn’t have real contact with the crew. We just helped, just supported the ladder as they climbed in, I guess and normal conversation I expect but no, not much memory of any detail of them. But once starting, once started and the signal for chocks away we pulled the chocks away, waved it off and did our salute as they moved, as they gathered speed, so and this main runway, though I think it was newly, newly made because it was completely tarred with, tarred with a black pitch and then covered with oak chips, oak wood chips which were then rolled in. Now, what that was for, thinking back afterwards, partly it could be to camouflage a new runway ‘cause it sticks out like a sore thumb when its new concrete. Might have been that. But certainly, it proved to be a good thing to save tyre wear. You imagine with our training lots of circuits and bumps around the take-off, circle round and landing, you know scores, scores of landings went on that wouldn’t otherwise have gone on with a flight, a flight of Wellingtons. So then, from there I went to Blackpool again to upgrade to a fitter 2A, fitter 2A airframe, so that was more time at Blackpool and that covered Christmas as well so a bit of a repeat, but in the meantime, we decided we must learn dancing. So, at Blackpool, over one of the shops was Madam somebodies dancing academy, so there we were learning the quickstep and the waltz and the foxtrot whatever and I have wrote, written in my diary that I am getting quite good at the waltz, but I haven’t tried it with a girl yet. So, but you can imagine the tower, the marvellous ballroom there, same as the Winter Gardens, sort of a up market place that had all those facilities and a huge dance floor and stage for the band. The whole place was crowded. The bars were crowded sometimes two or three deep waiting, trying to get a drink and no wonder sometimes we drunk these bars dry. So that was where our money went and then in my diary, I realised that I would occasionally draw ten shillings out of my Post Office account to keep my appetite for the old John Barleycorn [laughs]
PL: So, what were you doing at Blackpool when you returned to Blackpool?
FC: When I returned, we went to Wharpton[?] on buses and there, there was another school of technical training. I think it was Wharpton[?] but since called Warton, and so we were doing benchwork and my diary reminds me that I was nearly top of the class for different things like this because I had always been making and mending things as a boy, even when I was a reporter I spent a lot of time in my workshop making this tommy gun, half size tommy gun and making myself an automatic pistol, but it wouldn’t have been automatic but to fire, point two-two ammunition, but prior to that with my little cap gun, made of a steel castings probably put together for a roll of caps. I modified this pistol by drilling a hole where the hammer struck, just the size of a point two-two blank cartridge and then the hammer I drilled it so that I provided it with a spike which, when you, when you discharged, when you pulled the trigger that set the round off but I made a mistake really. I should have had it in the vice when I first fired it but I was holding it like you would and when I fired it really when you think about it there was no where particular for the, for the, blast to go, all it could do was to throw the side, pivoted side part of it off and crack, crack it off to my finger, so I thought I won’t, I won’t use that again.
PL: So, what were you making at the technical school?
FC: We were doing, we were doing filing. We had to file within a few thousands of an inch or even less. You were drilling, you were making brackets shapes, folding metal, drilling the holes, riveting, getting the, the idea of the rivet clearance hole and so on and riveting up and you were judged on the final product. So that’s where I got top marks again. So, I graduated, if that’s the word, we never used that, came away with a, with the upgrade which I think it gave me six pence a day more which was well worth it. So then back to the, back to Peplow, carrying on with the and then I was in modifications section and the diary reminds me that we’d start picking dual control on a Wellington on one morning we’d work all day, all evening, right through the night until six o’clock or so in the morning when we’d finished the job. We made provisionally an extra seat in that position because normally the pilot sits on the left with easy access for the crew down to the bomb aimers section and up to the front turret, but once the seat was in it was a bit of a squeeze to get by so we fitted an extra control column linked with the first pilots’ and another job we did in the modifications thing was strengthen up the under-carriage attachment structure. Where the under carriage pivoted from to, to be trapped that had to be reinforced. The radius rod which braces the length once it’s locked down, that structure was cracking. There was a, actually there was a heavy landing or any landing that was the, the main attachment pivot point and the radius rod attachment rod were trying to spread themselves. So, we, the modification was to strap a diagonal strut to strap between the two fittings which had I think three quarter bolts on it and my diary records that we did this Wellington in, on one side in eight and a half hours. So typically, with modifications seems to take time to do the first one but once you get the swing of it. And then because, because once we did that the aircraft had to have a test flight which meant all the crew positions had to be occupied, not just the pilot and his engineer. So, I was in the tail turret for this first flight I’d ever done, proudly stroking the, the gun butts, for the, the machine guns in there. So, we took off happily and we circled, climbed, circled and did different manoeuvres and looking over the fields for the first time from above it’s a real eye opener. Then there was an aircraft coming from behind, a single engine aircraft, I can’t remember what on earth it was but it was overhauling us from the star, from our starboard side and I knew, I knew you, you must never point guns unless you really mean, from the Home Guard you never pointed guns but in this case I was the hero with a wicked German and I was following him in the gun sights, I mean there was no ammunition, following him in the gun sights until he came along side by which time the turret was at right angles and there was an enormous bang behind me. And a rush of wind, a terrific rush of wind and what it was I hadn’t latched the doors, two doors together properly, which I mean it must have happened with lots and lots of other people at the time, so I nursed the turret back in line and scrambled, round to try and shut the doors because when it flew open and I looked over my shoulder at the green fields farm, you know, I only had a three or four inch strap around my waist and the chute, parachutes is clipped inside the aircraft in a bracket, so you’re a bit on your own there if you want to jump out. Not a happy place for anyone to be when things are happening for real. So, this is one of those things that the story must, must have been told endlessly if the doors flying open [long pause]. So, the pattern —
PL: So, so the point, what was the, what was the purpose of the test flight?
FC: Well the test flight was to, to operate the controls. We did other —
PL: Dual controls?
FC: We did other things regarding the rigging as well.
PL: Right.
FC: The, now, the undercarriage knock down selection [pause] it pulled the flaps, I think, partly down it was all through the aircraft, with all its trim somehow with its undercarriage dangling down, so it was linked up with the flaps but the, the, the point was if the — yeah, if they were flying and with the, with the trim controls, that was the other edges wasn’t it? Anyway, if you were flying and you operated the tail trimmer and then [emphasis] selected the undercarriage down, if you operated the tail trim too much and the flap and the undercarriage came down it would pull on the cable to do what it thought it had to do and it meant the cable snapping so it finished up with a spring strut being put in the cable somewhere I believe. But the Wellington was very touchy when you jacked it up in the hangar you had to, you had to know what you were doing. The jacking point typically you would think is on the point of balance but then that’s not a happy thing to do. You need weight on the tail when you’re jacking so because of this reason it depends, if you’ve got your engines in, it’s different to when you have got no engines in, but you had to watch jacking that you didn’t let it, let it tip so. It was a case of securing the tail wheel down till you were safely jacked and then the retraction we did, adjustments we had to make, the hydraulics all new to us we were learning how everything worked. We — when you fly the Wellington and if you think of a, perhaps a better with a low light coming across the wings you realise then what, how an aeroplane works, you get reduced pressure on the top side and increased pressure underneath. You realise then that being a fabric covered wing and geometric construction which is like a lattice work you looking across the wing, it’s like looking across a quilt on your bed, it’s all in squares, little square humps and you think it’s, that’s holding the blessed aircraft up that fabric. So, it’s well laced on.
PL: Um, um.
FC: It’s well secured, and the Wimpey could take a lot of damage. We didn’t have any damaged aircraft coming back to our patch because but, the, this design proved itself. If you had a big hole blown in it, it destroyed these, this lattice work then it wasn’t terminal for the aircraft. The strains could be shared up with whatever was there.
PL: Um, um, um.
FC: And then they went — the ones that had an engine fire and maybe burnt the fabric off, burnt the fuselage fabric off right into the tail plane they would still get back.
PL: Good gracious. There’s sometimes you’d have aircraft coming back, and it was really a skeleton.
FC: Yes, I know. Maybe just one, one tail plane and a bit of an elevator to control. But they were sort of an all laid back aircraft in the air. They were moving a bit, when you’d, a lot of aircraft when you look back towards the tail, it’s like a, a ship at sea. They describe a little square pattern, repeated pattern, on a ship. I mean later on a troop ship, sleeping on deck the mast and the stars they would be making little squares in the sky. But certainly, as I said the, the, the low sun across the wing made you realise that you been,the aircraft had been supported by it.
PL: Um, um. So, can you take a guess at how many Wellingtons you converted to dual control?
FC: No, I didn’t record it you see I didn’t have room for recording things like that. It was all about the, the drinking and the dancing and the meeting of different ones.
PL: [laughing]
FC: Now one night, I’d forgotten about this. On one diary entry I’d drawn a picture of a brooch with a nice letter ‘M’ with wings. That was for one of the good girls that I was with and then, Marjorie, and then when I’d finished it, I mean in the diary it gives me away what type of chap I am. I, it came up so good, the words are in the diary, but that it’s too good to give to Marjorie. I’ll wait till I find another girl with a letter ‘M’ [laughs]. But in fact, I gave it to my mother.
PL: Oh
FC: Her second name was May but I said this is ‘M’, ‘M’ for mother.
PL: Oh, how lovely.
FC: [laughs]
PL: So how long, how long were you a flight engineer?
FC: I wasn’t a flight engineer, ground engineer.
PL: Ground engineer, sorry.
FC: Well this was once I was a classed as airframe fitter, fitter to airframe then, then I said farewell to my pal I joined up with, Jeff Grinden, of all things had taken his tenor saxophone with him, like musicians do.
PL: Um.
FC: Because he had a marvellous life, like pancake. We had a mountain of spuds to peel, Jeff would be tootling away on his saxophone. He’d go to the bands that were playing music for the, for the Officers’ Mess or whatever and of course abroad he had it all the time he was abroad. When, when we parted company at Bombay he went with others to the Cocos Islands on a Liberator Squadron in fact. But on the, when we were, the draft that I was in to go to Blackpool again, the ready crew, the ship from the Clyde at Gourock I think. That was at Blackpool again. So that’s where I said farewell to Jeff. Who was at the next town up from Blackpool. I went there, I shouldn’t have left the area really, strictly but said my farewells. Then my train to Gourock, or Gradock or whatever, whichever it was. There I was lumbered up with all my webbing packed up with backpack, haversack, kit bag on my shoulder trying to find G deck and A deck, A deck’s the lifeboat deck, a long way down. Coming down this wide, quite wide stairways, there was a chap coming towards me and I moved to the side and he moved to the side and we stopped. And I looked up and it was Jeff, so he was on the same troop ship [laughs]. Oh yes, G deck was a long way down.
PL: So how, just trying to clarify how you moved from working on Wellingtons. So, did that work come to an end?
FC: Oh no, we just —
PL: So, so how did you get to be on a —
FC: Well in my case, I didn’t know it at the time, they needed well over two hundred upgraded fitters 2A.
PL: Right.
FC: Airframe people. They did over two hundred airframe people to put them on a 9613B, now why did I think of that. Well our kit bags had it on. And on the troop ship we had instructions from the CG-4A Waco glider, a small glider.
PL: Right.
FC: Because we going, this was for Burma, for the going into Burma. So, we had all the instruction on it and then we got to Worli, to Bombay, Worli is a huge transit camp for people leaving and coming in. And when the dhobi wallahs came around in the huts asking for our clothes to be washed we innocently, naively gave them all our sweaty old clothing and when we — later on, we saw about four acres of khaki spread out to dry in the sun. So, but they had a clever code, they’d invented their own sort of barcode amongst themselves. Just a pattern of dots inside the collar perhaps and then on the, from the outside troops, I mean it was a four-year tour when I went, a four-year tour. They were, they wanted to raise some sterling, so they were selling things off and one, I bought a topi, a pith helmet, flat, sort of thick with a flattish top with a RAF [unclear] with an RAF flash on it. I don’t know how many — how much that was. Another one was Irish linen, a stone coloured suit in the RAF pattern which is starched. Very smart. So I bought that off him. I can’t just think what else. But I was proud to wear that suit, I’ve got pictures of it. So, in India, that’s right, that’s right, about eight or so of us airframe fitters went up to, to, to 144 repair and salvage unit which was based at the time at Risalpur, North West Frontier Province as we used to know it. Right by Afghan border where the, where the Khyber Pass starts.
PL: Um.
FC: Nowshera is a town across the Kabul river. So that was our first of the Indian town we went in, and I remember the cinemas there with Indian films and then there was a big pre-war army, army station with, with lots of facilities there, marvellous billiards rooms. We had our barrack blocks had a wide veranda, a covered veranda and a big rack to put your rifles in to lock them up and pegs over each bed to put your harness or whatever these cavalry people needed to have with them and we had our own bearer there we paid about six annas a week, of course clubbed together with a dozen of us. We had the young lad guarding our possessions and keeping the, keeping it clean. And then we got used to the Indian char wallah coming around with — on his shoulder was a harness arrangement, he carried an urn with a, with a heated, heated urn to, to serve up hot tea and egg, egg sandwiches [laughs]. So that was a good place and then Christmas came again celebrated with the officers coming round serving up the grub I suppose and 35MU was also based there. The maintenance unit. While we were there on the Frontier we were, we were, our particular party, working on the Hurricane doing a major inspection and completely recovering the fuselage with fabric, that was our task. And that had flown all the way from Burma. What they did, the aircraft in Burma that came to, need repair or whatever stage of air worthiness it was, if they had the, the time left on the major inspection date and could do it, they could fly as far as they could. They wouldn’t want to put all the aircraft into the first repair unit, so that distributed all across India. It went on, there was a three and a half year campaign, so you imagine it was a lot of work for the set up for the, right across India and of course that then was a good start when they started their own airlines later on. They had a lot of, a lot of experience in aircraft. So that was a, a memory that, and that aircraft turned up in Burma later when I was told to, when I was told to do something on this Hurricane when I was in central, lower Burma [pause] yes it, as you approach it you see how it settles, just checking the whole thing you walk around the aircraft checking things and typically you’d give it a slap underneath the fabric areas to check whether there was any water in there. So when I came to this Hurricane which had on its [unclear] a long piece of cord on the trailing edge on top of the trailing edge [unclear] and I said to myself ‘I was right after all, somebody else has done it’ and when I turned round to just look at and realise what number it was, it was the one that where, on the North West Frontier when it flew after we did all of the rigging checks, after the major,it was I think left wing low so having rigged it all with a, a positive droop or something the answer was to put I think eight inches of cord on top of the trailing edge of the rear, of the rear part of it. Bolt that on, which put a slight down pressure on. Just a gentle thing, but left wing low again and that’s why I put this quite long piece of stuff on [laughs]. So, the chaps were glad that it’s doing the, still going strong.
PL: Um, um.
FC: But, but when I first went, three of us got posted to Burma.
PL: Right.
FC: For a few weeks.
PL: So why did that happen? Was there just need in Burma?
FC: Well with, with the Air Force, no with the Army if you were in the regiment and down to a platoon, it’s like keeping an aircrew together in the war. These platoons have got to, have got to train together, whereas and they would, they would keep keeping that platoon together. But the Air Force it was all numbers, it was like if they wanted two hundred airframe fitters by that time, they went through their books and we met up with those we’d been training with as recruits. So, the time comes when they needed three chaps in Burma like they would happen. With the units, I mean they, this was another repair and salvage unit so three of us got our rations and I don’t know how long the railway journey took on these hard old wooden seats, where you had your mess tin and you had your loose tea and you went up on the, when the train stopped, you went up to the locomotive, asked the driver for some boiling water for your tea, he would blast this, you want to get out of the way, blast this super-heated steam which is well above boiling point, you know, it’s a super-heated stuff, down a pipe and then run water through it. By the time it came out it was boiling so that was our provision. And then on different stations the Indian fruit sellers were there and cakes and things you could get. So that was at Delhi. We didn’t get to the Taj Mahal we only had a day or two stop there. By the time we reached Calcutta in a big, in a transit camp there where, that’s where we was ventured in to Calcutta find where Thurpos[?] restaurant is and have a lovely meals there. [pause] So, then the, the journey on to where, whereby new unit 131 repair and salvage unit was. We had to go by train and boat and, and truck, across the Brahmaputra that’s right because the — oh the, with the Burma medal, the Burma star it was, it was for people who served East of the Brahmaputra, that was the line, so by the time we — when we got to Dhoapalong, not far from Cox’s Bazar on the Arakan Coast of Burma, the Bay of Bengal Coast. It was an airfield, we were in a lovely area which had bashas, lots of bashas which are huts made of — thatched huts with bamboo, woven bamboo side panels and things like that with, with beds in there. So that was — and then the airfields were Cox’s Bazar and Chittagong and so on. And we were repair and salvage so our task was to be in that position to, to be covering aircraft perhaps, and if you think of that coast, there’s a long beach, seventy miles long on one stretch of that coast, so a great safe landing for the pilot, not all that good for the airplane though, when you had to get there quickly, before the tide came in [laughs] so that was a — and if it was a belly landing job you had to try and lift it to get the undercarriage down and that was a task really and a half. So, but then they were desperate for any aircraft parts to be sent back to, to the big repair depots, that’s where they got their spare parts from. Now when we moved when Akiabyron[?] was taken, just by the Danba[?] Coast, we had an advanced party go down to get our new camp prepared and — oh and then I was tasked to be an escort for spares, going from Chittagong to Akyab and I wore my lovely stone walking out suit that I’d paid a few pounds for when I first landed at Bombay. I wore that and when I had to find somewhere to sleep I think because I was so well dressed, they said the CO is away you can use his tent and his bed. Clean sheets, imagine, this is, we shouldn’t keep the sheets on in case we made them dirty [laughs] now, so typically in the morning, no, there’s no, there’s no aircraft seat for you to return, they’re all jammed up with the wounded but while you’re here if you roll your sleeve up, to see, the [unclear] I think shows your, I was going to say postcode, your blood group.
PL: Um, um.
FC: So, there was me in this MASH type forward hospital, laid alongside this soldier, for the first time giving a donation. Well its quite moving in a way and I remember thinking you could, you’ve got your religion here, I said, I’m C of E I wonder if my blood’s alright for him [laughs] thinking that, it set you up to do blood donation. For fifty or more times while I was at Farnborough later on. So that was my, the time when I —
PL: So, they just asked you if you would do a blood donation?
FC: Yes, anybody, any visitor wanted, any visitor they would —
PL: Right. Any visitor came along, and they would ask.
FC: Well, they were desperate days, weren’t they?
PL: Yes.
FC: And the wounded that were carried away in the daks[?], there were so many that were too, too bad to move.
PL: Um, um.
FC: And yet these forward hospitals had a lot, a lot on their plate.
PL: Um, um.
FC: So, the only aircraft to come back was a Tiger Moth, a little biplane, a trainer biplane a very old design. So here I was with my, a, a thunderbolt propeller spanners and kit for a Hamilton propeller with that in the rear seat and sitting on the pilot’s parachute because he only had some blankets to sit on. And we were flying a lovely flight really up, just on, just inland of the coast, a nice area to fly in and this big, this big telescopic spanner with a tommy bar, I thought if any Japs come I should point this other weapon [laughs] like a —
PL: So, they’d think it would look like —
FC: Like a forty millimetre gun.
PL: Excellent.
FC: [laughs] So that was the only time I ever wore that suit once I was in Burma because I just put it away and went with a jungle green. So that was when we moved to Akyab that was, we were quite, it was a camp we were in, a flat area, if you — you only had to dig a hole, I mean, not knee deep and it would fill with water. So, you were alright for washing water and [pause] and Thunderbolts, Squadrons. New Thunderbolt Squadrons had moved in so I think the first day I frightened them, four or six of them were, had come from the airfield up the perimeter track around to, to where the runway was and one had got rather to the side of the, of the good ground and it sunk its wheel right up until the wing tip was on the ground so and that was all armed up you see, so we had to, that was our first salvage job to get that back on its, back on its wheels on its feet again but then nothing was damaged so that’s another Christmas tree to us we could take bits off as spares. I remember one chap there with his — he’d got a, I think it was a hydraulic tank all blanked off with a — he was putting air into it to check for bubbles so the only liquid around at the time was an open top had been cut open off a forty five gallon drum, it was a couple of feet of petrol in it so you submerge the tank in it to check for bubbles and somehow, I don’t know, it was stupid really cause you can blow with your mouth, you can blow a pressure of two pounds a square inch, but goodness knows what pressure he put on the tank because it expanded up almost to a ball and so he’d wrecked the tank but it was great for us it was like, it was like a kettle, once we’d left a few blanks on and a spout that was for boiling up our hot water for Crow the engine pit, the engine mechanic who was the butt of everybody’s humour. He would be grinding, grinding up this K rationed chocolate into little crumbs to make cocoa with, so that was a good use for that little tank. But another time, oh, we moved to a better area on a bit higher ground. And then the, the toilets had to be dug. About three barrels deep, a long way down and set up that for a latrine and the, the, they made beds out of telephone wire, bamboo poles and telephone wire, like a, like a grid, no springs but we were off the ground. So, when we moved — but when we were in Dhoapalong before we moved there to Akyab I’d made myself a camp bed. I went into the jungley bit where there was an old, one of our ground tanks abandoned and I used that to do the metal work for the legs of the, of the camp bed. I found an old tarpaulin off a lorry that I took to the [unclear] he was a tailor in the nearest village where he sewed up the canvas for the camp bed which cost me eight annas I think. So that was all it cost me. So that was good to have my own camp bed. And then I had a bed roll, a bed roll where you made your bed to sleep in and then you left it like that and you rolled it all up so you could easily unroll it and hop into it. Like a modern way of doing it I suppose. So Akyab —
PL: So what sort, what sort of date are we talking at now when you were in Burma? What sort of date was it?
FC: It’s in the diary, it’s in, just into forty-five, just into 1945. I got, it’s all in my diary somewhere. In fact, when I put in a claim for this shoulder that had gone wrong after they took, I had lots of cancer operations, they took a big one away from here which attached itself to my shoulder and neck muscles. So, once they took about three hours operation, anyway once that was radiotherapy on it.
PL: Um.
FC: To kill off the cancer, I describe it as a friendly fire that came. It was a risk with anything but certainly to kill the cancer. The fact that my shoulder dropped. This shoulder, the right shoulder has always been two inches lower than the left. Because the neighbour, who sadly died, he was a tailor, registered tailor, one of the top tailors in that line. Do all the Mess kits with their elaborate frogging and gold braid and he was — and he got me to try on the Sultan of Brunei’s Mess kit and Prince Charles’s Mess kit, in fact Len had made the Queen’s scarlet jacket she wore on early parades in London. Horse Guards Parade. He said your right shoulder is two inches lower. Well I didn’t know it. Didn’t realise it.
PL: Um, um.
FC: But in the bathroom with a mirror which shows the tiles behind you, he was right. But now this shoulder has dropped, now this shoulder is lower than this and you’ve gone out a bit out of kilter. And I have constant pain with it.
PL: Oh dear.
FC: My neck, tilts movement and I only got a sixty degree arc to travel through. So, but I, I tolerate pain really quite happily. I got peripheral myopathy in the legs which, which makes my leg burn. I can’t lay down in the day they just burn.
PL: Oh dear.
FC: But I can stand all day.
PL: Um, um.
FC: In fact, when they, when I’m trying to get to sleep and they burn, I’ve only got to lift the leg up, off the weight of the leg even if it’s soft or hard. Lift it up. Oh, it’s marvellous, I wish I could levitate my legs when I sleep. It’s not much to ask, I suppose. But that’s one of the things I’m , so I’m very stoical about that. But anyway, going back to Akyab.
PL: So how long were you there for?
FC: Well it’s —
PL: How did it all draw to a close? I mean it sounds like you became very clever at making something out of —
FC: Out of scraps.
PL: Out of scraps.
FC: Well this was our motto really, there was no job we can’t do was my corporal’s motto. So, you, there was great improvisation really.
PL: Did you have a workshop there? Did you have all the other kit that you —
FC: Well we didn’t have a workshop as such. I don’t, don’t remember much in the way of workshop situation. There’s a marvellous book called “The Bamboo Workshop” and I knew the bloke, the author of it, because in the early get togethers at, at the Albert Hall in London, this is in the early days, 1947 they had already had got together earlier than that, so each year we went to — for a reunion. Oh, anybody in South East Asia was there, you know Burma or beyond. Getting together because we want, we had [emphasis] to be together. You had all that time like, all unified in that in Burma and with all the, I mean it was a million soldiers in, in the fourteenth army, we were part of the fourteenth army. In fact, in, yeah, in General Slim’s book “Defeat into Victory” which tells the story of the defeat and so on. Just in the last chapter there’s a paragraph that stood out to me talking about 221 Fighter Group that, oh no, 224 Group was bombers, we were Fighter Group and then there’s 221, no we were 221, it was 224 on the [unclear]. Anyway it, he talks about the such close working together with the Air Force that we, we considered 221 Group to be, to be part of the fourteenth army.
PL: Um, um, um.
FC: So that’s a good feeling really.
PL: Um.
FC: I’ve got newspapers of, we had a daily newspaper in Burma that came up with the rations when they flew rations, dropped rations, or flew them in anywhere. They tried to make a daily paper available which put you in the background of the what the rest of the world was doing as well.
PL: Um. So how long were you there for Frank?
FC: I had, when I joined, well when I was at Akyab, that’s right, that was maybe a couple of months later. I’ve got the dates, but then about a dozen or more of us were transferred to a number three repair and salvage unit, mobile unit which was formed in the Middle East, worked through the Middle East, come through India and then to the Arakan, to, to actually, took you up to Chapalong[?], this nicely set up with the bashas and things. In the book that was written that he wrote, Ranson, Samson, Reg, and he was always asking people in the Albert Hall ‘tell us about your units’. A lot of history and I regretted I didn’t tell him about 131 or number, well number three in the book was in the early chapter. But there were about twenty or more repair and salvage units that worked all across India.
PL: Right.
FC: And all into Burma. We were the number one —
PL: So, was it a sort of lorry, was all the kit, was it in the back, or how did it work?
FC: We were mobile, we had vehicles, we had three tonner lorries. We had high, high load up RAF trailer.
PL: Um, um.
FC: We had mobile workshops with a lathe, its own, it generated its own power a, lathe, a [unclear] I guess, a, but “The Bamboo Workshop” is a book that’s well worth reading.
PL: So, was that about — so, so did you work on the mobile, on, on the mobile unit?
FC: Yes. That was number three, when I was two years then with that unit.
PL: Right. Right.
FC: With the mobile unit. And so, they, when we joined the unit from the other unit, flew in, flew in across the mountains, the Arakan to Magwe I think, to — before they came down. We landed at Segore[?] it’s a Japanese built airfield just on the Mandalay Road up from Meiktila, only a few miles up there and we landed taxied around and the CO met us. Of course, you’re in a litter of damaged, Japanese aircraft and bodies around but the first thing he did because he was keen, ‘Are any of you footballers?’ And of course a lot, a lot put their hands up like they would because later on he formed — how many of us were there. Must have been a dozen football teams.
PL: Good gracious.
FC: And we played on the dirt runway. Not a happy place to come to grief on.
PL: Um, um, um.
FC: But he — and then later on Kendrick, Squadron Leader Kendrick, he organised a, a bullet cart race down the runway. He got the locals to [laughs] bring their bullet carts on and the, the CO, Kendrick, he’d had a grass skirt, he’d got a proper grass skirt, but it wasn’t grass it was nylon towrope, glider towrope about as big as your finger I suppose but so strong, but, so the electricians jeep he had a, this for towing because a chain is a typical thing they issue or a cable but that’s solid whereas using, towing a vehicle out of the dirt, or the mud typically.
PL: Um.
FC: The tow vehicle could go forward and gather its strength up, pull on it without a jerk which could stall the engine.
PL: Um, um, um.
FC: So that’s what he kept in the back of his jeep, but that disappeared and reappeared as the grass skirt. [laughs] And then he, he thief proofed his jeep, this electrician, so nobody could steal it. And what he, all he did, clever in my terms but simple. He had a change over switch, so what he did he interrupted the cable running down to the horn, horn, cause that’s just thin cable and then the starter one, button on the floor, that’s a, a small cable to trip in the relay to put the power in from the battery.
PL: Right.
FC: It doesn’t take a vast load but he, he got these side by side to the two-way switch. He could start the engine, nobody could start the engine because he’d cleverly moved the two-way switch. So, starting the engine was pressing the horn button, which nobody would have thought about. A thief especially. And the, the button on the floor, he — I think it you easily found with your foot. He put a little top hat shaped bracket over it with a hole in the middle to guard it, as a guard really.
PL: Um, um, um.
FC: But it meant that he could casually go down and press that button to, to plug the hole.
PL: Goodness, gracious me. So, what happened next Frank? So, you —
FC: Well this was, we, we got, the unit, number three had just got there the day before and put up their old tents and all the place, the only place we could sleep was on the, in the cookhouse tent. That big hundred and eighty pounder tent, tent. So, we soon got fixed up with a tent and settled in. What were we up to there? Oh yeah. Meiktila in lower central Burma on top of the plains. There were eight airfields the Japanese had built. Pre-war there was one at Toungoo a bit further on the Rangoon Road, off the Rangoon Road but the one we were on had a marvellous runway, cambered enough to keep the water off.
PL: Um.
FC: And stop any pools developing whereas the perimeter tracks being flat, there were pools that, puddles and pools on that but they, but they’d excavated massive monsoon ditches and big storage ditches. Plus, they’d got the locals doing it all.
PL: Um, um.
FC: So, it was, it was operable and they had their control tower up on, on poles on the, the, the trees. Well, well designed that was. And also, where the standing trees were, they got earth embankments to make a huge shaped pen to put the aircraft in.
PL: Right.
FC: So that on one occasion I was working on a Spitfire in this, in this pen. There was standing trees they’d left which was good for shade, you see. I was working on this Spitfire, sometimes if you had to put another tail unit on, you had to crawl down, you would support the aircraft prop, crawl down to uncouple the cables, trim the cables and the rudder and elevator cables and then the transport bolts on the, that took the, the front half, forward half to the rear half, a row of transport bolts to take out. That was rather a hot job. But this particular time I wasn’t there doing that when I was working on something on a little bench, it was a metal one, when, and I’d noticed this Hurricane with its forty-millimetre cannon parked outside and suddenly these cannons were firing right through the trees bringing branches down.
PL: [gasps]
FC: And I ducked under this little tiny bench and it went on and on and on. It seemed to go on forever but in fact I think their magazine holds about fifteen rounds. But if you think of [clapping] going on for — it seemed forever. We went around to see who’d, who’d fired this and standing in the cockpit a bit shame faced was the instrument man. He had put a new film in the cine camera which you matched up to the firing, put a new film in it, put the camera in, he [laughs] the Spitfire control column has a spade, spade shape, well that’s it. Suitable for your right thumb and the gun button has a guard around it.
PL: Right.
FC: So, if you’re working in the cockpit and pull it towards you and if you surround it you won’t set it off. But you’ve got the guard, you move it to a test position and then press it, that’s what he should’ve done, test. What he did was put it on full fire listening for this little whir of the camera and he’d got, fired this lot off and I think he, he was paralysed, he must of thought who’s doing that when it suddenly happened.
PL: Oh dear.
FC: But he kept his thumb on the button obviously.
PL: [gasps]
FC: And luckily, goodness knows where the shells were finishing up, a mile or two or more away. Because it fires about a two pound in effect a bullet.
PL: Um, um, um.
FC: And they can be explosive ones as well.
PL: Um, um, um. That’s amazing.
FC: So that was — and we came around and everybody in the unit came round and the cooks as well and the CO come up in his jeep. So that he had to explain by Mr Neal who we called guns, called him guns after that.
PL: Um, um, um.
FC: But particularly with the Spitfire, I mean the Hurricanes are totally big high aircraft on the ground a Spitfire is lower down so with the muzzles of the cannons.
PL: So luckily.
FC: You can be like a labourer leans on his spade, you drape your arm over that and it’s happened to people — those have been fired.
PL: [gasps]
FC: Been fired accidentally.
PL: Oh, my goodness.
FC: Maybe twenty millimetres [unclear] there. So, you see tail wheeled aircraft like the Hurricane and aircraft of that day, if they accidentally fire, they’re, they’re set up to about ten or fifteen degrees.
PL: Um.
FC: With a modern aircraft, tricycle undercarriage nose wheel, they’re parallel to the ground and if they fire any of those things of course, it’s just the height.
PL: Um, um, um.
FC: To be aware of. So, you wouldn’t walk in front of an aircraft. [laughs]
PL: So, were there many accidents?
FC: I don’t remember many luckily, no, but it’s a warning when there were, to those around and you work safely.
PL: Um, um.
FC: Yeah, I’ve got all my fingers and thumbs. We had to — the one Spitfire that had a damaged wing we got the wing off another of our Christmas tree wrecks and fitted it. Now the pneumatics were connected up, the pneumatic pipes on the route end of the wing. And, now Rolls Royce can put the whole shape into the pipe on a, on a piece of paper but in those days the pipe was just lazily bent to a sort of “S” shape which is kind to the pipe you see but when you’ve got a whole group of them coming up like this from one wing and you take it off and you’ve got to put on another you see, easy to — so when the — right, when I went to test it, right, clutch down, hiss of the flaps. One flap went down and it copped, cropped the cannons in the wing so I thought to myself, that’s a problem with no labelling you see.
PL: Um, um.
FC: So, this is a lesson that —
PL: Um, um.
FC: You label everything. But if you got the one wing off another aircraft without thoughts [pause] anyway that’s a lesson.
PL: Um.
FC: And then the — yes, we were detached. They had, typically the unit had the main, main base somewhere and with up to six or eight mobile repair sections, MRS’s and for instance, the one that I was on, number four, we had a crane, a Coles crane, a typical RAF one of the day. We had three tonners, jeeps and [pause] and what else did we have? I don’t know. I forget now. But at one stage — when we moved to Toungoo, that’s it, that was a pre-war airfield, a grass one but it had a big hangar and that hangar the Japs used as a warehouse for rice ‘cause it was — rice was in a huge heap like they pile up road salt nowadays, don’t they. In this hangar, great pile of it, goodness knows how many tons were there, but when we were — I was at Toungoo when the war finished and it was ceasefire and before the ceasefire, I think for eleven in the morning, the noise that morning they were, all these squadrons giving the Japs a good hammering and the, beside the airfield these big guns were firing up into the hills where the Japanese were, but suddenly you were, I don’t know, over awed by the silence because you’d never had, even the little chirpy insects seemed to be stopped. And then you realise the war is over, except the Japs were — they were waiting out Japs for a year after, they kept the West Africans back to, to flush out these Japanese. So, the — luckily the unit had, number three, had followed the, they were at Imphal, on the Imphal Plain with, which has got about eight airfields. The one there was Tollihull[?]. American built, because the American equipment made the road into China across those mountains.
PL: Um.
FC: So, when they were given the length of the runway as, whatever it was, five thousand feet or something, no, five thousand feet, that can’t be right, they must mean yards. Whatever it was it, it was the hugest longest runway but marvellous really because if you had an aircraft come to grief on it there’s plenty more of it.
PL: Um, um, um.
FC: Whereas on a shortish run you’d have to clear the wreck off to make room.
PL: Um, um.
FC: For the newcomers.
PL: So, after the end of the war, what was your experience between the war ending and coming back? I mean were you involved with the decommission of aircraft or — ?
FC: Well in Burma we were — my unit was, was chosen to be part of the British Commonwealth occupation force to occupy demilitarising the Japanese.
PL: Right.
FC: So, our unit was chosen, being the top one with experience, but we, we, we will go there, we backed up the three Spitfire squadrons. There was a number four Indian squadron and number four and, no number eleven and seventeen squadrons, well, they operate the top aircraft. Now they have had an almost uninterrupted history from world war one. I mean they stand them down sometimes when they have got to get a new aircraft and when they stand up again the unit with the new aircraft. That’s the way they work. But that was a marvellous unit.
PL: So, you stayed on for a while?
FC: Well we were — yes, you could, you could opt out of going to Japan so in fact we were volunteers and there were two thousand RAF volunteers to go there with us, my unit as support and the Spitfires were rounded up from where ever the war left them and put on an aircraft carrier because we were going off in December forty-five but the, they loaded up this carrier with it, all these aircraft and they were on that carrier for six months. We couldn’t get the shipping we couldn’t get the three ships. We needed three ships with all the squadrons and equipment and stuff of ours.
PL: Um.
FC: Well the small ships of the day, so when we did — while we were there in Burma a hugest hole in the world that I have ever seen was made by the Indian engineers to dump all the aircraft in. A huge trench, if you like, ramping down each, up and down each side. So, we [clears throat] had a like fun which you would think of as fun putting all the Japanese wrecks in there.
PL: Um.
FC: And then our Spitfire useless parts.
PL: Um.
FC: So that occupied our time and they were tidying up Burma in fact when we, and Meiktila is quite near Upping Lake for swimming and typically we had the Spitfire overload tank as an actual raft and then drop tanks and we had the blow up you know plate of all assault dinghies to swim from and that pal of mine who was, er, he was, he was a Geordie but he spent all his time in another part of the country until he came into the air force and he had a camera, as I had, so we took a few pictures between us but when it came to develop and print and the fixer, the, sadly some of the photos have faded away.
PL: Ummm.
FC: Actually, faded away. But I am digressing there. But, that’s right we went to, to Toungoo in the — we were there when, when the war finished. So that was a tidying up time.
PL: Um, um.
FC: Then the, the, the jeeps were modified with rail wheels ‘cause the, it’s the same railway, it’s an old, the old pictures, the old carts of the old days the ruts they make you’ve got to stay in the rut and this is what the blessed trains are. Brunel had the right idea, what’s it, eight foot broad not four foot —
PL: The Western, the Western Railway.
FC: Yes, not the four foot eight and a half inch silly things but then that’s, that’s what’s happened all round the world they kept to that silly measurement.
PL: Um, um.
FC: So, we tidied up Burma into this big hole and then we went swimming and then the order came the Burmese want all the scrap metal they can get hold of. Especially aluminium.
PL: Um, um.
FC: So, we had to winch and drag and hoick these things out of the trench.
PL: Out of the hole.
FC: Onto tank transporters [laughs] lash them down to take them, go onwards to the scrap yard.
PL: So, having filled the hole you then had to empty the hole [laughs]
FC: That’s why stories go back people have seen the aircraft in the hole they know it’s real.
PL: Um.
FC: As people left, they’d tell the tale
PL: Um, um.
FC: And this business of crates being buried, well [pause], crates weren’t sent to Burma they were sent to India, Bombay maybe and shipped across. The aircraft had to be erected, test flown and, and it, you didn’t have facilities to do that in Burma.
PL: When you said crates?
FC: Crates, big boxes.
PL: What does that mean?
FC: Well big boxes.
PL: Big boxes of parts and things?
FC: The whole thing is in a box.
PL: Right.
FC: For instance, in Japan we had I think six or was it four, Harvards that came all boxed up.
PL: Right.
FC: So —
PL: Like giant Meccano?
FC: Well, no, no, no they were complete aircraft.
PL: Complete aircraft?
FC: No, no well as complete as they could be. Their wings were off.
PL: Right, ok.
FC: And the engines and the tail.
PL: Right, but everything else came in the box?
FC: To get it in the crate, yes.
PL: Good gracious.
FC: Now this, when we were erecting and testing these, test flying these Harvards, they’d been in that packing box for about three years and then Jim, my good friend, the engine fitter he built up the — got the engine on and built, coupled it all up and did everything like that. He wanted to do the engine run, he was desperate to do an engine run you see.
PL: Um.
FC: Now the Aussies had Mustangs, new Mustangs. We had old Spitfires. The Kiwis had their Corsair a big American goal wing thing.
PL: Um.
FC: We had the Spitfires so there was a bit of leg pulling between us and but once we got this Harvard outside, Sergeant Robinson our Sergeant said to Jim I shall run this, you know, pulling rank on him [laughs]. Although Jim had done all the work. Anyway, as we started up, I think Jim was standing, standing just by the cockpit I think, just started up the engine, just started up and there was a, there was a bit of a bang from the cockpit and this instrument glass had blown out and hit him.
PL: [gasps]
FC: And what it was, two pipes had crossed you see. The suction pipe and the pressure pipe, this little pipe across there — the pump should have been, the instrument was driven by suction.
PL: So, was he all right?
FC: And then Sergeant Robinson didn’t want to do any more engine running he let Jim do it [laughs] so Jim’s doing all the others making lots — the Harvards makes a wicked noise the propellers make an awful noise.
PL: Um.
FC: As you know. But —
PL: So how did it all end for you Frank? How did you sort of — what was the beginning of the end and heading home?
FC: Well that was once we were in Japan you see, we —
PL: What was it like being in Japan?
FC: Well it was, thinking back it must have been what Japan was like about twenty years before
PL: Um
FC: ‘Cause the Japanese were, until 1945 when the Japanese surrendered in China, ten years that war was. I mean at one time they had all the South East area right up to the North side but when you think about forty million Chinese was killed, what sort of a cope, what do they all the greater cope prosperity sphere or something, fancy name, they made old friends wherever they went.
PL: Um.
FC: With all the murder, I don’t know, same as Germany when all these countries making no friends at all. What sort of empire were they aiming at? You see it’s the few people at the top having it all done for them. They make decisions but in Japan we had earthquakes we were on, I was on guard on the bomb dump which was an area where there were underground aircraft factories. They were stacked up with materials as well.
PL: Goodness me.
FC: But we had a bomb dump there and we were there on guard one night when in the deepest winter. Bad winter of 1947, which happened here, Europe, but also in Japan, roads completely thick with ice. We were sitting, two of us huddled in this little sentry box when we felt it move, ‘somebody out there, you go that way and I’ll go that way’ so we grabbed our rifles but there was nobody there, ‘now what was that all about?’, but it was the earthquake, just tremors just starting. Now just across the road from us there was a big lagoon but it was thick with ice, you see, because we were trying to break it by finding, throwing big rocks on it but when the earthquake started it made this ice crack up. So, we had our little bit of fun there with an earthquake and then once, once the three tonner came changing the guard taking us back. In the guard room a big demijohn full of rum, but you were only supposed, not to have any before you went on guard, just after you came out so I, my pint mug, I had a couple of fingers of it in there I suppose and of course when you’re on guard room you only take your boots off and get in bed, which doesn’t warm the bed up properly because you were [unclear] anyway I had this rum, finished it off and was then, I was in a dream that I was on a sailing ship because of all the creaking and movement, I was in a sailing ship in my dream and I opened one eye and the, the light was swinging and moving like this, I realised what it was so I — there was a Sikh chap with his turban on just sitting up in bed he said ‘I think it’s an earthquake’ and I don’t think he took his boots, and he slide the window open, they were sliding windows not fitting very well.
PL: Um, um.
FC: And jumped down onto the ice and the snow, well, frozen snow, and a lot of thundering of boots [noise of footsteps] coming down the stairs of the upstairs and it was dangerous too because it was, the lights fused, the lights went out and then there was some scaffolding along inside the building so it restricted the — but they all went out and I thought, I’ve had four, four hours guard out there so I’ll stay here.
PL: [laughs]
FC: But was dangerous really.
PL: Oh goodness.
FC: But the buildings are made, I realised when there was not a lot of damage by the American bombing naturally and not uninhabitable in fact we were in tents when we went to Japan. Now when we had left Burma the big transit camp down in Rangoon was so cold that they found a new area to put the tents up in. The Japanese prisoners put those up, like they would.
PL: Um.
FC: So I had my camp bed, everything else was on a vehicle for loading, so happily in the camp bed when was awoken by the tent having collapsed inward, almost collapsed down inward, because, well it was new tent that, which we’d never seen before, ours were awful old tents, this was a new one but you can imagine new rope and the tent pegs weren’t hammered in very much, very deep because the ground was so hard. But nobody had put tents there before it was in the area that flooded.
PL: Oh.
FC: So, we had a good two inches of water around our feet, so that was — I, when I wrote it up later, I thought, yeah, suppose the boot was on the other foot, think if the British were prisoners, the Japanese were going to their homeland and we put their tents up which had fallen down, it wouldn’t have been any laughing matter. We could laugh with the Japanese in the morning.
PL: Um, um, um.
FC: When it came, but not if it had been a different tale wouldn’t it?
PL: Um.
FC: So, our welcome in Japan was to be in tents again. Cherry blossom time I think later on. They were coolie, it was a flying boat station as well as an airfield with a big crane so when the aircraft carriers eventually came with their cargo of Spitfires there was this massive dock side crane. And then they were, we were divided up into working parties. There was some on the aircraft carriers and then some on the lighters, the big barges that they brought in, I don’t know three or four at a time and a big hook of this crane dwarfed, you know, dwarfing everybody and they’re dangling, when I wrote it up being a bit poetic.
PL: Um.
FC: And, about their first landing in Japan from the crane. And we had no tractors, we had no tow bars, don’t know if we had steering arms. They had to be pushed to the airfield about two, two miles away.
PL: Gracious.
FC: One at a time. Now, Bas, my corporal, when there was — jumped down into the lighter that had come in the barge to a hooker, he said ‘we, we got more help here’ and I can’t remember them introducing me to him properly, might have been Peter, but anyway he was stripped off. He was a moon man, you know, one with, with, a pasty chap who’d not been out in the sunshine much, but very willing and we worked together. I was telling him all about the unit, telling him about all the wheezes we could get for a, if you flogged your cigarettes down in the town you had a, each cigarette would more or less buy you a bottle of beer in the canteen you know, things like this.
PL: Um, um, um.
FC: Like you would [emphasis] tell a newcomer.
PL: Um, um, um.
FC: So, when the, when the last Spitfire got moved off and went back into this little workshop by the hangar where, where tops, and when I reached up from my NAC jacket, when he brought it, he was the new group captain. [laughs]. Telling him all the fiddles we could get up to.
PL: [gasps]
FC: But I mean, he, he and he said something like, it was a marvellous introduction to my new station. When I didn’t realise what he meant new station until that’s what he was.
PL: Oh no.
FC: [laughs] But then —
PL: So, did you get into trouble?
FC: Oh no. No, no. I mean he’d have been flannelled. If, if an officer or any — he’d have had a lot of flannel wouldn’t he. Well, this was honest, he knew we wanted to get the aircraft, wanted to have the aircraft, our aircaft flying again.
PL: Um, um.
FC: Not what I did at the time. He had the right spirit of us.
PL: Um. So, when you had to take these Spitfires for two miles, was it a question of ropes round everything and people pulling, pushing?
FC: People pulling, people pushing.
PL: Literally, so it was manpower? Were the locals sort of drafted in to help?
FC: They had, they had Japanese labourers. I think there was a requirement for the Japanese to work for the occupation force for so many days a month at least. Because when you think about it, we were getting them the idea that it’s a democratic situation.
PL: Um.
FC: Not rule, what they did as well, all the lords, think of our lords of the manor in our country with all the hard workers, like serfs doing their stuff. All the ground divided up between all these [unclear] a similar thing in Japan. They deposed all these characters, I think they went off to Tokyo for a ticket. But I didn’t know at the time but Air Vice Marshall Bouchier who’s a, our overall commanding officer, officer commanding. He took over this manor house to live in, just a few miles up the river where the Kintai bridge is, it’s a five arch wooden bridge with granite piers its often in photographs and pictures. The Kintai bridge. Now before we went there, we were, we had a pocket book telling you the custom of the country and so on and all sorts of helpful things and we were not supposed to fraternise. No fraternisation, so like you would going down by the river and meeting these Japanese girls we were like sitting on a little beach where the, alongside the river. It was, must have been a nice feeling just be sitting with a girl when you’ve got your book trying to say things and then laughing, you imagine they’re laughing and then they’re trying to read English.
PL: Um, um, um.
FC: To know what — but it was only bit of harmless fun really but a good job we didn’t get him outdoors up the river seeing us. So, then the jeep, you see, it’s — we all got around with jeeps at the time. Well think of this five arch bridge taking a jeep over it, well it weighed a couple of tons or something and it’s a wooden bridge meant for foot traffic
PL: Um.
FC: I mean its arched like that and you’ve got very shallow steps and then it curves and so, so it’s a bumpy thing for a vehicle so it was pointed out that the Japanese had been complaining that we should take more care of their old things. Beside it only led you to a park. The Japanese are a great one for parks. That’s to their credit. But Japanese we could, we could walk around at night without any fears around Hiroshima. We didn’t have any fears. We were, felt safer there than we did in parts of India.
PL: So, you, you were at Hiroshima?
FC: Well we were based on the Inland Sea where Hiroshima is based about sixty miles west but that was our nearest place to do some shopping in. And of course, we climbed up the —
PL: What was that like?
FC: Well it was — I was just going to say we climbed I think about an eight-storey building but all that was left was the concrete shell of it, you know, everything else was gone but when you got up there about, perhaps eight floors up and you looked across the city the roads had been cleared. Which showed the grid the patterns of the roads, but it wasn’t long before people went back and claimed their patch and put a little shed thing on it and the shops grew then. There was a dance hall and in fact I got tickets, dance tickets for the hostesses, I’ve still got them, so —
PL: Um.
FC: Whether I was hoping to go back and spend them I don’t know.
PL: [laughs] Goodness me. So, what, what, when would that have been? What year would that have been?
FC: That was 1946.
PL: Right.
FC: Yeah. We were due to go December forty-five, that was delayed right till April I think, forty-six when we landed.
PL: Um, um.
FC: But we needed three ships. Now before, while we were tidying up Burma because what was a good trade for the locals, if you wanted chicken or eggs.
PL: Um.
FC: Was some of your canteen things.
PL: Right, right.
FC: So the word went up that the Japanese were desperate for soap of all sorts.
PL: Right, okay.
FC: And you thought well yes, that’s it. That will be a good trade, so our test pilots one took the Harvard across over the mountains to Chittagong bought up all the soaps he could all sorts of soap and then the other test pilot took it to Cox’s Bazar and along that coast, and other places, getting all the soap he could. Thinking that would be good a trade for the impress money from the unit when we get there to build that up so this was loaded on our trucks. Boxed up and loaded on the trucks and though we had about fifty vehicles I think, they had a job to find drivers for them all. Anyway, everything was aboard and that and I travelled down as a passenger in a very comfortable situation laid on top of the bed rolls in the three tonner and I had, we each had a crate of American beer. Little bottles, little lager type things. And of course, in Burma they were always desperate for bottles because they make their, you know their wines and spirits, using, they need bottles. You had a, if you had a bottle to dispose of and you saw some Burmese there by the roadside you could drop the bottle out into the dust ‘cause there was either six inches of dust or six inches of mud.
PL: Um, um.
FC: So that was the way we travelled. When we, we didn’t go half way to Rangoon and stop and spend the night there because the water, the doctor with us said no that water’s all right that water’s all green. When it’s all green like that its healthy water its only growing good water so, but mostly we drunk it as tea. I think we seemed to get by during the day without a lot of water. We never had water bottles, well we had a little enamel one to hook on your webbing belt, but —
PL: So, what happened with the soap in Japan? Did you manage to sell all the soap?
FC: The mistake was after we loaded the vehicles into this particular ship there was no escort for this, for the truck with the spares and all the equipment no escort on the ship and the dacoits who were the bandits and thieves of Burma lifted all the soap. Now when we got to Japan, we found the boxes had been opened and we, we, we deliberately made a shortage of soap around that area and then the robbers had the soap to sell. So, they must have done, done a lot of, done themselves a lot of good.
PL: Um, um, um.
FC: Because I said later whether CID or whatever they were, were trying to investigate the thieves showed a clean pair of heels [laughs] with all that soap.
PL: [laughs] I see.
FC: So, we had — this, oh this earthquake that I was saying about when I was on guard. I went back and that upset the runway. The aircraft in the hangars were damaged.
PL: Right.
FC: They were crashing together, moving together.
PL: Right. Oh no.
FC: So briefly I stayed in bed. But when they were repairing these buildings, I thought those joints, those joints are too loose because they were making the uprights a tenon going into it. A great big slot for it, just with a big peg.
PL: Um. That’s what it was for.
FC: Meant for it.
PL: Right, right.
FC: When you pointed it out to the Japanese. And then one morning [clears throat] oh, we found the Japanese labourers with two big shell cases about six inches, a couple of feet long, I think they were off the cruisers, sunken cruisers in our harbour possibly, they were polishing them. So that evening when we went to, to do our drinking decided what mischief we could do, we thought we’ll get those big, big shell cases, we’ll take those and they were a bit of a heavy weight to carry when you’re a bit tiddly but by the time we were approaching barrack block, ‘H’ shaped barrack block, we were upstairs on the first floor. We didn’t know what to do with them, so the New Zealanders were billeted right below us and we crept, we slowly came in, put one each side of their doorway and crept upstairs to bed, like you would and like you would, I think possibly a weekend, well Saturday, I suppose it was Saturday or Sunday, came down, came out to go to breakfast [clears throat] looked over the balcony and down below it was a static water pool that was meant for, you to supply water for a fire, the Japanese were making a little arrangement of the garden in it. But below they were gathered around these Kiwis, gathered around these, these chaps who were, who had got their Brasso and cleaning them up so in my little write up as we went to breakfast, I said to Jim ‘by now all our fingerprints have gone they have only got Kiwi prints’.
PL: [laughs] Oh dear.
FC: So, they got in trouble, like they would. But that was when we got one over on them you see.
PL: [laughs]
FC: So how do you explain it that we found them there?
PL: Um, um.
FC: We found them there sir.
PL: So, were they engineers as well?
FC: Oh yes.
PL: So, you were all engineers together?
FC: Yeah. Well different trades of course.
PL: Yes, yes, yes.
FC: But they had their own Corsair aircraft.
PL: Right, right. So what sort of things—
FC: Patrolling around the, we, we had a Southwest, South side of the island, main island, the main occupation force was the Americans of course. We were under General MacArthur then.
PL: So, were the Spitfires really just for sort of, you know, keeping an eye on things, reconnaissance and things?
FC: Well they were patrolling around.
PL: Right.
FC: They were watching out that nobody was travelling from Korea, to and fro to Korea, I think.
PL: Right.
FC: But it was to show a presence there.
PL: Um, um.
FC: And then four [pause] 4 Squadron put up, well about four aircraft once and then 11 Squadron put up, 11 Squadron, eleven aircraft. Then what about you 17 Squadron blokes, how many have you got serviceable? I got a panoramic view from the control tower at Miho, this is on the North Coast where you count, I don’t know, how many Spitfires, thirty or something. One is taking off, I took it when one was taking off another one had just fired its Coffman starter cartridge to start the engine at, with a great puff of white smoke so that’s obviously in action, two things in action, and then by the time I’d moved around here to overlap the pictures, there was a view of other Spits and a, one was in the, in the flying position, the armourers were aligning the, synchronising the guns, but the Japanese armourer helping them like you would have to do.
PL: Um, um.
FC: So, but then Japanese were pushing, like you were saying pushing, pushing behind the trailing edge. Once there’s enough of you, it was a strong enough area to push. But when, a trick was with the Spitfire, the flaps were taken down by the pneumatic rams and then flaps up, all it did was to let the air out because there was a spring recovery, so when people are pushing like this and you are in the cockpit on the brakes, ready to put the brakes on, pneumatic brakes so it traps up and can trap a few thumbs.
PL: [gasps] Ouch.
FC: Well it was, despite this. On the carriers. The Spitfires on the carriers to get lift for taking off on that short thing, they would have the flaps partly down. Well, in no way you could do that, they were either up or down but what they did, they had blocks of wood, put blocks of wood, let the flaps came up by a spring onto a block of wood. They’d be in the best position to get lift for take off and once they were happily airborne, just flick the flap switch down and up again and they could put the wood before that. So, I’ve got this panoramic view, I thought I must —
PL: And that was taking off from aircraft carriers?
FC: No, no that was taken in a time when they did like in Malta.
PL: Right,
FC: They had to do this didn’t they?
PL: Um.
FC: You know, we had a, one time when the squadron was all worked up, back to working pitch at that time. The operation firepower or something like that. They were bombing up and loading up and doing their firing, live firing. So that was good for the pilots to get that, to get together like that. Do your turn round inspections and arm and rearm.
PL: Absolutely.
FC: So, it was this, these underground aircraft factories, they yielded off some metal and things and we made great — and I made a nice cabinet, wardrobe thing and the bottom shelf had a beer, crown beer bottle opener on with a cigarette tin underneath at the bottom, because it just took a crate a beer. I could lazily reach out, knock the top off you see.
PL: Um, um.
FC: And then they decided because we had to have somewhere to put our kit to make a long wardrobe, the full length of the barrack room out of aluminium and things and so of course you had to be about thoughtful and you had to be careful shutting the doors when people were asleep because of the noise.
PL: [laughs] So when did you get sent home?
FC: This was, demobilisation, you were given a number, a group number, so when group forty was ready, was ready to — that batch of people would be demobilised. When it got to fifty which was mine, we were on a long way up in Japan and [unclear] troop ships every Thursday or something and anyway [clears throat] and then ‘cause was when, oh Jim, that’s right. There was a Sir Geoffrey Depretes[?], an MP of the day came out to talk like a politician would have to do. At this big assembly of us [unclear] Kiwis and the Aussies and us and the Indians so afterwards any questions, so Jim next to me, when I’m, I’m, I’ve not got away in my group, my group, in my group I’m in so the top man boy Boucher, he said see me afterwards and I, I can guarantee you’re on, you’re on the next troop ship so we had a little farewell drink with Jim and we waited on and on and on and the troop ship never came until finally Jim went away on the same ship as we did.
PL: Oh my goodness. So, when was that?
FC: That was 1947.
PL: Gosh that’s a long-time getting home.
FC: So, from 1942 they hung onto me. Well if you think of it in April forty-seven the war over in Germany was over a couple of years nearly.
PL: Um, um.
FC: So, we did a long stint. We didn’t do a four-year tour because prior to that they brought the four year down to three and a half and then three and then two and a half which was what I did.
PL: Um, um.
FC: So, tour expiry came as same as that. On the North West frontier when it was on the cooler times a lot of the old ones still had a dog collar RAF uniform, they didn’t want to part with it. They didn’t want a blessed collar and tie they wanted to show that they were old stages.
PL: Um.
FC: So, my tunic is upstairs. I’m letting out the seams. So, I’m looking forward to wearing it when the centenary of the RAF is in April coming.
PL: Fantastic.
FC: So, I came out you see of Japan back to Blackpool again because we were based, we were in Nissen huts at Kirkham in the tail end of that 1947 winter. When the first thing they did when we got to Kirkham there was a stove in the middle of the Nissen hut you kept burning hopefully. They took our greatcoats away.
PL: Oh.
FC: First thing they did.
PL: Why?
FC: So, we wouldn’t flog them.
PL: Oh, for goodness sake.
FC: But we wouldn’t have flogged them. We wouldn’t have, would we?
PL: You’d have worn them.
FC: Would happily take them back in the summer.
PL: [laughs]
FC: [laughs] That would be a different tale.
PL: Goodness me.
FC: So that was Blackpool again.
PL: Um.
FC: So, we had a, had a fair bit of time at Blackpool in between other things. Yes, sorry, then I had three months leave to take paid leave. Well, you didn’t have to take it. I had three months paid leave. So, I had no leave when I was aboard. I had the old rest camp in Japan at Kobe, above Kobe at the, on the hill was a nice maiko it means Japanese dancer, I think. Where we had Japanese food and when the rice came, I wanted some jam on the rice because I had never had rice at home unless it had -
PL: Oh, jam on, oh, wonderful.
FC: We were squatting on low, I’ve got pictures on the low tables of girls, all nicely made up and dressed. So that was Japan.
PL: So, what, so when you got home what was your career after the war? Just very briefly because you’ve been so generous with your time.
FC: Well I didn’t want to — I had so much time using, working repairing things and making and mending things. I didn’t want to go back to reporting because really quite honestly I mean for a fourteen-year-old boy to come as to be reporting, it would be better for a grammar school boy to start because he’s got, his mind is trained and he’s got a lot of advantages. So, I — there was a job, I took all my three months and hadn’t done anything about — I knew I didn’t want to go back but the RAF newspaper, I was in the RAF Association magazine, advertising for trade engine and airplane, air people for Boscombe Down and Farnborough. So, I came to Boscombe Down when they wanted — and they had just taken on, if you can imagine, like a queue in a way, they had just taken the last one on when I arrived, so I went on to Farnborough to the Royal Aircraft Establishment as it was, who needed sixty, or it needed quite a lot of staff. So that was where I —
PL: So that’s how you ended up here?
FC: Yes, that’s it, that’s what brought me to Farnborough and the experimental flying squadron with all the different aircraft from Lincolns and Yorks, the, the Hudsons. We had the, had the sea fliers the Spitfires. The naval flight was there so it was exciting times when they were launching and arresting. Quite exciting times. Because at the end of the hangar was a big assembly that was the sort fitted on a ship to, to catapult them off and the Spitfire with four big rockets attached like under its armpits. The engine fitter had to go up there and run the engine, all engines had to be run every morning, typical wartime thing, so Farnborough must’ve been a noisy place.
PL: Um.
FC: With the Halifax’s and everything.
PL: Um, um, um.
FC: But anyway, the engine man hated having to go up there. It was perched in the middle of the sky it —
PL: Yes, yes.
FC: And then another time a bit later when the Korean war was on, I think, we had a Sea Fury on the, on our radio flight operating that one. That had to be put in the twenty-four-foot wind tunnel. They must have had trouble in Korea with the certain stores they were carrying or something, I don’t know what it was. Then my good friend who joined up the same day as me in Oxford, now, he was the engine man and he didn’t like being in the wind tunnel where they got a full bore and in with, sitting in with the engine going full bore.
PL: Um, um, um, um.
FC: But that was the typical thing they did.
PL: Um. So that must have been a very interesting life. How long, how long did you?
FC: Well I was there forty years.
PL: Wow. Gosh.
FC: Till 1988. And then of course it’s, it’s about a hundred years ago since I retired now because it’s, it will be thirty years next year won’t it? Three and four.
PL: It feels a little like we need to come back and speak to you again Frank about your, your experience testing, in Farnborough.
FC: Oh yeah.
PL: And your career doing that.
FC: Oh yeah. We did fly, did fly the Lincoln up to Valley, RAF Valley and they were, the Window, you know they drop Window these aircraft. Because various sorts, sizes of it. The worst one comes in packs which you daren’t disturb in a, in a dispenser thing on the wing tips of a, of a Canberra and if you drop one the pack all busted open because they were only about ten millimetres long, a little tiny bit of aluminium, ‘V’ shaped that way and then ‘V’ shaped that way.
PL: Was this for the —
FC: They spun.
PL: Right and this was to confuse the —
FC: This was to put something that looked like an aircraft.
PL: Oh right, right.
FC: And in fact, on ‘D’ Day, teams of RAF aircraft were flying in a pattern like this.
PL: Um.
FC: And dropping Window.
PL: Um, dropping them
FC: So that to their screens it looked like there was an armada of things coming. Well they knew how to confuse. But the one that went to, I was dumping this stuff out of the, the chute and there were ack-ack firing behind, firing at us behind. I thought, I hope they keep firing at that — and when we’d circled and landed at Valley the last bundles that must have been hooked up or something littered the airfield because I remember they were black and gold, or black and yellow, long. So, we were there for the weekend. We came on the Saturday, Sunday they had all the RAF out in a long line.
PL: Picking them up.
FC: [laughs] Doing the foot plod, picking them up. Nothing to do with me [laughs]
PL: Oh Frank, thank you so much that has been an absolutely fascinating interview.
FC: I’ve been linked up with FAST Farnborough Air Sciences Trust Museum to keep the heritage of Farnborough’s flying alive.
PL: Fantastic.
FC: We’ve built a replica of the first aircraft to fly. Fifty-two-foot span. Quite an impressive thing. So that draws a lot of people to see and learn about Cody, Sam Cody.
PL: Um, um, um.
FC: So, there’s another story in that.
PL: Um. Well I’d just like to end by saying a huge thank you on behalf of the Bomber Command Digital Archive because it’s been such a valuable, valuable interview. So, thank you very much indeed.
FC: Thank you. Well you’re welcome to my diaries as well.
PL: Thank you very much.
FC: Couple of years there, ok?
PL: I’ll pass that on.
FC: Thank you, yeah.
PL: Thank you.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
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AColensoF170522
Title
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Interview with Frank Colenso
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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02:36:39 audio recording
Creator
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Pam Locker
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-05-22
Description
An account of the resource
Frank Colenso grew up in Cornwall and worked for a local newspaper at the outbreak of the war. He recalls the return of injured survivors from Dunkirk into Falmouth Bay. He joined the local defence volunteers following the bombing of Falmouth and describes training and weaponry within the Home Guard and civil defence precautions. He volunteered to serve with the RAF and trained as an fitter airframe and served with 83 Operational Training Unit. He discusses modifying Wellington aircraft, prior to being posted to Burma to serve with repair and salvage units. He speaks of the living conditions in Burma and of his work there which included repairing Spitfires and Hurricanes. After the war ended he remained in Burma as his unit was part of the Commonwealth occupation force prior to his demobilisation in 1946.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Civilian
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Burma
Great Britain
England--Cornwall (County)
England--Lancashire
England--Blackpool
Burma--Akyab (District)
Burma--Meiktila
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1939
1940
1943
1945
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Carolyn Emery
83 OTU
bomb dump
bombing
civil defence
demobilisation
entertainment
fitter airframe
ground crew
ground personnel
home front
Home Guard
Hurricane
love and romance
military living conditions
Operational Training Unit
runway
Spitfire
training
Wellington
Window
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/234/3377/PColleyJ1701.2.jpg
94ec91085dc95338680dd17fbde097d3
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/234/3377/AColleyJ170927.1.mp3
274a0d8500796c546178e8a862d959de
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
Colley, Joyce
Joyce Colley née Orton
Joyce Colley
J Colley
Joyce Orton
J Orton
J Colley née Orton
Description
An account of the resource
One oral history interview with Mrs Joyce Colley née Orton (b. 1925, 2127558 Royal Air Force).
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-09-27
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Colley, J
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
HB: This is an interview for the International Bomber Command Centre at Lincoln. Taking place between myself Harry Bartlett, the interviewer and Mrs Joyce Colley.
JC: Colley [spells out surname]
HB: Who is an ex acting sergeant in the women’s auxiliary air force.
JC: That’s right.
HB: And served during er the Second World War.
JC: Second World War, that’s right.
HB: The interview’s taking place on the 27th of September 2017 [background noise] in Rugby [background noise].
Carer: Do you want a cup of tea or anything?
HB: No thank you. Right Joyce, we’ve been introduced.
JC: Let battle commence.
HB: We know that you’re over 21 for definite.
JC: That’s true, yeah.
HB: You were born 27th May 1925. Where were you born Joyce?
JC: Here, well not literally.
HB: In Rugby?
JC: No I was born in Nuneaton.
HB: In Nuneaton, right.
JC: Yeah.
HB: Right, and is that where you went to school?
JC: Partly, until I was eleven.
HB: Right.
JC: And then my dad got a, this job took him down South to Somerset.
HB: Right.
JC: So we all trooped off down to Somerset and we were there a few years until my dad died and then my mum wanted to, we all came trooping back up and erm I don’t know where we went then I’ve forgotten, it’s all a bit hazy. And I was here then until I was about fifteen.
HB: Right.
JC: And back we went down again. I met Ted you see in this job was down in Portsmouth, would you like to [unclear].
HB: And Ted is?
JC: My husband.
HB: Right.
JC: Only he wasn’t my husband then.
HB: No, were you working at this time Joyce?
JC: Yeah, yeah.
HB: What were you doing as a job? [laughs]
JC: Well I started, I can only remember from when I was in the Air Force.
HB: Right.
JC: And I was a tele printer operator.
HB: Ah right, so, so were you married to Ted before the war?
JC: Yes.
HB: Right, when did you marry Ted?
JC: Do you know I can’t remember.
HB: How far before the war?
JC: Ooh, [laughs] no I think it was ’44, do you know I can’t remember.
HB: That’s alright.
JC: I’m ashamed to say I can’t remember.
HB: That’s not a problem, that’s not a problem. So where were you when you actually signed up, when you went, did you volunteer or were you actually called up?
JC: Er, no well it was as bit of each actually.
HB: Right.
JC: They were going, they said if you don’t go you’ll be took.
HB: [laughs] Right. [laughs]
JC: So it was an either or situation.
HB: Yes.
JC: So I had to leave my job and went into the Air Force.
HB: And what was, where was.
JC: I was a trainee hairdresser at that point.
HB: Right.
JC: Yeah.
HB: And where were you when you were called up, can you remember?
JC: I was here.
HB: You were here in Nuneaton
JC: Yeah, Yeah.
HB: Oh right, right. So you got called up, well called up volunteered.
JC: That’s right, pressganged.
HB: Yeah, and did they just send you straight for training or did they send you home again?
JC: No, [makes whistle sound] up to Lancashire, just outside Liverpool, Wigan.
HB: Wigan.
JC: Wigan believe it or not.
HB: Right.
JC: Between Wigan, yeah, under a slag heap.
HB: Oh right.
JC: Literally under a slag heap.
HB: And was that an RAF station or was it just a training depot?
JC: It was a secret centre.
HB: Right.
JC: Coding Centre.
HB: Ah right.
JC: So I was there you see.
HB: Yeah, and is that where you did your training?
JC: Yeah.
HB: And when you finished your training can you remember.
JC: I went to Cranwell to do my training.
HB: Ah right.
JC: All me sir no, madam yeah, three bags full and then we did our training and then we were posted.
HB: Right.
JC: And I was posted to erm up North.
HB: Right.
JC: And my home was down South, typical Air Force, typical services.
HB: Yeah.
JC: So it took me three days to get from when I went on leave, three days travelling from my home to the station and backwards and forwards up and down the country.
HB: Oh dear, right.
JC: Three days one way, because of all the raids.
HB: Yes, oh yes.
JC: They were shooting from the sidings you see, troop’s raids going past.
HB: Yeah, yeah.
JC: I’m sorry this must be ever so boring for you.
LM: [unclear] [laughs]
HB: No, no. [laughs]
JC: She bares with it bravely.
HB: Yes. Erm, sorry I did forget to mention at the beginning of the interview that there, we have got a carer present who is, what is your name?
Carer: Agneshka.
HB: Agneshka.
Carer: [laughs]
HB: Right.
JC: It gets them every time doesn’t it?
HB: [laughs] Right so what, can you remember what year you actually joined?
JC: ‘44.
HB: You went in ‘44.
JC: ‘44 to ‘48 I served.
HB: Yeah, was it early on in ’44 that you went?
JC: Yeah, yeah.
HB: Right, so you went to Cranwell and did your initial training.
JC: Did my initial training.
HB: Marching about and saluting.
JC: That’s right.
HB: And you then got posted to Wigan?
JC: Yeah.
HB: And did Wigan have a name or did it, or was it just a number?
JC: No, it did have a name but it was the station name.
HB: Right.
JC: Blackbrook, RAF Blackbrook.
HB: Right.
JC: It comes eventually.
HB: Yeah, like I say there’s no rush Joyce at all.
JC: RAF Blackbrook, yeah.
HB: So you go to RAF Blackbrook.
JC: Hmm.
HB: And your job, you get sent to do, what was your job?
JC: Tele printing.
HB: Right.
JC: Secret bomber, sending out bombers and bringing them back in erm and missing reports and death reports. That was awful.
HB: Hmm.
JC: I remember once being on duty one night duty and they’d been on a bomber raid over Berlin and I put five reels of paper in my machine every line there was a missing man or a killed man.
HB: Oh no.
JC: I thought there’d be nobody left I swear, we were all in tears.
HB: Do you know what squadron that was with?
JC: Erm, no I don’t, I don’t remember.
HB: Right.
JC: But it was bomber command they went on bombing raids.
HB: Yeah. And that was from Blackpool.
JC: Yeah, yeah.
HB: So you working on the tele printer, where were you living?
JC: On camp.
HB: You lived on camp?
JC: Under a slag heap.
HB: [laughs]
JC: On the Liverpool Lancashire Road.
HB: Yeah.
JC: Buried under a slag heap and that’s where we lived and where we worked and we never saw light of day or breathe fresh air.
HB: So you were underground?
JC: We were underground, we were under a slag heap.
HB: Oh right, oh right, underneath the slag heap?
JC: Underneath the slag heap, it was air raid precaution you see.
HB: Yeah, yeah.
JC: Terrible, no fresh air.
HB: So how, when you were billeted on the airfield, where you in a?
JC: No air field.
HB: Sorry?
JC: No air field.
HB: There was no air field?
JC: We weren’t on an air field, we were on a secret, it was a secret.
HB: Communication centre.
JC: Yeah, communication centre, as I say we were buried under the slag heap and we were moved by coach/bus, erm RAF bus from our billets which were in Wigan.
HB: Right.
JC: Backwards and forwards to, to RAF Blackbrook.
HB: So the actual billet you were in was in Wigan?
JC: Yeah.
HB: Were they private houses?
JC: Some were, yes.
HB: Where you.
JC: Then we all got moved back into camp.
HB: At Blackbrook?
JC: Yeah.
HB: Right, so when you first got there you were in a private house somewhere?
JC: To start off yeah, a private billet.
HB: Right. And how many of you were there?
JC: There was only me billeted with a family.
HB: Right.
JC: Oh no two of us.
HB: Right:
JC: Two of us that’s right, yeah.
HB: And were you, and was that your pal or just someone you served with?
JC: Well somebody we served with.
HB: Right.
JC: Really.
HB: And did you keep in touch with the family?
JC: No, no, not once we’d left, no.
HB: So how long do you think you were in the civilian billet before you moved into the camp?
JC: Oh about a year.
HB: Right.
JC: About a year, I don’t know why they kept us all in there but we were all, I think it was until they got it built to be honest.
HB: Oh right.
JC: Because you know it was all new, all, I tell you it was all crash, bang wallop you know, all done in a rush. This must be ever so boring for you I’m ever so sorry.
Carer: No, [laughs] I just listen.
HB: Er. so, so you, you get picked up in buses and taken backwards and forwards.
JC: From the camp.
HB: Yeah, and you go down underground, how many would be working in your section?
JC: Oh, there’s a tele printer section in one room and a telephone exchange in the other.
HB: Hmm.
JC: And it was, oh there’d be about forty or fifty girls there, quite a big camp, and the bus would come and take us back to the camp, yeah.
HB: Yeah. So when you were operating the tele printer and doing the secret coding.
JC: Secret coding, yeah.
HB: Where were your messages going to and where were they coming from?
JC: Well they’d be going to bomber command.
HB: Right.
JC: Various stations. That’s why it was secret you see.
HB: Yeah, yeah. So you were doing that.
JC: Hmm.
HB: Erm, what sort of stuff were you getting coming into your?
JC: It was all coded.
HB: Right, so.
JC: Six letter codes, in blocks of six.
HB: Right, six of six. And then you would hand that to somebody or?
JC: And they’d be de-coded, yeah yeah.
HB: Did you do any of the de-coding?
JC: No, no that was a separate, that was a secret section, within a secret section.
HB: Ah, yeah that’s interesting. So then eventually they built you some accommodation on the camp did they?
JC: No there was no camp as such.
HB: No, no, no, but there, so when you moved out of your civilian camp.
JC: We moved camp.
HB: Ahh.
JC: I was transferred from that camp to where I ended up RAF Blackbrook.
HB: At RAF Blackbrook, right.
JC: Blackbrook, yeah, yeah where I ended up.
HB: Right, so at Blackbrook where they flying aircraft from Blackbrook?
JC: No it was a secret coding.
HB: That was still a er
JC: A secret coding centre.
HB: Right.
JC: And we were coding for the North East of England.
HB: Oh right, right. So you went to Blackbrook.
JC: Hmm.
HB: And is that where you went into accommodation on the camp?
JC: Yeah.
HB: Yeah.
JC: Accommodation underground.
HB: So how did that work?
JC: Badly [laughs] we never saw daylight hardly ever.
HB: Oh right.
JC: And eventually we started getting bombed.
HB: Did you?
JC: Yeah, yeah.
HB: Oh right.
JC: They went as far up country as that and Germany.
HB: Right.
JC: So we were getting bombed. We had several girls lost through bombing.
HB: Did you.
JC: Yeah, and we had to go underground.
HB: Yeah.
JC: Into the bunkers, yeah, and the sirens started going.
HB: Yeah. So how long were you there at Blackbrook?
JC: Oh goodness, I don’t remember. I left from there so I was there for the rest of, for a long time.
HB: So you were there from about ’45 to 48?
JC: Something like that yeah.
HB: Wow.
JC: That’s when I began to get my sergeant’s stripes.
HB: Yeah, I was going to say so, so.
JC: Because I’m an old hand you see.
HB: Yeah. When did you become a corporal then Joyce?
JC: Oh, I think it must’ve been serving what eighteen months. Then I became a corporal and then I was upgraded to sergeant, yeah.
HB: Yeah, yeah.
JC: Sergeant [laughs] air woman.
HB: [laughs] Were you in charge of a section then?
JC: Pretty much yeah.
HB: And how many were in your section?
JC: About twenty.
HB: Oh right, so a big, a big group.
JC: Yeah, yeah big sections, there was a lot of us there.
HB: And what was your responsibility for them?
JC: Everything, made sure they were on parade on time and ‘air woman get your seams straight.’
HB: [laughs]
JC: We weren’t allowed stockings with seams in.
HB: Oh right.
JC: And if we did, and I was one of them, I must admit, I own up, I was one of them. You can never wear your stockings straight, you turned your stockings inside out because that made the seams show.
HB: Ahh.
JC: Or if you couldn’t get stockings you painted a line down the back of your leg.
HB: [laughs]
JC: We must [unclear] to you, we did yeah.
Carer: [laughs]
HB: So when you, after you’d been posted to the station, obviously your husband’s still living.
JC: I don’t know where he lived, he was in the navy.
HB: Oh he was in the navy, so, oh right so that was.
JC: I hadn’t met him then, no.
HB: Oh right, right.
JC: No.
HB: So how did you, what did you do for entertainment when you were off duty?
JC: Not a lot.
HB: No.
JC: Well we were on a secret camp.
HB: Yeah, yeah.
JC: And there was nothing there you see because it was secret.
HB: Right.
JC: Yes it was grim.
HB: Yeah. What did you do to alleviate the boredom then?
JC: Not a lot.
HB: [laughs]
JC: It was almost like what we do here to be honest.
HB: [laugh]
JC: Not a lot no.
HB: So what did you do a bit of reading and a bit of.
JC: That’s all we could do.
HB: A bit of chatting?
JC: Yeah the book. But of course in the war time all the books were taken for the pulping to ammunition and that sort of thing.
HB: Right.
JC: And that sort of thing, so you couldn’t get books really.
HB: Right.
JC: You just sat and chatted.
HB: Did you ever leave the camp to go to dances or anything outside?
JC: Sometimes, but not very often, we were bussed out and bussed back.
HB: Yeah. Did you have to, did you have to go in uniform when you went?
JC: We usually did yeah.
HB: Did you ever sneak out?
JC: What do you mean under the wire, literally under the wire? Yeah a couple of times.
HB: [laughs] I thought you might have.
JC: You’re not supposed to know that.
HB: I thought you might have.
JC: We found a hole in the hedge in the wire mesh.
HB: Yeah. And where would you go when you sneaked out?
JC: Well into the nearest town. We hitched.
HB: Oh right.
JC: No money to spend to buy a ticket to go on the bus.
HB: No.
JC: So we hitched [laughs] literally, yeah.
Carer: [laughs]
HB: [laughs] showing a bit of knee.
JC: That’s right yeah. And of course they were ever so kind, people were very kind, seeing us in uniform they let us into cinemas without paying, they smuggled us into erm theatres through the chorus girl’s entrance and one day we went to a theatre and we were standing and er ‘where are you going girls’ and we said ‘we’re trying to get a seat’ [whistles] and he beckoned us in and he took us round the side entrance and we all went in with all the chorus girls and we ended up across the stage, the curtains were drawn back with all the girls, it was hilarious, hilarious.
HB: [laughs] did you join in?
JC: No because they, no we couldn’t really, but they sneaked us across from one side of the stage to the other, the audience was there, the audience was there.
HB: What town was that then?
JC: This was in Liverpool, yeah Liverpool.
HB: Oh right.
JC: Hmm.
HB: I bet that was fun.
JC: It was, it was hilarious.
HB: Yeah.
JC: Well I still remember it.
HB: Well yeah it must’ve been good fun.
JC: It was a good laugh yeah. People were ever so kind to us, the doormen would sneak us in for free to the cinemas and they were really kind, really lovely.
HB: What did you do for rations then if you went under the wire, did you take a chocolate bar with you?
JC: No, no, chocolate bar, what are you talking about.
Carer: [laughs]
JC: What are they, no there was no such thing, no we just went without.
HB: Yeah, yeah.
JC: That’s all you could do.
HB: Yeah, yeah.
JC: Chocolate bar.
HB: Right, so now we get to the difficult bit.
JC: Oh, I thought that was the difficult bit.
[laughter]
HB: We get to the difficult bit now right.
JC: Yeah.
HB: So how often did they send you on leave?
JC: Once every three months if we were lucky.
HB: Right.
JC: It depended on bomber raids, if we could get transport, because the trains, it used to take me three days to go from Liverpool to get home, three days on my leave there and three days to get back to camp.
HB: So you really only had.
JC: A few days, yeah, yeah. And that was once every three months.
HB: Yeah, so.
JC: If we were lucky, mostly six months depended on bomber commands, the pressure of traffic at the time, whether we’d get rail transport, personnel everything. There was a war on dear.
HB: Yes, absolutely. So you’re sitting at your tele printer and you keep going off on leave so the big question is how did you meet Ted?
JC: At a dance in, we were back, because I was out of the service by then. Back in civilian life.
HB: Oh you were back in civilian life, oh right.
JC: Yeah.
HB: So you didn’t meet Ted during the war?
JC: No, no, no, no, I met him here in Rugby.
HB: Ah right. So you’ve been invited to all these theatres and cinemas and.
JC: Not invited dear, smuggled in.
HB: [laughs]
JC: Invited in inverted commas.
HB: Yeah. So what about boyfriends then?
JC: It depends they were all in the forces, so you’d make a date to meet somebody and they didn’t turn up and then you’d find that they were sent on a bombing raid but of course they couldn’t tell you.
HB: Yeah, yeah.
JC: And sometimes they came back, most times they didn’t.
HB: Yeah.
JC: It was very, very sad, very sad.
HB: Did that happen to you?
JC: Yeah, yeah, oh yeah, a special mate. And you’d stand in the Nafi que waiting for a cup of tea and you’d turn round and there’d be a chap standing behind you with no face.
HB: Oh right.
JC: That was, and the trick was to say ‘do you want a cup of tea mate’ you know without blinking without showing any emotion, that was the trick.
HB: Right.
JC: Never once did you ever let go and if a man like that asked you to dance you always danced, you never refused EVER.
HB: Yeah.
JC: Just wasn’t done. Broke the code.
HB: Absolutely, absolutely.
JC: Yeah, yeah.
HB: So when you were up at Liverpool did they have dances on the camp.
JC: No, no.
HB: That was that all excluded.
JC: Yes because it was a secret camp.
HB: Yeah because it was secret, yeah. So.
JC: No we went into the town.
HB: So you went into the town. Yeah, oh right that’s interesting,
JC: We didn’t get buses we got trucks.
HB: Yeah.
JC: And when you were going, and you asked if they could get, and what they did they threw you into, literally threw us into the backs of the trucks. Hands under your bottom and shoved and that’s how we arrived at the trucks.
HB: Ah, that was a good excuse [laughs].
JC: It was.
HB: Yeah, so just going back to 1945 ’46 erm, you’re doing the tele printing work, what sort of things were you sending out?
JC: Well they were secret codes.
HB: So,so.
JC: Blocks of six, lines of five.
HB: Right, so.
JC: They were just letters which didn’t mean a thing or numbers.
HB: Right.
JC: It was secret you see as you know.
HB: Yeah. And you mentioned earlier on that you did the missing list.
JC: Yes.
HB: You did the missing list and that sort of thing.
JC: Yeah, yeah.
HB: So did you send them out?
JC: They were in plain code.
HB: They were in plain language.
JC: In plain language, yeah.
HB: Er for the losses.
JC: Yeah yeah, oh it was dreadful, kin formed, that means they their families had been informed, kin not formed means they didn’t know who they were or where they were, they just didn’t come back to camp.
HB: Hmm.
JC: It was really terrible.
HB: And you, I suppose really sometimes you’d recognise names would you?
JC: Hmm.
HB: That would be sad.
JC: It was terrible, really was, terrible. Bored her off look, [laughs] she has to go to her job.
HB: Yeah. Yes it’s difficult to sort of put that into words isn’t it?
JC: It is actually.
HB: Yeah.
JC: It went too deep and I’ve never forgotten it never.
HB: No.
JC: No never, all those lovely men and they were and then we started getting them back you know how the, was it John West is it, started getting back bomber command [unclear].
HB: Oh the er,
JC: Terrible injuries.
HB: Yeah.
JC: Faces burnt to a frazzle, dreadful.
HB: Yeah.
JC: And we had an aircraft landed on our where we were the site we were on and to see the, oh god I can’t tell you, dreadful, dreadful, falling out of the aircraft all in flames.
HB: Were they prisoners of war coming back?
JC: No, no they were bomber crew.
HB: They were just crew who had managed to get back.
JC: Get back that’s right.
HB: Badly burned.
JC: That’s right, shocking, shocking it was.
HB: Yeah that’s the, that’s the side that people don’t know about.
JC: No don’t know about.
HB: They don’t really know much about do they?
JC: No, no. But I thought of their, some of them were married with young children and they said that their wives loved having them [unclear] and the children went screaming from their daddies, it was awful, terrible, terrible.
HB: Very, very hard to imagine isn’t it.
JC: Oh terrible. Anyway.
HB: I mean at that, that’s an aspect you know we don’t very often get to talk about.
JC: Hmm.
HB: So you’ve got to 1944 or ’45 ’46, you’re still up at Liverpool?
JC: No I was back home then.
HB: Back in.
JC: No ’48.
HB: So you were up at Liverpool all the while up until ’48?
JC: Yes then I came back down to Somerset.
HB: Right.
JC: Back home.
HB: Which was where mum and dad were?
JC: That’s right.
HB: Right, so you, if you can remember it, 1948, the war’s been over a couple of years, erm, what were things like in the country and living?
JC: It wasn’t bad actually I think the country recovered pretty well really and because I was in Somerset and so it was cider country.
HB: Oh yes.
JC: Yes it was nice there.
HB: What did you do when you were de-mobbed did you just de-mob straight away from there or did you have to go anywhere?
JC: Well I’d been a hairdresser, oh no, no you were just chucked out of the camp and [whistles] and that was it you know.
HB: Did you go and get a smart dress and a hat and a handbag?
JC: Oh you [unclear]
HB: [laughs]
JC: No you came out in uniform and you sent the uniform back.
HB: Right.
JC: They had them back.
HB: Because a lot of the men went to erm, when they were de-mobbed they sent them to er a place and they were given a ticket for er for clothing.
JC: No we weren’t.
HB: You weren’t?
JC: No, no nothing like that.
HB: Right.
JC: No, nothing you just went home that was it, they gave you a rail ticket home, goodbye thanks but no thanks and that was it.
HB: Right.
JC: You’re gone.
HB: Yeah.
JC: Just like that. Oh no, no clothing ticket or anything.
HB: Was, when about in ’48 would that be would that be sort of in the middle or towards the end of ’48?
JC: I don’t know, I can’t remember, no I can’t remember.
HB: That’s alright. So you’ve come, you’ve come to the end of your time in the WAF, you’ve served all the way through with bomber command.
JC: Yeah.
HB: And you’ve seen what you’ve seen. What did you think about how the Government were about bomber command?
JC: What the government thought about bombing?
HB: Yeah.
JC: I don’t know I couldn’t know really.
HB: No, no.
JC: What the Government thought. I knew what the civilians thought, which was respect.
HB: Right.
JC: Total respect. What the Government thought I wouldn’t know.
HB: Right. So you didn’t read much about it in the newspapers what it was about?
JC: No, no I don’t remember if I did.
HB: Ok.
JC: I don’t think there was a lot in about the war, I think it was all about getting back, back into work and getting the country moving again really you know.
HB: Yeah, so you went down to Somerset.
JC: Yeah.
HB: Whereabouts in Somerset were you?
JC: Oh dear, Bridgwater.
HB: Oh right, yes, yes.
JC: Bridgwater, yeah.
HB: Well that’s not too far from Bristol and places like that.
JC: No, no, no that’s true.
HB: So is that how, when you went back to Somerset you were still hairdressing, is that how you, did you go back to hairdressing?
JC: No, no I had to give that up, my training. It was sad really because I’d done all my training and I was coming up for my last year, my finishing year, when the war came and then of course ‘you can’t do this’ ‘it’s a luxury trade’ and I was given the choice make ammunitions or going in the forces so I was advised to go in the forces.
HB: Right.
JC: Because you were filling shells.
HB: Right.
JC: Your skin went yellow, your teeth fell out, dreadful.
HB: Yeah, yeah.
JC: So they said if I were you I’d go in the forces so that’s what I did. But of course I came out with a trade.
HB: Yeah.
JC: Prior to, not one that I was joined in the first instance so I went into, I worked at the GEC.
HB: Oh right, yeah, yeah.
JC: And, erm I was doing tele printing there.
HB: So GEC, that was General Electric Company.
JC: That’s right, yeah.
HB: The big electrical company.
JC: That’s right yeah.
HB: And you carried on tele printing?
JC: Yeah, yeah.
HB: And how long.
JC: Only in those days I was doing, I wasn’t sending out bombers, I was doing erm, how many bits of this you wanted and oh boring stuff you know.
HB: Right, and how long did you do that for Joyce.
JC: Oh I can’t remember exactly, till I met Ted I think, no I don’t remember. I met Ted in Coventry.
HB: Right.
JC: At a dance.
HB: Was he a Coventry lad?
JC: Yeah, no he comes from Rugby here.
HB: Oh he came from Rugby, yeah, yeah.
JC: Yeah, that’s why I’m here now, my brother-in-law brought me back. I was in a lovely care home down the south.
HB: Oh right.
JC: Very nice indeed [pause] but when my brother-in-law came to visit he used to stay with us you see.
HB: Right.
JC: And we couldn’t get rid of the man, he would stay, he lives in France.
HB: [laughs]
JC: And he wanted to come back, he married a French woman and she wouldn’t come from France, she wouldn’t come back to England and she wouldn’t let David come back either.
HB: Oh right.
JC: So he was stuck in France and he said you can come and visit me here, because his son lives in Rugby that’s how I’ve come to be in Rugby.
HB: Ah right.
JC: [unclear] I didn’t choose to I liked it where I was.
HB: So you got a job with GEC and did you work all through to retirement or?
JC: Oh no I left when l was fifty.
HB: Oh right.
JC: I didn’t retire until I was fifty then I retired.
HB: Right.
JC: And Ted worked another two years and then he retired.
HB: Yeah, and did Ted worked for GEC as well?
JC: As well yes.
HB: Ah right. It wasn’t a GEC dance that you met at was it?
JC: Do you know it might have done.
HB: Because they used to have big dances didn’t they?
JC: They did, and it was in Coventry yes it could well have been.
HB: Yeah.
JC: I was leaving, he’d been to the pub with his mates and he was rolling up for the last dance you know and I was leaving with my mates to go home and he touched me on the arm and said ‘can I have the last dance’ and I said ‘I’m sorry but I’m just leaving I’m going home’, ’I’ll take you home’ he said. Now I’ve never seen that man before in my life and I immediately trusted him, I said he’s ok.
HB: Right.
JC: So he took me back home and we were never apart from that day.
HB: Lovely.
JC: We were married Fifty-four years.
HB: Ah that’s nice.
JC: Yeah, quite romantic really.
HB: It is.
JC: Yes, yes.
HB: And you’ve got no other family now?
JC: Nobody apart from my brother-in-law and David my brother-in-law brought me from a lovely care home in the south of England which I knew.
HB: Yeah.
JC: And he brought me up here. You see when he came to visit me down in Hampshire he used to stay at my house.
HB: Ah so you ended up living in Hampshire.
JC: Yeah we bought a house in fact that’s it there on the wall that photograph up there.
HB: Oh lovely.
JC: Yeah that was it.
HB: Oh that’s a big place, that’s pretty good, that’s pretty good. So.
Carer: Can I just ask.
HB: Yes.
Carer: Do you want me here?
JC: Not if you don’t want to be love no.
Carer: No because it’s taking so long I can’t sit here.
JC: No, no you’re alright.
HB: That’s fine, thank you. Erm [pause]
JC: You’re being recorded.
HB: And quite right too, quite right too.
JC: [laughs]
HB: That’s how it should be, erm, right so you were, ah right, I understand now, so who, were you working down in Hampshire as well.
JC: Yeah.
HB: And was that with GEC?
JC: No I wasn’t no, I can’t remember what I was doing, no I honestly can’t, it wasn’t the GEC I know.
HB: Right.
JC: I think I was hairdressing.
HB: Oh right.
JC: I was a hairdresser.
HB: Oh right you managed to get back to that.
JC: Yeah, yeah
JC: And I met Ted at a dance and we never separated after that.
HB: That’s lovely.
JC: Fifty four years till he died then David he bought me back here, back from everything I knew, everybody I knew, I was at a lovely care home there, back here where I didn’t know anybody so I had to learn everything all over again, broke my heart really because I didn’t want to leave.
HB: Yeah.
JC: It was lovely, they were really nice ladies there. Well they are here but.
HB: That’s sad.
JC: It was, it was, it upset me, still does.
HB: Yeah. What, if you can cast your mind back to the war years and your time in the, in the er RAF, what would you think was the best bit?
JC: The companionship I think. The comradeship and if you made a friend they stood by you, they was loyal, and then they were, well they stood by you whatever you know. I think that’s the best bit I remember the most.
HB: And what do you think was the worst bit?
JC: The death, the sadness losing bomber command friends. That was the worst bit.
HB: Hmm.
JC: Yeah, because I never saw the bombing you see while they were having dreadful bombings in Coventry I never saw that because I was in the, I was down in.
HB: Down in the bunker.
JC: In the air force yeah.
HB: Erm just let me write, I’m going to forget this if I don’t write it down [pause]. So how would, how, how do you feel about what the WAFs did in the war, what, what’s your feelings about the WAFs?
JC: I think they were invaluable.
HB: Hmm.
JC: Because they took the place of the men you see leaving the men free to go and do their bombing and what not you see.
HB: Hmm.
JC: And they were doing the telecommunications well the telecommunications for the whole North East of England where I was so all the signals were going back across the country. Oh no I don’t think they could have managed without the women’s services not really.
HB: And do you think they got the credit they deserved at the end of the war?
JC: In a way yes, although yeah, I think so but I’m not sure.
HB: Yeah.
JC: Certainly from the civilians yes but the Government hmm.
HB: Did you actually did you get your medals?
JC: No, no, not even a thank you ‘ok that’s it’ [whistles] shove off.
HB: Oh right.
JC: Literally.
HB: Because I think from your service ’44 to ’48 I think you probably qualified for a couple of medals.
JC: I should think so [laughs].
HB: Yeah, yeah. But you never thought to get your medals.
JC: I didn’t think we were entitled to one.
HB: Yeah. Certainly two I would think.
JC: Would you.
HB: Yeah, I would have thought so. You’ve got the defence medal. I could get you some details of that if you need it to be able to get your medals.
JC: I wouldn’t mind having a go, although I’m ninety-three I mean, you know it would’ve been nice, recognition at last.
HB: [laughs] Yes, yes, I mean you’re not alone.
JC: Oh I’m sure.
HB: A lot of people didn’t bother applying for medals
JC: No.
HB: And in fact you’re not the first to say that you never really thought about medals.
JC: No I didn’t no.
HB: You’d done your bit.
JC: And that was it, helped save the country di dah di dah you know and that was it. Yeah. You done your bit.
HB: So back in civilian life at the end of the war, that, that those early years, erm everybody you know the history books they talk about the erm restrictions and you know the austerity, how difficult it was, how did you fit into that when you came back from?
JC: Well it was very difficult because you’d gone from having companionship and erm whatever daft thing you wanted to do there was always somebody who’d do it with you, you know.
HB: Yeah.
JC: But in Civilian Street there isn’t.
HB: No.
JC: You’re on your own and that’s it.
HB: Yeah.
JC: So you miss the companionship more than anything, yeah.
HB: One thing I did miss and I forgot to ask you right early on, when you actually went into the coding centres, the place where you were working.
JC: Signal centre.
HB: Signal centre sorry, what was the hierarchy, how did it work say you were the corporal you would report to Sergeant I presume?
JC: Sergeant yeah.
HB: And how would that then work?
JC: Well they’d go up another scale go up another command I don’t know where it went after that.
HB: So who would have actually been really in charge of you there?
JC: A Sergeant.
HB: Just a Sergeant?
JC: Female sergeant a WAF.
HB: A WAF sergeant? And that sergeant would report to what a male officer?
JC: I’ve no idea to be honest.
HB: Oh right.
JC: No idea. There weren’t many males about.
HB: It was secret, that really was secret then.
JC: There weren’t many males about it was a female officer we had.
HB: Oh right.
JC: The CO was female, the whole camp was female.
HB: Ah, that explains it.
JC: Yeah
HB: That’s what, I was trying to think earlier on how it went. Oh so it was a female camp.
JC: All female camp.
HB: Right.
JC: The CO was female right the way through.
HB: Can you remember the CO’s name?
JC: No.
HB: [laughs]
JC: I’m glad to say [laughs]
HB: [laughs] never had to go and stand on the carpet.
JC: Oh I did.
HB: Oh dear, what was that for [laughs].
JC: Oh I can’t remember, I really can’t remember.
HB: [laughs] I bet that’s what you say.
JC: I really can’t remember.
HB: No, you didn’t get caught going under the wire then?
JC: No, certainly not.
HB: [laughs]
JC: Or coming back.
HB: [laughs] I don’t know, I don’t know.
JC: We used to go to the theatres and to and do you know the civilians were marvellous. If we went in, and we, we, perhaps there’d be six to eight of us would go as a crew you know.
HB: Yeah.
JC: And we all went in or out together and if we went to a picture place you know, we were ushered in and they’d move people, civilians out from the front seats, we went to a theatre, the most, so they moved the civilians out and moved us in so we could sit down and if we went to a theatre they’d move civilians out from the front and moved us in and that’s the sort of treatment we were given, top notch.
HB: Wow, yeah.
JC: It really was, top notch. They were brilliant.
HB: Have you got any, did you stay close to any of the people you served with.
JC: I did for a five years.
HB: Yeah.
JC: But of course we all went our separate ways and we ran out of things to say.
HB: Yeah.
JC: You know, they got married and had family and I hadn’t got married at that point you know.
HB: Yeah [pause] It’s alright it’s just a little bit noisy with people shouting in the corridor. Erm, hmm that’s interesting Joyce and I don’t think we’ve spoken to many people who worked in the signal sections.
JC: No, of course you wouldn’t talk about it it’s all coded.
HB: Yeah.
JC: And you didn’t know what you were doing what what it normally was.
,
HB: They just gave it you and you.
JC: Yeah, yeah, we had five letters and five down and they were squares and they had to be spaced so much apart for the machines to pick them up and they’re all on what do you call it tikatape now.
HB: Yeah
JC: No holes, no three above and two below. The small holes were fed and picked up by the teeth in the machine and fed through you know.
HB: Yeah. Did you keep a diary with you or anything like that during the war?
JC: No, you didn’t keep a diary because it was all secret so I don’t think you’d be allowed.
HB: Right. Ah well as you’ve already admitted Joyce sometimes things you were allowed and some things that you weren’t allowed.
JC: It did get a bit mixed a bit blurred shall we say.
HB: [laughs] Did you have any photographs of your time in the WAF?
JC: I did yes, but I moved places, but I’ve been moved about so much I’ve lost them all.
HB: Ahh.
JC: Which is very sad and saddens me because there were lots of my dear, dear friends.
HB: Yeah.
JC: They really were, really were friends.
HB: That’s such a shame.
JC: They’d stick, they’d lie for you they really would. They’d lie for you if they had to.
HB: Yeah.
JC: It was that sort of friendship you know.
HB: Yeah.
JC: You got you’re a day [unclear] a day.
HB: Yeah, so you.
JC: I think that’s what the war did to be honest.
HB: Yeah. And what do you think, what do you think your own contribution was to the?
JC: I think I made some kind of a dent you know. Doing the tele printing and everything else, certainly making a contribution doing the job that a man would have to do otherwise.
HB: Yeah, yeah.
JC: So I took the place of a man to let him free to go and bomb Germany [laughs]
HB: Yeah, yeah. Did you ever get the chance, at the end of the war people have told me about things called cooks tours where they take ground staff up in the aircraft and fly them over Germany and back.
JC: No, no I never got chance to do that.
HB: You never got chance to do that?
JC: No, no, it never came my way at all, no.
HB: Ah right. Well Joyce I’m not going to keep you any longer because you’ve got your party to go to.
JC: That’s true, that’s true.
HB: And I don’t know how long that is, about five minutes I think. So what I’ll do is finish.
JC: It’s only to celebrate this place being opened.
HB: Yeah.
JC: Yeah.
HB: We’ll terminate the interview there, we started at five past ten and it’s er ten to eleven.
JC: Not bad, I hope I’ve given you something to work on.
HB: You certainly have Joyce and what I’d like to do is thank you very much because people like yourself are getting a bit few and far between now.
JC: Well I suppose we are really, well I’m ninety-three.
HB: And the things that you can tell us, you may not think they’re important but when you look at the whole thing and how they all fit together, it shows.
JC: Well I hope it makes some sort of a sense anyway.
HB: Yes it will do.
JC: Good.
HB: I’m going to switch the machine off now Joyce.
Dublin Core
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Identifier
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AColleyJ170927
PColleyJ1701
Title
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Interview with Joyce Colley
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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00:44:52 audio recording
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Pending review
Creator
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Harry Bartlett
Date
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2017-09-27
Description
An account of the resource
Joyce Colley grew up in Leicestershire and Somerset. She was working as a trainee hairdresser before she was conscripted into the Women's Auxiliary Air Force in 1944. After training she worked as a teleprinter operator in an underground bunker. She remained in the Royal Air Force until 1948.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
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Great Britain
England--Lancashire
England--Lincolnshire
Contributor
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Carron Moss
entertainment
ground personnel
military living conditions
military service conditions
missing in action
RAF Cranwell
training
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/117/3379/PCookKHH1601.1.jpg
14944c26aa827cd2423b233d4d2ac572
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/117/3379/ACookKHH160725.2.mp3
199eff75afa2921f7b1278169d2c5ec3
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Cook, Kenneth
Kenneth Cook
Kenneth H Cook
Ken Cook
K H Cook
K Cook
Description
An account of the resource
Two oral history interviews with Wing Commander Kenneth Howell Cook DFC (b. 1923, 151017 Royal Air Force). Kenneth Cook flew 45 operations with 97 Squadron, Pathfinders.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-08-04
2016-07-25
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Identifier
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Cook, KHH
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
PJ: Right. Interviewers Peter Jones and Sandra Jones. Name of the interviewee Wing Commander, Wing Commander Kenneth Cook DFC. Attending with him is his son Jonathan Cook. The date is the 25th of the 7th 2016 and it’s just 5 o’clock pm. The place is Chadlington, Oxfordshire. Thank you, Ken for agreeing to be interviewed for the IBCC. Ken, tell me about what you did before the war?
KC: Okay. Well I attended grammar school at -
JC: Marling.
KC: Marling Grammar School near Stroud in Gloucestershire and I was one of the first to join the Air Training Corps Squadron that was set up in Stroud, number 1329 Squadron and that helped to focus my attention on joining the Royal Air Force and while I waited until I was old enough to apply and a couple of years later I found myself on the train going from Stroud up to Paddington with an appointment to go to Lords Cricket Ground to be a part of what turned out to be over five thousand budding air crew that were joining the RAF on the same day that I was and after a few weeks staying in local accommodation in that area I was then posted up to Scarborough to the ITW [name number?]. That was at Scarborough Grammar School. So I did my ITW and then I was posted up, back up to the north west of England to wait for a boat because I was going across to America to learn to fly in America as a pilot and going across the Atlantic we were chased by a U-boat which gave us a bit of a turn and we got away from it and got to the other side alright and then got on a train that took us three days to go along through Canada right down through the centre of America to Georgia. And so my opening days were down there in very high temperatures erm which I enjoyed very much and we were flying an aircraft called a Stearman, the biplane, and I’d gone solo but they decided that I and one or two others needed a lot more time than they could afford so they asked me to go back to Canada to carry on my training there which I did but when I got to Canada I was told the pilot training schools were all totally full so I’d have to hang around. So they then asked me if I wanted to be an air gunner and I said no. And they made me hang around a bit longer and then eventually they said, ‘We’re opening up a new air crew job called an air bomber. Would you be interested in that?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ I’d have a go at that and so I went on through a couple of courses spread over three or four months and I came out as the two guys that, I was commissioned as a young pilot officer off the course. There was two of us commissioned. I was one of them and so I came back home having gone out as an erk I came back to England as a pilot officer. Then having got back to England I found myself, believe it or not, posted to, what’s that airfield near High Wycombe, the grass over?
JC: Booker.
KC: Booker. Booker airfield, to fly Tiger Moths and so I carried on. Started my pilot training or continued my pilot training there and I’m lost now from where I go from there.
JC: Do you want to stop for a second Dad? Shall we stop for a sec? Can we just stop for a sec?
KC: Hmmn?
JC: Do you want to stop for a little break?
KC: Yeah.
JC: For a second.
KC: Yeah.
JC: So you -
[Pause]
SJ: Okay.
KC: So I was posted to the northwest England to fly. Can you stop it for a minute? I can’t think.
[Pause]
JC: Botha?
KC: Botha, yeah.
JC: Botha.
KC: Yeah. That was it.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Up there in Scotland. In the northwest. And then on to er what was I saying? Which one the -
JC?: Cottesmore.
KC: Cottesmore. That was the Wellingtons. Starting to learn night bombing and all that techniques. And from there I was posted to -
JC: Winthorpe.
KC: Winthorpe, was it? Yes.
JC: Heavy Conversation Unit.
KC: Yeah. HCU.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And then -
JC: And then Bardney after that for five [weeks?]
KC: And then to 9 Squadron at Bardney.
JC: Yeah.
KC: On Lancasters, yeah. Yeah. I did ten ops with 9 Squadron and a crew there and then we were invited to join them, they had just set up the Pathfinder force in Bomber Command and we were recommended as a crew that could join the Pathfinder force which I went on a course at Bourne in Cambridgeshire and then graduated on, as a Pathfinder crew in Lancasters [pause] and I did another thirty five ops with a Pathfinder crew. Altogether, I did forty five ops and I came out of that. Just after finishing ops I got awarded the DFC. And where did I go after ops?
JC: You went off to, where did you go then? You went off to Fiskerton didn’t you? To be the station radar nav officer. Was that right?
KC: Yes, I did. I was posted to RAF Fiskerton near Lincoln.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Having, I completed altogether forty five ops so I was now screened from any more ops but I then flew at Fiskerton. There were two Lancaster squadrons there and my job was to, as new crews came in from training I had to fly with each new crew to check them out, that they, that their navigators could operate the radar properly before they were allowed to go on ops. That was hairy because some of the pilots were new and they couldn’t land the Lancaster at night and we used to do what we called a few, what we called a few cannon balls going down the runway at night. Anyway, went through that period. The squadron then moved from, they closed the airfield and moved us to Fulbeck and so I went along although I was on the station and not with the squadrons I was instructed by Group Headquarters to go with them to Syerston on the Fosse Way and I stayed with them for about two years at Syerston flying with new crews when they came in. Checking them out on the radar and so on. Then what happened after Syerston?
JC: Okay. So you were getting ready for the Tiger Force. Is that right?
KC: Um.
JC: You went to back to the, posted back to Coningsby. Station radar nav officer.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And you were part of the build-up for the Tiger Force when you were due to head out to the Far East weren’t you?
KC: They were going, they were going out there. Yeah.
JC: Yes but obviously it was cancelled because the Japanese surrendered. Didn’t they?
KC: Yeah. That’s it.
JC: Okay.
KC: [?]
JC: So that took you to the end of the war. Right?
KC: Yeah.
JC: And so what was your first posting post war was at HQ1 Group at Bawtry.
KC: Bawtry yes. I was the group radar nav, group navigation officer.
JC: Yeah.
KC: At headquarters of 1 Group at Bawtry.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And then in 194 –
KC: I was a wingco then.
JC: That’s, okay, well you were then offered a permanent commission in, that was 1948.
KC: Yeah.
JC: You were offered permanent commission?
KC: Yeah.
JC: Yes.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And then you went on to Thirsk. Okay.
KC: Well, ‘cause I went to Topcliffe.
JC: Yes.
KC: ‘Cause that was, had been set up to, to train all wartime people like me in to being proper peacetime navigators [laughs].
JC: That’s right.
KC: And I was one of them. How to use Astro and all that stuff and to navigate the aeroplanes.
JC: What’s Astro?
KC: Astro and also with the radar, of course. All the latest stuff.
JC: Okay.
KC: Yeah. What happened after Topcliffe?
JC: And then you went to a conversion course on night all weather fighters and you then moved to Coltishall flying in Mosquitos.
KC: Yeah. I had to go on to learn the latest air borne radar for night fighter navigator radar people and then I was posted to Coltishall.
JC: That’s it.
KC: Where there was a night fighter squadron and I joined the squadron. I can’t remember how long. About a year or more and then I was posted – when? I took command.
JC: That squadron, that squadron converted didn’t it? To –
KC: To Javelins.
JC: That’s, no, to Meteors I think it was.
KC: Meteor night fighters. That’s right.
JC: That’s right. Yeah.
KC: Yeah. From Mosquito to Meteor night fighters.
JC: Yes.
KC: When did I take command?
JC: You, so that was, I don’t know when you took command but in 1953 you were group navigation officer at that point and in 1956/57 you went to West Malling didn’t you? And you were appointed as a flight commander. Is that right?
KC: Yeah.
JC: Which was unusual for a navigator wasn’t it?
KC: I was one of the first navigators to be a -
JC: Yes.
KC: A flight commander.
JC: Yes. Okay. And then in 1957 you went to 153 in West Malling.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And you were appointed commanding officer there.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And given the rank of Wing Commander at that point.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Yeah. And the aircraft you moved to then were Meteor.
KC: Meteor and, and yeah Meteor night fighters.
JC: That’s right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: They were 12s and 14s I think.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Were they?
KC: Yeah. Mark 12s and Mark 14s. Yeah.
JC: And later you converted to another aircraft.
KC: Yeah. Javelin.
JC: That’s right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: That’s right. Okay.
KC: Javelin. Night, all weather fighters.
JC: Okay. And then after that you were posted, you had an opportunity to improve your, your shocking education.
KC: Yeah. They sent me to the Staff College.
JC: That’s right.
KC: I went to the RAF Staff College for a year and they were obviously teaching me to read and write again you know.
JC: That’s right.
KC: I was at Bracknell in Berkshire.
JC: Okay.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Do you want to take another quick break? Just take a quick break dad?
KC: Yeah. Shall we do that? Yeah.
[Pause]
JC: So where did you go? You went off to the Middle East.
KC: Yeah. I went to Iran.
JC: No. No.
KC: No.
JC: That was post air force. You went to somewhere else. You went to Aden didn’t you?
KC: Oh I went to Aden, yes.
JC: That’s right.
KC: In the Middle East. Aden. And I used to have to tramp up in to the Persian Gulf from Aden.
JC: Yes.
KC: Visiting the air force bases and that all along the Gulf.
JC: Yes.
KC: And I was out there about two years wasn’t I?
JC: That’s right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Until 1963.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And then you were posted back to a training command I think. Is that right? For a couple of years. And then you moved on to Signals Command at Medmenham near Marlow.
KC: Yeah, it was, it was, was it a Group Headquarters or a Command Headquarters?
JC: It was, it was HQ Signals Command it says.
KC: Oh the Command Headquarters then.
JC: Yes.
KC: As a staff officer I was there.
JC: Yeah. And what was your role there?
KC: Signals Command, Medmenham.
JC: Is it related to personnel? Wasn’t it? It says here you were a senior personnel staff officer.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay.
KC: Yeah. I think I was involved, yeah, in staffing matters there.
JC: That’s right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Yes you were. And then you took retirement in January 1968.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And then started your civilian career.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Yes.
KC: Yeah
JC: So is that as far as you want to take it? There we go. That’s that bit. Now, shall we start again and I’ll, I’ll ask you some questions around this different things that you just want to give me there as well.
SJ: Those.
JC: Okay alright. So dad, so going back to so when were you, first of all just give your birthdate, dad. When you were born.
KC: 9th of April 1923.
JC: 1923. Okay and where were you born?
KC: Randwick.
JC: Randwick in Gloucestershire.
KC: Near Stroud.
JC: Yeah. Near Stroud in Gloucestershire.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And just kind of describe what sort of a place Randwick was back in those, those days?
KC: Well, Randwick was a small Cotswold village. Everybody knew everybody.
JC: Yeah.
KC: I went to Randwick village school.
JC: How many kids were there in that school? Roughly. Can you remember?
KC: There was about a hundred and fifty altogether.
JC: Was there? Okay.
KC: There were about three or, yeah, three classes total.
JC: Yeah.
KC: In the school.
JC: Okay.
KC: And I passed the eleven plus.
JC: And you also had, did some things in the village as well didn’t you? Weren’t you sort of active in the choir as I remember? Is that right?
KC: I was in the church choir.
JC: Yes.
KC: Yeah. The C of E church choir.
JC: Yeah.
KC: I became the head choir boy ‘cause I was the guy that would always get pushed in the back by the choir master saying, ‘Sing up Ken.’
JC: Fantastic. Okay. Alright. And so then you went, you passed your exam and went to Randwick School and where was Randwick School?
KC: Well it -
JC: Sorry not Randwick School. You went to Marling School.
KC: Marling. Marling School.
JC: And where was Marling School?
KC: Marling School was on the outskirts of Stroud.
JC: Which was how far away from -
KC: About four miles.
JC: Right.
KC: I used to cycle there on a bike every morning.
JC: Right. Okay.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And so you stayed there for a number of years until you were what? About sixteen were you?
KC: Yeah sixteen.
JC: Yeah. And then you left the -
KC: I then, I got a job with a company called Erinoid. It was in the early days when plastics were first being made in this country.
JC: Yes.
KC: And Erinoid were one of the early companies and I was invited to join their lab, their laboratory.
JC: Right.
KC: Where all the experiments was being done on the latest type of plastics.
JC: And so -
KC: I was an office boy if you like.
JC: Right.
KC: But in fact they made me look at everything that was going on with a view to picking it up.
JC: Right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: So you were almost like an apprentice there?
KC: An apprentice. Yes.
JC: That’s what you were kind of doing.
KC: Yes.
JC: Doing. Okay. And, and so you did that job. So we were now in 1939 so there would have, that would have been presumably you were working there at the outbreak of the war. Were you?
KC: Yes I was. Yeah.
JC: Right. Okay.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And what was, how did you feel about the outbreak of the war? What was, you know your initial thinking?
KC: Well one of the first things I did was to join the Air Training Corps in Stroud.
JC: Right okay.
KC: And from there -
JC: And what made you join that as opposed to joining the army or the navy? What was it about the Air Training Corps?
KC: It was about flying and I wanted to learn to fly.
JC: Right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: It seemed like a better option. Did it? Fair enough.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Fair enough. Okay. So you got to the age, I guess, of eighteen where you could potentially signup.
KC: Yeah.
JC: So were you conscripted or did you volunteer?
KC: I volunteered.
JC: You volunteered.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And where did you go to volunteer? At somewhere -
KC: I went to Weston Super Mare.
JC: Did you? Right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Why did you have to go down there ‘cause that’s a bit of a way from Stroud?
KC: That was the sort of a holding centre.
JC: Right.
KC: Where you went down there and you’d find you were there with all sorts of guys and so on.
JC: Right I bet. Did any, did you go down there with anybody. Any friends go with you? Or?
KC: No.
JC: No you went off on your own did you?
KC: On my own. Yeah.
JC: And did you have to do anything before you went down there? Was there anything more local in Stroud that you had to do to -?
KC: Only that I was now an active member of the Air Training Corps in Stroud.
JC: So it was the Air Training Corps that helped you -
KC: That helped me.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Very much. Yeah.
JC: I see.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay. And so what happened when you went to Weston Super Mare? What happened when you went down there?
KC: Oh crikey. What happened at Weston Super Mare? I think we were, we were every day marched out on to the top of the cliffs.
JC: Yes.
KC: And made to parade up and down doing all sorts of, learning to drill, you know -
JC: Right.
KC: All the drill stuff.
JC: That’s where your drill stuff happened?
KC: Yes.
JC: Right. Okay. Good. And, and of course you had your mum and dad were back at home.
KC: Yes.
JC: What was their reaction to your having signed up and volunteered? Do you remember?
KC: My dad was almost, sort of well, ‘I expected you to do something like that Ken.’
JC: Right.
KC: Sort of thing, you know.
JC: Yes.
KC: My mum said, ‘I don’t want you to go.’
JC: No. I bet.
KC: 'I don’t want you to go.’
JC: As mums do.
KC: But I did. But I used to, you know come home on breaks and -
JC: Yes.
KC: See them.
JC: And you had, you had several older brothers and a sister. What were they doing during all of this?
KC: Yeah. Harry was the eld– , well Mabel was the eldest wasn’t she?
JC: Your sister. Yes.
KC: Yeah.
JC: That’s right.
KC: And she’s the one who kept, if you like, the family running.
JC: Right.
KC: Although she lived a few miles away.
JC: Yeah.
KC: She kept an eye on my mum and dad.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And really kept the family running -
JC: Yeah.
KC: Smoothly. And I had brothers like Harry.
JC: Yes.
KC: He was –
JC: Did he sign up for any, any of the services?
KC: Sorry?
JC: Did he sign up for any of the services? Or was he a bit, he was a bit older wasn’t he?
KC: A bit older. Yeah. Walter. Walter did.
JC: Yes.
KC: Yes. He did.
JC: What did he sign up for? Did he sign up for, was one of them merchant navy? I can’t quite remember what he was.
KC: It was something like that.
JC: Yeah.
KC: I think it was. Yes.
JC: Yes.
KC: Merchant navy. Yeah.
JC: Yes.
KC: Yeah.
JC: What about your nearest brother?
KC: Charlie.
JC: Charlie. What did he do?
KC: Well Charlie was in a reserved occupation ‘cause he worked for Newman Henders and he was a draughtsman.
JC: Right.
KC: And they were working on munitions and stuff.
JC: Oh right.
KC: And so he was screened. They wouldn’t let him go.
JC: Right.
KC: He had to get on with the war stuff that he was working on.
JC: Fine. Okay.
KC: On drawing boards and things.
JC: Okay. Alright. So -
KC: Yeah.
JC: So that’s what the family were doing and what they were thinking and you were off at Weston Super Mare and coming home at weekend, occasional weekends and things like that were you?
KC: Yeah. Yeah.
JC: Okay. And how, and so you did that for a bit and then you said before that you had to go up to, to Lord’s to kind of muster up there did you? Is that, is that right?
KC: Yeah. Yeah. Yes. I had to report to Lord’s.
JC: Yes.
KC: ‘Cause I wanted to fly aircrew.
JC: Yes. So that was where aircrew were sent.
KC: Aircrew. We all, literally I was absolutely shattered. Walked into the Lord’s Cricket Ground ‘cause I’d never been, even to London like that in my life.
JC: Right.
KC: And walked in and there with thousands -
JC: Yes.
KC: Guys like me and -
JC: And what was -
KC: We were there. They took over the expensive housing from, I’m not anti-Jews but a certain part near there a lot of Jew families, rich Jew families.
JC: That was St John’s Wood wasn’t it? Around the St John’s Wood.
KC: St John’s Wood.
JC: Yes.
KC: And the government kicked them all out.
JC: Yes.
KC: And took over all their sumptuous houses, I mean for me as village kid coming up there, going into their bathrooms and seeing all the ornate stuff they had in their bathrooms, you know.
JC: Quite something was it?
KC: It was. It was unbelievable, you know.
JC: And were you so you were sort of put into these, these kind of houses and apartments I guess in -
KC: Yeah.
JC: In London. And you were sharing with people from your part of the country or from around the country?
KC: All over the country. There were guys that could hardly add up to five.
JC: Right.
KC: Sort of thing.
JC: Yes.
KC: And there was, not cockneys but they had accents that you couldn’t understand half the things they said, you know.
JC: Right. I bet, I bet there were people that you hadn’t been exposed to many of those kinds of accents, had you?
KC: No. I hadn’t. No.
JC: Right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Fantastic. Okay.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And so okay so you did, so you did that and then from there that’s where they sent you I think to Booker wasn’t it? To start the -
KC: Yeah.
JC: The training.
KC: FTS Booker.
JC: Yes.
KC: To start pilot training.
JC: That’s right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay.
KC: Yeah. Yeah. That Booker was near High Wycombe.
JC: That’s it and that was for air experience wasn’t it? On, on -
KC: Yeah.
JC: What sort of aircraft? Those were on -
KC: Seeing if you were going to be airsick all the time.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Which, they would chuck you out of aircrew. Yeah.
JC: And that on what sort of planes were those you were flying?
KC: That was Tiger Moths.
JC: Tiger Moths.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay. Gosh.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay. And how did you take to the flying? What was your sort of initial memories of doing that?
KC: I felt quite comfortable about it. I think, I mean I wasn’t eliminated or anything like that.
JC: Right and could you have been eliminated at that point?
KC: You could have, yeah.
JC: Right.
KC: If you didn’t cope reasonably well they’d chuck you off the course.
JC: Right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay and so, so that was sort of April May 1942 and then in June 1942 they put you on board this ship the SS Leticia.
KC: Leticia.
JC: Leticia that’s right. And that was -
KC: And we went across the Atlantic -
JC: And that was from up in Scotland. You had to go up to Scotland to catch -
KC: Yeah. Yeah.
JC: That didn’t you? From the Clyde.
KC: The Clyde.
JC: To go over to Halifax in Nova Scotia.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And –
KC: We were chased by U-boats going across the Atlantic.
JC: That’s right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And then, and then from there you travelled down on the trains through to Georgia to -
KC: Albany, Georgia.
JC: Albany, Georgia. That’s right.
KC: Took about three days and nights on the train.
JC: That’s it.
KC: Thousand, hundreds of miles. It was a distance train trip.
JC: Okay. But you were flying from a place called Turner Field.
KC: Turner Field.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Albany, Georgia.
JC: That’s it. Okay. And then you were, what sort of planes were you flying down there? This was -
KC: PT17s. Stearman.
JC: Okay.
KC: A biplane.
JC: And this -
KC: The American version of the Tiger Moth sort of thing.
JC: Yeah.
KC: But it was a heavier airplane than the Tiger Moth.
JC: And why were you sent over to the States to do, to do this?
KC: Because they wanted air crew quickly.
JC: Right. But why not train them up here?
KC: The only schools we had were absolutely jam packed full.
JC: I see. Okay.
KC: And to, they needed to, they needed hundreds more.
JC: Right.
KC: So we were sent. I mean some were sent to South Africa.
JC: Yes.
KC: I was sent to Canada and America.
JC: Right. And America was still neutral at this time wasn’t it?
KC: Yes. Yeah.
JC: So, so, so but they were still happy for, for aircrew to be trained up in America on this -
KC: Yeah.
JC: There was -
KC: I don’t know how we got away with that but we did.
JC: Yeah. Okay and this was something called, there was a name for this scheme wasn’t it? What was it called?
KC: The Arnold Scheme.
JC: The Arnold Scheme. Okay.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Alright. Alright. So, so you did some training on these Stearmans and then they decided that you needed to do more flying and they sent you back up to Canada.
KC: Yeah.
JC: But the -
KC: They said they hadn’t got enough hours.
JC: Yes.
KC: To keep me down there because it was such a concentrated course down in America.
JC: Yeah.
KC: So they sent me back to Canada and they said I could carry on up there. All the lot of guys had got up there at this holding unit and I found I was there with about five hundred other guys who were also were waiting to carry on with their training.
JC: Right.
KC: And so I was there, I can’t remember how long I was there.
JC: So this was in, this was Trenton.
KC: Trenton, Ontario.
JC: Trenton, Ontario.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay. So -
KC: Yeah.
JC: This was in September 1942.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And I think you were there for some months by the looks of it.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Through until about January, I think.
KC: Yeah.
JC: In 1943.
KC: In the process they’d come every so often and say, ‘would you like to become an air gunner?’ And I’d say no.
JC: Why didn’t you want to be an air gunner?
KC: Well I didn’t, I thought that was an unskilled job.
JC: Right. Okay, Fair enough. Okay. And so, so then they offered you this thing called an air bomber.
KC: Yeah. Yeah.
JC: And what, what was that?
KC: Well, the air bomber, that was coinciding with the four engined bombers coming in to the RAF.
JC: Right.
KC: And -
JC: Like what sort of, examples of those, like what?
KC: The aircrew in the Lancaster.
JC: Yes.
KC: You had the pilot and the flight engineer.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Then you had two navigators. One was what they called the navigator plotter.
JC: Yes.
KC: His job was to work out time, course and so on and the other one was a navigator observer which was me.
JC: Right.
KC: My job was to do all the, operate the radar that we carried to drop our bomb loads using my radar. If we had to do visual bombing I had to also operate the bomb site down in the nose.
JC: Right.
KC: Of the Lancaster and I also was trained to use guns in the turrets in case we were attacked and the gunners were killed.
JC: Yes.
KC: My job was to get them out of the, out of the turret and take his place.
JC: Right.
KC: That sort of thing, you see.
JC: And wasn’t there some forward guns as well that you were supposed -
KC: Yes. In the, right in the nose.
JC: Yes.
KC: There was a turret.
JC: Yes.
KC: Right at the front and the gun protruded out the front.
JC: Yes.
KC: And down the tail end there were four guns in the tail end turret.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And the mid-upper turret -
JC: Yes.
KC: Were two guns.
JC: Right. Right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay. Good okay. So you trained on this new job of air bomber for a period of several months. You came off and you were commissioned.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And coming out of the course. What rank was it again?
KC: I was a flight lieutenant.
JC: No. I think you were a pilot officer.
KC: Oh pilot officer, sorry.
JC: I think.
KC: Pilot officer. That’s right.
JC: That’s what you came out as didn’t you?
KC: Yeah.
JC: And then you were sent back to the UK at that time.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And you went up to Wigtown to fly these Bothas. Bothas. What sort of aircraft was that?
KC: Botha was a twin engine.
JC: Yes.
KC: Aircraft, it had been an operational aircraft but they reckoned it was underpowered so they took it off ops.
JC: Right.
KC: And used it as advanced training for people like me going on to ops.
JC: And had you formed a crew at that time or were you just randomly -
KC: No.
JC: Assigned to -
KC: I was a random guy at that time.
JC: Right.
KC: Didn’t -
JC: Okay.
KC: Didn’t, get a crew until you got to the OTU.
JC: Okay so that was the next thing. You went to the OTU.
KC: Yeah.
JC: At Cottesmore.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And you were flying Wellingtons.
KC: Wellingtons.
JC: So you got a crew there.
KC: There, yeah.
JC: And how did you, what was the process of choosing a crew. How did you -
KC: [Laugh] That’s a good question. We were -
JC: Were you carefully selected and matched up?
KC: We were a lump, a lump of aircrew there.
JC: Yeah.
KC: All sorts and sizes gunners and wireless operators and bomb aimers and navigators and pilots and so on and we used to wander around in a, you literally used to go up and say, ‘Have you got a crew yet mate?’ And whoever it was would say, ‘No I haven’t. Would you like to join with me? I’m a navigator.’ He’d say, ‘What are you?’ ‘I’m an air bomber.’ He’d say, ‘Yeah fine.’ And then we’d keep together and we’d go to somebody else, ‘Would you like to come in our crew.’
JC: So it was -
KC: And that’s how it was done.
JC: So obviously it was a scientific and carefully managed process so –
KC: Yeah.
JC: So that was good. So tell me a bit about the crew that you, that you ended up with. What was the skipper’s name?
KC: Jim Kermans[?] He was much older. I mean, we were, I was twenty one, twenty two and he was twenty nine. He was the dad of the crew.
JC: Right.
KC: Twenty nine.
JC: And where was he from?
KC: He was an Australian.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Very staid sort of person. Not much sense of humour.
JC: Yeah.
KC: On thinking back he must have been worried to hell on every flight he did. That sort of impression.
JC: Did he give you that impression while you were there or did you think he kind of took it in his stride quite a bit?
KC: He did it a bit when I was there.
JC: Yeah.
KC: ‘Cause I had to get very close to him.
JC: Yeah.
KC: The pilot. With some of the things I had to do -
JC: Yeah.
KC: Was directly on behalf of the pilot.
JC: Right.
KC: So I had to get to know him.
JC: Yes.
KC: I mean he had a flight engineer.
JC: Yes.
KC: But er -
JC: What was the flight engineer’s name?
KC: Ken Randall.
JC: Right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And where was he from?
KC: The other navigator, what was called the navigator plotter was Don Bowes.
JC: Where was he -
KC: Who was an out and out Yorkshireman.
JC: Oh was he?
KC: He could hardly speak English. It was all Yorkshire stuff [laughs].
JC: Alright. What about, what about Ken Randall. Where was he from?
KC: Ken Randall, he was a Birmingham, brummy.
JC: Was he? Right Okay.
KC: Yeah. Yes.
JC: So you were meeting people from around the country that you’d probably never met people from that part of the world before.
KC: Yeah. It’s amazing how we welded into such a good crew.
JC: Yeah and what so what made a good crew do you think? What was -
KC: I think -
JC: How’d that work?
KC: You were individuals. In a crew of seven you’d find two or three of you were buddies and then suddenly a fourth one in the crew would sort of latch on to us ‘cause we’d go to a pub and he’d be there on his own.
JC: Right.
KC: And you’d say, ‘Come on. Have a drink,’ Sort of thing, you know.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And that helped to bring them in, you know.
JC: Right. So the pub was important then?
KC: Yeah. Oh yeah.
JC: Yeah.
KC: The village pub.
JC: Yeah. Yeah.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And where was the village pub? So you were -
KC: Bourne. Well when doing ops from Bourne -
JC: Yeah.
KC: We used to go down in the village pub, literally was in the village of Bourne.
JC: Right. Yeah.
KC: And we used to brews[?] in there and have a few.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And then get back and get to bed ‘cause we probably had to get up early morning to do some flying the next day.
JC: So, so on a so you obviously with Wellingtons you found your crew now.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Who else on the crew? So let’s just finish the crew off. So you’ve got your flight engineer, you’ve got your navigator, you’ve got your skipper who’s the pilot.
KC: Yeah.
JC: What about the, so you’ve got two gunners haven’t you?
KC: Yeah. We had, the mid upper gunner was a Canadian.
JC: Yes.
KC: And the tail gunner was an out and out broad Scotsman.
JC: Right.
KC: He used to get excited when we were on ops and he’d talk about this thing coming in and he used to shout and scream but it was in broad Scots and none of us could understand [laughs].
JC: [laughs] Brilliant. Okay. Good. So, Okay, so you’ve got your crew and you’ve moved over to the, to Winthorpe and then on to Bardney where you started operations in Bardney.
KC: I did ten ops at Bardney, 9 Squadron.
JC: And that was on Lancasters.
KC: Yes.
JC: On number 9 Squadron.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay and, and what sort of place, what was, what was Bardney like as a place to kind of work from?
KC: Bardney was very much a new airfield with Nissen huts.
JC: Yes.
KC: Everything was Nissen hutted accommodation.
JC: Right.
KC: And it seemed that, you know, everything was sparse there but it was just about enough for human people to live and be fed.
JC: Right.
KC: And then, but you were going off on ops and that from there and you used to think coming back oh I’ve got to come back to that bloody den downstairs again sort of thing, you know.
JC: Right. Right. And what so if you had an op, when did you know when you were flying on an operation. Did you -
KC: We were all, all the aircrew had to go for the briefing which was always held on the night of ops. The briefing was at two o’clock in the afternoon.
JC: Right.
KC: So all the aircrew that were about on the station would go straight towards the briefing room which was -
JC: Yes.
KC: Quite a huge room.
JC: Right.
KC: And they had table after table in there.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And they could pack a couple of hundred or three hundred aircrew -
JC: Right.
KC: In there.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And you’d walk in and then the far you came always came in at the back door. You walked in and you looked straight ahead because there were the maps of Germany and the continent ahead of you and there was the route you were going to fly that night and [?] we’d say, ‘Oh not bloody Berlin again.’ This was after I’d done about eight ops to Berlin, you know.
JC: Yeah. Yeah.
KC: And so, you know, we used to talk to one another, ‘Oh bloody Berlin again,’ you know.
JC: Yeah. Alright. So, so had the briefing room there. And who ran the briefings?
KC: The squadron commander.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And his flight commanders.
JC: Right. Okay.
KC: And of course they had specialists. I mean they had the guy who looked after the wireless operator guys.
JC: Yes. Yeah.
KC: And he was the radio wireless op king sort of thing.
JC: Yes. Yeah.
KC: And I think that was about it. What other trade was there? Oh the engineer.
JC: Right.
KC: Station engineer.
JC: Yes.
KC: Was always there.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And he would say something about what had happened to some of the aircraft. They had to do some modifications or.
JC: Right.
KC: And he also would cover anything wrong with the radar gear that we carried on board that had -
JC: Yes.
KC: Been modifications to it dadedadeda.
JC: Right.
KC: And all that stuff.
JC: Right. What other things came out of the briefings? I guess you would have some intelligence. There would be an intelligence officer there.
KC: They showed the route and they had a large scale map on the wall, the big wall at the end of briefing room but all they had shading areas showing where all the searchlight belts were -
JC: Yes.
KC: Over Germany.
JC: Yes.
KC: And where the night fighter air fields were -
JC: Yeah.
KC: In Germany.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And heavily populated areas. They were brought out to show you that -
JC: Yeah.
KC: You know don’t go flying over these on the way because they’ll shoot you down.
JC: Right.
KC: If you get mixed up with some of these other cities.
JC: Yes.
KC: On the way in to, in to your target in Germany.
JC: Yeah. Okay and so how long would a briefing typically take, would you say?
KC: Sorry.
JC: How long would a briefing typically take?
KC: I should say minimum of two hours.
JC: About two hours.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And then would there be a break and you could go off or did you then go straight to -
KC: They would tell you what time briefing was going to be.
JC: Yeah.
KC: For the raid.
JC: Yeah.
KC: They would announce what time the night flying meal was arranged for.
JC: Right.
KC: So you had a good cooked meal before you went.
JC: What sort of things would you have before you go up?
KC: Eggs and bacon ‘cause eggs were rationed. Eggs and bacon and you know tomato and things like that.
JC: Right.
KC: Lovely.
JC: Lovely, yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. There’s got to be some pros to it I suppose. So, that’s good. Okay and so you have your meal and then what happens? You go to your dispersal do you?
KC: You went back to your room in dispersal and if it –
JC: How did you travel around the base did you –?
KC: Bike.
JC: On bike.
KC: [We were drove?] or bike.
JC: Right. Okay. So you would ride out and it could be a half a mile away or that kind of distance.
KC: Yeah.
JC: To your -
KC: A couple of miles.
JC: A couple of miles.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay.
KC: Could be. Yeah.
JC: So it could be getting dark by this point and you’d be cycling off to –
KC: Yeah.
JC: And the plane would be there and there would be a building next to the plane that you would, you would sit in prior to -
KC: Yeah.
JC: Going off would you?
KC: Well remember we had to go back to briefing.
JC: Yes.
KC: For the raid.
JC: Yes. Okay. So that’s in addition to that. So you had a second meeting then -
KC: Yeah.
JC: Do you?
KC: Yeah.
JC: Right. Okay and what was, what was the purpose of that? That second meeting.
KC: Sorry?
JC: Have a drink. Have a drink, dad.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Sorry. I’m getting you to do too much talking.
[pause]
JC: And what would, what would the purpose of that second meeting be dad? The briefing. What was different from that from the first, the first briefing in the afternoon?
KC: Any changes of timing.
JC: Ah I see. Okay.
KC: Something might come through from group head or command headquarters.
JC: Yeah.
KC: That they’d found out something about Jerry tactics or something was going to happen.
JC: Yes.
KC: So that might modify the way you were going in. They may even change the route.
JC: Right.
KC: ‘Cause they were ‘cause your original route would take you right into the middle where all the German night fighters were.
JC: I see.
KC: So they would re-route you.
JC: Right. So they’d have updates on intelligence.
KC: To try to avoid that.
JC: Okay. So they’d have updated information. Alright. So you’d have that second briefing and then you’d go off to your dispersal area. Right? Is that -
KC: Yes. Yeah.
JC: Yes. Okay and then would you go straight in to the plane or sit around in the dispersal area for a bit or how, how long a -
KC: We used to sit in our room.
JC: Yes.
KC: You know, I mean it was Nissen huts where I was. I probably had about four or five guys on beds in the same Nissen huts -
JC: Yes.
KC: That I was.
JC: Yeah. Yeah.
KC: So I we’d have a chinwag or you know you’d, you may have wanted to go and have a bath or something like that.
JC: Right.
KC: You know.
JC: What else did you do to kind of while away the time ‘cause obviously there was lots of sitting around waiting isn’t there? So -
KC: Yeah if this lady wasn’t here I’d tell you exactly what we were doing [laughs].
JC: Right okay fine I think we’ll leave that to the imagination there, dad. That’s fine. Okay. [laughs].
KC: Yeah.
JC: What about things, did you play cards or anything like that or -
KC: Some of the guys did. Yes.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And -
JC: Yeah.
KC: And card games or poker and things like that.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Well, you know, poker’s a card game.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Things like that.
JC: Chess and things like that?
KC: Chess, yeah.
JC: Yeah. Yeah. Okay, alright so then the time came and you had to get in, get in to the plane.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Presumably you had to suit up. Just describe what you had to wear before you -
KC: Well, you’d, you obviously would put your flying overalls on.
JC: Yeah.
KC: But we used to have odd pockets in these flying overalls and so each chap would decide whether he wanted to take a knife, bars of chocolate stuffed down the leg or something like that.
JC: Yeah.
KC: In case you bailed out and -
JC: Sure.
KC: You wanted, you know. That was the idea was to take something like bars of chocolate.
JC: Didn’t you have ration packs as well?
KC: Oh yes.
JC: Did you have emergency rations?
KC: Yeah. Had a -
JC: Or something.
KC: Ration pack, yes.
JC: Yeah. Yeah that you carried with you.
KC: Yeah. Yeah.
JC: Right. Okay. So you had your overalls on and what else? What other things did you have to put on before you climbed in to the plane?
KC: Well, obviously the Mae West.
JC: Yes. What’s a Mae West for those that wouldn’t know?
KC: The Mae West was, was the, if you came down in the sea you wore it. You had your flying suit on and also your underclothing and anything like that and then this Mae West went over the top and it had a system of buoyancy.
JC: Right.
KC: But also you could inflate air. The little bottle -
JC: Right.
KC: With air and you could pull a plug plunger and that would shoot air and this thing would, from being close to you would suddenly you were in the middle of a floatation -
JC: Right.
KC: Gadget.
JC: Yes.
KC: Sort of thing, you see.
JC: Yes. So like a lifejacket almost. Yes.
KC: So if your aircraft came down in the sea and you had to get out of it whatever happened ‘cause it was going down with you on board –
JC: Yes.
KC: This was how you made your thing work so at least you.
[phone ringing]
JC: Yes. Yes. Okay so we’ve got that. And then what else? You presumably have a flying jacket would you, as well? That you would need to, to wear.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Yes.
KC: During the war they changed those quite a bit. I had one that was very woolly and fluffy.
JC: Yes.
KC: But it was also a nuisance ‘cause it was all padded in the wrong places and things like that for wear.
JC: Oh really.
KC: So it wasn’t, it wasn’t sensible.
JC: Oh right.
KC: So we chose not to wear that. We wore them in the middle of winter of course.
JC: Right. Yeah.
KC: But if we could get away without it we’d put an extra jumper on.
JC: Yes. Okay. Okay, alright so you put, put all that clothing. What about a parachute? Did you have to wear one of those?
KC: We all wore harness.
JC: Yes.
KC: What they called parachute harness.
JC: Yeah.
KC: With clips on the front and your parachute was a pack about that wide.
JC: Yes.
KC: Which was stored somewhere handy for where you sat.
JC: Right.
KC: In the aircraft.
JC: Right.
KC: And the idea was that if you had to get out the first thing you don’t enquire, ‘Where’s my bloody chute?’
JC: Yeah.
KC: You took it with you and as you went out of the aircraft you clipped it on.
JC: Yes.
KC: You pulled the thing so you come down alright, you know.
JC: I see. Okay.
KC: That was the drill that you were taught.
JC: That was the idea was it okay. And this was all -
KC: And I was pleased not to have to do that.
JC: Yes that’s good. Leaving a perfectly good plane. Yes.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay so that’s how you dressed. So you climb into the plane and then presumably what happens then the kind of engines on and you’ve got sort of checks that you have to do before -
KC: Yeah and you had checks to do and you got in to the aircraft. Each of us had our pre-flight checks to do.
JC: Yeah.
KC: You know, I had to get all my equipment, bits of equipment that I carried.
JC: Yes.
KC: To do my job. And if I was using radar which I was had to set up the radar sets. [ ?]
JC: Have a drink. You’re not used to talking this much are you dad? Actually, you are used to talking this much. Yeah.
[Pause]
JC: So you’re getting your radar sets ready. Yes.
KC: Yeah. Getting it all set up and you know you’d obviously plug in your leads to make sure you were on the air with everybody else in the aircraft.
JC: Yes.
KC: And just check that out.
JC: What about oxygen and stuff like that?
KC: Oxygen. Yeah.
JC: Pre-test that?
KC: You each had your oxygen point where you sat.
JC: Yes.
KC: [Excuse me] and plug that in.
JC: Yes and did you have if you needed to move around the aircraft you had presumably a kind of mobile -
KC: Yes. A portable bottle that you could -
JC: Yeah.
KC: Pick up. They were stowed in two or three places in the aircraft.
JC: Right.
KC: So if you I mean for instance if you wanted to use the loo in the Lanc.
JC: Yes.
KC: You had to go right to the back of the bloody aircraft.
JC: Was that presumably where the rear gunner was, was it?
KC: You went right near to the rear.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Gunner.
JC: Yeah.
KC: But to get there you had to climb over what we called the main spar.
JC: Yes.
KC: Which went right through the middle of the main wing.
JC: Yes.
KC: But also went through the cockpit bit where we were.
JC: The fuselage. Yeah.
KC: So to get to that you had to literally climb over this thing.
JC: Yeah. Yeah.
KC: With all your garb on you know.
JC: Yeah. Yes. And -
KC: Not popular that.
JC: Yes and a slightly personal question but what was it like going to the loo on a Lancaster?
KC: Shall I tell you?
JC: Go on. Yes.
KC: Well on one occasion my bottom froze to the, to the pan.
JC: Did it? ‘Cause it was a metal toilet seat.
KC: We moaned about these things and then they changed this seat from metal to plastic because of that. Because not only me but some of the other guys had gone to the toilet and found they couldn’t get their bottom of the toilet. It was frozen on. It‘s absolutely true.
JC: Oh right okay. Alright.
KC: And -
JC: Yes. So -
KC: Yeah. I don’t think I’d better say any more about that.
JC: Okay dad. There’s enough detail there. Thank you dad. That’s good. Alright. So, so you’ve done your pre-flight checks, you’re in the plane and then you’re kind of taking off. Now that must have been quite a spectacle being there with lots of aircraft taking off at one time.
KC: Oh yeah.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Yeah.
JC: What was that like? ‘Cause I guess you were able to, where you were sitting, look out and see -
KC: Yeah.
JC: Other aircraft around were you?
KC: See. Yeah, all the aircraft encroaching towards the beginning of the runway.
JC: Right.
KC: So they might have come right across the other side of the airfield. The airfields were pretty big.
JC: Yes.
KC: So they were taxiing around the peri track, they were.
JC: Yeah. Yeah.
KC: And suddenly all converge and all these aircraft were coming from all directions to -
JC: Yes.
KC: That one point.
JC: Yes.
KC: To get to the end of the runway.
JC: Right.
KC: That used to be a bit nightmarish at times because -
JC: You could have crashed into each other.
KC: Some of the guys used to get too bloody close and -
JC: Yeah.
KC: Bang the tips of their wings and things like that.
JC: Right okay so alright so can you, have a drink dad.
KC: Yeah.
JC: I was just going to ask you what your memories are of your early operations because that must have been quite, quite, you know, scary as a new crew.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Relatively new crew. Can you -
KC: It was, it was horrific.
JC: Yes.
KC: Is the fair way. In terms of there were these guys on the ground shooting up and trying to get you and you were flying along and suddenly there was a bloody great explosion out to the right and somebody’s been hit by ack ack and he’s exploded with all his bombs on board. The first time you see that is quite an eye opener I can tell you.
JC: I bet.
KC: And I used to see, we used to see it on almost every raid we went on. Some poor sod would get a direct hit from -
JC: Yeah.
KC: German ground ack ack stuff and what they, of course they had their night fighters up as well.
JC: And what sort of planes were those. Those were -
KC: They were –
JC: Messerschmitts, were they? Messerschmitt 109s.
KC: Messerschmitt and they were twin engine Messerschmitts.
JC: Yes.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And they had a tactic.
KC: The ME109 was single.
JC: Right.
KC: But they had ME110s.
JC: Right.
KC: Which was a two man crew.
JC: Right.
KC: Yeah. And they were deadly.
JC: Yes. On what –
KC: ‘Cause they had the latest radar as we had the latest radar.
JC: Right.
KC: So they could pick us up.
JC: Right. And what was their tactic? You said about them using to try and fly up underneath.
KC: Yeah.
JC: I remember you saying about that.
KC: Their main tactic was to get A, to get themselves into the bomber stream.
JC: Yes.
KC: Our bomber stream.
JC: Yes.
KC: And then they had to use their own radar to pick us up.
JC: Yes.
KC: Bearing in mind we were going across twenty or twenty five thousand feet across coming up from the ground.
JC: Yes.
KC: From Germany and across the North Sea and so on.
JC: Yes.
KC: So they would suddenly find they were up among us.
JC: Right.
KC: And we soon knew they were there because suddenly, you’d be going along all nice and dark and suddenly boom an aircraft blew up just in front of you.
JC: Right.
KC: ‘Cause they, if they attacked us on the way to the target we all still had all our bombs on board.
JC: And was that the tactic that they used to try and shoot up into the bomb bays as well.
KC: Yes they used to fly. If that was me flying along with my crew along there they used to come up there.
JC: Yes.
KC: And they’d open up because they knew all your bombs were in the bomb bay.
JC: Yes.
KC: On the bottom side of the aircraft.
JC: Right.
KC: So their idea was to explode our bombs.
JC: Yes.
KC: To blow us up.
JC: Right. Right. I see.
KC: And the nearest I ever had in my crew was when they did that ‘cause they did it several times but this particular occasion the, they were so close they were too close when they opened fire.
JC: Right.
KC: So the cannon shells came through the bottom of the aircraft, missed all our bombs but they ended up some of them in the front cockpit just missing me and the pilot and the other navigator.
JC: Right.
KC: But it was so close, bearing in mind we were wearing oxygen masks, the bomber crew.
JC: Yeah.
KC: But it was the cordite when the shells exploded in the aircraft.
JC: Yes.
KC: Was so strong even with oxygen mask I could smell, smell the cordite.
JC: Right.
KC: From the cannon shells exploding -
JC: Right.
KC: Inside the aircraft.
JC: That’s amazing.
KC: But also of course they came through and didn’t just stop. They kept flying through and this particular case of the attack they broke our plexiglass nose.
JC: Right.
KC: It shattered.
JC: Yes.
KC: So we had a gale blowing in the front didn’t we ‘cause there was no blooming plexiglass to protect us.
JC: Right.
KC: I’ve never forgotten that one. Yeah.
JC: Because didn’t you have to go down there as well to do the bombing?
KC: Visual. If the radar didn’t work.
JC: Yes.
KC: You didn’t bring your bombs back. You went down. I had to be able to use the visual bomb sight.
JC: Yes.
KC: The Mark 14 bomb sight.
JC: Right. Right.
KC: Lying prone and looking through the actual bomb site and directing the pilot verbally over the intercom telling him which, to go left, right, up or down whatever the case might be.
JC: Yes.
KC: Because I was using my bomb sight.
JC: Yes.
KC: To aim at what I thought was the target we were going for.
JC: And, and so what stopped you from just dumping the bombs and heading off home? Why, why would that, you know.
KC: Well we weren’t going to do that. Fly all that bloody way and not drop our bombs were we?
JC: Yeah I know but why, why was it so important to, to kind of, you know, get, get them on target. Would you have been required -
KC: Well -
JC: To come back again if you -
KC: Because when you operated the bomb release.
JC: Yes.
KC: You set in motion a line overlap camera.
JC: Right.
KC: There was a camera built up in the bomb bay.
JC: Yes.
KC: And when your bomb doors was open and you pressed the bomb button to release the bombs, it operated this camera.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Which then took a line overlap the ground that you were flying over so when you got over that back to base the station photographic officer came in and took the camera thing out of the camera, whatever they called it, you know.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Part of the camera away.
JC: Yes.
KC: And developed it and could, they could plot and decide whether you’d bombed your target or you’d bombed ploughed fields or something.
JC: Yes and so if you hadn’t hit the target they’d send you back there again the next night basically.
KC: That wouldn’t have counted as an op.
JC: And wouldn’t counted it as an op. So you would have -
KC: And your crew would kill you.
JC: Yeah. Yes.
KC: ‘You didn’t do it properly Ken. You made us do another bloody op Ken.’
JC: So but I guess on the other side of that there would be occasions where you were over a target being shot at.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And searchlights going everywhere weren’t there?
KC: Yeah.
JC: And you were trying to make sure you hit it and they probably wanted you to leave quick sharp didn’t they?
KC: The rest of the crew.
JC: Yeah.
KC: They’d say, ‘Ken drop the bloody thing. Drop it.’ [laughs]
JC: Yeah. Yeah okay. Alright.
KC: And I didn’t.
JC: No. No. No.
KC: And so when we came back I knew I had a good photograph of what we’d actually, where we’d bombed.
JC: Yeah.
KC: We had bombed the proper target.
JC: Okay so you did those early, those early operations in 9 Squadron and then you were moved to 97 Squadron as part of the Pathfinder force.
KC: Yes.
JC: Why, why were you selected to go to the Pathfinder force?
KC: I think we discussed as a crew because if you went there you got a promotion.
JC: Right.
KC: You got another rank.
JC: I see.
KC: Okay.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Yeah. And we felt that we’d done ten ops on main force.
JC: Yeah.
KC: What we called main force. We felt we were ready to upgrade ourselves.
JC: Right.
KC: And so we volunteered and went through the, of course we had to learn all the latest radar which the main force -
JC: Did you automatically get put on to Pathfinders if you volunteered or is there a selection process that you had to go through. Did they, because presumably they wanted?
KC: There was a selection process.
JC: Right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay.
KC: But they knew your record if you’d already done ten ops on. As I had.
JC: Yes.
KC: As we had on 9 Squadron.
JC: Yeah.
KC: They knew that you knew what was going on.
JC: Yes.
KC: Sort of thing.
JC: Yes.
KC: And they still put us through this course to learn the latest radar.
JC: Right.
KC: That the Pathfinders had that the main force didn’t have.
JC: So tell, what was the role of the Pathfinder force? What was that really about?
KC: The role of the Pathfinder force was obviously to find the target and mark it with pyrotech markers or whatever –
JC: Yeah.
KC: You were, had been told to use. It was also part of our job was to put down route markers because some of the main force would lose their radar on the way.
JC: Right.
KC: So we’d put markers down which were at their briefings they would be told that route markers would be dropped and look out for a red/yellow or whatever pyrotechnic coming down. That’s the one you aim for going towards the target and things like that you know.
JC: So it was like breadcrumbs was it?
KC: Yeah. Yeah.
JC: Laid for you and you did they breadcrumbs.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Right. Okay. Okay and why, why did they need you to put markers down? Why couldn’t every, every crew just - what, what was the purpose of marking?
KC: They were not highly trained like we were.
JC: Right.
KC: We had been put through these special courses when we joined the Pathfinder force. We had special courses to try to get us to work to the odd minute.
JC: Yes.
KC: Of time.
JC: Yes.
KC: Bearing in mind we were going on a twelve to fifteen hour flight and to talk about getting within the minute or two or whatever was quite a tall order.
JC: Right.
KC: But we did it.
JC: Yeah.
KC: The guys who were, like me who were Pathfinders. That’s what we had to be able to do.
JC: Okay.
KC: That’s why I got a DFC at the end of it.
JC: Good. Yeah. Your timekeeping. That’s good.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Good. So you, so you did this role and you, you marked the targets. Were you also dropping live munitions as well or was it just markers that you were dropping?
KC: Oh every time we dropped bombs.
JC: Yeah. You dropped bombs as well.
KC: Well when I pressed the button to let go the markers.
JC: Yeah.
KC: On that stick of bombing that I was using.
JC: Yeah.
KC: We were getting rid of incendiaries, sometimes incendiaries.
JC: Yes.
KC: Would go down.
JC: Yeah.
KC: A shower of them or it could be incendiaries plus five hundred pound bombs were going down.
JC: Right.
KC: It could be a whole stick of all that stuff.
JC: Yes.
KC: And then in the middle of that we were dropping stuff called Window.
JC: And what is Window?
KC: Window was the code name given to stuff that we used to throw out, disperse out of the aircraft to try to muck about with the ground radar system so it would instead of just getting, picking up our aircraft this was a massive metalised thing that dropped out of our aircraft and it caused consternation to the Jerries on the ground because instead of getting one clear blip of a bomber suddenly there was a bloody great cloud of stuff and you couldn’t pick out the bombers.
JC: Right.
KC: Because of our, the stuff we dropped out of the aircraft.
JC: It sort of confused.
KC: One of the tactics we were doing things against them and they were doing things against us.
JC: Right.
KC: But this was the sort of thing that we were trained to do.
JC: Right. Right. Okay. Okay and so were the Pathfinders always ahead of the main force or did they, ‘cause they had to mark the target.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Or did they have to -
KC: They were always the primary markers.
JC: Yes.
KC: They were Pathfinder primary markers.
JC: Yes.
KC: And you did that when you were, had become very -
JC: Yes.
KC: Experienced Pathfinders.
JC: Right.
KC: But then because some of the raids we had seven or eight hundred aircraft on.
JC: Yes.
KC: There had to be marker crews coming in towards the end.
JC: Yes.
KC: To drop markers for the last lot of ordinary bomber boys that were coming in.
JC: Yes.
KC: They still needed to find and put their bombs down on the target.
JC: Right.
KC: So the Pathfinder guys, believe it or not, we used to hate that. If you were one of the unlucky sods to come at the end you know you would get everything shot out of you because -
JC: Yeah.
KC: By the time you got there the Jerries knew you were coming anyway.
JC: Right.
KC: And their night fighters were up amongst you.
JC: Yeah.
KC: But usually very experienced Pathfinder crews that came in towards the end.
JC: Right.
KC: To make sure that the rest of the main force had some markers to aim at.
JC: Right. Okay. Okay that’s good. Alright. So, any particular, so you obviously did quite a few operations. You did forty five in total didn’t you?
KC: Yeah.
JC: And any, any, any of them stand out in your mind at all for any reason?
KC: Um -
JC: You mentioned Berlin as a difficult place to go to.
KC: I did ten ops to Berlin.
JC: Yes.
KC: I think what was the, there was, also we did trips to the Ruhr area.
JC: Yes.
KC: Which was full of anti-aircraft. That was a terrible lot to go over because they used to try to knock you out of the sky straight away. There were some trips. I’m trying to think. I’ll think of it in a minute.
JC: Well just while you’re thinking about that the other thing is obviously during your operational time was the, of, was preparations for D-Day wasn’t it? Going in to -
KC: Yeah.
JC: 1944.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And so you started to intersperse operations over Germany with operations over France.
KC: Absolutely.
JC: And so what was your role really in the kind of run up to D-Day?
KC: We, we were given targets, German targets on the beaches.
JC: Yes.
KC: The Normandy beaches.
JC: Yes.
KC: We were given targets for about three nights in a row.
JC: Yes.
KC: To cover the Germans.
JC: Yes.
KC: They had built quite hefty defence systems behind the beaches of Normandy and we went over, and we came down lowish to do it. We didn’t do it at twenty odd thousand. I think we were dropping stuff over, over the French coast about ten thousand feet.
JC: Right.
KC: And so the idea was to make sure that you clobbered all the German ‘cause they had tanks on the beaches.
JC: Yes.
KC: And they’d built in gun systems.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Into the rocks and so on the beaches and so we used to go and drop sticks of flares to have a look and then when we could see them we’d turn around and do a visual run over them and clobber them.
JC: Right. Right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay. So that was a, was a slightly different role then from what you’d been -
KC: From normal.
JC: Normal operations.
KC: The normal mass bombing.
JC: Yes. Yes.
KC: We did in places. The big cities in Germany.
JC: Yes. Okay. Alright. So you, so you did all that and that took you up to, to around the time of D-Day which is when I think you had your, your last operation. July 1944 in fact was your, no, sorry, April 1944 was your final operation I think.
KC: Where was that too?
JC: I don’t know. I haven’t got a note of that but your, certainly your latter ones you did, I think, ten or twelve operations over France.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Various parts of France.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Including the Normandy, the sort of, the immediate environment of the beaches.
KC: That’s why I got that gong.
JC: That’s right. Yeah so that was why you got the Legion d’honneur.
KC: Yeah.
JC: So yes you did that. Then you moved on to do sort of training type roles didn’t you? After -
KC: Yeah.
JC: Preparing other crews to go up.
KC: Yeah. That was one of the worrying things in my life.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Whenever I flew with people I’d say, I’d say to, when I got down I’d say that bloody Pardew[?] he can’t land it.
JC: Yes.
KC: He was doing what we called a kangaroo landing every time he landed.
JC: Oh really. Bouncing down the runway.
KC: Yeah.
JC: With inexperienced crews.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And your role with them was to prepare them on the radars and that sort of thing.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay. Okay and how were you feeling at this kind of time? What was the sort of, ‘cause you’d done forty five operations so an experienced hand at doing all this so what was your sort of feeling about things? Do you recall how, how that was?
KC: Yes. I felt that I was due for a rest.
JC: Right.
KC: I felt I was happy to come back again.
JC: Yeah.
KC: But I felt we’d had some real tough ops.
JC: Yes.
KC: We’d been on Pathfinders.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And I thought enough is enough for a while.
JC: Yes.
KC: And that’s the way it went.
JC: Yes and you had, I think at least one or two operations where you come back and you’d lost engines.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Yes and so -
KC: Yes, that’s, yeah at its believe it or not I was never terribly worried about that as long as –
JC: Yeah.
KC: We had two or three engines left.
JC: Yes.
KC: The Lanc would fly on it alright.
JC: Yes.
KC: But if you lost two engines -
JC: Yes.
KC: Particularly on one side.
JC: Yes.
KC: That could be, that meant that meant the pilot really, it was it was really critical because he had to operate the pedals to offset the fact he hadn’t have any power on one side.
JC: Yes.
KC: He’s got all the power on the left side.
JC: Yes.
KC: Or the right side.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And it needed quite a bit of physical effort to control that.
JC: Right. Right. Okay -
KC: But we had this chap Jim Kermans [?] who was a bloody good pilot.
JC: Yes.
KC: He was mature. He was twenty nine years old and we were all about twenty one.
JC: Right.
KC: The rest of the crew.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And he was mature, he was a trained lawyer in Australia.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And you know he was, he was a great guy really.
JC: Right.
KC: I didn’t like him too much as a man.
JC: Right.
KC: ‘Cause he hadn’t got any sense of humour.
JC: Right.
KC: But as, as an aviator he was tops.
JC: Yes. Got you back safely all those -
KC: Yes.
JC: All those times.
KC: Yes.
JC: Yes. Yeah, so that’s good and what happened to the crew after you finished your forty five operations. Did you stay in touch with them or did you all disperse to do other things?
KC: We soon dispersed off.
JC: Yes.
KC: To do, you know, different members of the crew, whatever their job was, they were sent to training schools.
JC: Yes.
KC: To, like the wireless operator guy would go -
JC: Yeah.
KC: To help train new boys and so on and that sort of thing. Yeah.
JC: Yeah. Okay, alright. And at the end of the war you were you did this goodwill tour as well which we hadn’t spoken about so -
KC: To America.
JC: Yes. So, tell, tell us about that. That was with quite a famous squadron wasn’t it?
KC: 617.
JC: Yes with 617.
KC: The one that Guy Gibson when they did the -
JC: Yes.
KC: Eder dams and all that.
JC: Yes that’s right. The Dambusters.
KC: They were based at that time at Binbrook.
JC: Right.
KC: And the AOC asked me would I like to go along -
JC: Yes.
KC: And fly on that trip to America with 617.
JC: And what was the purpose of the trip? You said it was a goodwill tour.
KC: Goodwill.
JC: So it was to -
KC: We were going to first of all flew across the Atlantic to Washington DC.
JC: Yes.
KC: And whilst we there of course we, the public were invited to come and look at our aircraft because you know we had, we had operational bomber aircraft.
JC: Right.
KC: So the public were invited in, in their droves.
JC: Yeah.
KC: To see our Lancasters.
JC: Yeah.
KC: You know, and it was quite a sight.
JC: Yeah.
KC: To have the whole squadron of Lancaster lined up on their airfields.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And the crowds would come in literally in their hundreds and thousands.
JC: Right.
KC: To see them.
JC: Right.
KC: You know.
JC: And what’s your memories of America having gone from wartime Britain. You know, immediately after the war to what was your lasting memory of America?
KC: I thought they were lucky sods.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Yeah because -
JC: I guess the food was slightly different wasn’t it?
KC: Oh yeah. Yeah, that was lovely you know ‘cause we were still on rationing back home.
JC: Yes.
KC: But there we had the best of everything.
JC: Yes.
KC: That we could lay our hands on.
JC: Yes.
KC: You know.
JC: Fantastic.
KC: Sorry that sounds awful but you know what I mean.
JC: Fantastic. Okay and, alright so, and so you toured around the States with this -
KC: Yeah.
JC: Good-will tour. Okay. Right -
KC: We were on Lincolns by the way.
JC: You flew on Lincolns. Not on -
KC: Not Lancasters.
JC: Right.
KC: They’d just brought the Lincoln in and we were, we took, was it twelve or fourteen Lincolns across to America? And of course everywhere we went, the first thing we would arrive we would do a flypast.
JC: Yes.
KC: Bloody great Lancs flying over the town.
JC: Or Lincolns, yeah.
KC: Or Lincolns rather.
JC: Yeah. Yeah.
KC: Flying over their towns.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Which they seemed to enjoy and we went right across. I mean we started off in Washington DC was our first port of call and then to Detroit. Across America to Detroit and from Detroit across to Kansas and Kansas to LA and from LA coming back more south. What was the place in the south? I’ve forgotten the big cities across the south.
JC: Was it Dallas or somewhere like that?
KC: Dallas, yeah.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Dallas was one of them.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Yeah and then back up to Washington eventually.
JC: Right.
KC: And from there and then we took off and flew back to England.
JC: Right. Right.
KC: It was, to me it was an absolute education ‘cause I mean we saw the states you know all the time.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Seeing places we’d read about and never been to.
JC: Yes, fantastic alright. Good. Okay so you came back and then you had your post war career and you carried on flying Mosquitos and then you converted to some of the early jets didn’t you?
KC: Yeah.
JC: And what was that like? Going from a sort of a propeller-driven plane to a, to a jet.
KC: That was an education.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Yeah. So that was, that was the early Meteors and then on to Javelins wasn’t it?
KC: Javelins. Yeah.
JC: Yes. Yes, okay.
KC: Yeah.
JC: So, good -
KC: Super planes they were. I thought anyway.
JC: Okay and you took and you took some of these planes on overseas didn’t you? I remember seeing pictures of you in places like Cyprus.
KC: Yeah.
JC: You went on training.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Operations didn’t you? Down -
KC: Yeah.
JC: Down there.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Were you involved in any of the sort of post war, so there was obviously problems in Cyprus and then there was -
KC: Yeah, we were there.
JC: In Suez and things like that were you?
KC: What aircraft did we have to go there?
JC: It would have been either Meteors or, or Javelins I’m assuming. Was it?
KC: I think it was Javelins.
JC: Yes.
KC: Yeah ‘cause when we were there we were the air commander of Cyprus [billed us?] we were told quickly, ‘You are now part of my defence force.’
JC: Right.
KC: Sort of thing and I was going off at night in the dark. My crew and other members of the crew and so on ‘cause they were having problems with the, what are they called? The Jews. You know the -
JC: The Israelis.
KC: Israelis. Yeah.
JC: Yeah.
KC: They were being a nuisance and coming over Cyprus and things like that.
JC: Right.
KC: And into the Cyprus airspace.
JC: Yeah.
KC: So we’d get scrambled to go and chase them off.
JC: Yeah.
KC: At night.
JC: Okay.
KC: But they were also Turkey were reinforcing their own people because there were a lot of Turks on the island of Cyprus.
JC: Yes.
KC: And the Turks were bringing in, we found out through flying -
JC: Yeah.
KC: They were bringing it, dropping in at night on parachutes.
JC: Right.
KC: Down to their own people in the villages.
JC: Yes.
KC: So we, more than once I’d been up the backside of one of these guys dropping stuff to the Turks from Turkey.
JC: What? Transport planes -
KC: Yeah.
JC: Coming over.
KC: Yeah I used to hone in on them I used to tell our control downstairs, ‘Got one, I’m locked on to him. I’ve got one.’
JC: Right.
KC: And they used to say 'Monitor him. Keep an eye on him.'
JC: Yeah.
KC: For the -
JC: Right okay fantastic. And then you say you carried on and you actually moved. Did a permanent stint out in Aden. What was going on in Aden? Why, why was there an air force base in Aden?
KC: I’m trying to think what made me, what made us go there.
JC: It was a British protectorate really wasn’t it?
KC: It was a British protectorate and I think that, I can’t remember how I ended up going there, what made me go there but that was a very interesting part of my life because you know we were the forerunner of what later was going to be problems up in the Persian Gulf.
JC: Right.
KC: From Aden I used to jump on aeroplanes and go up to some of these towns, biggish towns and so on the Persian Gulf which later became real trouble spots.
JC: Right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay. Okay so that was that and then you came back and I think you did sort of some MOD type roles until the end of your air force career in 1968. Moving around. Non-flying duties. Yes. Yeah, okay.
KC: I’d had my innings.
JC: You’d had your innings at that point. Had your innings at that point. Okay. Good.
KC: I was very lucky to get away with it, with what I did when I think when I look back at what I did and what could have gone wrong, you know things like that. Amazing.
JC: Amazing. Yeah absolutely.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Good. Alright.
KC: You’ve got a history book now.
SJ: We have [laughs]. So did you have any lucky charms or superstitions?
KC: No. I honestly didn’t. I didn’t believe in it.
SJ: Yeah.
KC: No. No.
PJ: They say a lot of crews are superstitious or they were weren’t they, you know and there was always this little teddy bear in their -
KC: Yeah. I don’t think I had anything like that.
PJ: Coat or something.
KC: No. No. No.
JC: No. You didn’t believe in all of that.
KC: No.
JC: Just a good square meal.
KC: That’s right.
JC: What happened, what happened when you got back from flying, as well? Presumably you got another, there was a debriefing.
KC: No.
JC: Was it a debriefing?
KC: We got a night flying supper.
JC: You got a – did you?
KC: That’s what it was called. The night flying supper.
JC: Oh right. So you had a good meal before you went and a good meal when you came back did you?
KC: Yeah.
JC: Oh right.
KC: When we came back there would be plates of eggs and bacon.
JC: Again.
KC: Beans and things like that again you know.
JC: Yeah.
KC: We, well we’d been flying for the last ten hours.
PJ: Yeah.
KC: Things like that and we were a bit, bit ravenous.
JC: Yeah. Did you take presumably in addition to your kit could you take things up in the plane with you?
KC: Yeah.
JC: A flask of coffee and things like that, did you?
KC: Yeah Mars bars and things like that. Stick it down there.
JC: Yes.
KC: There was a zip pocket in your trouser leg.
JC: Yes.
KC: And so on to stick a couple of Mars bars in there and things like that.
JC: Keep you going yeah?
KC: Just in case you had to bail out.
JC: Yes.
KC: People used to try and think ahead and think well at least I’ve got a couple of Mars bars I can have something to eat for the next couple of hours or so.
JC: Yes. Yeah, okay.
PJ: Did you all used to go out for a drink together? ‘Cause there was always this thing isn’t there, they say, that good crews -
JC: Well I -
PJ: All stuck together, and they all went out together like family.
KC: Well we did a lot of it. The strange thing was that some of my crew were not terribly social. Only one or two of them and we were seven in the crew of course and there was probably three or four of us that did that and there were a couple who always had a reason for not coming. Yeah. But you know we used to get on and let them do with what they wanted to do.
JC: Was there anybody out of the crew you felt particularly friendly with compared to the others?
KC: Em, Ken Randall, our flight engineer was a lovely chap. Brummy. You know, Birmingham. He was almost naïve but he was absolutely a totally professional flight engineer. He knew everything about all the engines. He could hear noises nobody else could hear coming from the engines and things like that and nice boy, nice fella.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Our tail gunner was absolutely, absolutely, absolutely broad Scotch so if we were being shot at, being chased he would shout but he was shouting in Scot and we couldn’t understand [laughs].
JC: Okay was, he was from Glasgow or somewhere wasn’t he?
KC: Yeah.
JC: Yeah. Yeah. Right. So, yes. Fantastic. Good. Any other questions? I think I’ve got most of the ones from here.
SJ: Yeah. How do you feel that Bomber Command has been treated since the war?
KC: Pretty grim I think. Politicians I think are absolutely shysters. They want, you know they want things their own way and, but they don’t realise how people are doing trying to please them and I always felt that some of the things I’ve read that were going on around me were absolutely terrible. Politicians, on the whole, I have no time for them. They’re just there for the moment and they get what they can at the time and that’s it. But then that’s me. I could be quite different from anybody else on that.
PJ: What about a medal? A campaign medal?
KC: Yeah.
PJ: Do you think it’s, that you should have had a medal because they never had a medal did they? They had the bomber clasp they just brought in. A campaign medal.
KC: Well, I had medals.
PJ: Yeah but a campaign medal for, you know like for actual the bombing duties and -
JC: You had, you had a war medal.
KC: Yeah.
JC: You have an Aircrew Europe Medal, you had a defence medal and a Pathfinder Eagle.
KC: Yeah. And I got a DFC.
JC: And you got your DFC as well.
KC: Yeah.
JC: But yes there was, there were campaign medals for others weren’t there but not for Bomber Command?
KC: Bomber. We didn’t get anything special campaign for the -
JC: No.
KC: All the raids we did. No.
JC: No.
KC: You know we were going off night after night in the Lancasters with a bomb load. Not just bombs. We had bloody great loads of incendiaries we were taking to cart and drop down. It was, when you think back on it was a dirty war really but we did what the Germans tried to do to us didn’t we? I think we were a bit more successful.
PJ: Well, thank you Ken for letting us interview you for the IBCC.
KC: Okay.
PJ: It’s been a pleasure to hear your stories.
KC: You’ve got some notes.
PJ: Thank you.
KC: Yeah. Good.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
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ACookKHH160725, PCookKHH1601
Title
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Interview with Kenneth Cook
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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01:20:59 audio recording
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Peter and Sandra Jones
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-07-25
Description
An account of the resource
Wing Commander Kenneth Cook was born in Randwick in Gloucestershire. At Marlings grammar school, he joined the Air Training Corps. On the outbreak of war he joined the Royal Air Force and went to America under the Arnold Scheme for pilot training. He continued training in Canada as a navigator/bomb aimer. He returned to Great Britain and continued training at RAF Cottesmore and the Heavy Conversion Unit at RAF Winthorpe. His crew were posted to 9 Squadron at RAF Bardney. After ten operations, they joined 97 Squadron Pathfinders. Altogether he flew 45 operations, including several to Berlin. At the end of his tours, he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. Thereafter, he served at 1 Group Headquarters, and then RAF Fiskerton, RAF Fulbeck and RAF Syerston, tasked with checking the readiness of new crews, specifically the navigators. For a time he engaged in preparations for Tiger force. At the end of the war, he accompanied 617 Squadron on a goodwill tour of the United States. After the war, he remained in the Royal Air Force and was stationed in Aden and Cyprus. He was awarded the Legion d’honneur and rose to be a wing commander. He retired in 1968 and thereafter pursued a civilian career.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1943
1944
1945
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Janet McGreevy
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Canada
Cyprus
Great Britain
United States
Yemen (Republic)--Aden
England--Gloucestershire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Rutland
Germany--Berlin
Yemen (Republic)
Germany
1 Group
617 Squadron
9 Squadron
97 Squadron
Botha
crewing up
dispersal
Distinguished Flying Cross
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Lincoln
Meteor
military living conditions
military service conditions
Mosquito
Nissen hut
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
Pathfinders
RAF Bardney
RAF Bawtry
RAF Coltishall
RAF Cottesmore
RAF Fiskerton
RAF Fulbeck
RAF Syerston
RAF Winthorpe
sanitation
Stearman
Tiger force
training
Window
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/238/3382/PCooperS1501.2.jpg
2a23a039a4e935255b71c83868fe4af0
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/238/3382/ACooperS151027.1.mp3
743d46ca47820faff3930564f5cdd69e
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
Cooper, Sydney Foster
Sydney Foster Cooper
Sydney F Cooper
Sydney Cooper
Syd Cooper
S F Cooper
S Cooper
Description
An account of the resource
12 items. Two oral history interviews with Sydney Foster "Syd" Cooper (b. 1921, 1528331 Royal Air Force), photographs and other items.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Syd Cooper 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
2015-10-25
2015-10-28
2017-09-13
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Cooper, SF
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
GR: This is Gary Rushbrooke for the International Bomber Command Centre. I am with Sidney Cooper at his home in Pointon near Manchester and it is the 27th of October. Sid, if you can just tell me a little bit where you were born and ‒.
SC: I was born in Blackpool.
GR: Born in Blackpool.
SC: Born in Blackpool 15th‒, 15th of October I921. I’ve always been a worker. I started work when I was ten. We used to go in singing halls. And in those days people used to walk down the prom singing away, you know, mill girls and that. And they come to us and said, ‘Hey, you lads, do you know “When the love birds leave their nest?”’ So I says, ‘Yeah, we know that’. So they said, ‘Can you sing it for us?’ So me and Metcalf (pal of mine) we sang it. Yeah, right. ‘Can you stand there?’ ‘Yes’. People walking by, looked in, seen those kids singing and after we’d got a few people there we’d buzz off. They’d give us tuppence and then we’d go to another one, and we did that.
GR: And that was at ten years old.
SC: Oh yeah, I’ve done all sorts of ‒. I’ve sold black puddings on Blackpool Prom for threepence apiece and gone to Chester, run errands for stallholders and this that and other. It was a past time of mine and er, I did that oh ‘til I was fourteen.
GR: Brothers and sisters?
SC: Brothers and sisters, yes. I had two sisters and ‒, two sisters and four boys, and our Jack ‒, he’s here somewhere, here he is, there’s me brother. He joined ‒, he joined, the bloody Fleet Air Arm.
GR: Was you the oldest or youngest?
SC: I’m the eldest boy.
GR: You’re the eldest boy, yeah.
SC: He’s three years younger than me or two years younger than me. He went in the Fleet Air Arm.
GR: He went in the Fleet Air Arm. So that was in Blackpool?
SC: So I tried to get in the Air Force when I was about twelve or fourteen and wrote to them and they sent me a form back to fill in. I filled it in to the best of my abilities and sent it off and they wouldn’t accept me. I wasn’t of the accepted standard required by the RAF. I only weighed about four stone, four or five stone and small, and so I never get in, but I got my own back and joined up and became an engineer.
GR: So you tried to join the RAF, what when you were, what, fourteen years old?
SC: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
GR: Which was a bit young.
SC: Yeah, yeah, well you see, because I wanted to go in as an apprentice, you see, and they’d go to school. They’d march down with a piped band, and walk back with a piped band all the time. I knew quite a bit about it, you know, found out about things but anyway it wasn’t to be.
GR: So you were turned down initially.
SC: Oh yeah, turned down. Well after that ‒ [unclear].
GR: Right so when was that? How did that happen?
SC: That was 1941. 1941 I joined the Air Force.
GR: And they sent you for training?
GR: Sent me for training as a flight engineer, which I passed and came away with a first class and went to er, ‒, posted to Blackpool. That’s where I come from. And you’re posted in The Progress Hotel. I thought, ‘I know her, I know her, I know the owner’. It’s just gone out of my bloody mind now, I thought ‘Smashing!’ I walked in there, walked in there, bloody queer you know. Holmes, Mrs Holmes. Bloody place, we were just in one room, just beds, nothing else. Electric light, yes. Heating, no. And this was 1941, Christmas. So, anyway, I was posted ‒. I was going on to 256 Squadron then at Squires Gate, which I knew, and we had to walk there and have meals, and then walk right across the airport to where we were. I had A for alpha er, to look after from a flight engineer’s, from an engineer’s point of view
GR: So you were a fitter engineer.
SC: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I never had a fly in one. There was an accident there with a Blackburn Botha, Blackburn Botha, and a flood and one of our aircraft, it was a Defiant, Defiant and that was a bad aircraft and over Central Station it crashed, but of course I didn’t know much about it because I was in the Air Force at the time. Anyway, I left there ‒.
GR: Just going back, 256 Squadron where you was an engineer fitter. Was it Hurricanes and Defiants?
SC: Pardon?
GR: Hurricanes and Defiants?
SC: That’s right, yeah.
GR: And what did that encompass? Was you an engine fitter?
SC: Engine fitter. Yes. Engine fitter and, of course, they had the same engines in them anyway. And I got posted then to Stradishall and there was no aircraft there or anything. We were waiting for it to commence and I was on Air Speed Oxfords ‒,
GR: Still as a fitter?
SC: Oh yeah, yeah and sort them. Oh, Stradishall was a queer place. There was 214 Squadron were there on Wellingtons and er ‒.
GR: Stirlings I think?
SC: Stirlings, yes there were, 3 Group and oh, I don’t know who I was with but there was another squadron on the station, 138 Squadron. They had Whitleys.
GR: Sid’s putting his fingers to be silent. I think 138 was a special duties squadron.
SC: They had Whitleys, Manchesters and ‒, oh, it’s just gone out of my head, and you know ‒.
GR: You said Manchesters. Halifax, Stirlings?
SC: No, no, no.
GR: Lysanders?
SC: Lysanders, Westland Lysanders [emphasis]. They had Whitleys and Lysanders and er, I have seen people [unclear] taking secret people to France. I see them get up the rope. Anyway, there was one incident that I saw, a Stirling, sorry a Lysander, skid and go in the back of a wagon, just pulled the canvas off, nobody hurt, nobody killed, but we went when it was terrible weather, terrible weather. We didn’t have an aircraft at all but we were employed clearing the runways. My address was number 35, Married Quarters, an empty, empty house. There was nothing there, just three beds in there, no lockers, anything at all, just three beds then usual blankets for to cover us, two blankets apiece, and in the morning we had to get out there, no fire, no hot water and we got all wet through. We had to put our wet trousers on and go out again ‘cause there was nowhere to dry ‘em. Anyway, there was no flying for about eight days it was that bad, 1942 this and ‒, I’m trying to think of where ‒. Oh, I was keen, as I say, always after the money, so I heard they were forming the RAF Regiment so I jumped down and wanted to join the RAF Regiment. They says, ‘Who are yer?’ I says ‘I’m here, I’m there’, anyway he says, ‘You can’t’. You see, because in the Air Force there was six groups of money.
GR: That’s right.
SC: All the people could be of the same rank but all on different money dependent on training. There was group one engineers, group two, group three, group four, group five, and six was ‘M’ [unclear] medical . You can only re-muster upwards and you’re at the top and there’s nowhere you could go. So I says ‘Oh, right, so’.
GR: Probably, as an engineer fitter you was more needed as that.
SC: That was the best job they had in the RAF for people of my age. Anyway, I decided I’d go in as a flight engineer.
GR: So you volunteered for aircrew.
SC: Yes, volunteered for air crew. So they says, ‘Yes, medical, this, that and the other, yes. You’re just the type we want’, so I went as aircrew.
GR: ‘Cause I believe in 1942 as Bomber Command was moving into four engine bombers ‒
SC: That’s right.
GR: Stirlings, Lancs, Hallifax.
SC: Exactly.
GR: So, the extra crew member they needed was the flight engineer.
SC: And a gunner, mid upper gunner.
GR: With your background obviously ‒. So did you do training then? More training?
SC: This will amuse you. Jack Campbell [?], he joined together with me. We even started school together he and I. He joined, he was going as a gunner, wireless operator air gunner, WOP AGs they called them. So of course, being volunteers we were tested, you weren’t tested if you were brought, you was summoned in, so we went into a little room, not much bigger than my lounge and there was queues in there so we go in the queues and was given a bible apiece, a bible apiece, so we were there he recited something and we’d repeat it you know, obeying all the laws and kings and queens and that bloody rubbish. So, we said, ‘Yes, so where’s this bloody shilling coming in?’ The King’s shilling I’d heard of, anyway we came out of there with no shilling. Well, I thought he’s had about 50 shillings that should have been ours, or not. But apparently it’s a myth I think [unclear]. So, that was it. Anyway, so I was in, so I went from there to er, I’ll go and try and find it the name ‒ but it was the head place, the main headquarters, where the boy entrants were and all that ‒ .
GR: Alton?
SC: Alton. Correct, correct. We went there to new entrant headquarters. We were there for a fortnight. Of course, we were hierarchy you see, so that was fair enough, altogether we were off on our way, marched up, and they decided so many people, and we all got a corporal in charge of us and we went to Cardiff, yes Cardiff. ‘Where we going now?’ Goes up the road, another train, we end up in Llanelly, I don’t know, it was always called ‘Slash’ to airmen. We went to Number 1 SDF air crew training, gunnery school, Pembray and that’s me at Pembray. You can see me, the good looking one.
GP: We’re just looking at the photograph of the good looking one on the front row?
SC: Yeah, and he was the instructor, Flight Sergeant Marley.
GR: RAF Rembray, Number 1 Air Gunnery School
SC: That’s right.
GR: January 1943. Wonderful photograph.
SC: Yeah, right. So then came the good news in the morning. He said ‘You lads go out and enjoy yourselves’. Out we went, you see, we’d just arrived, come back, then in the morning we were told what we were going to do. We were under this gentleman. He says, ‘Well this is a very interesting course that you’re going on and of course you’re going to learn a lot. And that’s the good news. Now the bad news, you are not allowed out all week’. Couldn’t get out of the camp, couldn’t go for a drive, so we started about half past eight in the morning to about eight o’clock at night learning about these guns, trying to fit a nice [unclear] on ball turret , different things and armour piercing bullets, and tracer bullets and Christ knows what. Anyway we learned about them SGO Vickers gas operated guns, Tommy guns and oh we left there, all of us one morning, we’re off again. This is after about eight days. We got on this train and went to Cardiff, to Cardiff and then we went from Cardiff to ‒.
GR: It doesn’t matter if you can’t remember.
SC: Gillston, Gillston, all off there and then we were marched to St Athan.
GR: St Athan.
SC: That was a big place and we went there and we, of course, were greeted as we usually were with ‘Who are you? We didn’t know you were coming’. [Laughs]. Anyway, we went in the airmen, went in the airmen’s mess and got bedded down and the next morning we were all marched together, there’s more than this, this was just part of it, and righto, fall out, fall out there and he said ‘So-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so’ calling out our last three hundred names, ‘All here’, and ‘So-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so go they were there and so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so go they were there.’ So, they say right, ‘You are training to be a flight engineer on Halifaxes. You are going on Lancasters and you’re going on the big ones.’ Well the big ones was like going up in the air, like going up a mountain. So we were trained on Halifaxes and, so anyway, after we finished the course, passed out, in a puffer train again and we went to er ‒ oh I don’t know what they called it? Went somewhere to a con unit.
GR: Heavy conversion unit.
SC: Yeah, yeah, yeah, heavy conversion unit and this was in Yorkshire, anyway went there, and we were going to be crewed up there. The crewing is remarkable because this ‒ the crews which were there, they’d come off Wellingtons you see, of course they’re only a five man crew. They want a rear gunner and engineer and you mixed among yourselves and you sort yourselves out.
GR: And you’re in a big room.
SC: Yeah, well it’s nice. You go for a drink, this, that and another and they say, I suppose, ‘Well, he’s not so bad is he?’ you know and that’s how you crewed up. You’re not detailed. So, you’re going in with welcome arms. So, we joined, we joined up with this lot. [Background noise]. Oh, you’ve got that. I was trying to remember their names. That’s the crew that I was with.
GR: So, this is 427 Squadron.
SC: Yeah, that’s right.
GR: And the pilot, Sergeant Hank Henry.
SC: Aye, Henry, Hank Henry.
GR: Hank Henry and he was with the Royal Canadian Air Force and so were two of the other crew members.
SC: Yeah, that’s right but one, the navigator was a foreign officer.
GR: Yes.
SC: In the Canadian Air Force. Anyway, and there was no rubbish. Everyone was the same, you know, when we were out, on board, and so ‒
GR: And so was this the summer of 1943 or ‒
SC: No, winter ’43, early.
GR: Early winter 1943.
SC: Early ‘43.
GR: You crewed up at 427 Squadron.
SC: Yes, you see, they’d been on Wellingtons. They’d already got some ops in so we went over to er ‒ and we were taken to er, Leeming.
GR: Leeming.
SC: Leeming in Yorkshire. Well, that was 6 Group. That was the first group being formed with Canadians, so it was Canadian governed from start to finish and that was OK. So we did a few ops there. I can’t remember how many, about twelve, something like that.
GR: Can you remember your first operation that you flew on?
SC: Yeah, Bochum, yeah, I’ll never forget that, Bochum, and the navigator says to me, ‘This is where we’re going’ and oh I was dead keen, you know, up for it, dead keen, and Christ it looked as if you could put your hand in it, for flak. I thought, ‘ This is good’. Anyway ‒
GR: So, just before the first operation you had your briefing. Was you frightened? Was you looking forward to it? Or did you just take it in your stride?
SC: Well, well, I mean I didn’t know anything about it. You know, it was all completely new to you. We did a few cross countries, high and low tests, and one thing and another but we were all keen on things you see. No, well, a Halifax is a difficult, I hasten to add, ‘cause there’s twelve tanks, six in each main plane and ‒
GR: And they’re your responsibility.
SC: Oh yeah, well we had good, good skins. I mean you didn’t ask anything, I just said to Hank, I said, ‘I’m just going to switch over’, ‘Aye, OK’, he said, you see. So, anyway ‒.
GR: Did it make you feel a bit easier when you did your first operation that some of the other crew had already done ops?
SC: Well, well, yeah, I mean, you know, they were old hands, you know. Well, they were very, very, very good, you know, we got on marvellous. And people say to me, ‘Well, what did the bomb aimer do? And I’d say, ‘I don’t know’. Well, I was that busy myself ‘cause I got a panel there with all the instruments that the pilot had and I’m watching them for pressure, pressure, temperature and this, that and the other. Very, very keen ‒ and I had [unclear]
GR: Careful with your chair Sid, you’re about to go over some of your photos. Now, that’s alright, leave it there. So, Bochum was a bad one, the first one, lots of flak.
SC: Pardon? Well, yeah, well, I mean there’s not much difference to them but I mean before that I’d had nothing to compare it with. Because I remember one ‒, one place I think ‒, and I’ve got a bad memory, I think it was Wuppertal we went to. We went up there and I’d been looking through the little dome that I had, little dome, and ‘Christ there’s something coming towards us!’ And I just says, ‘Duck!’ and we went under it and it went over and this was absolutely forbidden to go over the target the wrong way, so we’d gone over and you should go right round and have another go but er, anyway, we managed that and we got on very well, very well, anyway it had become probably September, September, September they formed 427 Squadron at Leeming. They were all Canadian there and they decided, the powers that be, decided to form another squadron, namely 514 Squadron, 3 Group. 514 Squadron 3 Group and of course they were getting short, well I hadn’t been told but it appeared that they were getting short of technical staff ‘cause they had nothing, just can’t get them. [unclear]. So ‒, so we went there and it was a place called Foulsham, went to this place.
GR: So is that your whole crew?
SC: No, no just me.
GR: Just you.
SC: Just me. Engineer. So, I finished me flying, I hadn’t done a tour but they decided because where’d they get all the fitters from? See, you know, you need what? One hundred and fifty or two hundred men of different types. So anyway we goes there and they didn’t have an aircraft, they hadn’t even got an aircraft but they were forming the people. I’d overstepped it. Who should ‒, who should be the only sergeant? But Giles, who I knew at Stradishall. He was bent and he was a corporal. He had an accident where he got a screwdriver in his eye, lost his eye, and requested he stopped in the Air Force and he stopped on in the Air force until he was demobbed in ‘46 and he died when he was about 96 or 98. I used to go and see him.
GR: How did you feel about going from ground crew down to obviously air crew and back down to ground crew again?
SC: Yeah, well, I was promoted to Sergeant as a tradesman.
GR: But did you not want to keep on flying?
SC: Well, well not really. It was a relief to some extent but I missed the camaraderie that existed. It was absolutely marvellous. There was one occasion and I forget where we were going, on ops and my ‒, say this is the aircraft, my seat was here, here’s the bulkhead with my instruments on, well I couldn’t see ‘em from there, so I got my parachute and I used to sit on it, sit on this parachute and underneath was a lot of oxygen bottles, yep, and I could look up at them like this or stand up. Anyway, on one occasion I’m going to the back, going to the toilet actually, going to the back there and I grabbed my parachute. The parachute was what they called the observer type that you clipped on. The pilot sat on his, that was the pilot’s parachute. Get this, I picked up the wrong handle, I got the metal handle. [whooshing noise] bloody parachute right down to the bottom before you could say ‒, bottom of the aircraft.
GR: So, the parachute exploded in the plane?
SC: Oh, aye, well, it’s held together with bungee cables, you know, [unclear] there’s no explosion down there. When I was there the other side of it was the wireless operator and I says ‘Christ, that’s me, if we’re in trouble that’s me’. He said, ‘It won’t make much difference, if it comes to it we’ll go together you and me’, and you know I nearly bloody cried when he said that, and I believe him. People, [coughs] pardon me, if we’re talking people many think I’m telling lies but I’m not, I was really upset, and I was crying with pleasure because I know [unclear] he would, I’m bloody certain he would. So, anyway that was one unfortunate bloody thing that happened.
GR: So you are now with 514 Squadron? Obviously back to being a fitter, a fitter engineer.
SC: Yes, yes, then we were receiving aircraft to make the squadron up you see and give them what they called an acceptance examination. You can’t just use it and some required some modifications, you don’t hold the system up because they put it in a different flare chute in, you have to put it in when you get to mace [?]. So we formed up and then in December 1943 this is, December 1943. The last operation they did, I forget where it was, but they went to ‒, went from Foulsham and landed at Waterbeach, which was new station, nicely built place etcetera was there, so we were there ‒, I think over ‒, I think it was the second Christmas we had the misfortune on sea [?] flight. They say that a bomb dropped off an aircraft and there was about twenty three killed, killed on sea [?] flight, but well, we don’t know what happened really. Anyone with any information was dead and it was a [unclear]. Mind you it was mixed, a lot of old, er, chaps who were on pension and had been called in you see. And I mixed with people who were much older than me. We’d got Charlie George, Charlie George and Ginger Leadbetter. They’d wouldn’t have nought to do with women. If you went on holiday, and it wasn’t payday, you could go on a casual and take a few quid to go with. So, I was there and Ginger Leadbetter came away, Ginger Leadbetter, aye, and Charlie George says to him ‘Have you got your money?’ These two were old friends. They’d be forty-odd. ‘No’ he says, ‘I haven’t got it’, ‘Well, wouldn’t they give it to you?’ ‘Oh aye’, he says, ’It was a woman!’ So he says, ‘Where?’ He says, ‘The officer, a woman!’ He wouldn’t take the money. [Laughs].
GR: I bet you [emphasis] did.
SC: Oh, I would have done but lots of people didn’t, not because of the women so much, but anyway it was ‒. I really enjoyed myself there, and the CTO, Chief Technical Officer was er, a ‒, oh Christ, smashing bloke. He knew everything that went on. Anyway, the war’s over Christmas 1945, that’s right ‘45, just before Christmas ’45. Only my eldest daughter was born at August towards ‒. I got no leave, not like today. Can’t get [unclear]. So, he says ‘Right, post you to Italy’. Italy, Christ! So, we went to Italy. Well, this was rumoured again, it wasn’t publicised but it’s rumoured and I really want to emphasise this is rumour, that there was a chance of a war breaking out between Yugoslavia and Italy ‘cause Italy was on our side then.
GR: Yes.
SC: They changed, you see, and this was to show force and round about fifteen bombers, Lancasters, used to come out every day, land at Pomigliano, which is Naples, which I was at at that time, or Bari, which is on the Adriatic side, along there, go backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. I don’t think they [unclear] on there [unclear] in their quarters. ‘Cause we were stable there, we had our own places in which to live, but that’s what happened and there was no bullshit there, nothing, and someone said ‒, you’ll laugh, you won’t believe this but it’s true, ‘A parade in the morning’, a parade [emphasis], ‘Get out’, ‘There is’, and anyway we all formed and don’t forget we got German prisoners of war in tents on camp. Somebody says ‘There’s something going on’, he says, ‘Cause Latchthorne[?] has had a bloody haircut’. He was the [unclear] officer, had a haircut. Anyway, a strike had broken out in the Far East, an RAF strike, and they were frightened it would go right through ‘cause we were, what you’d call, Middle East, Middle East Mediterranean Forces, and that was funny.
GR: How long did you stay in Italy for?
SC: Well, came back from Italy and this will amuse you, come back, I think it would be June when, this is testing my memory, when apparently political things had settled down a bit, we were withdrawn and we came back from there and then ‒
GR: So about June 1946?
SC: Yes, yes,
GR: Came back to the UK?
SC: Yeah, came back. Didn’t know where we’d go. We see all these go backwards and forwards, go back on a train six in a carriage, six senior COs in a carriage, in a compartment, and eight for the others and we’re there and I said, ‘We ain’t gonna get any bloody sleep here’, took us four or five days to get home. So I says, I says, ‘Aye, this is awkward. I’ve sorted it out. What do you reckon?’ So, I says, ‘Right, seats, one man on each. Right, luggage rack, one man on each’, so he says, ‘That’s alright, well ‒’, he says, ‘There’s six of us’, I says, ’Well, I’m coming to that, one fella lies on the floor between the two benches’, he says, ’That’s five ways, what about the last one?’ I says, ’ That’s me. I’m gonna make a bloody hammock over the top with the bloody kit bag ropes’. Of course it was alright for about three quarters of an hour but the rope broke [laughs] and I fell [unclear] so anyway that’s what happened. So we, we, we, eventually got to England across [unclear]. I don’t fancy the water. I says, ’I don’t fancy the weather, the weather’s supposed to be bad.’ So he says, ‘It’s not so bad, it’s alright’. [Unclear] you silly bloody dope. We came back on the very day lots of ships got sank on the race around England. Anyway, we er, managed and then early morning parade, calling names out this, that and the other, well this, that and the other, over there. And he says, ‘Right, you’re going to Church Lawford’. Oh, right. ‘Church Lawford, you’, and I was going to Church Lawford. That was the AFTS, Advanced Flying Training School, with Harvards (American aircraft). Well I knew the bloody engine’s just the same. So Ginger and I went and unfortunately ‒, Ginger, he was a rigger, on air frames on the other side, and we went to this place. Well, in the Air force when you go from station to station to station you have to have an arrival chit and it has to be endorsed by the person to say that they know that you’re here, you see, and there’s about a dozen, at least a dozen places, what with a medical here, there and everywhere. So anyway, different ones. Well of course it takes you some time to go to these people to introduce yourself. Well the first place you go, pay accounts, another payroll, so I goes there and signs in. So we went to the doctors and dentist, goodness knows what. The last one, where’s that? Where you’re gonna work. That’s two days you’ve been doing now. So we goes, and some NCOs seem to have a certain amount of freedom with the officers because quite often they knew more than the bloody officers above your engineers and that. You’d get engineer graduates from college and well they knew nought about aeroplanes. Anyway, goes there and when I was there you could tap on the door and then put your head round and he’d say ‘Come in’, or ‘I’ll send someone out in a minute’, you see, so he had that licence. So Wing Commander Perry (never came across a wing commander before in the engineering, very queer), anyway, him and I stand there outside, smarten up, you know, no answer ‒ . So anyway [laughs], so Ginger says ‘Come on, let’s go and get a coffee’. I say, ‘There’s someone in here’. He says ‘There isn’t. There’s nobody in there is there?’ I says, ‘I can hear him writing’. He said, ‘Writing?’ Of course, biros hadn’t been invented. I could hear him scratching, you see, ‘cause I had bloody good ears then, which I haven’t now. I said, ‘There’s somebody in there.’ So, he says, ‘Oh right’. So anyway taps on the door and walks in, stood in front of him, he’s still writing, Ginger is still next to me. This is true to the letter. He says, ‘Did you hear me say ‘Come in Sergeant’?’ He said, ‘No Sir’. So he says, ‘Did you hear me say ‘Come in Sergeant’’, I says ‘No, Sir’. He said, ‘Well f‒ off out then!’ [laughs]. I’d never came across language like that from a bloody wing commander so we bloody goes out. Anyway, we’re in the bloody s‒ here with him. Anyway, a girl comes in, calls in and says ‘Welcome’ and then that and the other. He must have been about forty five years of age, must have been by the looks of him. So anyway, we went over and there was two men that we were relieving. There should have been about five senior NCOs and rumour had it, somehow, it has just dawned on me that one of them, that I relieved, had been a prisoner of war and they still wouldn’t let him go ‘til they’d got a replacement, and they got a bloody replacement and that was me! I never seen him again, he’d gone, but I really enjoyed myself in the Air force to some extent, well to a large extent.
GR: When was you demobbed?
SC: Demobbed on 16th August 1946.
GR: And what did you do next?
SC: Well foolishly I did nothing, just hung about and that. ‘Cause I went to Blackpool, took the wife and kids to Blackpool and then I couldn’t get a job.
GR: Now, you’ve mentioned it, was you married?
SC: Pardon?
GR: Was you married during the war?
SC: Yeah, I was married in 1946, 1946. No, no. no, married in 19‒.
GR: ‘Cause you mentioned your wife a couple of times.
GR: Before the war started?
SC: Oh no, no.
GR: During the war? It doesn’t matter exactly when.
SC: Married in May ‘44, May 1944 ‘cause I wouldn’t get married while I was flying.
GR: While you was flying.
SC: My wife wanted to get married earlier but I wouldn’t, not while I was flying, so we married in the April next year, er, ’44.
GR: So after you’re demobbed, back in Blackpool.
SC: Back in Blackpool. I couldn’t get jobs and that was a terrible place for employment.
GR: Unless you was singing on the pier.
SC: [Laughs] That’s right but my voice had gone so I couldn’t and I got some contacts in Blackpool but it wasn’t to be and I went to Standard Telephones and er, in the model shop, gets out of there, goes back to Blackpool, went to the accounts department. I had a good job there ‘cause there was two of us in my place, a big place was Standard Telephones. Chap next to me, he was first class, he went on holiday, [unclear] I got a lot less. Anyway I must have suited them ‘cause I got a £2 pay rise. They used to come in and put it face down in case anybody had a look. Oh Christ, £2! So I got a job there then. Well, when I was at Church Lawford I was dealing direct with a company where the ‒, a motor company, that was agents, main agents for Pratt and Whitney you see, I’d lend them stuff and they knew me by name. Anyway, ‘course I know [unclear] ‘cause there was no one above me, I was the gaffer, and I left there and joined British Airways, British Airways. My brother said to me, ’Oh, you want to get with British Airways, they’re good in aircraft despatch and that’, because you got to work out the balance before it went in the air. You know when you’re a kid and you’re on a seesaw you’re going one way, ‘hey there, get further back and get so and so’. Well you can’t do that with an aeroplane. It’s got to be balanced before it’s up. You can’t do it once it’s up.
GR: So you joined British Airways as a ‒?
SC: As a clerk, as a clerk on five pounds nineteen shillings and sixpence. And I lost twelve quid. I was bloody annoyed. Anyway I went up and eventually there was a new system coming out and I don’t know how it got about but I became top of Europe, you know, ‘cause I said to my boss, I says, ‘Are you trying to make a bloody fool of me on that bloody thing?’ ‘No, no, no’ he says ‘You must go’. Anyway I came top, and it was only British Airways of course. So I was promoted to the hierarchy and I stayed there until I left when I was sixty, ‘cause my wife was very poorly so I had to leave there. In fact I got a letter here ‒
GR: So you finished your working career with British Airways?
SC: No, I got a letter here to say that one of 427 Squadron had crashed on BA property and they were holding a meeting, I got it here somewhere, the meeting. Yeah, that’s it, that’s the letter they sent me. Because I belonged ‒.
GR: British Airways have dedicated a memorial to 427 Squadron for a crashed aircraft and did you attend the unveiling?
SC: No, well I couldn’t leave the wife and she wasn’t fit to fly so I never went.
Gr: So, I’ll switch off.
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ACooperS151027
PCooperS1501
Title
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Interview with Syd Cooper. One
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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00:47:48 audio recording
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Pending review
Date
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2015-10-27
Description
An account of the resource
Sidney Cooper was born in Blackpool and joined the Royal Air Force in 1941. He first served as an engine fitter in Fighter Command before remustering as aircrew. He flew operations as a flight engineer with 427 Squadron from RAF Leeming. He later served as ground crew with 514 Squadron. On leaving the Royal Air Force in 1946 he worked for Standard Telephones and British Airways.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Air Force. Fighter Command
Royal Canadian Air Force
Spatial Coverage
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Germany
Great Britain
Italy
England--Norfolk
England--Suffolk
England--Yorkshire
Temporal Coverage
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1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
Contributor
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Christine Kavanagh
Creator
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Gary Rushbrooke
427 Squadron
514 Squadron
aircrew
Botha
Defiant
fitter engine
flight engineer
ground crew
ground personnel
Halifax
Hurricane
Lancaster
military living conditions
Operation Dodge (1945)
RAF Church Lawford
RAF Foulsham
RAF Leeming
RAF Stradishall
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/238/3383/PCooperS1501.1.jpg
2a23a039a4e935255b71c83868fe4af0
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/238/3383/ACooperSF170913.1.mp3
f5ab974b220266502dd18f4c17ee7b44
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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Cooper, Sydney Foster
Sydney Foster Cooper
Sydney F Cooper
Sydney Cooper
Syd Cooper
S F Cooper
S Cooper
Description
An account of the resource
12 items. Two oral history interviews with Sydney Foster "Syd" Cooper (b. 1921, 1528331 Royal Air Force), photographs and other items.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Syd Cooper and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-10-25
2015-10-28
2017-09-13
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Cooper, SF
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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SP: So this is Suzanne Pescott and I’m interviewing Syd Foster Cooper today for the International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archive. We are at Syd’s home and it’s the 13th of September 2017. So, Syd do you want to tell me a little about life before the war?
SC: Well, I lived in Blackpool and Blackpool is a peculiar thing, I’ve worked on the Promenade, I’ve sold black puddings for threepence, with mustard on, and I’ve run errands, I’ve demonstrated yo-yos: anything for money. I was money mad. Run errands for people and that was my, that was my life, which I enjoyed and I used give everything to my mother, I never kept any money. But I really enjoyed it, but of course times were hard in those days, you know. People used, mill girls walking arm in arm singing the tunes. You see Trevor MacGoff, a friend of mine, we knew all the tunes when they came out you see, and we went past the singing rooms – there was about four singing rooms in Blackpool – they said, ‘hey do you know Shepherd of the Hills?’ ‘Yeah, aye.’ [Indecipherable] They said ‘can you sing it for us?’ And we’d sing it for ‘em and they’d say aye, they do! And these’d just come out! So they got us to sing, he and I, we’d be about twelve, or ten, and we sang it and we knew all the popular songs immediately they were published, you see. So we said eh, we’ve got some money here so we’d go to one singing room and say do you want any singing? Yeah, aye, and we’d sing a couple of songs, they’d give us tuppence, we’d go to another and do the same and that was anyway that was a way we earned money. Well of course the, we used to go to the air shows of course, at Squires Gate, and we, I don’t know, we joined it of course, there’s a war, I’m doing this, I’m doing that, I’m doing, and what they were going to do, you see, and some were going in the navy, I’m weren’t going in the navy, I didn’t fancy it – I couldn’t swim anyway - so I lost them during the war. Well I’m working for this, in the Air Force, I’ll go now and this, [whisper] see I’ve forgotten what they called it, it was 1521 BAT Flight, 1521 B A T and this B A T stand for, er, B A, I don’t know, anyway, they had curtains, had to fly by instruments, and one evening, this is just an isolated incident, one evening I was on night flying, would be about half past three in the morning, and an officer came up to me and said ‘where’s this so and so gone?’, I says, ‘he’s gone’, ‘how long’s he been gone’, ‘oh about fifteen minutes’. ‘Right’ - and the wind was ferocious [emphasis]. Of course Blackpool’s always windy, particularly the airport you see, and I’d got a big can of oil with me, and I was taking it to another part that required it, and I’m stood like this, and I was stood like this and he was saying ‘where’s so and so and what are you doing’ and ‘well, I’m finished in the short term’ and the oil was dripping out of the can. Not only was it dripping out of the can, the wind was taking it on to his trousers! [Laugh] Course you see I was only what, twenty and I got the wind up, so that was an incident, I never heard anything but I don’t know whether he ever knew where he got that oil from. Anyway, it was a nice place there and I’ll tell you an incident that is remarkable. There was an aircraft taking off, it had been raining a bit and the main planes were wet, wet, well the whole situation was wet, this was at Stradishall, I’ve just remembered, Stradishall in Suffolk, where the 214 Squadron or 138 Squadron, anyway, Bill come, said ‘I’m going up’, I said ‘are you going up?’, so he said ‘yeah, right’. So the Airspeed Oxford is hand started; you have to wind it up, you see. That’s on, you know, I don’t know whether you know aircraft at all, but on the nacelle, that’s where the engines, on the inside, you get what they call a dzus, that’s D Z U S, turn it a hundred and eighty degrees and flap comes up revealing place where you can put your starting handle. So I was doing this, this was on the port side. Anyway, I’m winding this, got it going, got the starboard going and said ‘you’re all right now’ and he throttled back, in the car, and pointing, so I looked and the flap had come up from where the starting handle goes in, enters. Oh Christ, so I go come back, you know, to lower your engine speed, you see, they’re not much, the, not automatic, someone at the front door, post, mail [pause] yeah, [door closing] so I tried you see, they couldn’t make the engine, no air coming, you see, because they weren’t variable propellers, they were just ordinary wooden propellers, so it was still a draught coming apart from the elements and so I tried to get up there. [Chuckle] I went up there and my feet come from under me - it was only a little to get to help you and anyway I stood right back until my calves were touching the leading edge of the tail plane and I ran right and I got to the top and I just get at the top and my bloody feet come from under me, over the top I went and the engines are running and I fell on the ground. There’s only a little distance between the rotating propellers and the leading edge, but anyway I was all right, and he was like this - the pilot - like that with his eyes, but I’ll never forget that, I’ll never forget that. I don’t think he will either! Anyway so, I left there, what did I do? Oh yeah. [Pause] Right, think it, trying to think what I, where I went after that. Oh, I was, that’s at Stradishall, righto, so I thought right I’m not stopping here, I’d gone to the top of me tree, so I’m going in for a flight engineer, that’ll be my bloody thing. So I went in to be a flight engineer; flight engineer I became, and I did pretty well on it and er, [whisper] and it was something new you see, there were very few flight engineers and it was the, went, had to go somewhere for stock, for stores procedure and all sorts of things that really wouldn’t be there, but anyway, we left there and went to er, to Cardiff and went to a place, Brays in Wales, and it's the Number 1 Gunnery School in Wales, and we had to, on an air gunner’s course. We arrived at Pembrey and went to, there’s a place, I don’t know the town but it was locally known by the blokes as Slash, we went there and had a few drinks and went in, next morning we paraded. ‘Well gentlemen you know this is going to be a very concentrated course, you’ve got to be full gunners when you leave here and it will last about eight to ten days. We’ve got a cinema here but there’s just one thing that well, you won’t be pleasant about and that is that you’re not allowed out, you cannot go out of the airport at all’ [emphasis]. So I said, so we started there about nine o’clock in the morning and sometimes we were still doing something at nine o’clock at night, and going on the beach and firing, firing different guns. See we had, we did really a condensed air gunner’s course, which we weren’t too bloomin’ happy. So, anyway we left there, oh, and my memory, we had to pass a course of aircraft identification, you see, because you don’t want to shoot anyone that’s your friend, [chuckle] and some aircraft are quite similar to the British aircraft and little bits of things that you recognise, so, I was bad on them so the chap said ‘well I’m going to cough every time it’s English, so come on’ [cough] English, friend, friend. Anyway we passed there and we came out and we went, went on the train and ended up in Yorkshire, that’s right. No, no, no, we didn’t, no, we went to er, there used to be, is there, huge place, Christ. We got off and marched up to this airport in Wales, and of course it was the training ground for flight engineers, and we marched in and anyway, in the morning we were got together and we were dictated which we were going to be: Lancaster, Halifax or, the English one, the big one, yeah, or Stirlings, and we didn’t have any option, we were told, and I was going on them. Anyway, that was fair enough and I did very well on that, I think. And so we were nominated, we were then flight engineers, right, see, and people were busy sewing sergeant’s stripes on and brevets; brevets were scarce was the flight engineers, I don’t think they got to making many of them but however we, whatever we would do and we went our different ways and we arrived in Yorkshire, and I can’t remember the name of the airport but it was a Con Unit - that’s a Conversion Unit - and along came some people we were just learners for the flight engineer’s point of view we knew all about the aircraft, or at least we thought we did, well we did, we came in, and it was some Canadians and they’d been on Wellingtons which only have a crew of five, now they need a crew of seven: an extra gunner and a flight engineer. And they did something which I think was very, very good, in as much as we went up with various people, you know, and we were, they were watching us do the job and that, you see, and they were converting from Wellingtons to the big aircraft. Well, we’d been there about five days and a chap came up to me - I knew him because I’d been flying with him – and he said ‘Syd’, he says, ‘I don’t know how you’re going to take this’ he says, ‘but we’ve been watching different people that we’ve met, people that with whom we’ve flown and it’s been unanimous: we want you to be our flight engineer.’ Well, [indecipherable] Christ, you know, yeah, and so I became their flight engineer. We’re there, we went up one day, we come down and we crashed, not badly, just undercarriage come away, and went to the doctor’s, went to the hospital straight away, nothing wrong with us so we got in, got up, went up in another aeroplane, anyway we did our Con Unit business there and I was directed to go to, well the number that were there, went to Leeming, Leeming in Yorkshire, and they were forming, then, 6 Group, because they hadn’t got their own Air Force on then, and so we were, 427 Squadron, was the first of the 6 Group, Canadians, and I flew with them. Well, and we had some fun, fun there. The first time we went I was a busy bee. You see you can have nothing to do but you can make yourself work, when you’re flying, you go and say how do to somebody and this that and the other, and that’s quite all right. Well, on the, I used to stand up on take off and I, the wheels, there is a signal in, there’s a lever inside the cockpit that you lift up and the undercarriage will come up, but it's governed that it must be airborne, [laugh] but I could put my finger in and lift it, lift it and bring the undercarriage up, but it shouldn’t be. Well I used to stand to his right hand doings, and quite often in the speed, you got chatter, chatter, and you put them fully forward for maximum take off weight but the vibration and chatter they would start travelling back and you had to hold them together, or sometimes I’d get up there and I’d hold them together, hold them by the fingers there and he’s again this, because we were taking over the Great North Road, and rumour had it, I don’t know [emphasis] but rumour had it that they stopped large vehicles going, taking off, passing there while we were using that runway. While, one occasion I’m there, we wore goggles in case you’ve got a window closed, open, well he, the pilot, Hank, would hold the control column fully, er, driving that, and watching the doings, don’t chatter, hah, he used to put his thumb up, right, okay, up with the bloody undercarriage straight away you see, because you gather speed because they had, they reckoned it was as bad as thirty degrees of flap, undercarriage down, anyway and I pulled them up. Well we’d done this several times like that he goes like that, I goes oh, oh with the bloody undercarriage you see. Well then, I felt sure it went like that, and I looked up, and it wasn’t that, it was because his goggles had fallen over his eyes [laugh] and to this day now, there’s only me knows that I brought the undercarriage up too early! Anyway, this was just the first trip of which I’ll tell you about, and it was a place called Bochum, but anyway, everything went okay and bloody navigator said to me ‘what you doing Syd?’, I said ‘I’m just having a look out’, so he says ‘come here, that’s where we’re going.’ [laughs] [indecipherable] I thought, well bloody hell. Anyway I was really excited and I used to do a lot of work and run backwards and forwards and I used to stand up see if I could see anything you know and help in that respect. It really took it out of me because, I don’t know why, ah well when we disembarked on arrival back to town, back to home, we were allocated to certain tables and we were talked to by the, by intelligence officers and making notes and what was it like, so and so, did you see this, you see, I suppose and then they’d compare them with others, and where’s he? Oh, and you could have coffee and rum – I was asleep on the floor! So, it had took something out of me. Anyway, that was it and we had a, quite a good doings. You see, now, the trouble is, I get embarrassed by your novels and people that write books and stories about Bomber Command and this that and the other because a lot of it’s not true, and you know, like they say, ‘oh Commander to tail end Charlie, are you there, Ned?’ [Laugh] I said all that rubbish ‘cause they don’t do that, no rank on the aircraft. The pilot, Henry, that was his surname, Henry, Henry was a sergeant, I was a sergeant, bomb aimer was a sergeant – he was Canadian - mid upper was English, he was a sergeant and the tail gunner was a flight sergeant, but however, and we’re on one occasion we were having trouble, we’d been what they called coned when you get a lot of searchlights on you at the same time and by jove it’s light and of course, I don’t understand artillery, but there’s some means that they can do something to the guns where the explosion takes, occurs, on a predetermined altitude. Well when there’s a do you go in waves, you see, well we know that eighteen thousand, they set the guns to fire at eighteen, but you see you get a wave and you might be going in at twenty thousand feet, you see, well the Germans – height twenty thousand feet, get ‘em up, but before the guns, they’d, twenty have gone over and someone’s come and they’re flying at sixteen thousand feet and they’ve got to readjust the guns and that’s the idea and in consequence you have to be on, over the target on time [emphasis] or otherwise you would be dropping bombs on your fellows or they’d be having a go at you! So it was very essential that you were there on time. Well, we’d had a do and we’d been evading, evading artillery and searchlights, successfully, and obviously we weren’t on course and he called me, ‘Syd, here, come here, what do you reckon that is?’ So I just got just across, you know, from here to that table, so I went, I says ‘it’s a lake, innit.’ So he says ‘yeah, what is it? Do you reckon it’s so and so so and so?’ I says, ‘Christ,’ I says, ‘I don’t know’, I says ‘I’m not geography, I don’t know.’ He says ‘I reckon it is.’ Well of course, I hadn’t thought, but you see you cannot navigate until you know where you are to start, you see, and of course when you have a few minutes of diving and climbing and that, of course you don’t, you’re not on course. Anyway we had to, we hadn’t been over the target, but anyway we did our job and came away and he managed to calculate where we’d been and he did a fine job, and that was it, but I’ll never forget that day. Deviating somewhat, I’ll tell you this: this is surprising. Well no, it’s a shame really, [cough] my wife and I, not at the airport, at home - this is after the war - and we went to a place and we were having a lunch and she says ‘I’ll go and get, I don’t know what I want, I’ll see what I want’, so I said, so I sat in a chair, I said I’ve got two chairs, you see, and I was guarding those and how you look around and up at the other end of the restaurant room, I saw a man, biggish chap, and he’d got the diabolical table manners, he appeared to me, and I’d seen that but I felt that I wanted to have another look and I kept looking. Anyway, this feller stands up and he comes wobbling down to me, I thought now I’m for it, you know, I mean I was eight stone wet through and he was about sixteen stone and I thought well we’re in for it! He says ‘do you know me?’ I said to him, ‘well I thought I did’. He says ‘only you was looking.’ I says ‘I know I was, I thought I knew you.’ He says: ‘well?’ I says ‘well I don’t know you.’ So he says ‘oh’, he says ‘I wondered why you kept looking up and I were getting a bit annoyed’ or embarrassed. ‘Oh’, he says, ‘that’s a Bomber Command badge in your doings’, so I says ‘yes’. He says ‘are you in the Air Force?’ I says ‘I was’, ‘oh’ he says ‘yeah, oh right!’ And of course we were buddies then. We were buddies then. So he says ‘where you go? I said ‘I go to the Cheshire Aircrew Association’ so he says ‘do yer?’ He says ‘it’s supposed to be a bit smooth there.’ So he says ‘aye, well I go to Barton, you see, that’s at the aerodrome’, I said ‘do yer?’, so he says ‘I’d like you to come’, he said ‘and you’ll like it and you’ll probably want to start coming with us.’ So I said - you see well he hadn’t mentioned anything about me looking at him - so he says well, I forget, he said ‘I’m known there, everybody knows me there’, you see, you see, he says me name’s. I said ‘what is your name?’ he says Morgan, he says, ‘better still, they call me No Fingers Morgan.’ I says pardon, No Fingers Morgan that’s the reason why he couldn’t manipulate his eating, so he says ‘they all know me: No Fingers Morgan.’ So I says okay and he was one of the New Zealander, the New Zealander surgeon that looked after the RAF and he’d been there and seen him and his hands finished there. So I says ‘Christ’ I says, ‘did you jump?, I didn’t know that till then, so did you fall out?’ So he says no. I thought he’d parachuted you see, and you could get frostbite, so he says no, I went there, and he was the flight engineer to see the damage and the door was just hanging on the hinges this that and the other, and of course he’d did what he had no right to do: he’d gone without oxygen, because we used to carry oxygen with us. That was, I’ll never forget that. But after a time they’d finished their operations because they’d all been on Wellingtons, they left there and I, now where did I bloody go then? I left there and oh, and er, oh, and oh, er, I’d been, well I went direct from there, I think I went direct from there to 514. Oh yeah, I went there to 514.
SP: So you went from Halifaxes at Leeming, you’re flying Halifaxes, to 514.
SC: Yes, yes. Now, I’d had an option to say would I like to be an engineer, I says I am a bloody engineer! So she says but would you like to do all the lot, so I says yeah, yeah. So I was an engineer, but I wasn’t sergeant, but that to come. Well I went to, oh, I went to Foulsham, that’s F O U L S H A M: pronounced wrong and spelt right, it was foul, terrible! Anyway we went there but 514 hadn’t started, they didn’t have an aeroplane. I think they had one or two, maybe, and they were doing what they call acceptance, you see you just don’t have aeroplane and go flying, you check everything’s on right you see. And they were just forming in Foulsham and they had, just prior to them forming this, but there would be [muttering] er, anyway, Foulsham and getting parts together and one thing and another, and I worked there on the aircraft, then, we’d only been there about maybe a month and we moved to Waterbeach. Well, who should be, no, I was a sergeant when I went there, anyway, it don’t matter, but chap come, Orderly Sergeant, Giles, him that I knew at the other place, and Jones, they were there, but they had to gather people from anywhere to form because, you see that shows you, those are just engineers, no, that picture there, the R and I – Repair and Inspection - he was a marvel was, that’s him there, he was just my size him, Squadron Leader, and well that shows, all these were associated with the maintenance of the aircraft.
SP: So what you’re showing me is a plane with about-
SC: Pardon?
SP: So you’re showing me a plane that’s got crew the width of the plane and about seven deep, so there’s a lot of people on there, so.
SC: Well, you can have the photograph if you want.
SP: We’ll photograph it and put it with the recordings, there’ll be a photograph of this, but we’re talking about the Technical Wing, commanded by Squadron Leader.
SC: That’s him. Jim Healey, yeah.
SP: Jim Healey, and this was at Waterbeach.
SC: He was a smashing, you see, and they were running short of engineers who could do the job, you see. I don’t know whether they blame the schools or not, but it was just the job. So I went there as an engineer and they didn’t have Halifaxes, they had Lancasters, and I never had anything to do with the, well you have to have aircraft as they come. Some have radial engines, some have in line engines, they don’t say pop ‘em on, we’re short of an in line, we’re not going to bother until we can get one, you know, so radial like a Hercules they’re a different thing, I never had much to do with them. Anyway, and Giles there, Giles in’t it, fancy seeing you anyway. Now, you see I’m just interrupting meself now, and there is too [emphasis] much emphasis laid on aircrew at the expense of groundcrew. Now Giles, we used to call him Farmer Giles, miserable bugger he was, but I got on well with him, and he didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke and he never did but work and he was a marvellous worker, sergeant, and he come and he’d lost an eye, I don’t know what happened, but in the meantime of me going other place he lost an eye, and him, he got on his knees to let him still join, keep the Air Force, and he stayed until he was chucked out and he’d only got one eye. I must tell you this before I go any further, well eyes, in those days went to Moorfields which is supposed to be the epitome of good eye people in London: Moorfields. He went to, sent him to Moorfields and they measured it or whatever they do, and he had that eye, but of course in those days they were glass eyes, plastic hadn’t got, I’m going forward, well I’ll leave that there, and he was a good worker was Giles, so that was fair enough. Of course I got promoted to corporal, I got promoted to sergeant you see, so that suited me, suited Giles and everyone, and I would say this, I don’t know why, but I was the only person ever [emphasis], as far as I know [sound of steps then drawer opening and cutlery] who they had a whip round for their marriage and they bought me cutlery and that, and Giles organised it and I’d never come across him before.
SP: And you’ve still got that one today – you’re just showing me the cutlery.
SC: And that was very, very, I was grateful of that, not because of the doings, anyway, I had that. Anyway, we went and we had our, oh, and bloody hell, 19, we went there in ’94. We left there and went to another station.
SP: 1944.
SC: And that was, they’d gone, coming to block one night, well in later days bleedin’, bloody Waterbeach, there’s limited flying and that, they says right, you’re doing, looking at, assessing equipment, so because we didn’t need it any more, finished, 514 wasn’t flying no more and you know. Service, you had different coloured labels and I had to sign them that: fit for reissue, beyond repair and this that and the other. Anyway, so we goes to this bloody place and there’s a Squadron Leader Knight was in charge and he says, ‘are you Cooper?’ I said yeah, he said ‘right, I’ve got a job for you’, he said. I said ‘bloody hell what’s that?’ See ‘cause they’d finished, and he’d just men there, so he says ‘we’re packing up and you can do that and you’ll be at hangar number three.’ So anyway that went by and Christmas time, no I’m going back a year because they had an explosion at Christmas in C Flight did 514, and there was about eleven killed, at Christmas time, but I was away on leave at the time so I missed that.
SP: Do you know actually happened?
SC: Pardon?
SP: Do you know what caused it?
SC: Well a bomb came off, bomb, I don’t, well you see, you never know you see, because they were loading bombs on and anyone that has an idea weren’t there! They were killed.
SP: So this was as they were loading the loading bombs for an operation.
SC: Yeah, I think there was about seventeen killed. But anyway, that was very sad. Anyway, where the hell was I? I got posted from there to there, I was there, I was only there two days and going there, and I can’t remember the place but it was a nice, nice place to go but I never went. They called me in says we’ve got a job for you, I says oh, so I said ‘where is it?’ He said, oh, previous to this, the, a Flight Lieutenant Wand tried to get me to go to this Spain, and Healey thought the world of me, I don’t know why, then he says, called for me, Squadron Leader, so he says ‘look do you know, would you like to go to Italy?’ I says ‘Italy?’ So he says yeah, he says ‘Wand’s put you to Italy’, he said ‘you don’t want to go there, there’s bloody mosquitos and that, do you still want to go?’ so I says no, so he says, ‘right, you’re off.’ Anyway, of course they all caught up with me, Healey goes, posted off somewhere else ‘cause this man he hadn’t got a job and then come and said ‘oh we’ve got a job for you – Italy.’ I says ‘Italy? But the war’s over’, so I says ‘well how come’, so he said ‘oh you’ll see. Anyway, you’re going to 1 or 2 LSU’, that’s Lancaster Servicing Units in Italy. So, bloody hell, so I went to Italy and unbeknownst to lots of people, I venture to suggest, is that there was a chance of a war breaking out between Yugoslavia and Italy over, it’s not called Siles, what they call it, the big city up north? I’ll think of it later, over this city. It had gone from one to another over the years and of course Italy had recently transferred their [cough] favours to England rather than Germany you see, so right. But of course you never get a hundred percent, yes there was still, for reasons best known to themselves, sooner be in with the Germans, but anyway, so I’m on my bloody way to Germany, to Italy. It was good in Italy, we did a lot there. The services had took the palace – apparently there used to be a king of Italy, king of this palace - you could go there and have a shower or something like that, press your suit for you or something, and in Sorrento, have you been to Italy? Sorrento, well the main hotel in the square, near where the YMCA was, they took that over as well so we could go there, I went there about three times for the weekend, free, and of course we could go over to er, Capri, Capri they had a Capri backwards and forwards. Well, I’ll come to that later. Anyway, Brown, who was a bit up, I mean I remember his telephone number, Weston 1368, plenty of money, I thought I’d got them in here [paper rustling].
SP: You went to the opera, yeah.
SC: And he made these for us, for, see these are all things that I’ve seen. They’re in English.
SP: So you’re showing me all the programmes 1945 to ‘46.
SC: Yeah, I mean with them being Italian, the one thing, Italian talk, all the time and you don’t know what’s going on, but that helps you.
SP: Yeah. Details for the British Military Authorities of Naples, all transcribed, the actual operas of La Boheme, Rigoletto, and you got invited to all of these.
SC: Well we went regularly, well we had to pay, but this chap was familiar with, something a bit highbrow. Brown they called him; he had a beautiful case like that, with seven razors in it, he says, ‘Oh no, I’ll use Wednesday today’, [chuckle] but he was nice chap. They won’t be interested in those, would they?
SP: I’ll photograph them so they’re with, I’ll photograph one of them so we’ve got it with it.
SC: Oh right. But it’s quite a thing isn’t it.
SP: It is, yeah.
SC: And we were at the piano which is on the first floor which is next to the Royal Box. You couldn’t have the Royal Box but we’d be one side or the other side. Of course we had to pay, and I thought perhaps that might, you might want that.
SP: So you’re showing me here your operational records for all of 514 Squadron, again we’ll put these, I’ll photograph this for the Archives and leave everything with you and take the photograph.
SC: I thought perhaps that was of some interest, the Opera House.
SP: Yeah, very much so. So obviously, after your time in Italy did you then return to England?
SC: Yeah. Well, I went backwards and forwards. It was hard work, but these bombers came in to let these, look we know what’s going on, but it was never published. I’ve never come across anyone that knows. There was between eight and twelve bombers, every day [emphasis] went there, somewhere, there to Bari, Bari’s on the Adriatic, that’s LS2, LSU2, on the Adriatic coast, Bari, B A R I. Funny part was, that railway line crossed the landing, coming in across the landing coming in, that’s aircraft there, but I enjoyed it but it put me back so I didn’t get released, but there’s no medal for that, no medal for that, no, not to this day there isn’t, because lots of people don’t know that it existed. I mean and they was nine months, backwards and forwards, these bombers, just to let them know that we were a force to be contended with, still, in spite of the war finishing; that’s what we heard. Well, I’ll just tell you this, it was there you never bothered about nothing, saluting or anything there. [Chuckle] Came up hey, there was going to be a parade. Parade! A parade, [emphasis] no bloody Parade! Oh aye there is, there’s a parade. Now, a strike had broke out in Far East and they thought it was coming right through, so they’d block it there and then. I’ll never forget, so we just stood there, you know, for this doings and bloody Wing Commander, er Squadron Leader Wright came out and said, you know, he knew about it, I suppose they had advised the Station Commander and he came and a bloke said there can’t be a strike, and Lapthorne, Lapthorne was the MT, Motor Transport, in charge. I suppose he was a Flight Lieutenant or sommat, but he was a rough ‘un, so bloke says there’s something going on cause Lapthorne’s had a bloody haircut! [Laughter] So anyway, that’s what happened and it didn’t develop. But we had a good time in Italy really, and that, but I mean lots of people decided to go home. Spent the first time, the first Christmas in Italy and there was going, there was something non, non, I forget the name they gave to it, you’re not to associate with Germans, English people, and of course it went with the staff. Well on this place we had what used to be a very big olive grove and we turned it into an RAF camp. We had German prisoners of war and - poor souls - they’d gone out the desert and they’d got shorts on, and cotton tops, and this was Christmas 19, Christmas 1965.
SP: ’45.
SC: Christmas 1965.
SP: ’45, yeah.
SP: Yeah. ’45 and so we said, and some of them, and some of them were nasty people because they belonged to German, Hitler Youth, and waiters in the sergeant’s ess, what bloke can do, can’t give them jobs. Anyway we held a little, I think I’ve seen a bloody picture short time ago of the, [drawer opening] oh that’s it, that’s behind the bar at, it’s the sergeants mess, but I’ve got one of the mess somewhere, and the waiters, and we held a little meeting, there was only about fourteen of us, senior NCOs, and said yeah but they’re bloody Germans, what do we do with them? They were in tents [emphasis] and this is Christmas and snowing. Yeah, oh Christ, it was cold. There was a fellow from Glossop, a sergeant, and he says, excuse me, you know, we were chatting amongst ourselves, what can we do you know, chatting amongst ourselves, what can we do, and this that and the other, we can’t talk, we can’t have nowt to do with ‘em, and he got the bloody real people moaning, because we wanted them to enjoy Christmas as we did - to a lesser extent - and anyway he says, the quiet bloody, this chap in from Glossop, the sergeant, he says ‘from now on we’ll call you’ -what bloody hell did they call him? Ferodo, - he says ‘your bloody behaviour would stop a bloody eight ton truck’, you know, Ferodo, the bloody battery works out there. Anyway, they enjoyed themselves to some extent. I used to walk to work, about from here maybe to the main road, which was quite way, taking chocolates for kids and sweets and they’d come and meet you on the way down. But anyway I come up, got, it closed. Oh Christ, we came up on the train, oh Jesus, through the Apennines and through Austria, took us about six or seven days to get home, on the trains! Bridges broken down and one thing and another. [Laugh] Senior NCOs, there was six to each carriage, so how the hell we’re going to bloody sleep? I says don’t know. We’d got all our clobber with us, he says he’s at it again, he’s going to organise this, be nothing when he’s bloody finished! So I says ‘right, seats across, one on each. One on the floor between the two seats, on the floor. Right’, I says, ‘and two of us on the luggage rack’, you see, luggage rack each. So says, ‘oh right, we’ll put on there now’, says there’s bloody seven, ‘there’s six of us’, ‘oh yeah’, I says, ‘I’ll make a bloody hammock!’ So I got some rope off the kit bags and this that and the other, emptied hammock, put it on the door, that like that and I was up swinging in this and it pulled the bloody door off the hinges! So I landed on him on the bottom! But anyway, you know, we had some really good times, I mean just didn’t, you see we, of course you can’t put it down he was with me, and he and I a very short, very [emphasis] short of people like us, not because it was us, but engineers and that, and someone had let ‘em go, you know, released, and I was, and both of us were sent, well I didn’t know, I was at Rugby station and he turned up. I says where you going and he says so and so, I says so am I! So anyway we’d gone to this here squadron, it was No 1, No 1 Advanced, it was letters, headlines, No 1 Advanced Flying Training School, so he and I were there.
SP: Who was with you?
SC: Well, he was with us in Italy. But I meet him, I met him on the platform.
SP: What was his name?
SC: Pardon?
SP: What was his name?
SC: Don’t know, he comes from Darlington, Ginger he was known as, he comes from Darlington. We goes there and we arrive there and there were Harvards, you’ve heard of Harvards, haven’t you, well they’re American. But of course, I mean they had American single bank bloody radials, made no difference to us. We got there and they was waiting, and it was said [emphasis] that one of the, the engineer, who I relieved, he’d been a Japanese prisoner of war! But he said right, I’m off and buggered off. Anyway I was in charge, he was in, and Ginger was in charge and there should have been about, there should have been a Warrant Officer, we’ll say two, four, four, er, sergeants and four flight sergeants with a crown over the top and four ordinary sergeants like we were, him and me, but that’s all there was, only him and me. Anyway, I must tell you this, although perhaps you won’t do it, but in the Air Force lots of people, you go on your own somewhere, you know, they needed so and so to go, right. Well you have an Arrival Form to have filled, with the various departments. Likewise, when you leave the station you have a Departure Form of which you must have endorsed for every place: doctor, dentist, fire brigade, gas, you had to have gas, and sergeants mess and so on and so on, so you can’t walk away with stuff. Well you see, of course if you’re going away maybe you want to, can’t get away quick enough, but [emphasis] to arrive is a different kettle of fish. We thought oh Christ, it’s going to be murder, it’s going to be bloody murder here, [cough] so we get this thing this thing, it’s about that size, got to go [laugh] and this that and the other. So, course when you arrive there you see, I mean I’d come a sweat then, I know what was going, a sergeant, you know, but I’d been there six years, and you live and learn, so course there’s this list and you go and get them to sign that you’ve reported, you see. Course the first one, where do we go? Pay Accounts, so you get bloody paid, second place you go: sergeants mess you want to get your head down you know, and all that. You see. Where’s the last? The last is where you’re going to work you see, so you go there. [Chuckle] So anyway, and [muttering] and we went there, I noticed, now I can’t remember his name and I know you wouldn’t be able to find it, it was a shame, but he was a Wing Commander over the engineering, Wing Commander White, just one syllable his name, but it’ll come some time, anyway [laughter] we goes to the, goes there, well I’d had to come, you know, polish your boots, extra [rubbing sound] buttons, you know and this that and the other. Anyway, knocks at the door. Well it’s a funny thing, but from the engineering point, senior NCOs, I mean because a lot of the officers knew nothing about the bloody job and they relied on you, you see, you usually knock on the door and open it, and say only a few minutes, er, girl will come, you know, secretary will come and let you in, so you while, so obviously, you see, so we gets up there, knocks on this, bloody Wing Commander that must have come across, right, knocks at the door, no, knocks at the door, no. So [laugh] Ginger says ‘there’s nobody in, bloody hell, come on, let’s go to the mess.’ I says ‘there is somebody in.’ He says ‘how the bloody hell do you know?’ I says ‘I can hear ‘em writing’, biros hadn’t been invented, I could hear [scraping sound], and course I went like this. I says ‘there’s somebody in there, I says, ‘I can hear them writing’, so knocks on the door, opens the door and there’s this fellow sat at the desk, looks up, carries on, so goes in. Ginger, there’s somebody, I say told you. So we goes in, so he says ‘did you hear me say come in sergeant?’ so I says no sir. He says [laugh] ‘well, eff off, get out!’ Ginge says ‘No, I didn’t hear you either’, says ‘well you can eff off and get out.’ So went outside then he come out and girl come and says Wing Commander so and so would like to see you. So we goes in and he was smart as paint. Oh, you couldn’t, and I would guess him to be at least fifty odd, fifty five, Wing Commander. He says well, he says, you’ve got a lot of work to do, and this that and the other, you see, bloody hell, I was, so I yes I understand that, he said do you know Harvards he says. No, I said, but I know the bloody engine. Oh right, so he goes there. I’ll tell you this, out of it, he’s walking round, and he’s got a, he was an officer, with a mil board to write down anything he tells him. So he comes to me, says Cooper, always called me bloody Cooper, Cooper he says, right yeah, and he got this feller, this officer, and he was knocking on as well, so he says ‘‘scuse me sir, ‘scuse me’ - I don’t know his name – ‘but what do you want Johnson?’ He says ‘you’ve got some white chalk on your trousers.’ So he looks this, imagine he’s tall, he’s about six foot two, and he looks this: ‘white, yes, chalk, you don’t bloody know’, he said, and he dusted it off, and anyway, he said, ‘you were right, it is bloody chalk.’ I thought, Christ, work with him. Anyway I know on one occasion he come there and said how are things going, oh they’re all right, and he knew everything that went on, so he says so and so and so and so, he says not working on this? I says no, I says it’s only just come in. It hasn’t, he says, I saw it yesterday, oh Christ! But anyway, he was always, and he’d shout full length of the doings for me, you know, are you there and that. Anyway, I can’t remember how much, but I had a sum of money offered if I’d stay on, it was about four hundred pound if I’d join, but of course I mean I was married, I had no home to go to, she was in with the mother in law and all that, so you know I don’t like going, but I enjoyed it really, I was you know, some days, important, aye. Well if you broke anything you see, anything like a drill, you had to take the shank, but the shank, not the twisted part, and give it them you see or otherwise you could take the other part next and get two! [Chuckle] Bloody Giles, he says to the doctor, ‘I don’t suppose it’s any much point in the stores’, so he says ‘why, what’s wrong Giles?’ He says ‘I dropped me eye’, dropped it. He says ‘you what?’ He says ‘me eye.’ His false eye, he’d dropped it on the floor: smashed to bits. So he said ‘I didn’t know you’d have to bring the bloody bits for an eye!’ So anyway they did, they sent him to Med, well you just can’t buy an eye. Now this is a bit embarrassing: [laugh] we was going on the bloody train, this is at Waterbeach, we were going to London. I was going to see my wife to come but, and he was going to Moorfields for another eye, well you just can’t order one, you know, it’s really. So imagine that’s the [paper rustling] carriage, goes that way. There was a lady there and a lady there, and they looked matronly, if that’s the right thing, well Giles gets in and gets there and I get there but, separate spaces, and right, off it’s going, so he’s going to Moorfields and I’m going to Welwyn Garden City over the, [laugh] and hustle and bustle, a man come in, big man, big man about fifty, fifty something, sits between me and that woman over there and [blowing sound], so opens his attaché case and gets papers, drops ‘em [banging on paper] thought we’re going to have a bloody good time then. [Cough] Anyway, it was obvious to me he wanted to go to the bloody toilet. So I, he, Giles, never told him, but anyway, he goes to the toilet, and he goes to the toilet through the bloody window of the, as the train’s going along. People won’t believe this but it’s true as true, and he come back, you see, dead smart he was, mac and bowler hat and this attaché case, and says er: ‘Well ladies and gentlemen, ladies, you must, I must apologise, what else can you do,’ he said, ‘and you too gentlemen’ he says, ‘but I wouldn’t burst my bladder if I was dining with the Queen of England!’ [Laugh] Bloody hell, people will not [emphasis] believe that! Now I used to be able to get hold of Giles. Giles lived till he was about ninety seven! I used to go to his house to see him in the Lakes. Now Jones lived in Birmingham, it’s really sad you see, and it’s coming to lots of people, could be me if I’m not careful, as he had to go into a home, he came from Wigan. I knew his son and he’s gone, but I didn’t know where he’d gone or anything and Wigan’s a big place really, and so I phoned his son up, so he said, well he said, leave it, I won’t tell you over the phone, call and I’ll give you, I’ll write it for you, letters, but he says but I must warn you, he says, he does a lot of sleeping and I think it is, I said to him across road, says, I mean if I’m here and this that and the other, there’s a, so that was it. So I went with British Airways for twenty eight years and then of course I got a job as a clerk and here I am, fed up! [Laugh]
SP: And you worked quite a long time didn’t you? Was it, what age did you retire from your clerking?
SC: Well I wanted to go till I was ninety but I was taken ill when I was ninety, eighty nine, eighty nine and I had to be brought home three weeks running, but it’s.
SP: So you worked as a clerk until you were eighty nine. That’s fantastic!
SC: Yeah, I used to do everything at home, but I can’t do a thing, can’t even go up the loft now. But it’s very, very upsetting really, you know, I mean to say, as I said to Albert across the road, I said we are not living, we’re just existing, till you know, till the final day. See I won’t go in a home.
SP: I think Syd, you’ve done remarkably well to work until you’re eighty nine and you’ve got a fantastic home so I’d just like to thank you on behalf of International Bomber Command Centre for your time today and all the stories that you’ve told us.
SC: Do you think they’ll accept the manner which we’ve done it?
SP: Absolutely, you’ve just told us exactly your story and that’s what we’re after at the International Bomber Command Centre, so thank you.
SC: Yeah.
Dublin Core
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Identifier
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ACooperSF170913, PCooperS1501
Title
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Interview with Syd Cooper. Two
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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01:14:46 audio recording
Creator
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Susanne Pescott
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-09-13
Description
An account of the resource
Sidney Cooper was born in Blackpool and speaks about his early life there. He joined the Royal Air Force in 1941. He first served as an engine fitter in Fighter Command before remustering as aircrew. He flew operations as a flight engineer with 427 Squadron from RAF Leeming. He later served as ground crew with 514 Squadron. On leaving the Air Force in 1946 he worked for Standard Telephones and British Airways. Syd finally retired at eighty nine.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Air Force. Fighter Command
Royal Canadian Air Force
Spatial Coverage
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Germany
Great Britain
Italy
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Norfolk
England--Suffolk
England--Yorkshire
England--Blackpool
Italy--Bari
England--Lancashire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Anne-Marie Watson
Carolyn Emery
427 Squadron
514 Squadron
aircrew
entertainment
flight engineer
ground crew
ground personnel
Halifax
Harvard
Lancaster
military living conditions
Operation Dodge (1945)
Oxford
RAF Foulsham
RAF Leeming
RAF Stradishall
RAF Waterbeach
training
Wellington
-
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/243/3388/ACrooksGA160817.2.mp3
b1ab1555c7b4f26e1c82a59d572148bc
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
Crooks, George A
George A Crooks
George Crooks
G A Crooks
G Crooks
Description
An account of the resource
One oral history interview with George Crooks (b. 1922).
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-08-17
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Crooks, GA
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
JF: I’m John Fisher and it’s the 17th of August 2016. And I’m here to day with George Crooks, who was in 50 Squadron ground crew during the war and also with me is his daughter Janet and son-in-law Terry, and he’s had a rather rather lively war. Tell us about your lively war George. Now, you started off first as an apprentice electrician, didn’t you?
GC: That’s right, yeah, I was an apprentice electrician right from the age of fourteen until eighteen when I joined the RAF. I volunteered for that. They called me back twice, the factory did, called me back as a reserved occupation but I insisted so they let me go. I finished and went and joined up.
JF: And where did you go first?
GC: I went to Henlow, Henlow RAF College for electrics and, er, I served me course through there and was posted from there to 50 Squadron, yeah.
JF: And where were they based?
GC: 50 Squadron at that time was based at Swinderby and then, when Swinderby was improved by having new runways built, we moved to Skellingthorpe and that was our base then for quite a while but we was all in tents when we first moved there. They’d got no billets, it was all tents and it was in April. We had a standpipe outside the tents and everybody was outside washing in cold water at the standpipe and shaving, they had to shave every day with cold water, but ‒
JF: Which planes were you working on then?
GC: We was working on Hampdens, our first planes were Hampdens, and then we had the ‒, two or three Manchesters come in so we converted over to Manchesters, but before we got a squadron of Manchesters they were, er, were [pause] demolished, what would they say? Yeah, the Manchesters became unserviceable so we started to change over to Lancasters and then we ended up with a squadron of Lancasters.
JF: Which squadron was that? Do you know?
GC: 50 Squadron.
JF: Yeah.
GC: 50 Squadron, yeah.
JF: And they were part of 1 Group?
GC: 5 Group.
JF: 5 Group.
GC: Number 5 Group, yeah. Skellinghtorpe was only about two miles from Lincoln Cathedral. That used to be a landing point.
JF: Yeah. When you were doing Lancasters tell me about the time when you were doing rather long hours.
GC: Oh, yeah, yeah, that was when the first of the thousand bomber, thousand bomber raids was started and we was short-staffed and I was the only bomb armourer electrician there and I was doing ‒, I was on the airfield every bit of the day and I was only allowed two hours sleep per day and they used to bring my meals out on a truck and I used to have me dixie pan ready so when they come everything went into this dixie pan, mashed potatoes, and corned beef, or you might get a sausage and veg and then on top of that would go your sweet, your apple pie and custard [laughs]. All in one dixie pan, and ‒
JF: And did you carry on working while you were eating?
GC: Oh yeah, yeah, you had to carry on doing it. They allowed you five or ten minutes to get your meal down you.
JC: So what sort of work were you doing there?
GC: I was doing bomb racks, bomb racks, and incendiary canisters, repairing them all and making sure that they all worked electrically before they were put on the aircraft or before the bombs in the bomb dump, put the bombs on, and the racks on the bombs.
JF: One day you decided you’d had enough of two hours sleep a night, didn’t you?
GC: I reported sick. After nine weeks I reported sick. I could hardly stand on my legs and the MO said, ‘If you don’t get out of here and back to your work I’m going to put you on a charge of malingering’, [laughs]. So immediately I thought, ‘Well, you’re not going to defeat me’, so I reported back to the electrical officer and I demanded my course for the Group 1 Grade of Technicians so, surprisingly enough, within a week or so I was transferred to Nutsham [?] College and I did four or five months there at college and came out top of the class, and with the marks that I had they sent me to Bombing Development Unit at Feltwell in Norfolk and there I was doing experiments with the boffins from Farnborough, doing experiments with the window programme (which was dropping of silver paper to block out radar) and also we was experimenting with the blind bombing equipment radar over the Irish Sea and the Navy and they were dropping smoke bombs to test this equipment ‒
JF: Yeah, that must have been quite an exciting time?
GC: It was more exciting than ‒, and I got more pleasure out of that ‒
JF: You didn’t sign up did you for this sort of thing?
GC: No, no, not originally you know.
JF: You came there as an apprentice I think, didn’t you?
GC: Yeah, yeah, I got started off as an apprentice, and while I was there at Feltwell I got promoted to corporal, so I did well there but when the forces, or the army, moved out from Africa, after the desert war, they were going up through Italy, so our experiments and what not was becoming less needed at the time. So I was posted to West Germany [?] to pick up a desert uniform with little shorts and stockings, desert boots, we was trained down to Liverpool Docks and before I went up the gangway they called us out by name and there was about thirty of us and from there we went to West Germany [?] took back our desert equipment and picked up Icelandic equipment, fur coats, helmets, fur-lined boots and all the equipment that went with it.
JF: That was a shock.
GC: It was a shock, from desert equipment to Icelandic and we flew up to, went by train, to Alness in Scotland and we flew from there to Reykjavik in Iceland and that was in the August, no that was in the April, I believe it was in the April and I was brought back in the April the following year. While we was up there we used to service the Sunderland flying boats and all aircraft that was coming through from Canada, the Lancasters that were built in Canada, was coming in as a calling point, to refuel and then back up to Scotland or wherever they were going to be delivered. Mainly, mainly they was being flown by lady pilots, so we serviced those and sent them on their way, and also any other aircraft that came in. I remember the one time we had an emergency call, or an emergency landing by a Russian aircraft and by this Russian aircraft, there was a fellow waiting there to show me, I was called as being a senior electrician, to go and see what this problem was, so I took the little box with all the little tool kit, and testers in, a little wooden box with a handle on, and went out and this Russian, whether he was a pilot or one of the crew I don’t know ‘cause the conversation between him and me was non-existent virtually, he was gabbling on in Russian and I was gabbling on in English and neither one of us knew what each other was talking about, but by hand signals and pointing of hands and one thing or another he finally showed me that by putting this switch on the lights weren’t working on the instrument panel so I had to find the fuses and the connection for that, so I asked him by pointing at the sign which is international, the electric sign which is a flash of lightning in red paint, and I had to draw it out virtually and he immediately guessed what I was talking about. And he’d got a revolver in his hand while I was in there, he got a revolver in his hand and every time I went to touch something he’d tap the panel and say, ‘No, no’, waving his finger and we’d have a discussion again, him in Russian and me in English. It was like a comedy act and eventually I managed to find the fuse but my spares would not [emphasis] fit anything that the Russians had got so what I had to do was get me cigarette packet out, take a piece of silver, take a tiny strip of silver, and short out the fuse circuit and then ask him by pointing, ‘Switch the light on, see if its working’, and he immediately jumped up in the air ‘Good, good, good’ [laughs]. But the crew in the meantime they must have took off to the officers’ mess and they were being fed and whatever and I left them at that. I was anxious to get away. I’d never been so frightened in all my life. When he pointed this ruddy gun I was expecting the gun to go off any time, but he wouldn’t allow anybody else on the plane or around it, he shooed everybody away, he wouldn’t allow anybody on the plane, only me. So that was quite an experience.
JF: Well, did you spot anything on the plane that you didn’t think should be there?
GC: No, not really [laughs]. As I say, he took me straight to the cock pit like, and, demonstrated what was going on.
JF: How long did you stop at Reykjavik?
GC: I was there twelve months but apparently at that time they only allowed, the air force personnel, were only allowed to be there twelve months. ‘Cause they said, there was a threat of TB so if you’d been there twelve months they sent you back home again and they had a fresh batch of crews going there.
JF: So where did you go off to then?
GC: When I come back from there I was ‒, it was towards the end of the war then and I came back to Scotland and loaded off these Sunderlands and they sent me to Pershore, and I was at Pershore two or three months waiting discharge, so as soon as they offered me go find your civvy suit, I donned my civvy suit, threw uniform in the corner, I was glad to get off. I was in trouble several times ‘cause I didn’t claim my medals and at one stage when I was on a parade, at Swinderby, I was asked where me medals was, I said, ‘I wasn’t claiming any’, so I was in trouble again ‘cause if I didn’t get me medals put on for the next parade I’d be in trouble, I’d be on a charge again, but I never got round to doing me medals the whole time I came out, so I never got any medals at all while I was in the forces, but me family grew up and they said ‘You should have had your medals, you should have your medals’, so through the family, like, I claimed, I claimed me medals and I’ve worn them, like, every November and take me wreath to the cenotaph.
JF: Now, what was your wife’s name?
GC: Jean.
JF: And how did you come to meet?
GC: When I came out the forces I had a sum of seventy, with savings and whatever they had gave me, I had seventy pounds. That was a lot of money in them days so immediately I went out and bought a motorcycle. And I’d only been home a week and me mother during the war, she’d got two sons away in the Forces and a husband away in the Forces, so she was on her own all through the war, so it must have been terrible for her, like, during the air raids and such like, but I said to her, ‘I’m off to Blackpool, I’m going to have a holiday now’.
JF: And where were you living at that time?
GC: I was living at Princes End in Tipton.
JF: Which is in the West Midlands, yeah.
GC: Yeah, so I went off motorcycling. I hadn’t even got a licence then, we didn’t bother about licences in them days, and put a suitcase strapped to the back of the bike and went off, found a ‒
JC: Bed and breakfast.
GC: Bed and breakfast and I met ‒. I had a problem with a whitlow on my fingers on that there, a whitlow, and I went to the hospital, and they extracted it, the whitlow out of there, and patched it up but stupidly I went to Derby Baths for a swim so it was wet through, all the bandages, so I asked three Scots fellas was there (and I always got on with Scots fellas in the Forces), I asked them if they’d re-bandage it and they said, ‘No, there’s a nurse upstairs. Upstairs there’s three lassies upstairs and one of them’s a nurse. Now you go up there and ask one of them to redress it’. So I knocked on the door and this lassie from Scotland, she came to the door, and I told her what I was wanted, I said, ‘There’s a nurse here, isn’t there?’, and she says, ‘Yes but she’d not here at the moment’, so I said, ‘Well, will you redress my finger?’ She says, ‘Oh no, I certainly won’t’, she says. So I asked her three times about something or other, I don’t know whether ‒. Oh, ‘When will the nurse be back’, ‘I don’t know’, and, ‘Do you think she’ll be back tonight’, ‘I don’t know’. So I thought ‘I’ve had enough of this. I think I’m dead’ ‒. But next day we met up, and there were all the lads and that there round the back looking at me motorbike and she came down and started talking about one thing or another, so I made a date then and we went off to the funfair. I went to the hotel, a hotel down on the front and we had a few drinks and we went to the funfair and then later we went to the ballroom, you know, the Tower Ballroom, and dancing and what not, that’s how we got together. We started writing to one another, yeah. So, then after writing I used to go up there at weekends like and met, met up with her.
JF: Good, that was nice.
GC: So we had sixty-five years together. She’s up there look, wee Scotch lassie.
JF: That’s lovely yeah.
GC: I’ve got family now, yeah, all spread out.
JF: Your father also had a heavy time, didn’t he?
GC: Oh yes.
JF: Tell us a bit about him.
GC: Yeah, as I say, he was brought up in Mansfield, Nottingham. Well, Mansfield, all around Mansfield there were five, five pits and they were all miners. The only job you could find in Mansfield was mining and I think somehow he was claustrophobic and he was never going to go down the mine. All his relations and what not went down the mines but he was not going to go down no mine and he did a bit of farm work and when he was of age he joined up. He wasn’t too keen on the farming and when the war broke out he joined up. Then he was with the Sherwood Foresters and they sent him straight over to the Somme and he went all through the Somme, like, but he was wounded at the Somme three times and they sent him home each time and I think he met me mum, me mother like during that period. Oh, as I say, they sent him back and when he’d finished the army, he said when the war was finished he said, ’Well, the army has broken me, took everything I’ve had virtually so they can replace me’, so instead of coming back into Civvy Street he joined up into the regular army for twenty one years. He had to sign on for twenty one years, and no alternative, twenty one years or no, so he signed up but he says, ‘I’m not staying with the Sherwood Foresters. I’m not going to be a ground slug’, he says, ’I’m going with the horses’. ‘Cause he’d been on the farms, like, so he took a fancy to the horses. So he joined the Lancers, so he changed regiments so he was with the Lancers, but he went from there, while he was with the Lancers, he went to India. He married me mother before he went and they had two years in India, he was on the Kaiber Pass [laughs] fighting the fuzzywuzzies [?] or whatever they called them and they came back to Teignmouth Barracks and at Teignmouth Barracks he was there for two or three years and we came along, me son, I came first, and then me brother, he was born in Teignmouth Barracks, but he was only two and I was four and we was sent to Egypt and so we were out in Egypt for eight years.
JF: What year would that be George?
GC: 1926 to 1934 [coughs]. Pardon me.
JF: Don’t worry.
GC: I’m talking too much [laughs]. Can you switch it off for a minute? Eight years out there and came back to Teignmouth Barracks and ‒, oh then he was disbanded then. He finished his service in 1936, in 1936 they found him a job here in Tipton as a works policeman, so while he was here they formed a territorial army unit at the works and then in 1939 he was called up and he served another three years in the Second World War but because he was too old to be sent overseas he had to join the anti-aircraft guns, so he was on anti-aircraft guns all during the war, and they decided he was too old even for that and after three years they discharged him.
JF: And how old was he then?
GC: Oh God, how old would he be then? He’d be well in his sixties, about sixty-five to seventy.
TC: 1889 he was born.
GC: In 1889 he was born.
JF: So, your father and you had really interesting wars.
GC: And me brother, he ‒, I think he volunteered, but he ended up in the Royal Corps of Signals and when the ‒, ‘cause that was later on during the war, but he was in the D-Day landings and he was a despatch rider.
JF: Yeah?
GC: And he used to, like, travel to the front, backwards and forwards, front and back, like, with messages and such like, and he said he was a good target for the snipers, but he travelled all through France, Belgium, Holland, into Germany and he went right the way through to Berlin. So he had a pretty stiff life, yeah.
JF: George, thank you very much. You’ve been most interesting and as they say you had a lively war.
GC: [Laughs] Yeah, yeah. Oh in Iceland, that was terrible. You used to have the aircraft coming through, get the Lancasters and what not coming through, and sometimes you’d have to get everybody to open up the engine. I mean, they used to have to anchor the aircraft stair with wire hoses, put the wings into concrete loopholes in the concrete, they used to tie them down because when the blizzards come it would blow them off the island and into the fjord at the bottom of Sidwell [?]. And American aircraft went down there, it had blew the aircraft off the fjord and it blew it down into the fjord so ‒, but if you wanted to work on an aircraft eight of you used to get together, used to have the fitters and whoever who was available like, the electricians, we had to put [unclear] up with a ladder up one side and then a platform and then a ladder down the other side. You’d all be wearing all fur-lined clothes, five pairs of gloves and what not, your big boots, and you’d trudge through the snow onto the platform and then one behind the other you’d have to tie white ribbon, white tapes, white tapes we used to have round our necks and on the end of each tape you had your tools tied and then you went up the ladder one behind the other eight of yer, one behind the other ‘til you got to the platform and then you’d wip one of these gloves off, or maybe you’d wip two off but you’d wip these gloves off ‘til you were only left with your silk gloves, the silk gloves on and then you’d start undoing the cowlings, one at a time, and you’d go round and round in a circle ‘til eventually you’d got all the cowlings off and then you’d have to take the generator off so you’d have to go round again, and if it was a fellow who didn’t understand what we were working on you had to explain to him, ‘You got to get them nuts off there, you got to get them things off there, don’t do that one, do the other one first’, so you’d go round and round in a circle until eventually you got the equipment off the engine [laughs], mind you’d have to put your gloves back on again ‒.
JF: How cold was it?
GC: Oh, bitterly cold, yeah, and we used to have a little stove, it was just Nissen huts we had out there and they were lined with plaster board, but in the middle of this there were twelve of us in a Nissen hut and in the middle of the Nissen hut there was this Reece [?] coal stove and it was only that high and about twelve inches round and the chimney up the middle, and we used to stoke it up with coal, and at night time there’d be twelve of yer sitting round this coal fire trying to get warm [laughs] and then in the morning when you managed to get out of bed, you had no end of blankets and whatnot, get out of bed and get dressed and you, we had to go to the washhouse so the first one out the door used to open the door gingerly, but as soon as he opened the door down came a great bulk of snow right down on to yer. If you were unlucky you went out like it’d probably drop on top on yer, and then down the centre between the huts they used to have spikes all the way down to your quarters, the canteen and the cookhouse and whatnot, the officers at the bottom, they had this rope all on steel pickets and you had to go out the hut and you got your goggles on and everything and you grabbed the rope, and some days ‘cause of the snow and the blizzard you had to follow this rope up until you got to the cookhouse, dining hall, yeah.
JF: How did the planes manage to land and take off?
GC: Well, they didn’t actually, when the blizzard was blowing like, and generally, I don’t know why, but every Tuesday and every Thursday you seem to have the blizzard blow. It was like clockwork and the blizzards used to come up and you was virtually stuck but all the Sunderland flying boats they weren’t allowed. As soon as the seas started to freeze up, they sent them back home, but then there was times come when even the ships couldn’t get in ‘cause the sea had frozen up so we had to rely on the Americans for our food virtually. If it hadn’t been for the Americans at the next station up [unclear] but they were pretty good. They used to send over tubs of ice cream which we’d never even seen but their idea was to build up the temperature inside your body the same as what’s outside so if you got ice cream in your body, like, it brought your temperature down in your body and you didn’t feel the outside temperature so much.
JF: Well I haven’t heard that one before George.
GC: Well, it’s the same in India though, isn’t it? If you’re out in India they feed you with curries and all hot spices and what not, don’t they? So, it’s just to even the temperature in your body, your body temperature up with the outside.
JF: George, thank you very much. You’ve been really interesting. Thank you.
GC: You’ll never get all that down on paper [laughs].
JF: Thanks a lot. Thank you.
GC: Oh yes ‒
Dublin Core
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ACrooksGA160817
PCrooksGA1601
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Interview with George Crooks
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
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Sound
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eng
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00:34:05 audio recording
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Pending review
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John Fisher
Date
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2016-08-17
Description
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George Crooks was an apprentice electrician before volunteering for the Royal Air Force at the age of eighteen. After his training he served as an armourer with 50 Squadron at RAF Swinderby and later RAF Skellingthorpe. He later worked experimenting with blind bombing and Window. Upon leaving the Royal Air Force he had a holiday in Blackpool where he met his future wife.
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
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Great Britain
Iceland
England--Lincolnshire
England--Norfolk
Iceland--Reykjavík
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Christine Kavanagh
5 Group
50 Squadron
ground crew
ground personnel
Hampden
Lancaster
Manchester
medical officer
military living conditions
military service conditions
RAF Feltwell
RAF Skellingthorpe
RAF Swinderby
Sunderland
Window
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/253/3400/PFellowesD1501.2.jpg
e88ffe00536dab58919683f9b4889b66
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/253/3400/AFellowesD150406.1.mp3
2e0bb6d3e178d0c61e40d54ef14a6507
Dublin Core
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Title
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Fellowes, David
David Fellowes
Dave Fellowes
D Fellowes
Description
An account of the resource
Eight items. Two oral history interviews with Flight Sergeant David "Dave" Fellowes (Royal Air Force), documents and a photograph. He flew operations as a rear gunner with 460 Squadron.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by David Fellowes and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2014-11-25
2015-04-06
2016-08-08
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Fellowes, D
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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(AP) This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Andrew Panton. The interviewee is David Fellowes. Mr Fellowes was a rear gunner in a Lancaster aircraft. The interview is taking place at The Princess Marina House in Rustington, West Sussex on 6th April 2015. Apologies for the poor sound quality at the beginning of the interview due to static on a tie clip microphone.
(DF) [Static] I’d just passed out of gunnery school number 1 ATS at Pembury South Wales and we all went on leave as brand new young Sergeant air gunners. Whilst we were on leave, we received our postings where we were going to go and what was going to happen to us. In my case, I was posted to 30 OTU in in a place called Hickson in Staffordshire. So I left home [unclear]. The first stop was Crewe and I got to Crewe, we had to change trains to go to Stafford. On the train, there I was sitting alone and all a sudden three Australian Flight Sergeants pilots came bustling in. Well we soon made up a little conversation and I asked one of them whereabouts in Australia do you come from and he said: ‘Sydney.’ I said: ‘Oh yes.’ I said: ‘I know it’s a long shot I have an aunt in Sydney. She went out there after the First World War with her husband and have a sports business.’ ‘Oh,’ he said ‘Do you know what part of Sydney?’ ‘Yes in the district called Marrickville.’ ‘Oh,’ he said ‘That’s funny now I used to live in Marrickville. What road did she live in?’ I told him: ‘Illawarra Road and her name is Mrs Ivy Evans.’ Well he made a rather quick Australian [phone in background] good word and he said: ‘Well that lady happened to be my mother’s best friend. Chapel friend.’ So he said: ‘Well we also have something no much in common so will you be guarding me, we’re gonna be on the same course.’ So I said: ‘Yes, why not indeed.’ So when we did get to Hickson we were on the same course and, of course, I crewed up with him. We made the backbone of the crew. The two of us. Flying at 30 OTU, of course, on Wellingtons you didn’t require a Flight Engineer. When we were posted from Hickson, we went up to 1656 Heavy Conversion Unit to convert from the Wellington on course onto the Halifax. It was here up at Lindholme that we gathered the seventh member of the crew, our flight engineer. In this case we didnt have a choice, we were sitting on one side of the large room and the flight engineers were sitting on the other and names were rung out the captains name and then the Flight Engineer’s name and we were getting a bit close towards the end and there was this very old looking gentleman sitting down over there and I said to my skipper: ‘Hey Art I bet we get the old [unclear] over there.’ And, of course, what happened they called his name out: ‘Sergeant Shephard Flight Engineer you will fly with Flight Sergeant Whitmarshand crew.’ So we got this old gentleman. He was a family man already and, in fact, his trade was, in fact, a master baker, would you believe, but he was an excellent Flight Engineer. He really did know his stuff and we were very well pleased to have him but, of course, he was the daddy of the crew. If I remember rightly, he was about 38 years old. [Mobile phone ringing]. We passed out from the Conversion Unit at Lindholme and it was - we were destined to go to a Lancaster Squadron. So we had to go Lanc finishing school [mobile phone ringing] which was relatively a quick changeover from a Halifax to the Lancaster for the benefit of the pilot. Most of the rest of the crew especially the gunners had had experience on both kinds of turrets on each airplane. Anyhow, so it didn’t really worry us too much. Anyhow our skip did ask us if we could – how we felt going to an Australian Squadron, so we said: ‘Arh yes,’ because we knew there were advantages to going to Commonwealth or Colonial Squadron, and that was they were all on permanent RAF stations and had good quarters, married quarters so when you got there you never saw Nissan huts, wooden huts and things like that. You stayed in a married quarter. Married quarters, of course, were empty because wives weren’t allowed to be on the station during the war. When we got to Binbrook, we were allocated Number 13 Airman’s Married Quarters and it was there that we set up house. When one got to the Squadron, one of course had to check in, you went around with your arrival chit with all the different departments getting the signatures so they knew you were there. You reported and found out what flight you were going to and we went to B Flight which was in Number 1 Hanger. Well we were very lucky. It was a good flight. There was a lot of happy old people there and, of course, before we went on ops we did a training flight and then normally what happened was your skipper would go off with an experienced crew to see what it was all like. Well, low and behold that wasn’t going to happen to us. The Station Commander, Group Captain Edwards VC, DSO, DFC and bar said: ‘Oh, I’ll take Whitmarsh and his crew to Friesburg.’ Well ‘course word gets around the station about who you’re gonna fly with they say : ‘Dear oh dear oh dear.’ ‘Cause he had got a bit of a reputation. Quite a good one really but nevertheless he set off and took us to Friesburg. Coming up before we got to Friesburg , well way before Friesburg before we got to the bomb line we passed over an American sector. AnAmerican sector for some unknown reason didn’t care for us flying over their sector very much and opened fire on us and we did in fact got hit by flak. Well this rather upset the Group Captain [chuckle] which is quite understandable. He – no he wasn’t impressed with that. He did mention something about dropping a little bomb on them to keep them quiet but it didn’t happen. Anyhow the trip went on we did as we did – should have done and then coming home before we came home he had to go down and look at the target to see everything was alright and then, of course, we turned round and came home. My role in Bomber Command as an Air Gunner was to protect the crew from any form of enemy fighter attack. Now in the – I volunteered to go into the rear turret. I erh didn’t want to go in the mid upper turret, my other gunner fortunately did. He didn’t mind sitting up in the turret that would turn 360 degrees all the way round. I much preferred to sit in the rear turret by myself with four Browning 303 machine guns. It was a cold lonely place, yes, it was, it used to get very cold. It could be down to minus 14. Icicles would hang from your oxygen mask and erh – we were lucky though we did have an electrically heated slippers and we also had electrically heated gloves. These weren’t too good because it made your fingers too thick and bulky if you wanted to do anything but nevertheless I survived in the rear turret, though on one occasion while I was in the rear turret we’d gone to Stuttgart and as we were coming out there were two Lancasters signalling down, just behind us on the port side andthere was a Halifax on the starboard side. We did have wireless operator looking out through the astrodome checking on any fighter activity and also to make sure that nobody was going to drop any bombs on us which could happen. We had spotted a Wolfe 190 cruise over us so we thought hello there are fighters about. Then all of a sudden around the back of these two Lancasters, which were just a bit lower than us and on the port side, a JU88 came right in close. I opened fire, the mid upper opened fire and we gave the order to climb port but I can still sit here and see bullets and cannon shells ripping right alongside me into our aeroplane. Well, the tail plane was pretty well damaged and so was one of the fins and rudders, the - one of the fuel tanks was ruptured, the starboard wing fuel tank was ruptured and unfortunately our mid upper gunner got hit in the neck[?] which meant he had to be taken out of the turret, put onto the rest bed, given morphine and well looked after until we got back home. The fighter that I’d had the combat with I maintained firing at it all the time until all of a sudden it flipped onto its port wing nose went down and it went straight the way down and it looked completely out of control. Well we reported all this is our debriefing when we got back home. Made out a gunnery-you know - slip, and then, er, we did hear later that we had it confirmed that we got that JU88. The 7th of January 1945 is a day that I shall perhaps never forget in all my life but we were scheduled to fly to Munich in O-Oboe. Now O-Oboe was in fact our aeroplane. It’s a fact that on our squadron after you had proved yourself and you were doing your job properly and looking after things, you were given your own aeroplane to look after. That meant also you had a ground staff looking after that aeroplane as well. This particular night we were scheduled to fly to Munich which is a fairly long way into Germany. On the main sector down to the River Rhine we were scheduled to fly at 14000 feet so we stuck to the rules be flying at 14000 feet but when we got down to the area just prior to the River Rhine in Alzey[?] which, of course, used to be German territory we found ourselves in very thick nasty cloud and we were bumped around all over the place and you could feel the airplane being kinda damp. It wasn’t very pleasant. It wasn’t very nice at all. Our skipper said that he thought that we perhaps oughta climb and get out of this bad weather and also to get away from any icing up. Well the crew all agreed and so, I do remember him asking the flight engineer for climbing power. I can remember hearing the engines increase in power and away we went to climb up out of the cloud. As we came out of the cloud at the top, I don’t know what the exact height, it must have been about another 15 thou - to 15000 feet or more, there were other aircraft who’d already gone up there and it was quite clear but all of a sudden there was a great big thump – a bump. Well we - somebody said: ‘Christ, we’ve been hit.’ And we were, in fact, hit by another Lancaster coming out the cloud and as we were fly along just above the top of the cloud the other Lancaster came out and put his port wing into our fuselage. Er, our starboard wing we lost round about six foot and we think, we think it just went into their flight deck because that airplane just peeled off and went straight down and we can remember the explosion. Now our aeroplane had received this big thump. We went into a spin for 3000 feet and eventually the skipper got it out. He then ordered bombs to be dropped safe, so the bombs were dropped safe. That just meant that they wouldn’t explode when they hit the ground and from then we sorted it all out and climbed up to 20000 feet, above icing level and we took stock of what had happened. We had, in fact, possibly lost about six foot of the starboard wingtip, the starboard airline[?] was all chewed up and there was hole in the fuselage from the trailing edge of the starboard wing virtually back to the door and floor side of the fuselage and the floor had disappeared. Miraculously the mid upper gunner was still up in his turret. It was decided by the Flight Engineer and the Wireless Operator that they could get him forward ‘cause there was the possibility that the turret could have fallen through. They got him out and up to the front. Well that left me down in the back in my little turret which as still operational ‘cause it worked off number one engine and as I said we were going to go back to the UK to land at Lymonsea[?] Airfield, Manston and it was here on the way that the skipper said to me: ‘You know David that the tail’s swinging. Perhaps you oughta think about bailing out if you wish.’ ‘Cause otherwise, my chances of getting away would have been pretty slim but I declined this offer. I said: ‘No, I can’t do that and can’t leave you lot on your own.’ Besides that there was still the possibility that we could get jumped by a night fighter. So we flew on and flew on at a reduced speed until we got to the French coast. We could see Manston and there we made a long approach. A flapless landing at Man – at Manston. On landing at Manston, a follow me truck went out and we followed that down to where they wanted us to park the aeroplane. The crew in the front of the aeroplane couldn’t get out through the back because of the damage that had been done – the hole – so they had to forward the forward escape hatch. I, myself, was able to vacate my turret and just got out the normal way down through the rear door. They took us up to then the – to be debriefed, but had a look at the aircraft first and we thought Dear God. How did we get this aeroplane back? We were so grateful the fact that all the control rods of the aeroplane ran down the port side of the aeroplane. It was all the starboard side, of course, had sustained all the damage. So, yeah, we considered ourselves very very lucky. Went back up to flying control where we were debriefed, given somewhere to sleep and the next morning we had hoped that one of our own airplanes from the squadron would come down and pick us up. But, unfortunately, bad weather set in, both in Manston where it snowed and also at Binbrook. So, we were stuck there for a couple of days and we were playing snowballs larking about. Nothing to do. And all of a sudden, a voice called out: ‘Right you lot, you’re going back to Binbrook by train.’ So there we were all manner of dress. God, it was really terrible, really. And they gave us some money. We went down to Margate first of all. Got a transport down to Margate to get a train to London. When we got into Margate, we decided well – we hadn’t had a shave for about three days. So we hopped into a barbershop which was run by ladies. Their husbands were looking – had gone off into the army and these ladies were looking after the shop. Anyhow, we sat there and would you believe they gave us a reasonable shave with safety razors. Anyhow, after having a shave and bit tidied up, we went up to – we thought we better have a photograph taken of all this. So we went into a photographers and we got this photograph taken and we all signed it. We’ve all got one each and then got the train up to London. When we got up to London – oh dear oh dear – well you can imagine the state of us holding our parachutes, Mae-Wests, helmets over your shoulders still, flying boots some, some not. And, of course, there happened to be a service policeman and, of course, he stopped us and asked what he thought we were on. Well, our skipper Arthur Whitmarsh he really told him what we were on in good Australian language and we didnt hear any more about that. And from there, of course,then we back up by train up to Binbrook and we were – well, of course, they were pleased to see us again, but inside a week we were flying again. 23 of March 1945 we were briefed for a daytime raid on Bremen. Everybody thought we’re in for a straightforward flight. We were told that if anything went wrong we would have to fire off the colours of the day and the American fighter escort, of Thunderbolts and Mustangs, would come down and give us a close escort. We flew, no problem, through to Bremen. We then dropped our bombs right on target. We were running out of the target and all of a sudden, we were badly hit by flak between the two starboard engines number three and number four. Well they both stopped. They had to be feathered. Then, of course, we started to lose height and, of course, we weren’t so fast either. All the other aircraft were overtaking us. To – we then fired off the colours of the day which was done partly to alert the US fighter boys to give us fighter cover. Unfortunately we didnt see a thing. We were, if I remember rightly, flying round about 20000 feet and, of course, well we weren’t all that far from home anyway Bremen, so we set course back to back to base and well the poor old skipper up the front there, besides having full on rudder on to keep the aeroplane straight and he turned round and said when he landed, he said: ‘I’m sure I got one leg longer than the other.’ But we got back home alright. We made a good two engine landing at Binbrook again. No big problem. There was occasions particularly one unit we went to Hanover[?] when we discovered that the German ME262 was being used in operations against Lancasters. Now we did, unfortunately, have an occurrence where in the area of the raid the ME262, the German jet fighter, was quite prominent in action against Lancasters. Now, we had thought about the best way of combatting this, bearing in mind, of course, that the ME262 was a much faster aeroplane than the JU88, ME109 and the other aeroplanes Wolfe 190 and that we only had a 50 mile an hour overtaking speed gunsight[?],that the best thing to do was to take good avoiding action. But but we did this. The matter of fact if you’re flying straight and level and you spot an aeroplane, shall we say, on your port quarter high when he makes an attack he’s got to make a double back, like this, to get onto your tail and it was when he did that double back that you would then, if he was high, climb port therefore he couldn’t follow and so he’d have to break off the engagement. [Pause] This attack by the Germans JU88 was again, of course, at night time. It was - although it was night time it was very light because I can remember the cloud the way we looked down was covering the German countryside was quite still white and it was quite light up there, but soon as the attack started the JU88 open fire and his, his firing was more continuous. My reply was in short bursts round about four five seconds. This is done deliberately because a you don’t want your guns to overheat. You want to conserve ammunition, of course, as well if necessary. But I could still see the bullets from - well they weren’t bullets in his case, they were cannon shells whizzing past me and , damaging the aeroplane, where my 303 bullets which included tracer firing directly into him. One of the problems we had in aerial combat was that the enemy in German Luftwaffe aircraft they had far better and more powerful guns than we did. They had cannons point 5 where to us all we could offer was the ordinary 303 rifle bullet. Although, we - in our every three bullets that we fired there was one bore, one armour piercing, one err ahh incendiary –
(AP) Lets do that one again.
(DF) - one. Our bullets, we were set in a series of five. We had the ordinary ball bullet. We would have an incendiary bullet; we had an explosive bullet and a tracer. And there – that was repeated all the way along, this way you could see where your bullets were going and also, of course, if they were converged at the right angle at the right time, of course, they could do quite a little bit of destruction. Initially our gun sights was straight forward, ring and bead. That was a fixed ring that had a bead in the centre. This could be lit up at night time and when you rotated your turret, either way, of course, the gun sight went with it. Also, if you elevated your guns the gun sight, of course, went with it. We did later on towards the end had some experimental gun sights involving radar and gyros. We had the Mark 14 gyro sight which, of course, was a much improved version and it even guaranteed 98 per cent hits. So that was a big advantage to us. It – but unfortunately it all came in too late. It didn’t come into the beginning of 1945. [Pause] What did we did really do when we got out to our aeroplane? Well, normally we would have a chat with the ground staff crew and we’d have a last cigarette ‘cause we never smoked inside the aeroplane and normally wanted a quick pee. The usual place was against the tail wheel. Everybody eventually get into the aeroplane and take up their positions and carry out the checks that they had to do and there you’d sit until okay you were given instructions to taxi the aeroplane. The pilot would then taxi the aeroplane away down the taxiway onto the runway. He’d get a green from the runway controller and you’d open the throttles and you’d tear down the runway and Grace of God you got yourself airborne. Now from that onwards, that point onwards sitting in your rear turret well you did have a lot to do. First,you’d done all your checks before you’d take off. You’d done that. And you’d keep a watch out first all for other aircraft coming in towards the bombers stream. So you – you know you would try to miss any other aircraft that were flying around in the stream. Further than that you go on to occupied Germany and there then you’d have to keep your eyes open and look for enemy aircraft. We did this by basically turning the rear turret where search – where you’d turn from port to go right the way round starboard, lift up a little way and right the way back round again and you’d do a square search right up as far as you could see and then start all over again. This way, of course, then your chances of – well you wouldn’t miss any aircraft coming in towards you. Further to that, in our crew we used to roll the aeroplane a little bit to make sure that there was nothing coming up underneath. So you can see, you sat there and you were doing something all the time. This way, of course, prevented you feeling too cold. You were kept active all the time. Your skipper would call you up about anything around every 10 to 15 minutes. ‘Are you alright?’ The main thing being, of course, are you still getting your oxygen which was an important thing?
(AP) What about the bit about beneath the aircraft - the attacks – vulnerable?
(DF) Well –
(AP) Would you talk a little bit about that?
(DF) The - they started to use – the Germans started to use the JU88 – I can’t remember the name of it – something music.
(AP) Shraeder music.
(DF) Shraeder music. And, of course, they came up, to hit you not in the body of the aeroplane because if they did and the aeroplane blew up, they’d most likely get blown up as well. They really aimed at your fuel tanks in the wing and once they were really afire, well of course, your chances of doing anything about it were not very very good. Some aeroplanes towards the end did have armour piercing protection and have [unclear] so that the tanks wouldn’t catch fire – but, no, that music, we just used to roll the aeroplane just so we could see underneath.
(AP) I mean, the bit about removing the Perspex? And the flak, the flak must have been going off. Little pings.
(DF) Yeah but you didn’t think about it.
(AP) No.
(DF) You accepted it, you know. Part of life’s rich pattern. [Unclear] What you wanna talk about first?
(AP) Hang on.
(DF) To aid your vision we thought that it’d be a good idea to remove a lot of the Perspex from your rear turret. Now, there was good reason for this as well – as well as including good vision the Captain and the Flight Engineer used to clear their engines round about every 20 minutes to half and hour, that means they would take them up to full power and, of course, it burnt off carbon which used to fly out from the exhaust. Now, we didnt like this because it would give away that you was an aeroplane somewhere there and the other was those little specks of carbon would stick on your Perspex, and if you had a little dot on your Perspex you’d immediately think it was a fighter. An enemy aircraft. So, to get out of all of this we asked to have all the Perspex taken out. And they took the Perspex out and there it solved the problem. But also, yes, it was a little bit colder but the other good thing was you didn’t have a lot of Perspex to clean.
(AP) What about the noise and ping-ping?
(DF) When one was approaching the target I often used to think that, there was the Pilot, the Flight Engineer and the Bomb Aimer up at the front of the aeroplane they could see all what was happening. They could see searchlights up ahead penetrating the sky often in groups of three or more with blue and one which was a master searchlight and the others were attached to it. The akk akk often was a bit more fierce [unclear] as you approached the target and, of course, there was always the risk of other airplanes dropping bombs on you or you colliding with them. Flak in itself used to come up. You’d hear the bang. Then you’d often hear ping. Ping as the little pieces of the shrapnel casing penetrate the aeroplane. The ground staff used to count these when you got back home, but also you could sometimes smell all the cordite from the shells themselves when they exploded. I used to sit in my turret and, of course, I didnt see all of this until, as we had - the bomb aimer dropped his bomb we’d flown straight and level for the required length of time, so we got a photo flash and then, of course, I said to myself : ‘Good God. Did we go through all that lot?’ You know, say ‘Oh well. That’s it.’ But, of course, by that time the skipper dropped the nose down and we’re turning round and we’re off back home which – prior to going on any raid it was important that before you went for your briefing and crew meal before the flight that you got as much rest in as you can. So normally, you would go and have a good lie and a sleep before you went for your crew meal in the mess and then went to the debriefing. Now, of course, there was all of you together, the seven of you and you were chatting away. You weren’t – never showed any signs of fear or – can’t think of the real word – but they all felt quite pleasant, happy about what we got to do and you got into your aeroplane and you settled down and comfort relatively and away you went. I don’t think we ever thought about it. How long it was except you knew it would be good when you got back home and had another crew meal and, of course, the promise of a large glass of rum, which was an incentive. [Chuckle]. People wonder about why we did all this. Well first of all, of course, we volunteered for this kind of work. The RAF couldn’t make you fly as aircrew. So we knew what we were going into. We knew that there would be short trips, heavily defended; we knew there’d be long trips to do and it was part of the day’s work. We knew what – we knew what we were up to and people just didnt really think about the bad side of it. You just got on and did a job of work which we were paid for. In our particular crew, we did a lot of training. We made up our minds we were gonna survive and, of course, we did.
(AP) And you –
(DF) And I think a lot of that was due to the fact that our attitude to the job.
(AP) You you never felt that terror or fear? You just got on with it?
(DF) No, no but also one of the other things of course, some of us would have in mind, of course, that terrible thing called if somebody got to a stage where they didnt want to fly any more, they’d had it. They’d go LMF Lack of Moral Fibre, but, of course, the hardest part of that was going to the CO and admitting it, it was a big thing to admit.
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AFellowesD150406
PFellowesD1501
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Interview with Dave Fellowes
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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Sound
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eng
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00:38:49 audio recording
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Pending review
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Andrew Panton
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2015-04-06
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Dave Fellowes flew operations as a rear gunner with 460 Squadron. He and his crew survived a mid-air collision with another Lancaster which resulted in an emergency landing at RAF Manston.
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
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Great Britain
Netherlands
England--Kent
England--Lincolnshire
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1945-04
1945-05
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Gemma Clapton
1656 HCU
30 OTU
460 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
bombing
Halifax
Heavy Conversion Unit
Ju 88
lack of moral fibre
Lancaster
Me 262
mid-air collision
military living conditions
military service conditions
Operational Training Unit
RAF Binbrook
RAF Hixon
RAF Lindholme
RAF Manston
taxiway
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/270/3422/AHeatonSM160322.1.mp3
faf7544445c20c5d8a834bb67cdbf1ae
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Title
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Heaton, Stuart Michael
Stuart Michael Heaton
Stuart M Heaton
Stuart Heaton
S M Heaton
S Heaton
Description
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One oral history interview with Stuart Michael Heaton (b. 1925, 1818543 and 164742 Royal Air Force).
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IBCC Digital Archive
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2016-03-22
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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Heaton, SM
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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AS. This is Andrew Sadler interviewing Michael Heaton at his home in Swiss Cottage London em on the 22nd of March 2016 on behalf of the Bomber Command Archive. Michael thank you very much for allowing you to interview em you, em can I start by asking you where an when you were born?
MH. Yes I was born in Worcester on the 29th of May 1924.
AS. Right and em what, did you have parents involved in the First World War?
MH. No but my parents were living at that time of course but my father was not involved, he was in a reserved occupation.
AS. Oh what, what, what was his occupation?
MH. Em it was em ha, I should know it, it was with a factory in Rugby eh where in fact he met my mother. Em I am just trying to recall the name of the factory but they were making some parts for machines, I just can’t recall the details.
AS. So how did you em, how did you come to be, to join the Royal Air Force?
MH. Of course ah eh I was fifteen when the war started, there was plenty going on very quickly. And eh there was a film I remember, a Holywood film, I can’t remember what the details were but it dealt with eh the crew of a bomber. And eh somehow that had an impact with me and I thought, ‘that is exactly what I want to do when the time comes when I am old enough.’ There was a preparity, prepartity for joining up, for volunteering and I joined the ATC, the Air Training Corps eh which was of immense benefit to me learning about discipline and eh the navigation.
AS. At what age did you join that?
MH. Eh, I was sixteen or seventeen.
AS. And were you at school then?
MH. No eh I was working in a bank in a place called Ledbury in Herefordshire and eh this bank, I was eh educated at Ledbury Grammar School eh which I joined in 1933 and left in eh 1940. And eh the grammar school was also the headquarters for the Air Training Corps. And the two or three years that I was with the Air Training Corps were a tremendous benefit to me both in ways of learning about discipline but more importantly about navigation. And eh when the time came that eh I was eh summoned to Birmingham before eh, before a selection, aircrew selection eh I was already eh quite knowledgeable about em eh navigation and so when I was asked, what would you like to be. That category I told them, to be a navigator. Most boys would go in for to be a pilot only probably to be disappointed because that was overstaffed and eh so I was summoned when I was eighteen to Birmingham for this eh aircrew selection and were there for about two days actually. And at the end of it when I came before the em selectors eh they said to me ‘would you like to join immediately or wait for eight or nine months when you would be sort of called up.’ So I said ‘I would have no hesitation whatsoever I would like to join immediately.’ Went home back to Leadbury, met by my parents in a weeks time I was in the Air Force, that’s how it started.
AS. Where did you do your training?
MH. Well my training which was very long indeed, over about two years. Training a navigator was the longest course of the aircrew officers. So we had to report here in London, St Johns Wood, ACRC, Aircrew Receiving Centre known as “arsey tarsey”or the [unclear] eh and so I reported there at eh [cough] a place just opposite the zoo, London Zoo.And then we were on the go all the time, either peeling potatoes, scrubbing the floors, going to lectures, swimming various things em for about six weeks as far as I can remember. From there we went to our first posting eh on the way to Scarborough on the Flying Scotsman I remember which of course has now come back. And eh that was to the ITW. That was an important first course em all em aircrew went there before they went their different ways. I found it was absolutely no trouble at all because I knew everything they told me through my time in the ATC. So it was immensely helpful in that respect. And the course was about six weeks I can’t quite remember. So do you want me to go on about the training?
AS. Yes.
MH. So having finished that and passed the course we then went to a transit cam, place in Ludlow where we were living in tents out of doors waiting eh for our time to board a ship which would take us to Canada. That was a tiresome place, I found it tiresome anyhow, food was awful etc. From there we went on to Manchester to Heaton Park [unclear] eh and waited there for our time to board the em the Queen Elizabeth. That was a troop ship at that time carrying a huge number of people em to New York. I don’t know how many, there was talk of forty or fifty thousand certainly on, on board the ship you could hardly move. Eh the beds were in layers all the way up with an electric light all the way up. My misfortune was to have one right at the top. Eh I didn’t enjoy the voyage at all, of course there were, there were, there were nothing accompanying us, the ship was very fast. But one thought did think about eh German submarines which were quite active at that time.However, passed without any problems as far as that was concerned. But I felt ill all the time, didn’t know what it was, thought it was sea sickness but it turned out to be em, it turned out to be eh. What is the name of that stuff when you go yellow?
AS. Jaundice.
MH. Jaundice, exactly, jaundice, anyhow I was forced to look at the Statue of Liberty as we sailed into New York. We were treated there with an enormous amount of kindness by the American people. Got bananas which we never heard of course they were not available in this country during the war. Eh I gave the [unclear] so on and so forth and, and from there we boarded a train to take us up to Canada to a place called Monkton on the East Coast which was a sort of receiving station in Canada. Eh and we and I reported sick, that’s when I knew I had jaundice so I went straight to hospital and eh I was there for about ten days or so and eh was then released. So and then from, from that eh receiving centre we were put, we were, we were able to choose actually which place in Canada where we were able to go to. I had met some friends by then and we had wanted to all be together.So most of us managed that and that was in London Ontario. The other place was eh a place near Winnepeg eh, much further eh to the West. So this was a very important eh, eh place to be and high standards were demanded eh and eh threats were made if you don’t do this and don’t pass this you will be off the course and sent home. Eh included amongst that penalty would be air sickness. I was afraid about that because I suffer from motion sickness as a boy and I didn’t tell anybody about it. In fact I found when we got in the air we were so busy I didn’t have time to think about it.So em that was a great relief for me. Anyway this course, the Observers Training Course lasted about four months, about four or five months. And em it consisted of eh well it was like being going back to school really except that the subjects were different. We all lived together in a big sort of Nissan type of a building and time em was divided between em flying or going to this em school. They took em we were er, we were very ,extremely well looked after. I am just looking back, we had absolutely, no, hardly any time for ourselvses. Apart from navigation there were other subjects, meteorology, morse code, armaments to name a few about seven or eight differnent subjects to learn about which we would be examined. And eh it was necessary to get em certain proficiency in them in order to be, to get our brevet.That was, that was available in the end if we passed everything. So there was a certain amount of tension going on, it was very competitive there about eh about eh twenty five or thirty in the class I suppose, eight class, eighty nine A, I remember. The pilots were eh were em not of the Air Force and eh Avro Ansons were the, were the aircraft which was used. We went either as first navigator, we took it in turns as first navigator or second navigator. Got used was getting used to eh preparing a log, doing various tests on eh on board and eh hoping to reach our target at the right time. That was extremely important to do that and hopefully not get lost. I do remember getting lost at night em I had no idea where I was, there were no pin points I could see. Em but the pilot informed me we were near Chicago [laugh]. So many miles off course it was absolutely hopeless. So I thought ‘oh I am not going to pass.’ Anyhow eh it so happened that the commander, the wing commander from time to time flew with eh, with us one by one. And I was very fortunate to have wing commander, I have forgotten his name an extremely nice man. And eh when we were given a target and an ETA you had to arrive exactly at the right time. You got no help with the navigation at all you had to do it yourself. Navigation mainly was by way of pinpoints in order to ascertain the wind eh direction and velocity. That was extremely important to get that right, if you got that wrong you would never get there at the right time or in fact never get there. I so happened on this particular day, it was a fine day, cold, we were in the month of November eh cold but eh very bright and we reached the eh, eh the target exactly on the eta. I do remember the wing commander looking at me and giving me a thumbs up and I thought ‘that was really very lucky that I got there.’ Em do you know the time, I am interested in music eh and eh I play the piano a bit and eh for the Sunday Services. Eh I played well a sort of, more like a harmonium, I think if I remember it and that helped me a little I think. Eh ‘cause I got to know the padre who invited me out to meet his wife and what not. And eh probably the eh wing commander would attend church service so. I was pointed out in some respects which was only a small thing but looking back I think it was quite helpful for me. Anyhow just jumping ahead we did have some time over Christmas, went to Toronto, me some people there, were taken around and enjoyed ourselves. Eh and we were beginning then to think about the end of the course which would probably be around February or March. Eh and at the end of the course that was when the commissions were put out, were granted rather eh and eh, eh there was a big celebration of it. Anyhow, I thought and won’t, remember writing home to my parents, don’t expect me to get a commission it is absolutely hopeless. ‘cause I had been, I hadn’t been so fortunate with my eh flying eh navigation, made several foolish mistakes. Em ground navigation seemed, seemed to be going eh fairly well but I was quite sure that I wouldn’t be selected for a commission. So we came to the end of, the end of the course, I am jumping ahead quite a bit now. Came to the end of the course and we were on parade and our names were called out, mine being one of them and told to stand apart. I thought ‘oh my goodness is this going to be some more trouble?’ One thought and another. But it turned out we were being selected for, for a commission. So I could hardly believe it eh, when, when I heard that was the case. I was the youngest in the class so I thought that was against me to. It was a matter of astonishment for me for this to have happened. We were then left to go to our own devices and send telegrams off to our parents if we wanted to do that and generally jump about and make a noise sort of thing. Eh the award eh we could invite our friends to a big celebration eh where we would be awarded our wings our brevet eh.The band playing and so on. So our friends from Toronto came down I remember and friends we made in London came as well and also it was a very joyful occasion. Then we had leave for em ten days or fourteen days. We went down three of us to New York and had a good time before going back to Monkton in Canada to get ready for the ship to take us back to England. The ship then was the Isle de France and we made eh, we made it safely back to England glad to say. And em we were, had a week leave with our parents when we went home and in our officers uniform. Feeling extremely proud of myself [laugh] and eh and my parents were quite pleased about it I think. From then on eh [cough] eh we to an advanced navigational,advanced navigational course. In a place near Cheltenham I think or Gloucester. Em, it didn’t last very long. And just to get used to navigating over England which is a very different situation from navigating over em Canada.England being far more difficult to navigate. Em then from that place we had an important move eh to eh an aerodrome in Oxfordshire who’s name just escapes me for the moment but that was to crew up. This was a very vital eh matter, it happened eh that eh, it started of in the Officers Mess and it was for, which consisted of eh all, all the groups. Pilots, flight engineer, navigator, wireless operator, gunners and eh, for the, for the captain who was the pilot to select. Well; we were there all in a rather nervous state rather like getting married. Eh waiting for a pilot to come and ask you whither em you would like to be part of his crew. Well I saw a eh fellow and I thought he looks quite a safe type. Pilot officer, he was an extremely important person of the crew because your life depended on him. And eh it just so happened that he came to me and said, eh, he was rather nervous as I was and said eh ‘would you like to be part of my crew?’ Eh so I said ‘yes I would.’ So he said ‘well have a cigarette.’ Since I was a non smoker I didn’t quite know what to do about it. Anyway I thought it was rather unmanly not to have one, so I had the cigarette and was huffing and puffing, didn’t like it very much. Anyhow from that point we both went to a Sergeants Mess in order to fill up the remaining ones. That was again the wireless operator,eh flight engineer, the bomb aimer and the two gunners. The rear gunner and the mid upper gunner, crew of seven which all Lancasters had. Well that took a little bit of time and eh Harold who was my pilot and I, he was very nice. He always used to say to me ‘what do you think about so and so, do you think he would fit in?’ That sort of and our crew came together and we stayed together for the whole of the rest of the time. Of the all the missions were done with the same crew. So having, having got crew that was extremely important we were then going to train on Wellingtons which was a very different matter from being on Ansons. And eh so we had to get used to that and it was at that point to that I first came in contact with radar navigation. At that point, at that time rather eh it was extremely secret and eh, eh we were told without any shadow of a doubt eh terrible things awaited us if we found to be talking about it or in any way discussing it outside of our class. The main, the main radar at that time was GEE, G, double E. Which was a marvellous way of ascertaining where you were. The course lasted, so whilst navigator were learning about this the rest of the crew were in eh, circuits and bumps that’s a very up and down in the Wellington. For a pilot really to get used to a Welling, to a Wellington machine. So I didn’t do very much travelling on the Wellington at that time which I was quite glad ‘cause the circuits and bumps really made me quite, quite nauseous. No sooner were we up but it was time to come down, didn’t like it at all. So I was much happier learning about radar navigation. Em I am skipping ahead, I have forgotten the amount of time we were learning about eh, eh radar. The next station, then we went to was somewhere near eh Leicester, I think was it, I can’t remember. Eh and we were then on Stirlings again it was necessary for the pilot to get use on this big, huge, sprawling eh machine. Eh from navigation course eh we were going on a long trip at night and in the day time, sometimes as far as Cornwall. Sometimes up, eh tried to get eh used to, eh this is for particularly the navigator to get used to eh to using the Gee radar but never forgetting the DR. Eh direct navigation which we had learnt about eh in Canada. We were marked on the logs that we presented eh and from there we went onto another course on Lancasters. A Lancaster Finishing Course again for the pilot to get used to em driving a Lancaster. By this time we, we were, because the next station was a squadron. So we were all anxious of course to get on the squadron and ah we had to pass various tests to do that. Navigation, from the navigation point of view we were marked quite severely on the proficiency, how,we had our logs were examined very carefully. Anyhow all of this was very time consuming of course. We hardly had time to do anything else and eventually from there we were posted to a squadron. This of course was the object of joining the RAF. By this time almost two years had passed with all the various courses as far as I was concerned. The gunners course was much shorter and the other ones to were much shorter. Eh and the squadron was number 50 Squadron which was stationed at Skellingthorpe outside Lincoln, about three miles outside Lincoln and there we stayed until the end of the war. So our training then had finished and I had come to the point when were, it’ the real thing. ‘So should I stop there?’
AS. You started at Skellingthorpe in the squadron can you tell me about, about the missions that you went on, what it was like and what the living accommodation was like?
MH. What the accommodation? Yes, ok so I was an officer a pilot officer eh Howard my em, the pilot was a flight lieutenant. I forgot to mention, he had been a trainer in Canada. Eh and so we went about together a lot eh. We, we had a very cosy sort of a place we were lucky eh the main, we weren’t in with a whole lot of other people, we had a room to ourselves. With a fire lit I remember, it was almost, I shouldn’t say, it was almost like home. We had batmen to look after us or bat women to look after us em [cough] ‘excuse me.’ We being officers of course we had our own mess eh the non commissioned officers the NCOs they had their own mess as well of course. There was a division on the crew with Harold and myself being the only two officers and the rest of the crew being NCOs. But once in the air that didn’t have the slightest difference at all and we were all the same in the air. And em we would go about together too. If we were going into Lincoln for a drink or a night out sort of thing then of course we would go together with the rest of the crew. But on the station we were officers and they were NCOs, there was that difference. And eh the food, the food was very good really eh I don’t, I don’t remember complaining at all about it. We were waited on in the Mess. And em there were frollocks and people getting drunk of course at nights and doing ridiculous things. I suppose that is young men sort of playing the fool and all the rest of it and eh the spirit was “you may as well make hay while you are at work, whilst you have the chance, you might not be here tomorrow.” That, that was not a matter which was eh, dealt, dealt upon, I think it was, we think it was in everybody’s mind.Because one did see empty places in some of the accommodation places when crews had not returned. But I don’t think it was, well for myself eh it wasn’t a matter I dwelt upon. Eh It’s, it’s, it’s difficult, it’s a difficult subject you. Before you went on a raid eh you had to divest yourself of anything that might give your name or any information and put that in a locker. You did wonder, or at least I wondered, ‘I hope I see that again.’ [laugh] because one couldn’t tell. Anyhow we had to have our first operation and this was of course a cause of great excitement for us all and nervousness as well to. The target was Gdynia a port on the Baltic a long way away, long way away for a first, for a first trip. Eh it was at night time eh and eh so we knew we were on a raid that particular night because we were told to report to the briefing room at a certain time, I don’t know what the time was. Probably most of them were late afternoon or early evening for take of. Eh on reaching the briefing room with a whole lot of other crews, the briefing room consisted of all crews sitting round a table in a hap hazard sort of way. Waiting for the commander to come in to tell us what was going to happen. Eh I had all my navigational equipment with me of course, charts, various instruments and all the rest of it in a big bag. And eh we all sat together as a crew and , waited for him to come. Now the, the commander was a man called Wing Commander Jimmie Flint, F,L,I,N,T and he was a well known and,person and continued to be very well known after the war and he lived to be a hundred actually and died only fairly recently within the last couple of years anyhow. He was a man, he was known as “Twitcher Flint,” “Twitcher Flint” a big moustache and eh he would come over and say ‘Well chaps eh, eh you target for tonight.’ Whatever it was, if that target was a long way away a great groan would go up. Eh because it was going to be more difficult and last longer of course. Anyhow this was our first target and eh he would then, various people would come on to give us the directions about the eh course to go there.The track and the course to get to the target and what time it was necessary to get there bye. This, this happened on every target that I was on.So we had to listen. The met, eh meteorological man would come on and eh give his idea what the weather would be. Above all what the winds might be. Of course this was very difficult because nobody was over in Germany to give this information. So we used to regard the wind eh direction and velocity which was given to us as a bit spurious. But anyhow we didn’t have any alternative. So the various, various other people would come sometime to wish us well and then eh it was time to depart for the plane. Now eh the navigator had a lot of work to do at this particular point. He had to plan eh the course and eh get his log ready recording various information. So he was left behind in the briefing room while the rest of the crew went off to the plane. This was always a sort of nervous part I felt. Eh anyhow we had to get this done within a certain time, obviously because we had been given a, we had been given a time for take off and there was quite a lot of work to be done by everybody to do for that time. So after we, the navigators which had remained behind finished their, got all their charts recorded and ready, we went of in the transport. Hardly saying anything to anybody I remember. Sometimes you were the last to be dropped of at your plane and I found out, a very lonely position I must say. Eh dropped of outside the plane, by the time I got there they were revving up, the ground crew were all out.A lot of activity going on the ground eh waiting for me to,to eh get on the plane. I was the last man to get on, I got on, got on the plane over that great hump in the middle of the plane to the navigators cabin. Saying hello to the crew, effectively the wireless operator eh the partition between the navigators cabin and the pilots and the flight engineer and the bomb aimer in front, in front. Almost as soon as I got in eh the pilot wanted, we were all on intercom of course to make sure that was all right and wanted to get going. So I really had to rush pinning down on the chart, getting ready for eh take off. I don’t know how much detail you would like me to go into. Eh for take off we weren’t allowed, the wireless operator and I to sit at our places eh ‘cause in case there was an accident we, we get the worst of it. So we had to go down and squat down between the partition, between the navigators cabin and where the pilot sat, in a squatting position eh until we were airbourne.That happened all the time. There were were always various switches I seem to remember that had to be switched, I really can’t remember the details now but they had to be recorded on my, on my log. As soon as we were airbourne I would be back at the navigators cabin and I was then kept busy all the time until we reached the target. Eh first of all taking off if it, if it was in,in winter of course, darkness came early. But if I could get a pin point or something, well I had Gee of course, I could get some, some eh, eh pin points to put on my chart to ascertain what the wind velocity and direction was which would be helpful to me. As soon as we got near the European coast then the radar was of no use at all because it was jammed by the Germans.They would give you false information which would be disastrous so radar was wonderful up to the, up to the coast but then you couldn’t use it. It was also useful coming back as well. Anyhow from then on it was a matter of eh various legs, legs on the chart which we had given to at the briefing. Eh with order to reach the target, we didn’t go straight there of course, we might go through four, five, six, seven or eight different legs in order to get there. On this particular bombing commission to Gdynia I remember we had to go to Sweden first by various means. Eh, which of course which we shouldn’t have done to get to Sweden and Sweden at that point in Sweden the, the target was, was directly Sotheby. So that is what happened and by that or whatever eh we arrived fairly well on time, I am glad to say which was a huge relief to me. Eh and eh the bombing at the, as soon as we got near, near the target the bomb aimer would then take over the navigation.And he would guide the plane, starboard skipper, port skipper to the actual bombing point and it was up to him then of course to eh, bomb the target. Gdynia was a, was port on the, on the Baltic and as soon as the bombs were dropped everything on the aircraft went up, ourselves included because of the release of the weight of the bombs of course. So I wasn’t used to this, all my navigational instruments went flying everywhere, all over the floor. I should explain that there was a very dark,black heavy curtain eh which joined the eh, em partion between the navigators cabin and, and where the eh pilot sat eh and eh ‘cause I had to have the light on obviously. So I learned a lesson from that to put all the navigational instruments in a bag as soon as we got near the target otherwise you would never find them again. So em quickly to eh give a direction to the pilot making quite sure we were going Westwards and not Eastwards em for the first leg home. There were all the time directions to be given by the navigator to the pilot, eh ‘skipper eh course number,’ Whatever, whatever degree what we,he needed. He eh and I would have eh em a compass inside the navigators so I could tell if he was keeping to that course. That was very important because if comp, if the pilot strayed from the course that was given to him, that seriously affected if we would hit the target. So I would, I would say to him ‘Skipper you are two degrees off.’ Now that irritated the pilot very much indeed once we got back on the ground. Not in the air. He would say to me ‘how do you expect me to keep this course all the time? you don’t realise what a heavy job it is piloting, keeping the course.’ So I said ‘What you don’t realise if we don’t keep the course we won’t hit the target.’ So it was something that happened all the time. But it really was, it really was important that, to do, that he would keep the course. I know it was hard for him and I couldn’t resist it once or twice.[laugh] Well there was the matter of getting home and very important at this point to make sure you were going West and not East for obvious reasons.Then it was the matter of getting back home safely again it wasn’t a direct matter. Eh various legs and all the rest of it and once we got over the, to the North Sea we could use Gee then and home in on Gee and eh and arrive safely. Eh,I just, just mentioned eh I was never very much, my thoughts didn’t go to if we would get shot down and or anything like that. My great fear and it really was a fear, this thing I had dreams about is if we would get lost in the darkness. It was winter time em, very often ten, tenths cloud you couldn’t see anything eh couldn’t you couldn’t have any pin points to [unclear] there was nothing to help you. You had to go on D, direct navigation and, and, and go on what you thought was the right way. All to often we would be flying to a target and the gunners would say ‘oh everybody’s going off to the starboard.’ You think ‘I am not going to the starboard.’ But it caused a certain amount of fear. If you didn’t get to the target on, well if you got to the target on time that was fine, that is what should happen. But it was very, very difficult, only,only a few minutes in a few minutes it was very difficult to do that a long way from home with very little navigational help. Astral navigation was of no good whatsoever because it was too long winded. And the aircraft anyhow getting the bubble and the sextant with the plane jumping up and down.It was virtually impossible and you would probably get a bad reading anyhow.Although we did use it when we were training in Canada as a last resort. But my main fear was getting lost or getting to the target too early in which case you would circle the target which was very dangerous. Or get it too late when the fighters would be up for obvious reasons. And also on, on these raids remembering there were five hundred, seven hundred even a thousand aircraft all bombing at different heights at different times and the, and the chances of, chances of aircraft crashing into each other. That is what was on my mind more that anything else. Also I thought if we got lost, the shame of it all, I would be blamed and eh this worried me intensely I must say.Much more than any sense of danger. Of course it was wonderful getting home and to think we got home safely, we bombed the target and a feeling of exhilaration. The first, as soon as we got of the plane we were welcomed by the ground crew which was always nice. Oh I should have mentioned when we were taking off it was quite customary for the CO to come and see us of, the dentist would see us of, the padre would see us of. Everyone would be waving at us so it was quite nice. Anyhow as soon as we got down the first point to go to was the intelligence and there we were eh quizzed about eh what had happened in the raid. And did we see [unclear] my log was particularly eh necessary.Because we had to make a note of if we saw any planes going down or anything out of the way which had occurred to us had to be marked in our log. So all that information was delivered to em, to them. For the men it was up to the mess for bacon and eggs which was a great treat because eggs we only eat once a week eh and then eh back to our billets. And then next day fine we were on the next night, so I will stop there.
AS. What year was it that you did your first ?
MH. 1944.
AS. 1944 so how many did you do all together?
MH. I’m sorry.
AS. How many sorties did you do all together?
MH. Twenty two we wanted to do thirty because that was the tour. A tour consisted of thirty and we really wanted to do thirty but the war ended to our disappointment.[laugh].
AS. When you were in Skellingthorpe, how much time did you get, did you do, do sorties every, every night or did you have time to rest or were you just waiting for the weather to be right?
MH. Well eh we flew, we flew when we were told to. Eh we obeyed exactly what we were told to do. Yes exactly we had time of. Time of we’d go, we’d go into Lincoln to that pub there I have forgotten the name. I have forgotten the name of it now, a pretty awful pub I seem to remember. Or we would go and see, go to the pictures eh, go and have a supper out somewhere and eh that was nice. We had quite a lot of free time as far as that was concerned. During the day time we had to report to our different sections. I had to report to the navigating sections. Oh by the way to, we had to deliver eh logs to the navigation section and they would be looked at and logged A,B,C or D you know and if they hadn’t been done properly we would be in for trouble. Which I thought was a bit, a bit of unnecessary really for after all, there but anyway that was what it was. There was a good lot of teasing went on and eh it was quite a happy occasion. Eh being in the, being in the mess and getting to know other people. Navigators tended to stick together and each group tended to stick together. But we used to go out as a crew, get drunk and all those sort of things people do or did in those days. I remember it being a socially, happy time.
AS. When you em, how did you hear about the end of the war, when were you told about it?
MH. I think we must have been at the station when we heard about it. Em some people went to London eh, eh I personally made some friends in,in Market Harborough. Met a bank manager there who my family knew his brother and eh they were awfully nice to me I must say and I would go and spend the weekend sometimes with them. Em,sort of a bit like going home. Occasionally we had leave and I could go and for instance on Christmas of that year I was able to go back to my parents. And who were, who were in a state, they were very nervous. They didn’t show it, I only heard about it afterwards. And eh anyhow it was very nice to, I was very fond of them, eh it was very nice to be home again and have proper sheets on the bed.[laugh] and be, and be looked after sort of thing. It was, it was very necessary that you didn’t talk too much about what went on. Eh and especially you shouldn’t write about it eh through your parents or anybody else. A great friend of mine eh from my time at London Ontario, eh made a big mistake in writing to his parents about it. Unfortunately his letter was censored and eh he was had up before the group captain and eh he was all but eh loosing his commission, he didn’t but it was a lesson for him. So, so I had to arrange a scheme with my mother were as I wouldn’t tell her what target we had been on the night before. It was nearly always reported in the newspaper, I used to cut it out of the newspaper and just send this piece of the newspaper to her. So she would know from that and funnily enough only the other day, just before you came. I came across the book that she had kept all these eh cuttings in. So anyhow that is just by the way.
AS. At the end of the war, what happened to you at the end of the war?
MH. Yes, ok at the end of the war was absolutely eh, eh I don’t know, everything suddenly changed all of a sudden em, it was very disappointing in many ways. When we were in uniform during the war the air force, particularly aircrew were regarded with a high, from the public with high regard and eh we were extremely proud of that. Uniform and having a brevet and eh, and being at the squadron we were highly respected. That all vanished as soon as the war was over we were just people again [laugh]. Eh and eh there was a feeling of, well I didn’t have a feeling of relief that the war was over I regret to say. Because I really wanted to complete the tour and, and do the thirty, thirty missions all together.So I was really disappointed and anyhow it was a sort of no mans land type of place. We didn’t know what was going to happen, nobody did. I, I as I say I didn’t go to London to celebrate.But eventually we were given a choice,that we could em, join another squadron which would take us abroad. Because em,a long time had to pass before we could be demobilised in view of the enormous number of people involved. In fact it took me about eighteen months before I was demobilised. So we were [sounds like weren’t] given the opportunity of volunteering em to go abroad in Transport Command. So Howard and I talked about it and I was all for it actually, there was nothing, I didn’t want to go down a mine or, or be a harvester or anything like that. So and I thought there was an opportunity to see a bit of the world so and he seemed to like the idea and the bomb aimer eh, although he wouldn’t be a bomb aimer he would be a second pilot. There would be just four, they would be Dakotas we would be flying, a bit of a come down from a Lancaster. He eh and the wireless operator we decided we would like to do it so we said goodbye to the gunners and the flight engineer. And eh so that was rather sad the crew was broken up actually and I never saw them again. So the four of us were sent up to 10 Squadron which was in a place called Melbourne in Yorkshire and there started training again on, on Dakotas. For me it was easy well very easy indeed I didn’t have much to do and I had almost forgotten pretty much what we do there, what we did there.[cough]. It was to get used to dropping eh materials out of, out of, out of the plane. Eh which I didn’t like the sound of very much. The plane door was open and we had to push things out and get used to that and get used to being in a, in a Dakota. Anyhow and also being on a different squadron which was a Halifax squadron which we thought was going another step down as well. Eh so eventually came a time when we would eh, fly out to India. So that took place from Cornwall and eh I remember my parents were holidaying there. I met up with them there and they saw us of actually. So we flew out to eh India in Dakotas, by stages, by stages from there, the first stage was in,in,in Corsica I think it was. And then to Libya, then to Palestine as it was then, then to em,em East Africa and then to Aden and stopping the night each time. We didn’t do any night flying at all so it took quite a long time to go.Unfortunately from the flight to Aden I developed a sinus which was extremely painful em with the pressure. So I had to stay behind there and they had to get another navigator to take them on to India and I stayed in Aden for a week. The worst week of my life I think, it was just awful feel ill and all alone, heat, humidity, just awful. Anyhow all things come to an end and I eh flew as a passenger to Karachi and then, then eh to Bombay and then was told that 10 Squadron was in Poona only a short way away from Bombay. So we joined the, we joined them there and met up again with Harold of course who by now was a squadron leader, I was now a flying officer, eh and eh the bomb aimer who was a pilot had been commissioned as a pilot officer and the wireless operator, awfully nice guy he was there still as a flight sergeant. And we did trips up to here and there Karachi mainly, mainly and eh then Harold who was quite a bit older, two or three years older than I am was eh demobilised. And returned to Canada where he eh he was married to a Canadian so we said goodbye to him and the bomb aimer to, the second pilot he was called by then. He was an older man to so that just left the nav, wireless operator and myself of the original crew. [door bell rings] Em, so I wasn’t very happy on the squadron and eh, eh there was an opportunity to join another squadron in eh Calcutta, number 52 Squadron and eh volunteers were being asked and Johnnie the wireless operator and myself volunteered to go to 52 Squadron. So they allowed us to go. So we then flew to, as passengers to 52 Squadron in Calcutta. This was to have quite a big effect on my life actually. From 52 Squadron which was a very nice squadron to be on eh, they were flying between Calcutta and Hong Kong. So we then teamed up with a new pilot called Rex Ainsworth who was a very proper pilot with a moustache and eh second pilot Paddy Williamson, four of us. And we flew between Calcutta to Rangoon, to Bangkok, to Saigon to Hong Kong. That was the route, staying of at each place for the night.We all liked Hong Kong so much because there were a lot of things going on there it was fabulous after war rations and so on. Something always seemed to go wrong with the plane at Hong Kong, funny [laugh] Anyhow I left [unclear] and that happened a few times, there were other trips to. Then the squadron moved down to Mingaladon airport, that is the airport for Rangoon. And we were stationed there for a time. Then at long, long last my number for eh came up for,for going home and eh so I went home on,by boat. Took about three weeks, I was home carrying a bottle of whisky and eh eventually to my home to the great joy of my parents and myself and then wondered what am I going to do?
AS. So how was fitting back into civilian life?
MH. Yes that was difficult, that was difficult because we were so used to discipline of the Air Force and how one spoke and behaved and so on. And coming home to civilian. England was in a poor state, this was January 1947. Dreadful winter, one of the worst winters ever recorded and coming straight from, from Burma that was noticeable shall we say. Em getting used to English ways, the country was demoralised. Rationing was worse than it was during the war I think. No idea of a job, I didn’t know what to do, I had been in the Air Force for four years. I didn’t want to go back to the bank eh every thing I saw, the people I thought were lacking in spirit and fed up so what with that and the weather. But, but when I was being demobilised I was told about, there was a course for em ex officers which lasted about eh, eh three I think about three or four weeks,to help you, to help you learn what to do about being a civilian again. I remember this and I thought, the course was at Worcester and only about sixteen miles from where my parents lived, a place called Ledbury in Herefordshire. Em I thought ‘I will go on this course.’ It was a good opportunity, so I went on the course and eh telling us all about accountancy and eh various other subjects and all the rest of it, which is, which is quite helpful. But the main thing about this was at the end of the course, if you were considered suitable, there were offers of various jobs from companies. So I remember BAT, British American Tobacco eh had a job and I thought, ‘I don’t want to stay in England any more it is hopeless, everybody is so down and out, what am I going to do, I had been abroad, I really want something better than this.’ I thought ‘ok I will go abroad again.’ So I applied to BAT and they wrote and said ‘yes we would like to see you, come up to London please.’ So I came up to London and spent two days at one of the railway hotels at their expense and went through a whole lot of questions. And eh seen by a psychiatrist I remember eh, asked all sorts of difficult questions. Hopeless questions just to see how you would react and at the end of it em, eh they said ‘we will get in touch with you.’ At the same time there was another company in Calcutta who were looking for eh a company secretary. I thought oh, well I, I might add I had vowed when I was in Calcutta that I would never in my life, ever [emphasis] return to this city again. It was because of the heat and the humidity and, and poverty and anyhow, so this was in Calcutta. So, so there was a firm with a head office in Coventry Alfred Herbert Leading in Machine Tools [?] So they invited me for an interview as well. So I went to Coventry and eh, and eh there were three or four other people after the same job I think. Anyhow I got an offer of a job from eh BAT at the same time as I did from Alfred Herbert in Coventry. Both very different jobs, there was a snag about both eh. With BAT you had to say you wouldn’t marry before you were twenty five and that you would spent all your working life overseas. I didn’t like either of these at all. Both tying me in. With, with the Calcutta one, the climate and for reasons I have just said I didn’t want to go back there.Anyhow I eventually chose the Calcutta one and I got a job on a four year contract. Went out to Calcutta again[laugh] as a civilian in a very different city for my eyes from what it was before and eh there I stayed for eleven years.
AS. Working for BAT?
MH. No to BAT I said ‘thank you very much I am taking the other one.’ So with Alfred Herbert. It was a good choice, it was a good choice. They had this enormous area of land, the whole of India [unclear] parts of India to cover and Ceylon and, and Malaya and that and Thailand. So it was enormous. And I, I did well there and prospered. I was made a director eh and the only reason I left there really was for health reasons. I really found that my health was suffering because of the climate so I came back after eleven years then had difficulty settling down in England again. But the idea of living abroad now had gone.
AS. When you came back were you working for the same firm?
MH. No, ah it is interesting, when came back, I wanted to go, I went to Coventry eh to see if anything was available and was told ‘we really appreciate what you have done but we are very sorry we haven’t got anything available for you.’ Eh that was a big blow for me because I had hoped maybe to go to Australia where they had a subsidiary company or maybe to Italy. Anyhow,but there was a good reason that they didn’t have anything. Within five years the company was, had been taken over by Government and was, was bankrupt. Alfred Herbert,so Alf, so Alfred Herbert who I met on a couple of occasions at least because his third wife used to live in Calcutta. So that was the sort of common touch and she always wanted to see me whenever I went to Coventry on leave. The four year contract I had with, meant I had to stay in Calcutta for four years. I, I wouldn’t be allowed home in that time eh and eh then I would have six months leave and the next time I went back it was a three[two?] year contract, four and a half years. ‘Are we, are we still on? Oh, can I diverse?Yes.’Once when I was in Alfred Herberts in their factory in Coventry, and enormous factory making machine tools. You couldn’t see the end if you stood up. Because I was a director of the subsidiary company in India eh I was allowed to have lunch with directors and the senior staff in Coventry. So on this particular day eh, I was invited in to have lunch at, at, at the canteen I suppose and they said ‘This is where Sir Alfred generally sits, but don’t worry about it he has gone home and you won’t be in any trouble, just sit there.’ So I was sitting next to the place where Sir Alfred generally sits. Sir Alfred I might add was greatly feared in the whole of the. He had founded the business since I had been, enormously successful for him and eh his word was well, it was wise not to upset him. So there was a general chatter going on whilst you were giving your order for lunch. Suddenly the door opened and in walked Sir Alfred, his Rolls Royce had broken down. So he came in and sat right next door to me. So he said, the waitress came up and eh, so he said ‘I will have this or the other for lunch.’ And then turned to me and said, everybody was quiet at this time of course. ‘Well Heaton,’ he said ‘Tell us something about India.’ Well of course I was enormously embarrassed so I said ‘well Sir eh, it’s very hot.’ [laugh] He saw that I was embarrassed and [laugh] moved into other conversations. Anyhow when, when I had decided to leave and eh he wrote me a letter, personal which I still have eh and asked me what my reasons were for leaving India. And I told him, eh I think he was afraid that I might be, I might know something about some wrong doing or something like that in the firm. And I was very friendly with his grandson actually eh and he thought I would tell him, because he addressed this letter not to the company but to my private residence. Then said when I came home eh that I should report to him. So I had hopes of that but in that time he had died at ninety one. I have a photograph of him in my study that I can show you in due course and you can see from his face the sort of man he was. Well then, when I came home, then I, what am I going to do? How can I can a job? Well, started looking at advertisements all the rest of it. And eh wrote of eh tantalising letters I hoped to eh, to eh various places who I thought would be very happy to have me with my, with my Indian experience and being a director at a young age and all the rest of it. I thought, I had high hopes, I said to my mother ‘don’t worry I will soon get a job.’ I didn’t get a job. Those people who replied to me were terribly sorry, not suitable eh disappointing thing. In the meantime time was getting on and eh, eh I was running out of my leave pay, final pay. And eh, so very disappointing, getting a bit disheartened as well thinking is something the matter with me. And so I was looking in the Telegraph and I saw there was eh, there was a estate agency up for sale, for half sale. So I said to my mother ‘I will go and have a look at that.’ In Surbiton near London. So my mother came with me, we went to Surbiton and so this rather pokey business and half of it was available to me if I bought it for two thousand five hundred pounds, which was quite a sum in those days. We are talking in nine, eh nineteen fifty nine, fifty eight, nineteen fifty eight.Anyhow short of the tale was I thought ‘blow it, yes I’ll pay it.’ So I bought half the company without knowing anything at all about estate agency. But I felt I had to get away from Ledbury and that was, that had been the problem actually. Anyhow I started work with this company. Didn’t like it very much, thought I would have to make a go of it. Found out [unclear] there had been some fiddling about.With the customers deposits being used for paying wages or something. When I asked my partner ‘what is all this about?’ So he said ‘well we haven’t got the money.’ I said ‘you can’t use this to pay.’ So straight away, up to see solicitors, they said ‘you must resign at once and get out of it.’ Which I did, I thought what about my money ‘well you will, see what the best we can about that.’So there I was having bought a house in eh, em, I have forgotten what the place was Hersham, Hersham on Thames and eh back to square one. So then I started asking, answering advertisements and immediately got a reply and got a job straight away, Bush House as a company secretary. I stayed there for one year, there was no, no eh future for me in there. Eh I looked at another advertisement in a, in a print, printing factory also for a company secretary, got that without any trouble. That was sold to Pitmans and new people came in, didn’t like them, stopped there. Moved out of there, got a job with International paints, eh a job much lower than normally I would have taken there. And quite enjoyed it, I thought I must make a move again. I saw an advertisement in the paper em, eh jeweller requiring a company secretary must be about forty, that was exactly my age. I applied for it, then I was asked. ‘Am I boring you with all this? Just stop me.’
AS. Please carry on.
MH. Tizex[?] were the people concerned I had to go to them first and as luck may have it there was a, a Sir Hilary, somebody I forgot. Anyway he was a rear admiral during the war and in the Indian Ocean. So Indian Ocean, I thought ‘oh India.’ So I mentioned ‘Really where were you in India?’ That put me out from other people who were applying for the job, I believe in retrospect. So Anyhow, he said ‘ok I have got to see a lot of people, we will be in touch.’ About a month went past, he rang me up one evening at home, he said ‘are you still interested in the job?’ I said ‘yes I am.’ So he said ‘come and see me again.’ So I went again and he told me more about the job. The job was Ciro Pearls Ltd with eh, with em shops in this country, in Germany in and in America. Eh so widely run. So he said you [pause] ‘look shortlist now six people and eh you will be hearing from them.’ Anyhow I heard from them, present yourself at the shop in Regents Street and I was the last one. Oh Chairman a very nice man, a Russian Vladimir Gorash em. I have got his photograph here to.And eh a few simple questions. In short I went home it was Easter time, I said to my mother ‘I think I have got that job.’and I had. When I got back there was the offer. Well that’s my last, I was with them for twenty five years. Em,and rose to be Managing Director and in time Chief Executive Officer of the entire group. So it was really a good move. So I did a huge amount of travelling particularly in America, East to West Coasts. Em all over in this country,right up as far as Aberdeen. [Unclear] in Germany many[unclear] and in Austria we opened a shop in Vienna another one in Saltsburg. France in Paris altogether about a hundred shops altogether or about a hundred outlets I should say. There em and I retired em when I was sixty five having done twenty five years with the company. Em; did well salary wise eh was almost my own boss pretty well. The eh, the,the Russian Chairman retired and died.And eh I became, became, I took over his job and held that for about eh oh I suppose twenty years going up to that job altogether. So, so it finished, a highly satisfactory, very interesting, the shops were all in the best possible places. I travelled by Concorde or first class. I was expected to, to eh act in a, a certain way and with that came all these props as well. So it was a very interesting job for me. Quite unlike anything I had done previously. I went round the world once and called in on Calcutta to my old place again to in Alfred Herbert and met some of the staff which were still there. So em and since then retirement, just enjoying myself until now[laugh].
AS. Thank you very much as far as your aircrew were concerned you said that you, when you changed squadrons and went over to India you left three of them behind and you never saw them again. Did you keep in touch with any of the other aircrew.
MH. Yes my pilot, yes until he died, he was in Canada.
AS. Was he a Canadian?
MH. No.
AS. But he married a Canadian.
MH. Yes, he was, he was a teacher an RAF teacher there, an instructor. He was an instructor in Canada em then he decided he wanted to take a part in the war.He was in the Air Force as an instructor, he wanted to take part in the war and came back to England and that’s where I met him. But he had married when he was in Canada, this Canadian girl. Em, so he came back by himself leaving her out in. in Canada. She actually did come over with a view of staying in, in this country until the end of the war but she hated it so much that she went back to Canada. So he was without his wife until he went back again. Unfortunately he was on the booze and he died, he was only sixty nine.
AS. Oh right.
MH. The others I have lost touch with.
AS. Right, well thank you.
Dublin Core
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Identifier
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AHeatonSM160322
Title
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Interview with Stuart Michael Heaton
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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01:22:28 audio recording
Conforms To
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Pending review
Creator
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Andrew Sadler
Date
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2016-03-22
Description
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Michael Heaton grew up in Worcester and was a member of the Air Training Corps. He worked in a bank before joining the Royal Air Force and trained as a navigator in Canada. He completed 22 operations as a navigator with 50 Squadron from RAF Skellingthorpe. After the war he was transferred to Transport Command with 10 and 52 Squadrons in the Far East. Following demobilisation, he went into various jobs and when he retired he was the CEO of Circo Pearls Ltd, where he had worked for 25 years.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Air Force. Transport Command
Spatial Coverage
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Canada
East Asia
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
Contributor
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Hugh Donnelly
10 Squadron
50 Squadron
52 Squadron
aircrew
bombing
C-47
demobilisation
fear
Gee
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
military living conditions
military service conditions
navigator
RAF Melbourne
RAF Skellingthorpe
Stirling
training
Wellington