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This story was submitted to the People's War site by Jan Bedford of Kent County Council Maidstone Library on behalf of Fred Connington and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

´óÏó´«Ã½ People’s War — Headcorn Library Monday 16th August 2004

Fred Connington

My background is having come from a very large family in London. My father died in 1930 as a result of a wound from the First World War and left my mother with 9 children which was a bit of a burden for her. I went to an elementary school in Tooting and that was where I learned to run. Every lunchtime I was chased around the playground by a great, big, fat boy and it worried me sick. On one occasion I got so fed up with it, I jumped and punched him on the nose, that stopped him and it also got me 100 lines. I had to write ‘I must not be a bully’, which I didn’t think was very fair. But the result of going to that school was I got an exhibition scholarship to a cabinet making school in Shoreditch in 1936. I spent 3 years there, in what was then the junior school and I got another scholarship which took me on for another 2 years to a senior school, and that was in 1939 when the evacuation was on.

I remember responding to a poster in 1938 that said, ‘Are you 16? Do you have a bicycle? Because the fire service require messengers’. So I went along to the Tooting fire station, standing behind a very tall counter, a very large fireman who looked over me and said ‘what do you want?’ I said I’ve come to join to be a messenger. He said, ‘well when you can see over the top of the counter I’ll take you’. That was my first attempt at national service.

We were evacuated to High Wycombe, lovely place. My first landlady was a very, very strict Baptist, Welsh lady with a very timid husband. He had to put his bike in the shed when he came home from work and take his shoes off. I was allowed to listen to the radio at 4 o’clock when Uncle Mack was on. And every time I moved off the chair the lady came behind me and straightened the cushions. I got a bit worried about that and I asked to be moved to another billet and I was given to a billet with an Aylesbury lady. Lovely lady but she was a chain smoker. I remember on one occasion she was cooking the dinner and there was a cat licking the water out of the saucepan with the sprouts in and I was watching the end of the cigarette gradually drop and it went straight into the pot. No, she was a lovely lady she looked after me very, very well. I was carrying on the cabinet making which was the course I was taking. And the reason I’m leading up with this is when I got called up at the end of 1941 and they asked where I wanted to go, I said the RAF. ‘ What have you done?’ and I told them and I was designated to be a carpenter. So I was downgraded from cabinet-maker to carpenter.

At the technical college in High Wycombe that we went to, you can imagine 40 of us, boys from Shoreditch and places ending up at the very posh school. Part of it was a young lady’s school and the headmistress hated the sight of us, she really went to town on us. We were into all sorts of mischief. When we left there in 1941 we decided we must show our respect to her so we tied her bicycle to the top of the tallest tree in front of the college. Now this was a lovely stone façade, beautiful thing, with about 4 trees in front of it, we chose the tallest one we pulled this bike up to the top and tied it very securely.

I played cricket for High Wycombe actually, the first time I’d ever played cricket. The chaps kept getting called up and I was volunteered by a friend of mine to be part of the team. And they made me long-stop. And the opposing captain was a great big beefy Buckinghamshire farmer who obviously looked as though he was going to beat the lot of us. And on the first ball that was bowled it touched his bat, at long-stop I put my hand up and caught the ball. And he wouldn’t go out, he said he wasn’t ready. He scored more runs than the whole of our side.

First unit I went up to Blackpool, we had training there. I got filled up with the injections they gave you in those days and I ended up lying on my dinner. I had fainted in the dining-hall. The Cardington was the first place I went to and I had my hair cut. The chap cutting the hair had what looked like a hedgehog. It had 2 wooden handles, one each side with a length of brown flex coming from it. And when he’d finished slaughtering me with the clippers, he came behind me and ran this rotten thing over my head to take all the hair off and nearly took the scalp off as well. My first RAF haircut.

I went up to Redcar for training and it was very, very cold at the beginning of 1942. An extremely cold patch, and it wasn’t very comfortable at all. And then I went to South Wales to a little crash and salvage unit. Acting as their carpenter, I made them a couple of offices from the crates that hurricanes were being delivered in from Canada. They wanted some more office space and it occurred to me that perhaps these big cases might do the trick so we got a couple and I put doors and windows in, partitions for them, and that’s the sort of work I was up to. The Unit itself was very, very busy going up into Cheshire and places and bringing back little Tiger Moths. There was a training school up there and these Tiger Moths were coming to grief and our large lorries, the Queen Marys we called them, used to go up to this area and bring them back. And my job as far as aircraft were concerned was to salvage parts of them that could be used again in production of other aircraft.

My next move was to Sealand near Chester where I started as an aircraft carpenter and I spent the next three years in Chester and in Henlow, Bedfordshire working on Mosquitoes. And I’m very sad to say there don’t seem to be many Mosquitoes about now. My job, part of it, was to modify Mosquitoes and put into them the racking and equipment necessary to put a lot of the new identification radar equipment that was going to be used. Also one of the jobs was to repair the bits that the Germans knocked off. Mosquitoes were coming back with damaged wings, damaged fins, damage to the fuselage and I had the job of putting that back into good order. So the aircraft would come in damaged, when it went off again it should have gone off as new.

As a carpenter in Chester I was very, very pleased to be given the first job ever of providing kennels for the German Shepherd dogs. They had 6 German Shepherd dogs, so I made 6 kennels. I put a shutter on the front and I was asked by the sergeant, ‘what have you done that for, why have you put a shutter on the front?’ I said, ‘well at night-time it will keep them warm and keep them in’. ‘Oh right leave it then’. The first night they put the dogs in these kennels, they must have been a bit worried about it because when morning came there were 6 dogs running over the airfield and the whole front of the kennel had been chewed off. They didn’t like being put away.

Does anybody remember the Dear John letters? I was involved in turning a hut into a church at Chester. While I was there the padre went on leave and the chaps used to take it in turns to sit in the padre’s office and hold his surgery for him. And on one occasion an airman came in and wanted to know where the padre was, I told him he was on leave and could I help him, and he said well I’ve had this letter and it’s a Dear John letter. His wife telling him she had found somebody else and he said he wanted to go home on leave. So I arranged with the CO for a pass. That was very sad, they were frequent, but very sad.

One of the incidents that I remember is a little bit naughty really. We had a rather short, dumpy WAP and the Mosquito fuselages are very, very slim at the back and someone has to go up there and hold the nut for the chap to put the bolt in the other side. And this young lady was designated to go up to the end of this fuselage and hold the nut. A few of the lads got in the fuselage with her and all we heard from this young lady in broad Staffordshire was ‘oh give over’. So I don’t know what was going on.

The latter part of the war I was at Henlow and I remember very, very well, I starting courting. I persuaded my wife, because we belonged to a Baptist church in Tooting, that I was going to start a young friendly club and would she like to be the first member, well I’m still married to her, so…A long, long time. I remember going along to Tooting Common and watching the doodlebugs come over. That was our recreation I suppose at that part of the war, to hear the noise of this engine and then cut out and then wonder where it’s going to happen. Fortunately Tooting didn’t get too much of a problem with bombs or doodlebugs. But it certainly had its rockets. I remember one whole section of street near where I lived just being devastated. It went straight down the middle and took out 2 rows of houses. I was at the camp at the time, but I knew something had gone wrong I could feel it, when I got home and walked from the tube into the area near where I lived I just saw it this mess.

It was later in early ‘46 I was sent out from Bedfordshire to Germany. I went to Evare first, which is the civil airport in Brussels, I spent a couple of months there. And then I moved on into Germany and I had the horrific pleasure, if you like, of going up through the Ruhr and just seeing the devastation that was there. If anybody ever got paid back for what they’d been up to I’m afraid the Germans did. It was just one scene of flattened buildings, little tiny corrugated shelters that they had built for themselves, smoke coming out from their little chimneys. When we stopped at one of the German stations, some German boys there they were selling Hitler Youth daggers, someone had gone into production with these things and they were selling these for a few cigarettes at a time. The journey back from the Hook of Holland took 24 hours and I don’t think I left my bunk once. We were stuck out there because it was impossible for the ship to dock in and I remember myself and all the rest of them were very, very sick, very bad.

We went up to near Blackpool to be demobbed I got into the station and I was told I was going to be on duty that night on fire picket. I told the RAF corporal, very smart he was I think he’d just joined, I told him that if he wanted any fire picketing done he could do it himself, I’d had enough. I resumed my cabinet making after the war, not for long, I went to work for a former cabinetmaker making canteens for cutlery for Mapping and Webb. I did one or two funny jobs, I went into the Ministry for 20 years looking after museums, post offices all sorts of things. And for the last 10 years I had a job that took me around the Thames barrier, loads of dams and those sorts of places and I was actually in the Geological Museum when the moon dust was brought in. I saw a little tiny glass petrie dish with grey stuff on it, that was the moon dust. And I actually saw the moon landing on a big television at the Geological Museum.

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