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A War. Is Started.

The first year or so of the Second World War had not affected me unduly. Yes I knew it was a serious business and I had no illusions of a quick and easy victory. Dad would have dispelled that sort of stupidity. I was just too busy doing my thing. And I suppose enjoying it.
When Bob and I joined up I had naturally assumed that he would go before me being older and I got that wrong too. There were thousands of would be aircrew and not so many mechanics with experience of engines and once I’d put my name down it was not long before I was called up.
First it was Padgate. Probably half of the people who joined up in those days went to Padgate near Warrington. I arrived there in my civvies, a scrawny, eighteen year old, with something of an inferiority complex. Convinced that everybody else there was cleverer, stronger and better off than me. Some of them were, but I must have fitted in about average. To be sworn in to serve The King, his heirs and successors and all that sort of thing. I still have my copy of the agreement somewhere.
We were then kitted out with as near to a full kit as they had. I got an almost full kit, but there were some who didn’t get a full uniform and there were some things I didn’t get which were put on a deficiency chit. I had not learned at this stage that the best place for all your kit in the services is on your deficiency chit. It’s so much lighter and easy to carry than spare boots, gas masks, spare socks and all the stuff they would have you dragging around if they could.
Within a couple of days we were shepherded onto a train which took us to Great Yarmouth. Yes that’s right. On the East coast, where they all go for holidays. Where there are lots of hotels which in nineteen forty one were empty and deserted. The place was fifteen minutes flying time from German airfields on the French coast. We were then ushered into these posh Hotels with no staff or services and lots of stairs and counted out into squads of about thirty under a corporal Physical Training Instructor. Ours was corporal Collinge and we were his first squad. His job was to teach us how to form up, dress from the right or left, march, salute, slope arms shouting one pause two and all that rubbish. I was pretty hopeless at all that, but scraped through somehow right to the great final passing out parade. After which the sergeant, one sergeant Mulreany (right out of Kiplin), came to me, out of all that great throng to tell me I ought to have the fg rifle wrapped around my fg neck. I took it as a complement. We had not been on the butts, never fired the damned thing and I reckoned even then, that with all the shooting I’d done with my air rifle and the instructions from an uncle I could have shown this pratt quite a bit about rifles. I was learning.
Apart from the passing out parade the seven or eight weeks training at Great Yarmouth was not terribly exciting. The corporal was alright and the squad as mixed a bunch as you would expect. There was a bloke with a banjo mandelin who really could play the thing and turns up later in this story. As does Jack Bingham from Derby who once said, in answer to a question, that .
‘Yes had had been a boxer, all his family were boxers’, but so many blokes said that I did not take much notice of it.
We all passed out O K and then it was another train journey to Cosford near Wolverhampton. Here I started learning about aircraft engines. It was a two year course in peace time, now telescoped into sixteen weeks. It was a bit too much for some blokes, mostly older ones, at about thirty. I enjoyed it. Learning about the latest things in carburetors and magnetos was a wonderland to me. I did accidentally stretch it out a bit by going to see the M O to ask about a sore throat I had and found myself dumped into an isolation ward there and then for almost a fortnight. They were not taking chances with throat infections in a place like that with thousands of men packed in together. This meant that I was on a different course entry squad, with all new blokes and out of touch with the ones I’d come from Yarmouth with. So when I went one evening to a boxing tournament I was interested to see Jack Bingham’s name on the program. I think the promoters must had had some idea because he was up to fight a bloke who looked quite a bit bigger than him, it didn’t matter, the chap had no chance. Jack stepped out from his corner and within seconds the guy was down and the referee stopped the fight. Jack really could box.
It was near the end of the course that one morning the sergeant called for volunteers to donate blood for experimental purposes. It was a new thing and one or two brave souls stepped forward. I stood fast. I’m not a natural volunteer. That is until lunchtime when we returned to our billet to see a bloke who had stepped forward. In his Best Blue uniform, with a railway warrant and a leave pass in his hand.
I groaned, fancy missing a chance like that. The next morning the sergeant called for more volunteers and I jumped my two paces forward. It was time to volunteer.
We were marched through the camp to a small outside sick quarters where a very pleasant nurse instructed us to lie down on a bed whilst she took some blood from our arms. We were then told to lie still for about twenty minutes, then sat up to drink a glass of Guinness and eat a couple of biscuits before collecting our passes and warrants, to go home for two days sick leave from the next morning.
I got away early, caught a train to Brum and found there was not one to Northampton till one o’clock. I was in no mood to wait about, I went out to the tram station, took a tram to the Coventry road terminus and got on the road with my thumb out.
Within minutes a rough old truck stopped with a rough sort of bloke driving it.
‘Coventry mate?’ he asked.
‘Yes please,’ I said.
‘I’m going along the bypass, you can walk into Coventry,’ he said.
‘I’ll stay with you there,’ I told him, ‘where you going from there?’
‘I can get you to Weedon,’ he said.
‘That’ll do me,’ I told him, ‘I expect you’re going down to London from there.’
‘No,’ he said ‘Northampton from there.’
‘Keep on,’ I said, ‘you’ll tell me next you’re going to Bedford from there’
‘That’s right,’ he said.
‘I’ll tell you where to drop me off mate,’ I told him, ‘this is my lucky day.’
He bashed on through Northampton and as we got to Yardley Hastings a bus was just starting off from the bottom of the hill. I said.
‘My luck is in, I’ll bet that bus will turn right at the top of the hill to go to Olney if we can stop it.’
‘Soon do that,’ he said, as he gunned past it, stopped in front of it and I leapt out thanking him and wishing him luck.
I jumped on the bus, it turned to Olney and the conductor didn’t even ask for the fare. I got off fifty yards from home, walked into the house at just the time I would have been leaving Brum by train.
Mum said
‘Hello, I’ve kept a bit of dinner in the oven for you.’ She was a witch. I know it.
It must have been about this time that Bob had been called up and Mum was quite excited. It seems that just before Bob was called up they heard a knock on the door one morning and found a couple of soldiers there. These blokes introduced themselves as cooks. There was a big training scheme going on all over the area and they were involved. They had had their cooks truck knocked out and were left without cooking facilities for their Sergeants Mess.
‘Would it be possible,’ they asked, ‘to use the kitchen’?
Dad explained that they needed it for their food, but the blokes said that was no trouble, the family could eat with them. So they moved in and took over the kitchen. Well I think Dad enjoyed it queueing up with his plate like old times. The two cooks did all the cooking and had no trouble supplying the family. Mum said she would leave the house and return to find the cooks settled on either side of the fire with the food cooking away in the kitchen. They were there I understood for several days till the lot moved on and they left Mum’s kitchen cleaner than they found it and a donation from the sergeants to cover the cost of gas used etc. Mum then decided to see what was left in her stores. It was wartime and everything was rationed and in short supply, so she was a bit concerned.
She looked at her precious sugar tin and found it right full. Her flour bin full. There were packs of margarine, lard, egg powder, tins of fruit and several large tins of bully beef. She was still a bit emotional about it when I got home.
I passed out quite well eventually with 68%. Which got me my A C 1 and immediate flight Mechanic’s pay, to go home on my first real leave. Fourteen days whilst the Airforce sorted out a posting for me.
I came down to earth a bit when I walked in home to be greeted with
‘Oh our Bill you’re just right. Sid Seabrook has killed a pig for us and it wants cutting up.’ So it was off with the posh new uniform and get going with the big knife. Mum was always a wangler with food and she had done a deal with a farmer friend, which meant she had handed in all her bacon ration coupons in return for pig feed allowances. These went to the farmer along with any scraps and he reared and fed a pig for her. She even at this time did not enjoy very good health and Dad did not like doing butchery jobs. Bob didn’t either, but he was not there at the time. Dad and I then had the job of walking round to friends, neighbours and relations with bits of the pig.
I think it must have been shortly after I got to Cosford that I went on what they called a patrol guard. This was simply two blokes patrolling their area of the camp. This was taken as an opportunity by one Duty Sergeant and the Station Warrant Officer to bully a few raw recruits. This pair accosted me and the other bloke, so we challenged them as was proper and my partner asked for identification from the S W O which was again as it should be done and the Sergeant tried his hand at making a mug of me. I suppose I always did look a bit dim. Probably still do. A bit skinny, not very smart, so I was a good target. He started off by telling me that I was not standing in the On Guard position properly, nor was I holding my rifle in the right way. My uncle; the one who had taught me how to shoot, had also given me a bit of instruction on how to hold and use a rifle and bayonet.
‘Don’t get all tight,’ he’d say, ‘hold it firm, but easy, so you can use it fast and if you miss with your first thrust, go past, get close, use your feet and bring the butt up hard’. We spent quite a bit of time with air rifles practicing. Much to the disgust of my parents.
Well this sergeant was right, I was not holding the rifle just as the book said and I was relaxed even if I did look a bit dim.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘This is how you hold a rifle,’ grabbing the thing and pulling it away from me. I let him get hold of it and allowed him to pull it toward himself until he thought he had it, before putting my uncle’s, if you miss system, into action by moving forward fast, right foot behind him, up with the butt and give a good push. He could not step back, my right leg had trapped his feet, so he went right down flat on his back with his arms flailing, giving me plenty of time to bring my bayonet round to prod him in the guts.
‘You ain’t supposed to take my rifle from me sergeant’ I explained to him and then I told my mate to watch the one he was talking to and use his bayonet if he tried anything, just as I intended to do. I think they were glad to get away from my sort of patrol guard. It taught me that the RAF sergeant is about the lowest form of life in the services. A small fact which future experience later confirmed with the occasional exception if course.
My first posting was to Kidlington. To an, A F U. Advanced Flying Unit. Where they trained pilots who had already passed out to fly tiger moths. They were converted to Airspeed Oxfords. Learning to fly cross-country and eventually night flying, before going to Bomber Command.
Kidlington was busy. That is an understatement. They had masses of Oxfords there, flying like maniacs and mixed in with them were a bunch of Hawker Hectors, which towed eight man gliders into the air and released them to teach their pilots to do landings.
Not many people, even aircraft buffs, know much about Hectors. They are a biplane with quite a good performance because they have a great big Napier ‘H’ conformation engine in them which is heavy and powerful. This gets them off with a glider in tow with ease, but is so heavy that on landing it tips the damned things up onto their nose every so many landings.
The system they used also included the glider releasing its end of the towrope and then the Hector flying over and dropping the thing from some height. Before landing. The glider now crept silently down. With malicious intent on any unwary airman who had only just dodged the towrope, was gazing in wonder at the Hawker Hectors standing on their noses and hoping he could dodge the next lot of Oxfords, which were bumping in at some speed. I learned quite a lot about self-preservation at Kidlington in the short space of time I was there, which included Christmas 1941.
I did mange to get out and into Oxford a couple of times, but there was nothing there at that time for me. The most notable thing which happened to me was one evening when I was queuing up to clock in I found my self standing next to a WAAF who was talking about free love. She advocated the complete freedom from sexual restraint among people like us, as we were away from home and wives and partners. Having had no experience with sex she scared me. I didn’t dare take her up on what was on offer.
Kidlinton was so crowded they opened another aerodrome which was no where near ready at Barford St Johns and I was one of the ‘lucky’ ones. That went there. Here there was no water laid on, no sewer, no heating and very little Hanger facilities. The flight office was the crate which some aircraft fuselage had been delivered in, and the Nissen huts were just huts with a sort of fireplace in them, but not much fuel.
To get a wash you waded out in your gum boots to a clear patch of flooded aerodrome and washed there. Shaving in cold water and cleaning teeth as best you could. There were plenty of blankets and lots of food from a field kitchen. The pubs in Barford were the best retreat when possible and they knew the state we were in and allowed for our scruffy appearance. It was at Barford St Johns that I did something I’m not too proud of. Not the first or last time I’m afraid.
A small group of bods in one of the blister hangers were standing around talking about wrestling and all that sort of thing with one of them giving forth loudly about The Double Nelson hold.
‘Impossible to break,’ he claimed confidently. I’d spent a lot of time in Gymnasiums where we often had self defense and other disciplines demonstrated and taught and I suppose I succumbed to my impatience and annoyance at the way he was going off. I said to one of the crowd.
‘Try it on me,’ and stood whilst the voice explained to this guy how to do the hold. I let him get comfortable, asked if he’d got it right and then spread him on the floor, which was a pretty rough dirt floor. I had no moral right to do this and felt awful about it, all I could do was apologize.
Well they were getting the sewer and water laid on into the aerodrome when they moved the lot of us up north to Leconfield, just north of Beverly. Lec was a peacetime aerodrome with well built, heated billets and full size hangers. Headquarters buildings, proper cookhouses, sick quarters and something like five hundred Airspeed Oxfords flying like bees round a honey pot.
I was allotted to R flight at the end of the arc of hangers. We had two corporals. Olio Joe Voice and Jack Muge. Decent enough blokes. Here the work really started. The normal system in the RAF is that an engine mechanic has an aeroplane, which he and a rigger look after. At Lec things didn’t work out like that. You got to the flight in the morning fairly early, depending on the light as much as anything and Jack Muge handed you a wadge of form 700s which had been sorted out by himself and Connie the clerk. If you got less than four it was almost a day off. Generally it was six or seven and could be more. In the name of efficiency they issued us with push bikes to get round faster.
Sometimes you were lucky and found one of the things stood up on its nose or laying on its belly. If you were really lucky one of yours had ploughed into another of yours and you were two less to deal with. The drill was to charge to the nearest. You had their numbers on a fag packet. Lug the cowlings off and look into the engines. Then you trapped somebody. Anybody and sat him/her in the pilots seat whilst you started the engines. Whilst they were warming up with your trapped helper sitting there you did the next one trapping another innocent and if possible left that warming whilst you might even get to another before rushing back to the first and running the engines up to test the magnetos. Skillfully hanging on to your trapped helpers you got round the lot before the pilots came out to do the days flying.
To say we were busy is the understatement of all time, but we were learning about aeroplanes fast. Then the night flying routine was put into effect. On night flying the system was that you started about eight in the morning, getting a batch of kites off to fly all day. It did leave a bit of time when they were all up and away to play around on the bikes, but you were soon refueling and getting them up again.
Late in the afternoon we did the night flying inspections, paying a little more attention to things like the feel of controls. Making sure they didn’t vibrate off and all that sort of thing and that exhaust gaskets didn’t flare too much to pester the pilots and then you went back to the billets for an hour or so before reporting back for the nights work. Older blokes soon got taken off this job. They went all nervy. It was hard. In the winter as the nights are long and the wind off the North Sea is cold. You can’t use lights and filling a petrol tank is done by shooting the stuff in and waiting till it shoots back out at you. Then you know its full because you are soaked in the stuff. Next the engines have to be started by winding the starting handle which you do from the mainplane right behind the engine. You wind like hell because the pilot is a pupil, is dead scared and can’t get to grips with the right amount of throttle to put on. When the stubborn bitch fires he’s got too much on and the thing goes like hell and you have to hang on to stay on the mainplane, yelling to the poor chap to turn the bloody thing down it’s freezing the sweat onto you. You get the next day off and start again the next night. After which you actually get a whole day and night off. This routine does not recognize Saturdays or Sundays.
The advantages you get from being on the night flying crew are passes which get you in and out of camp at any time of the night or day and meals at any time of the night or day, but you earn them. I managed to get out enough despite it all to meet and get engaged to a girl from Hull.
The aircraft worked as hard as we did. I noticed one in particular that came out of the hangers one morning flew all day, all the next night and day and the next night and went into hangers for it’s next forty hour inspection. It had flown forty hours in forty eight. And this was not just long twenty hour flights. Nor was it special.
It was a sharp learning curve at this stage. There were not quite so many aircraft in the air on nights, but the work load on the ground-staff was heavier. We had the inspections to carry out, the refueling, the starting up and settling in of pilots and then the aircraft had problems with taxiing. Being wartime they had no headlights and had some difficulty finding their way around. So we had the job of standing at the places where they had to make a turn with two hand torches, with blue glass, to wave them, first toward us and then giving them the turn to port or starboard signal as they got close. Then it was torches off and dive out of the way of the propellers. I don’t recall anybody getting caught by a prop doing this, but it got a bit close sometimes. We did have one bloke killed by walking into a prop. Norman Ginn was a very experienced fitter, but he set out to walk in front of a plane in the dark and misjudged it. It is so easy to make a mistake in the dark when there are so many engines running that you do not hear just one. The whole air is full of engine noise you can’t pick one out from it. By coincidence Norman appeared later in my life. More of that later.
I was working close to the flying control pilot one night. We did not use the control tower in the night. He was working from a table at the edge of the runway when he called me to him.
‘Take over,’ he said, ‘I’ve got to go. Give him a green and then let that one go,’ and away he went into the darkness. Severe Diarrhoea was not an excuse for getting off work at that time. I was on my own at the control table with Very pistols, red and green and Aldis lamps, red and green and more kites on the circuit than Heath Row has ever seen. Plus the possibility which we were always conscious of, that one of the aircraft coming in toward the runway would suddenly switch off all his lights, open his throttles and spray everything he could see with machine gun fire as he dropped his bombs. It never happened to me, but was always on the cards. There was also always the chance that instead of an Oxford landing a four-engine bomber would drop in with his troubles and have to be accommodated. This did often happen at Leconfield. Sometimes with casualties on board. At nineteen years old I was getting my experience fast.
We had lighter moments. The aerodrome was guarded by The Kings Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. Koylies. They did guards and training. One of them had a brainwave. He came to R flight and asked to see the flight commander. Shown in to the crew room he saluted, which shook the poor man as he was not used to that sort of thing and then told his story.
He was thinking about joining the airborne troops, but had never been in an aeroplane.
‘Would it be possible?’ he asked, ‘to have a flight,’
This was no trouble to organize. Somebody found him a ‘chute and settled him in behind the pilot and pupil.
The next day there were several. All with the same story and eventually nobody took a lot of notice when there was a small queue of Koylies waiting for rides. The same faces turned up day after day. Some of those Koylies got more flying hours in than I ever did. This was no trouble until one morning an Oxford took off on a cross-country. Belted down the runway and the pupil panicked a bit because it would not lift off.
‘I have her’. The instructor said. He pushed the nose down went through the gate with the throttle, put a bit of flap on and just scraped the thing over the perimeter hedge. Lots of wiping of sweat from brow and then.
‘What’s wrong with this bloody thing?’ Well nothing really, it was just well over loaded. Three or four Koylies were seated happily behind the pilots seats which was not unusual, but in the gun turret down the fuselage were a couple more enjoying a ride which could well have been their last. From then on it was count the sods. Four is the maximum.
Once more I managed to do something of which I’m not particularly proud. Connie the clerk was one of those rather quiet Scottish country girls. Really she should not have been put into the office with the gang of roughs which we were, but she did her job and put up with our swearing and muck and the stink of petrol soaked gear. I; not thinking much about it made a huge spider out of copper wire which I placed on her shoulder and then drew her attention to it. The poor girl nearly passed out and I felt like something the dog had brought it.
I almost ran into trouble one time there. Well I was sort of pushed into it. I came back from dinner one day to be greeted by Jack Muge, who explained that whilst I was away the Chief Engineer Officer had been round and found the petrol engine in the bowser had run right out of cooling water. He demanded to know who’s responsibility it was to check this and Jack, good friend that he was, had mentioned my name. Now I had the option of saying not bloody likely and refusing to have anything to do with it, which would have dropped Jack right in the manure business, or signing the form and then wriggling out of it somehow.
Jack Muge was a pretty good bloke really and I got on well with him so, I said .
‘Give me the form.’ And signed the thing for the last few weeks to say I’d done the checks and filled the thing with water.
Now it was necessary for the Flight Sergeant to put me on a charge for neglect of duty and he duly set about this task, but first he had to call me into his office to question me to be sure he had a good case. Being as thick as the proverbial he had no idea of how to question me, so he sat himself down and wrote out what he was going to ask me. These notes were duly copied by his secretary and passed out to Jack and myself for study. When I then went before him I knew what he was going to ask me and had the bomb proof answers. We went through this routine several times before he realized that he was much too thick to ever make the charge stick against me. After all the whole flight were prepared to swear that they had stood there and watched me fill the water jacket just before we went to dinner. The guy gave up eventually.
It had begun to dawn on me that most of these senior N C Os were peacetime Airmen who had done little but play football in peacetime and now were promoted to jobs they had no idea of how to do. I found this to be true several times later in my career. There were some who were O K, but not many.
Toward the end of my year or so at Lec Jack Muge called me over as I was fooling about on the bike.
‘You’re good on that thing are you not,’ he started.
‘I can manage,’ I said.
‘I‘ve got a job for you ,’ he continued., I didn’t like the sound of this so far, but then he said.
‘You know Cheifie’s secretary’ This was beginning to sound better, ‘Well she has got to go on this posting that you will be on. And it means she will have to ride a bike from some railway station to the camp and she can’t ride a bike. Will you take her somewhere quiet and teach her to ride?’
‘Jack,’ I said ‘You couldn’t have asked a better bloke.’ And that was how I got what was probably the best job I ever had in the airforce. The sun shone, we walked to a quiet dispersal and spent a few happy hours on riding lessons and I can’t even remember her name now.
Also about that time I had another bit of luck. I was walking back to camp having been to see my girl Doreen at Hull and just outside of Beverly saw a WAAF hanging over a gate throwing up. I recognized her as one of the cookhouse staff and knew I could not just leave her there so I took her arm and walked her back to camp.
After a couple of miles she had sobered up enough to recognize me and by the time we got to the camp she was almost sober. I put her hat straight and her tie, checked her buttons were all done up and sent her through the WAAF entrance as Sober and Properly Dressed S & P D while I checked in. She was waiting for me inside the gate.
‘Right,’ she said, ‘To the cookhouse,’ where we found all sorts of bods including the Station Warrant Officer and I was supplied with a supper. From then on I had friends in that important place.
I was also learning how to wangle things at this time. We did get some leave, the proper official leave had an automatic railway pass home, so that was no trouble, but long weekends did not. And, being always short of cash, railway travel had to be fiddled by buying platform tickets to get onto the station and then a ticket for the journey, which I did my best not to get clipped and a ticket from Northampton to Olney, which saved me from giving up the journey ticket.
There was also the option, which worked sometimes of going into the flight office and asking if there were any cross-country flights going my way. Once the flight commander laid on a cross-country to Church Lawford near Rugby where I was dropped off. I was really lucky that time because I walked out of the gates there and thumbed the first vehicle to come along.
‘Sorry Mate’, I said to the driver, when I realized that it was a Taxi, ‘Can’t afford a Taxi.
‘No trouble,’ he said ‘I’ve been paid for this trip, I’m going back to the station.’
‘That‘ll do me fine,’ I told him.
Another time I got somebody to give me ride out to Doncaster. He didn’t want to go further because it was quite thick fog. He was O K to there because he knew the area so well and could follow the river. I hitched down the A1 from there.
All sorts of moves were made to get home. I once sat in Paragon Station in Hull and worked out that I could just get to Wolverton and then Newport Pagnel in time to catch the Wesleys picture bus to Olney. That worked a treat because I just got to The Plough at Newport in time to have a pint with the driver and of course a free ride home.
I managed to get Doreen home to Olney a couple of times, but I had to be a bit more responsible when she was with me. I was never sure about how Mum felt about her, but I was probably a bit insensitive about other people’s feelings. Perhaps my instinct told me that our relationship was not going to last. Were we in love? Even this long after I could not really say. We enjoyed each others company, never fell out or argued. We were at the experimental stage with our sex life. I did not want to marry in haste because I was already committed to going overseas and that meant a very uncertain future. So I was determined not to get her pregnant although she insisted that due to an operation which went wrong when she was very young she had been told that she could never conceive. I did not know whether to believe that.
There were so many paradoxes in my life at that time. I was rapidly becoming a very experienced Aircraft engine mechanic. A confident man who could look an aircraft over in minutes and sign for all sorts of things and yet I was a raw novice at human relationships especially with women.
I met Doreen in some park in Beverly. I was with another airman who I can remember nothing about except that he had told me he was married. I think he had only joined me for this walk to salve his own conscience about looking for female company. I had no plans either way, but joined in when he accosted the two girls to scrounge a light for his cigarette. I walked along with the younger one I think just to be sociable at the time, but managed to arrange to see her again and that was how it all started. I later told Doreen that he was married, but her friend had already dropped him by then.
Doreen was the daughter of a Donkey-man she told me. I had no idea what a Donkey-man was until she explained that he was an old time ships engine room man. Now too old to go to sea, he was employed in Hull docks and his job was to take over the engine room of a ship when it docked to release its crew. At sea from childhood he’d never learned to read or write properly, but had been around the world more times than most, knew hundreds of ports, ships and routes. I got on well with Pop as he was always called. Her mother was a typical sea mans wife. Independent and slightly domineering, which Pop mostly ignored and so did I. At about the time I met Doreen her brother died at sea of malaria. I had not met him, the only tangible evidence of him I saw was the carburettor of a boat they told me he’d had down at the docks which had gone down during an air raid. I didn’t ask many questions about it at the time, but even then it struck me as strange that he should die at sea of malaria a disease which is carried by mosquitoes which don’t got to sea.
I was still working long and hard on the ‘drome, but with my sheaf of passes in and out of the place I could get down to see Doreen where they lived out on the
Preston road Hull in a council house. From there it was a short walk to a pub they called The Red Hell where we drank Hull Breweries dark ale.
In his time at sea Pop had become something of an expert engine room man. From stoker to engineer he’d done just about everything you can do on a ship and had had several apprentices. One of these, who passed under the name of Sam and nothing else he insisted, was working in Hull docks. He also came with us to The Red Hell on many an occasion. I think he liked having me along to get the beer in because he could slip his uniform jacket off and get it out of sight because it had gold rings around the arms. Lots of them and would have embarrassed any service personnel present. Sam had been to a technical school before going to sea and gained a lot of experience all over the world
He had been two of three times on the north of Norway run to Archangel and never got there, having had the ship blown from under him every time. In peacetime he’d been employed as a diver salvaging the battleships of the German fleet which scuttled near Scapa Flow. From there they had flown him down to Liverpool as a consultant when the Thetis was lost. She was a new submarine, which on its trials had nose-dived down into the mud just out from Liverpool. An accident caused by a spoon full of paint. When Sam got there the stern was sticking up out of the water. He told me that they didn’t accept his plan to get her out, which was quite simple and he claimed would have worked. It was hitch one of the battleships, which was standing there, to the thing and just lug it out. As it was, almost all of the crew died in her. She was salvaged and recommissioned during the war as The Thrasher and was lost in action. Again with the loss of all hands.
In Hull, Sam was in charge of the fitting out of five Corvettes. Installing engines and gear. He had taken on the job with the promise that the last one was his. He would command it and take it to sea. I never knew what happened to him and often wonder if he survived. It was nineteen forty two then. There was plenty of time for a man like him to get killed.
Then quite suddenly the big move came and I was on my way to another airodrome at Burton on Trent. The one we had been warned would entail riding our bikes the last few miles from some out in the wilds railway station. All went well as far as I was concerned. I got my bike off the train and just followed the crowd until some smart arse show off, fooling around with Chiefie’s secretary. The one I’d only just taught to ride; had her off the thing. My language to him was quite unprintable and he got the message that he was not wanted around whilst I sorted the girl out, persuaded her to get on the bike and try again. We made our way slowly to Burton where I declared a tea break in a café before the last leg to the camp where all the rest had arrived.
I was sent to my billet in a Nissen hut where I found a few blokes sitting around moaning about the fact that there was no coke for the stove. I took one of them to the coke bunker, climbed over the gate and filled the bucket, which I passed to him. We then went back to the billet where we got a fire going and arranged a coke thieving roster for the next week.
The airodrome at Burton on Trent had only just been built and opened. Conditions were just a bit crude, but nothing like the ones at Barford St Johns. I was put on one of the flights away out on the far side of the 'drome where I settled in to the usual job, but now without night flying, as they were not organized for that. One of the first things which struck me was the number of rabbits running about there. I reverted to form, made up a snare and set it. It caught a rabbit, but as there was no perimeter fence it was on the route to work for some farm hand who was as countrified as I was and took it home. He left the snare with its trace of fur on it. Which told me he was a poacher too.
I got only one leave pass from Burton, rushed up to Hull to collect Doreen and got her to Olney for about two days when I was ordered back off leave by telegram. I took her home to Hull and then went down to Burton where I was on immediate posting to another squadron near Cambridge which was preparing to go overseas. I had had more than a year with Airspeed Oxfords, working under conditions which tested both crews and machines. I had gained more experience with airoplanes than most people get in ten years and gained a lot of respect for the Ozford as a flying machine. I have since had time to read a bit about them. They were built by Airspeed a company started by Nevil Shute Norway, a man who wrote many novels as Nevil Shute. A Town Like Alice, On The Beach, The Trustee From The Toolroom, and many more, most of which I have. He designed The Oxford initially as The Envoy for civil flying, but I don’t think many were built before all the production went over to the Oxford. Initially designed to take an engine being developed by Lord Nuffield which never got produced because Lord Nuffield could not get an agreement with Air Ministry, it was engined with two Armstrong Cheeter Ten engines. A seven cylinder radial which had been in production for a long time and was by this time one of the most reliable, hard working aircraft engines in the world, though not having the performance which the Nuffield engine would have had. I think the most troublesome component was probably the air compressor, which served the brakes. It also had no provision for a variable pitch propeller. I think this was put right eventually, but I never saw one. The ones I worked with all had either wooden props or a Fairy steel one which was a pretty crude affair of flat metal pressed into shape. They worked O K though.
The Aircraft itself was a very sturdy machine. Made mostly of thin plywood and steel tubes, with a wooden main spar and Pneumatic landing gear, which was arranged to fold under the engine cowlings in such a way that in the event of a wheels up landing, the wheels still took most of the weight. These units were called Olio legs which is where Olio Joe Voice the corporal at R Flight Leconfield got his nickname.
With rather tall landing gear the plane went through a rather wide angle when going from or to it’s angle of attack, which was considered an advantage when teaching pilots to fly. I lost two during my time with them. Both at Lec where one night whilst I was getting a bite at the cookhouse one dived in just outside the perimeter fence. A typical pilot error where he had allowed the speed to drop just a little too low. The pilot was thrown right through the roof of the machine still strapped to his seat and was almost unhurt. The crash truck got to him by the simple process of driving straight through the perimeter fence.
The other loss was not so good. We had two Australian pupils who usually went off together for cross country flying. This day they took off and were I think on their way home when they ran into cloud. The one doing flight commander at the time gave the signal with his hand to break formation and saw his mate dive away as they ran into the cloud. He returned to Lec and waited for his mate to turn up which he never did. When he didn’t turn up we knew something had gone wrong and then came a phone call from a farmer who had seen him dive straight into the ground.
There was a court of inquiry which I had to attend where it was disclosed that the farmer had reported that the engines were screaming away all the way down and half the tail plane of the plane had landed a field away. Inspection of the other plane found a mark under the mainplane where the tail plane had hit it and broken off. The young sergeant had died instantly on impact. His name I remember was Rutherford.
The Pilot who was with Sergeant Rutherford and came home O K brought one of mine home from York a few weeks later complaining that the port engine was running terribly rough. It was not surprising really. From in front of the plane you could see the number one piston going up and down. The cylinder had worn so thin it had parted halfway down. The machines were wearing out.

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