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By then, however, I had reached Bombay. I found a city that had many of the characteristics of Singapore a year earlier. Having been, like Calcutta and Madras, one of the three original trading posts of the Honourable East India Company, it was predominantly a commercial centre and port. It had a complex government with two tiers, for the City and for the Presidency of Bombay, and, superimposed on them, in Delhi, the Government of India, which had been formed when the Crown took over after the Indian Mutiny. The Army (or, as it was commonly called, ‘The Military’) had a correspondingly complex structure, with Bombay District and Bombay Area commands under General Headquarters in Delhi. The Air Force was still thought of by civilians as part of ‘The Military’. It was represented by a Base Personnel Office and a Coast Defence Wing, equipped with a few Westland Wapiti biplanes and de Havilland Tiger Moth trainers, and manned by the RIAFVR; it carried out coastal patrols from Juhu, a grass aerodrome north-west of the City.

My first needs in Bombay were a street-map, which was easily obtained, and a car, which I hired on the credit of Wing Commander Ker of the Coast Defence Wing. It soon became apparent that to meet the needs of a Radio Installation and Maintenance Unit it would be necessary to requisition three newly-built factories, and the surrounding land, at the north end of Bombay Island, close to the causeway to the Indian mainland. Once that had been done, and the expected convoy had arrived from the UK, I could get on with setting up radar defences for Bombay. The need for them was urgent since for all I knew the Japanese task-force, which had already attacked Colombo and Trincomalee, was now in the Indian Ocean, on its way to attack Bombay.

It was then that my troubles started. Such had been the urgency when Group Captain Morton gave me his orders in Ceylon that I had not thought to ask for them in writing. He was the only other person who knew what they were, and he was now out of contact, in Bengal or Burma. But I soon discovered that neither the Collector, who represented the City government, nor the Secretary to the Presidency government was inclined to risk upsetting the commercial community by agreeing to the requisitioning of factories - especially on the say-so of an unknown 24-year-old wearing a Squadron Leader's uniform - and the Adjutant and Quartermaster General of Bombay Area was not prepared to requisition them until he had received a letter of authority from Air Headquarters. Desperate situations demand desperate solutions. Recalling that I was held, temporarily, as a supernumerary on the strength of Air Headquarters, India, I wrote a letter addressed from Air Headquarters to the Officer Commanding the Radio Installation and Maintenance Unit, Bombay, instructing him to ask the relevant authorities to requisition, as a matter of urgency, such accommodation as his unit required; I then got it typed at Base Personnel Office, kept the original and handed the copy to the AQMG. It was a blatant act of forgery and probably cost the taxpayer, eventually, a million pounds, but I still have no doubt that it was the correct action to take in the circumstances; there are occasions when it is an officer's duty to throw King's Regulations out of the window, and this was one of them. The letter had the desired result. The convoy arrived a few days later, the 500 personnel were housed in one of the factories and work on the radar equipment was started. Rather than wait while buildings were erected for radar stations at Bombay, I also got the AQMG to requisition the penthouse floor of a high-rise building in the fashionable Malabar Hill district, and a COL station was erected on the roof in a few days; another penthouse was requisitioned for use as a communications centre and filter room; a TRU was later erected on flat ground near Worli. In the event the Japanese never did attack Bombay; so many of their aircraft had been shot down when they attacked Trincomalee that the task-force, instead of entering the Indian Ocean, had to return to Singapore to reequip. It never again entered the Bay of Bengal. But I could not foresee that in April, 1942.

Radar equipment designed in the UK and found to work satisfactorily in the Middle East did not stand up well in the humid and hot conditions of the Far East, and in the rest of 1942 the RIMU at Bombay was concerned not only with overhauling radar stations and despatching them to their operational areas but also, to an increasing extent, with the design and manufacture of tropical modifications. During this period the establishment of the RIMU was upgraded and I was given the acting rank of Wing Commander.

However, my health began to fail. During the journey out of Singapore I had picked up a gut pathogen which gave me mild dysentery that did not respond to self-medication. I neglected it; perhaps I had an inflated idea of my importance to the war effort. My weight went down from its usual 12 stone to 8 stone. By the beginning of 1943 the RIMU had its own medical officer and he insisted that I be admitted to the military hospital at Bombay. There I was treated for a week with one of the then-new sulphonamide drugs and returned to my unit. The dysentery returned, whereupon the medical officer asked if I would agree to what he described as kill-or-cure treatment.

I readily did so. It consisted of a daily diet, for a week, of 2 ounces of castor oil, one ounce of Epsom salts, one small omelette and black coffee ad libitum. It was initially explosive but proved effective, and I returned to duty. However, in June, 1943, I started passing blood in the urine; renal calculus was diagnosed and after surgery I was invalided back to the UK, in September. The ship in which I travelled, the White Star liner HMT Britannic, seemed full of renal calculus cases. In the UK a medical board said I was fit for all duties in temperate climates, but must never again serve in the tropics.

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