Life as a Wartime RAF Photographer

5 — Willoughby Gullachson talks about his time as an RAF Photographer:

"War was approaching and I thought I am not going to get conscripted, so I volunteered and I went to Needless Alley (Birmingham) and volunteered to the RAF recruiting department. Oh, what do you want to do? I said well I have got a little bit of experience of photography. Oh, oh, oh, you know, you will have to go to Cardington first, do your square bashing, which I did. And then somebody said do you still want to be a photographer? I said yes, so we’ve only got room for you as an instrument maker, and I didn’t fancy doing instrument making because as I have said I have got very clumsy hands. Oh, well in that case we’ll make an exception and we’ll send you to the School of Photography at Farnborough. By this time the War had broken out, and I arrived in October 1939 at the School of Photography for six months’ training, (then) posted to Scampton to Bomber Command. [ Now I’m not, I will not do this because I am very easily upset about the war years, you know, I went through quite a lot of traumatic experiences.]

However, after Scampton I moved to South Africa to an air observer’s training school, 47 Air School, where I was for two years, at a place called Queenstown. And then, posted on from there to Bombay, upper Persian Gulf and then on to Iraq — in those days it was called Persia and Iraq ‘Horses”. I had two years there, (and the) highlight — I think this little bit’s worth having — in the experience that I had in Urbanya was one which I shall not forget for a long, long time: I had to go into Baghdad several times to the British Embassy just to do head and shoulder portraits of people for identification purposes. On this trip in and out, often we travelled in a Vickers Valencia plane, a Vickers Valencia plane was a sister plane to the Vickers Vimy that flew the Atlantic in 1921, and I could not imagine that I would ever fly in a plane so slow; its top speed was 80 miles an hour, it had four bladed propellers which were made of mahogany, and I had the luck to see the log book for this plane, and it had been flying then, believe it or not, since 1921 guarding the oil pipelines in Iraq which were being continuously bombed by insurgent Iraqis, and I had, as I say, the privilege to fly in it backwards and…, and one occasion, flying back from Baghdad was (I mean it is unbelievable by today’s standard), we hit a head-on wind. The distance between Baghdad and Urbanya is 55 miles, it took us 2 hours to fly those 55 miles, which is somewhere about 25 miles an hour I suppose, bucketing, buffeting up and down, but it was those sort of experiences to have an eye on what went on before I was there in 1942-3. These areas in Iraq were policed by British people then, Urbanya was the largest overseas air force station, and a very wonderful station, which was built by British bricks in 1936. There was a big outdoor cinema, there was a big indoor theatre where such figures - and I had to photograph these people at that time — as the Doris Waters sisters, Carrol Levis were but two of them that came there to the theatre through Ensa, and there were various things like that that I had to photograph. Then I had all sorts of other things to take, which I won’t bother…, you know real horror and the other side which is…, and I don’t want to go into that.
But let us go back; after there I went to South Africa and I went to Oatshorne which is an area where the…, oh dear, what do they call those birds, the long neck, ostrich, they had fields of ostriches. This is just about the end of 1944, and the ostrich farmers then were beginning to feel the pinch, because the feathers were no longer wanted for fashion, they were going through a rough time there.

I came back to the UK, and just before I came back the wars were finishing obviously, 1939 to 1945 war finishing off, and on VE night I had to go to a place showing such items as British Movietone News which was up to date, maybe a couple of weeks late but it was fairly up to date the, and there were approximately 200 black troops and I was the only white man there, and I had to wind up one of these petrol driven generators to get the electricity to drive the projector, which was projected on to a white screen which was erected, the rest was in the open, it was on a hillside, so that when I learnt of the end of the War, that was when VE Day finished, and then I was in the South Atlantic when VJ was declared. I came home, eventually I got demobbed and then a whole new world started.”

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