On Strike in India

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Pennie Hedge, a volunteer from BBC London, on behalf of Charles John Bossley and has been added to the site with his permission. Mr Bossley fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

I came back to England from Algiers, and the unwritten law in the RAF was that if you’d been abroad, you had to be in England for at least 12 months before you went out again. I was here 12 months and 1 day. I was stationed in Buckinghamshire, a training unit there - Wellington Bombers again, flying control again. And from there I was shipped up to Blackpool. The first bloke I met, walking along the platform, was a bloke I’d been abroad with for two years. “What, you up here as well?” “Yes.” “What are we doing up here?” “Dunno.” We’re going to India. They ship us out to India, South East Asia Command.

So we landed in Bombay. Sat there for about a fortnight. He went one way, I went another, to Bangalore. Was up there about three or four months. Putting up transmitter aerials and god knows what else. Then down to Ceylon. “Take a party down to Ceylon.” I was promoted to Corporal. So I goes down there and we finds this airfield, which had been built in the middle of a coconut plantation, in billets, and VHF airfield control. But in the meanwhile, two miles away you have on the edge of a hill, what they call a homing station. Aircraft get lost and they call “Mayday”. It’s an emergency channel. Its always open. It even exists today. So if a pilot’s lost he starts transmitting for 10 seconds and if you pick him up, you can give him a course to steer. If he listens to what you’re telling him, you can bring him right back. It’s a navigational aid. So I look after that until such time as I get demobbed.

But what a lot of people don’t know is that we have a strike out there. Simply because they were getting behind with the demob numbers, and we were well overdue. It was because by now the only replacements they had were the call up boys on the two years thing.

And we all refused work. The only person who didn’t was me. Because of the emergency setup. What happened was, they speeded it up, they brought in an aircraft carrier, and they took all the aircraft out, and in all the aircraft hangars below they put bunks. It was the HMS Indefatigable, and she was granted the Freedom of the Borough of Holborn. But they scrapped it two months after we come home. And I can’t understand it. It was a beautiful aircraft carrier. The crew said she was the first British aircraft carrier in Tokyo Bay, but I don’t know. So I was demobbed in December 1946. But they owed me so much leave that I didn’t have to do anything for the last 84 days.

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