About the contributor

War memoirs of a schoolboy 1939-1945
by Keith Armstrong

I was born on 8th September 1931 so I was a few days short of 8 years old, “the day war broke out”on that fateful Sunday, 3rd September 1939. I can still remember listening to the sombre words of Neville Chamberlain, our Prime Minister, as he made his historic statement. My remembrance of that day, 64 years ago, is doubtless not fully accurate but he said something like this, “Yesterday a note was handed to the German Ambassador stating that unless we heard from Mr Adolf Hitler by 11 am today that he was willing to withdraw his troops from Poland a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you that no such undertaking has been received and that, therefore, a state of war now exists between Britain and Germany”. Although I was only almost 8 years old the sombre tones of Mr Chamberlain’s voice and the content of his message made it quite clear to me that the situation was both serious and dangerous. I and my family were stunned as we sat in the dining room at 19, Coleridge Road, Ashford, Middx. We were only about 20 miles from the centre of London, a matter of some significance later on. Local targets were the Vickers Aircraft factory at Weybridge, Fairey Aviation at Hayes, General Aircraft at Hanworth and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company at Sunbury (now BP Research). RAF Northolt was not that far away and sent aircraft to Heathrow (then a grass airfield of small size) for dispersal for safety reasons if an attack was expected. I have since found a transcript of Mr Chamberlain’s speech, which shows that even after 65 years my memory of this day is not too bad. It reads, “This morning, the British ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by 11 o’clock that they were prepared to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received and that consequently this country is at war with Germany”.

We saw little of the Battle of Britain at Ashford (Middx). Ashford (Kent) saw much more. I can remember obediently diving under my desk at Echelford School (now renamed Clarendon after the school in Clarendon Road now demolished and replaced with old people’s homes. My brother, father and aunt also attended Clarendon Road school. I was annoyed with myself afterwards because it caused me not to see a Messerschmitt 109, which was the subject of the alert. I once heard machine gun fire above the clouds but never actually saw anything. Later on an Me109 was exhibited in the car park of the White Hart pub near the old fire station. The White Hart is still there in 2005 and so is the old Fire Station but now put to business use. At the present time the old post office is run by Peter Doble as a kitchen and plumbing equipment shop.

When the nightly air raids started we dug a hole at the bottom of our garden and installed an Anderson shelter. This was made of galvanised corrugated iron sheets bolted together. It was about half underground and half on top but covered with earth dug from the hole. It was about 6 ft 6 inches (2 metres) long and 4ft 3 inches
(1.3 metres) wide and my father built a brick blast wall in front of the doorway. It was made of three sheets of corrugated iron on each side bolted together and had a flat corrugated iron back and front, which contained an opening called the doorway. It had no door apart from the blast wall that I can remember. We used this to house our family of 4, my aunt and grandmother who lived next door but one and occasional family visitors. I think up to 6 people slept in this shelter during the period 1941-42.
I can remember running down the garden one night and treading on a piece of wood with an upturned nail. I still made time to look at the only formation of German bombers I ever saw. It was a mixed formation of Heinkel 111’s and Dornier 17’s. They were heading towards London and we could see a red glow from that direction already indicating large fires.

At Ashford we heard many, many nights of anti-aircraft gunfire and saw numerous searchlights. Shrapnel, (broken pieces of shell casing) could be found in the streets in the mornings, sometimes till warm. On one occasion a stick of bombs fell, first a bang then a louder BANG nearer to us, then a BANG on the other side and finally a bang further away and we knew that the stick had missed us. On that night we slept under the stairs because our Anderson shelter had begun to leak and drops of water regularly fell on our bedclothes. My parents then decided that we might as well die of bombs as pneumonia and for a while we children (my brother Colin and myself) slept under the stairs (considered to be the safest place in a house, according to government advisors), and the adults slept under the dining room table. In those days most people had linoleum in the dining room as a floor covering with newspaper as the underlay. After the war we found interesting copies of the “News Chronicle” under the linoleum on which we had been sleeping.
The headlines of one said, “Mr Hore -Belisha says he has invented his beacon and nothing more can be done to reduce road accidents”. The other said “Chamberlain returns from Munich, peace at last”. We laid on that newspaper while the bombs fell and the gunfire told a different story.!!

In spite of all this we received a good education. Teachers were mainly ladies and older men. Most of the lady teachers were single because the husbands they might have married had been killed in World War I. We were in many ways “their children” and they were very dedicated people. Even when I was 18 or 21 or more the lady who taught me when I was 11 years old (Miss Brickendon) could still remember my name if we met in the street and always wanted to know how I was getting on. We spent quite a few hours in air raid shelters singing “Roll out the Barrel”, “It’s a long way to Tipperary” etc. I went to Ashford County Grammar School in 1943 at the age of 12. Being one of the top ten in my class at the junior school I was given a free pass to the Grammar School and didn’t have to take the 11 plus exam. They did this for those with a consistent record in case they had a bad day for the exam. I don’t know what happened to all the ten but Elizabeth Butt went to Oxford University, Jimmy Bristow became a medical doctor, Bill Ashton a Home Office Pathologist, and David Ashby a Fleet Air Arm Pilot. David flew Fairey Fireflies from a carrier during the Korean War. I became a Chartered Engineer so I think the system was well justified by the results. Only about 20% of children went to a Grammar School at that time and I found algebra particularly difficult. This was partly because older children did their best to frighten younger ones into thinking it was difficult and partly because I took the view that if it all equalled nought and nought was zero and therefore of no value, what was the point of doing it. Only later, when I realised that zero was as good a number as any to make everything equal to in order to balance an equation did I make some progress.

It is more important than some realise to explain to pupils why a subject is being taught and its practical usefulness in later life. Had I been taught not only geometry but how to navigate a bomber to Berlin I am sure I should have done much better. Having been among the “cream” at junior school I found I was not among the “cream” of the “cream” at grammar school. At that stage I had outstripped my parents education (they both left school at 14) and so help was not available at home. They were both very concerned about my education and gave every encouragement and certainly would have helped if they could. In those days education was given for its own sake without any reference to its usefulness to life. Today is not that different. The more practical among us like to know why we are being taught a subject and what use it is likely to be. By contrast I have always liked history for reasons I cannot explain.

My cousin Donald George Armstrong Smith, son of Auntie Edie (my grandfather’s youngest sister) and Uncle George died under the Japanese while working on the infamous Burma Railway. He was captured after the fall of Singapore in 1942. Don was made to work on this railway for nearly two years before he died. He married
Hilda May Povey in the autumn of 1940 and died in November 1943. I still cannot bring myself to buy anything Japanese if I can possibly avoid it. Nevertheless I had some friends in Japan Airlines during my time with British Airways and several very good friends in Lufthansa. I have come to realise that there are good and bad in all nations.

However, at the time we heard of Don’s death all I wanted to do was to bomb the Japs. I set off down the garden to build myself an aeroplane to bomb them with.
Don was the only member of my family to die in WWII. After a quick look in the shed it rapidly dawned on me that I had enough plywood for one small fuselage frame and no engine, no undercarriage and of course, no bombs. I record this apparently odd reaction as a fact of the time. Reality dawned rather rapidly and the Japanese were saved from my personal retribution.

About 1943, soon after I went to Ashford County School, I joined the 4th Ashford Scouts and later became a Patrol Leader. At the beginning of the war or maybe a little later I had been given two Penguin Aircraft recognition books (they are dated 1941) and have been given to the Radar Museum at RAF Neatishead. I spent the rest of the war making model aircraft and practising aircraft recognition. My lifelong interest in aircraft began at this time and was no doubt connected with the fact that my father was interested in aircraft. Before WWII he used to cycle to the Hendon Air Displays and would describe aerobatics with enthusiasm and also the exploits of Klemm Sohn the Birdman. We once cycled to an airfield near Ashford , which must have been the Heathrow grass field as it was a short distance from the end of Clockhouse Lane. I was around 9 or 10 years old at the time and remember that they were single-engined aircraft in camouflage colours with RAF roundels but the type I cannot remember. Most likely they were Fairey Battles or Hurricanes.

I have recently discovered that I started plane spotting at a younger age than I had remembered. About two years ago (2003) I saw an article in a local paper by an aviation artist who had retired from British Airways. He had painted a picture of a Boeing B.17 Flying Fortress bomber. I think it was given that name because it carried so many guns for self-defence. When he put some of his paintings in a Art Show someone asked him, “Did you see the B.17 that crashed at Heston during WWII”. He had not seen it but put a letter in the paper asking for anyone who had seen it to contact him.

I was plane spotting at Heston that day, aged almost twelve. It was 6th September 1943, two days before my twelfth birthday. Heston was the Fairey Aviation Company flight test airfield at that time. Most of the aircraft parts were made in a factory at Hayes and assembled at Heston. .The airfield was the largest in West London and it was from there that Neville Chamberlain flew to Munich to talk to Adolf Hitler in 1939. Fighter aircraft for Royal Navy aircraft carriers were made at Heston and these had only one engine. On this particular day I heard a large aircraft with four engines sounding very rough approaching the airfield. I noticed that some of the engines had stopped and the other two did not sound very good and the aircraft was obviously in trouble. It was going to land whether it crashed or not as the engines did not sound as though they were going to run for much longer. The B.17 was just a little above the ground when it went out of sight behind the hangar and I heard a loud thud and just hoped that the crew had escaped. The aircraft was aiming for Heston but landed in a field just outside Heston airfield. An article by one of the crew members says, “During a raid on Stuttgart we were hit by flak (anti-aircraft shells) and attacked by FW 190 fighters after bombs away, losing both starboard engines.
Lt Kney (Captain) ordered “lighten the ship” and we ditched all removeable items. Reaching the English Channel we adopted crash positions in the radio room. The aircraft seemed to be doing OK so Lt Kney opted to attempt a forced landing at RAF Heston.
Upon our approach we lost the third engine, overshooting the runway we lost the fourth engine. We made a gear down landing on waste ground ( the rear gunner says a wheatfield) and came to an abrupt stop,when we hit an anti-glider stake, which embedded itself into our port wing root”.
Local householders came out with tea, sandwiches and cakes, saying , “Well done Yanks” I have since met only two people who saw the crash. One was a Foreman at British Airways and the other I met on a coach when members of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers visited RAF St Athan.

I wrote to Mr Peter Caines and he kindly sent me some most interesting information.
He was able to tell me that the crew had all survived the crash without any injuries. The aircraft had been salvaged and repaired and flew again but was shot down during a raid on Schweinfurt in Germany on 14th October 1943. The crew were very fortunate once again as they all survived as prisoners of war and returned to America when the war ended. Peter Caines also sent me a photo of the crew, two pictures of the aircraft, which was named “Big Moose”, and an article written by the rear gunner and published in a magazine. I was very pleased to know, after 60 years, that the crew had all survived.

We had some good scout camps. In 1944 we camped at the back of the “Halfway House” pub in Weedon, Northamptonshire on the banks of the River Nene. A name later to be given to one of the earliest jet engines made by Rolls -Royce. One day Ted Bailey and I were left in charge of the camp site while the others went off on some exercise. Ted and I decided to dam the river for two useful purposes,

a) To provide deeper water for swimming.
b) By cutting a small exit in the dam wall we obtained faster flowing water to
assist the washing up.

However, on the return of the Scoutmaster it was made very clear that the local farmers preferred water for their sheep to a swimming pool for Boy Scouts and we were instructed to demolish our handiwork immediately! Later that day, but before the return of the Scoutmaster, we had seen a very historic event. For most of the day we saw Douglas Dakotas and Armstrong-Whitworth Albemarles towing one or sometimes two gliders each and all with black and white invasion stripes on them. These stripes were used to aid identification of friendly aircraft during air battles over the landing grounds. Gliders were mainly Waco Hadrians (American) and Airspeed Horsa’s (British). It was like watching a two-lane motorway in the sky for several hours. I wrote to my old Scoutmaster in New Zealand to try to identify the event and date. He replied over 50 years after the camp with a sketch of the camp layout, the tent I was in, the dates for the camp and a picture of the camp site. How’s that for record keeping and good administration!! I had tried the Airborne Forces Museum, Aldershot and written to the Head of Airborne Forces and neither could place the event. D-Day was 6th June 1944 and Arnhem was in September but we went to camp in August. Only in 2003 on a visit to RAF Welford did I think that I had found what this event was. On 14th August 1944 Operation Anvil had been renamed Operation Dragoon because it was thought that the Germans had some information about it. It was to make a landing in the South of France promised to Stalin by the Americans. The records say it was a success and the aircraft departed from Welford, Aldermaston, Harwell, Greenham Common and other Berkshire airfields.

However I have since found that the aircraft flew from Sicily for this operation, although they were from Berkshire bases, so I am back to the original idea that the massive formations I saw were a decoy to convince the Germans that a landing was going to be made in Northern France. Flypast Magazine, January 2003 says on page 87, in an article on Beaufighter aircraft used by the Americans of the 417th Squadron USAAF, that the Allied thrust into France was so successful that the squadron was able to move into an airfield at La Vallon near Salon de Provence in southern France on September 12th, less than one month after the airborne assault.

On the way home from this camp we had a problem because we arrived at West Drayton railway station to find that the “puffing Billy” train, one small tank engine and two carriages, that normally ran to Staines West Station was not running. We were faced with a ten mile walk late at night. This was all in the dark and during a long air raid. All the time we were being told “only another half mile”. We soon began to doubt their veracity as we knew we had walked several “half miles”. A V1 “Doodlebug” flying bomb went over about half way home and we all dived in a ditch.

We finally arrived in Ashford after a good deal of grumbling. I reckon we lads must have tried the leader’s patience that day. It can fairly be said that they tried ours because I have thought several times that telling us the truth might have reduced the complaining once we realised that neither they nor we had any options but to walk or wait all night for a train. We saw several doodlebugs around this time but none landed too near us. As long as they passed with the engine still going you knew you were safe.

Annual holidays did not really exist in those days for many people. I doubt if we could have afforded any had it been peace time. However, my mother came from a Norfolk family and she was the only one to come to London. All her sisters married small farmers or labourers and her only brother was also a farmer. Consequently we had some wonderful holidays all spent with her youngest sister Mildred (Auntie Filly was her nickname) and Uncle Clive. He died some years ago and Filly died in 2004. She was born in 1916. They had a very small, (32 acre) farm known as Sneath Farm, Tivetshall, just south of Norwich. We could get there by train and walk to the farm. The farm is about 2 miles from Tibenham airfield, which was the home of many United States Army Air Force, B24 Liberator bombers for a few years. The farm was “in the circuit” for Tibenham, which put up the second largest number of raids of any Liberator base in that period. The main London-Norwich railway line ran through the farm so there were superb steam locomotives to watch in addition to the aircraft.

There was also the fun of helping with the harvest. In those days corn was cut and stacked in “stooks” in the field. It was then loaded into carts with a pitchfork, taken to the yard and built into a rick to await the threshing machine. This was driven by a steam traction engine, which was hired for threshing. The grain was poured into sacks and the stalks of wheat, barley or oats were made into straw bales by the threshing machine. I can remember how the hairs form the barley get stuck in your socks and itch. The farmhouse had no gas or electricity. Lighting was by oil lamps and the cooker used paraffin. Water was wound up from the well outside one bucket at a time by hand. It had a slightly bitter taste. The toilet was at the end of a barn. There were two holes in a wooden bench seat, one child size and the other adult size. A pink disinfectant powder was shaken in after use to reduce the smell. Periodically the dung was shovelled out at the rear and spread on the fields as fertiliser. They used good organic fertiliser in those days although the chemical type was coming into use.

My grandmother’s thatched cottage in “The Street”, St James was similar. The village pump is still there, but no longer in use, and her cottage and the next one have been made into one house with new windows but the main part of the building is still there. We used to take two buckets at a time as it is easier to carry two than one.
Her cottage also used oil lamps and cooking was in a brick oven fired by “faggots”. These are bundles of small sticks. Her cakes tasted superb and my mother could never make anything quite as good in a gas oven.

Metfield Aerodrome was within walking distance of grandmother’s cottage and one day we watched the return of a squadron of Republic P.47 Thunderbolts. These were large, radial-engined, long range escort fighters used to protect the Boeing B.17 Flying Fortresses and Consolidated B.24 Liberator bombers on daylight raids into Germany. I can still remember seeing one pilot climb out of his cockpit, slip on the wing and fall to the ground. Whether this was due to oil on the wing, injury or exhaustion I shall never know.

The next threat, early 1944, was the V-1 (Vengeance Weapon) known as the Doodlebug or Flying Bomb. It had a pulse jet engine on top and was like a small aeroplane and had a pop,pop,pop type of sound. It was test flown by a small lady pilot called Hanna Reitsch but had no pilot when sent out to bomb. As long as the engine kept running you knew you were safe but if it stopped you watched it carefully to see if it was heading your way. On one occasion I was standing on a diving board at the old Ashford Open Air Pool at the end of Adelaide Road by the park. My mother taught me to swim in this pool, now replaced by housing and an Indoor Pool at Staines. I watched the Doodlebug from the diving board as I tried to decide whether I would be safer under the water or not. In the end I decided that the danger had passed and carried on with my diving. I think this Doodlebug or another one fell near the Bells of Ouzeley Public House at Windsor. It is now called a Harvester Restaurant. It was only moderately damaged at the time. I saw a number of V1’s and watched them all carefully but none came close enough to be a danger to me.

I recently visited the Imperial War Museum at Duxford where they have two genuine V1's. I was amazed at how small they are and it occurred to me that they were closer to me during the war than I had thought. It was probably a good thing that I didn’t realise how close they must have been.

At the time many RAF pilots tried a dangerous technique of flying alongside the Doodlebug and getting their wing tip under the wing of the Doodlebug and then gently tipping it over and turning round so that it either crashed or went back to France.

Later that year the V2 rocket (Vengeance Weapon 2), the world’s first ballistic missile, came into use. As this hit its target at 3,000 mph no warning was possible at that time. The only defence was to find and destroy the launching sites. The first of these landed in Chiswick on 8th September 1944 (my birthday). One of these inventions of Dr Wernher von Braun came the closest of all weapons to killing me and my family. Von Braun later worked for the NASA Space Programme. As the bomber menace had faded somewhat by 1944 and our Anderson type shelter was leaking and letting in too much rainwater, we had gone back to sleeping in the house but under the stairs, considered to be the safest place at the time. Later we returned to our usual beds.
We were about to be shaken by the arrival of a V2 and too close for comfort this time. About 4 am on the day in question I had what I can only describe as a retrospective, instantaneous, dream that paradoxically took place in no apparent hurry. Although supposedly asleep in my bed. I dreamed that I was sitting in a public house awaiting the start of a darts match, which was to begin with a bang on a drum. (At that time I had never been in a public house but I had played darts quite a lot with my father.) The bang was the explosion of a V2 about a quarter of a mile away. My brother and I shared a bedroom, nearest the V2, and our window was blown in. My mother shouted, “Don’t get out of bed , I’ll bring your slippers”. I had a number of model aeroplanes on a string across the bedroom at that time and so as she came in I called out, “One of my planes has come down, don’t tread on it.” It is interesting what we think of in such situations. She came in crushing glass under her feet but the model was not damaged. I presume she put the light on in spite of the blackout. Our slippered feet trod warily on the broken glass as we all went downstairs to make the inevitable cup of tea, which afforded temporary relief. The blast also cracked the front wall of the house which my father repaired after the war. The house is still standing in 2005 but the front garden is a mess being very overgrown.
Fortunately none of us received a scratch. We found some sugary sweets, said to be good for shock and carried on as usual. (No counselling in those days). Our Church at the end of our road (Ashford Methodist) was damaged slightly. One large window and some small ones and a piano under the window was damaged by falling masonry. The piano had been given by Uncle Ned in memory of his wife. It served for many years with its minor scars.

At that time I did a paper round for pocket money to pay for my model aeroplanes. The deepest shock came from visiting the bomb site itself. This was only about 200 yards up the next Street (Clarendon Road). Had it not fallen in the soft earth of the garden I doubt if I should have lived to write this story. Several houses were destroyed in Church Road including one at which I had delivered a newspaper only the evening before. All that was left was the dark green front door at a strange angle in a heap of rubble. An RAF pilot on leave was killed among others. I then realised what a near miss I had had.

The houses were rebuilt after the war and then about 10 years later they were pulled down again to build the shops that now extend along Church Road as far as Dudley Road from Woolworths.

Also around this time I was sitting in a class with our form teacher “Moggy” Morgan doing Maths or English, I cannot remember which, when a Lancaster bomber came in sight from our classroom window. I watched it for some time until his voice boomed, “Armstrong, were you entirely oblivious of the piece of chalk that flew past your ear. I was and could only reply, “What piece of chalk, Sir?”. “Bring it here boy”, he boomed again, but fortunately the chalk was some distance away and someone else took it to him. A narrow escape! Obviously his teaching technique was not as interesting as the Lancaster. I hope he would be pleased to know that I have spent my working life with aircraft so all worked out well in the end.

I addition to our own problems of air raids and rationing we had several people “billeted” on us at various times throughout the war. Someone from the Council would come along and ask “how many rooms have you”? If you had any to spare, in their opinion, you would be told to make them available with effect from tonight. Our first “lodger” was Bert Startup a private in the army (REME I think). As kids we called him “start up the engine” . He was a nice chap and worked at the REME camp in Ashford.. After he went we were suddenly told that Mr and Mrs Pearce and their daughter Avril would be arriving as they had been bombed out in London. We had to give them our front room. Having a family to stay was a problem as we had a modest sized kitchen and only one outside toilet and, of course, only one bathroom. To reach the toilet they had to go out of the front door and through the small conservatory or through our dining room and kitchen to the back door and then through the conservatory to the toilet. Not exactly convenient for any of us. After they went we had a lodger called Marjorie Relf, a very nice girl who worked on vehicle repairs at the REME camp. She had a small third bedroom. Grandma, next door but one, had another girl called Joan and the people next door on the other side had another one called Brenda. They used to go off to work together. They all came from the Croydon area. Lastly we had Alec who was a conscientious objector so had to work in the local concrete factory in lieu of military service. He was a pleasant chap and built us a brick wall in the front garden as he was quite a good bricklayer.

We needed this because we had originally had iron railings. These were taken away during the war to make steel for weapons ansd so were any aluminium saucepans to make aircraft. Many people lost their railings and saucepans in this way. I think Alec’s wall is still there (2005).

Other memories are of food rationing. We had “Points” for tinned food, “Coupons” for clothes and a weekly allowance of butter, cheese and meat all of which were small. We used to mix mashed potato with butter or margarine to make it go further. I still cannot abide wasting anything, either food or raw materials. My children used to say, “The war’s over now Dad”. I know, but the ease with which they can tolerate the waste of food, in particular, still appals me. I hope they never experience rationing or they will know what I have been talking about. To assist with the food supply we kept chickens at the bottom of the garden and rabbits in grandmother’s shed next door but one.

My father worked for Staines Urban District Council. He drove a Dennis sewage wagon during the day and, after flushing it out, drove it at night as a back up water tanker for the fire service. These 1930 type lorries had no side windows in the cab
and must have been very cold in winter. There was no such thing as power steering in those days either. He also maintained two 50 Horse Power, single cylinder, Ruston and Hornsby diesel engines each driving a four cylinder Broom and Wade Air Compressor. These each did 12 hours per day producing compressed air to blow the sewage from Staines to Mogden sewage works near Isleworth.

Dad had to give up the fire service work after a severe attack of bronchitis. He smoked one ounce of tobacco and about 20 cigarettes a day to keep going, worked on diesel engines and stoked the coke boiler at the Church. Was it any wonder he died of lung cancer, aged 56, in 1961?

Dad worked at the Bedfont Outfall Works, part of the Staines sewage system. Today (2005) an Esso fuel dump for Heathrow is on the site of the old sewage works. It is on the edge of Heathrow Airport. He also had permission of the local farmers to shoot pigeon, partridge, duck and rabbit on their land. This helped our food supply significantly. In return he occasionally repaired their ploughs or other farm machinery. I have helped him to skin many a rabbit and used a 12 bore shotgun when I was about 14.

Mum and Dad also had to serve as part of the Street fire-watching team. Our street contained people with a wide range of income. Some, like us, were quite poor but we had a Bank Manager in a new house across the road and a widow and her daughter in the one next to it who seemed to have a comfortable income.

One good thing about the war was that it made people of all kinds and income levels work together to do the job of fire watching and brought them closer together. Regrettably each group shrank back into its own shell again fairly soon after the war ended. In some ways it was a great time to grow up. It was exciting for much of the time, seriously frightening occasionally, but it was great to live in a united country with everyone pulling together.

Only during the Falklands War has a similar feeling occurred since.

After the war I had the privilege of meeting some of the famous characters of the RAF I had so much admired during the war.

My first posting after Officer Training at RAF, Jurby in the Isle of Man, was to Odiham in Hampshire, near Basingstoke. I don’t remember the C.O. as I think he arrived a short time before I left and I was only there for three months, October to December 1955. His name was Group Captain A.K Gatward. I remember that he had his own, pale blue, Gloster Meteor jet fighter with his initials, AKG painted on it.
Only many years later did I find out that during WWII he had flown a Mosquito to Paris no less than 3 times with the object of bombing the weekly Friday parade by the Germans down the Champs Elysees. Every time he tried the weather was bad and he had been instructed to return if it was not good enough. On the third attempt the weather was still marginal but he tried anyway only to find that the parade had been cancelled so he threw a French flag out of the window and came home. He was also involved with Coastal Command and the Banff Strike Wing for a short time.

In January 1956, during a Technical Course at RAF Henlow, Bedfordshire I attended
a Memorial Service for Viscount Trenchard, the father of the Royal Air Force. His determination and wisdom gave us the RAF we needed for the Battle of Britain and WWII.

During my short stay at RAF Hemswell, Lincolnshire, our Wing Commander Technical was Wg Cdr R.E Caesar. He wore an Observer wing and had been an observer on Fairey Battles in France in the early days of WWII just before Dunkirk. Battles were slow and underpowered for their size and losses were heavy. He did well to survive that time. He was very friendly on the day I left to go to Marham.

I forget quite when but one day I was sent as Officer under instruction to a series of Courts Martial at RAF Wyton. One was an airman charged with stealing fuel from a Generating set, another was an airman who had used someone’s car without permission and the third was Squadron Leader Ken Letford D.S.O, D.F.C who earned his medals flying Lancasters during WWII. His was a particularly unfortunate case as he was charged with damaging one of Her Majesty’s aircraft.

It was stated that he had taxied a Valiant Bomber into a ladder that had broken off the pitot tube that led to the air speed indicator. His colleagues supported him magnificently and satisfied the court that the Valiant had been parked on a concrete apron designed for smaller aircraft. The apron was also on a slight slope and a strong wind had been blowing down the slope at the time. A case of several events conspiring to make the situation worse all at once. This is something that is often found when accidents occur. They are seldom due to a single cause. His colleagues carried out numerous tests in various wind conditions to show that the ladder had been blown into the path of the aircraft. It had been parked on the edge of the small apron because of wet conditions at the time. The court finally agreed and the case was dismissed. If ever there was a case that should not have been brought this was it! The cost of all the tests and the wasted time must have far exceeded the price of a new pitot tube. It was also compounded by the fact that the Valiant has swept back wings and the pitot tube was on the right side of the aircraft but the captain sits on the left. The co-pilot might just have seen what was going on but the pilot had no chance whatsoever, but he was Captain!!. I was very pleased that his case was dismissed and felt that if I was ever in court I would prefer it to be a Court Martial as justice was done that day.

Towards the end of my time at Marham I saw, but did not actually meet, Group Captain Johnny Johnson when he was C.O. at RAF Cottesmore. This was because he had just taken over Cottesmore to form the first Squadron of Victor B1 bombers the second of the three “V” bombers. We were involved in the first “Exercise Dispersal”. This was a practice so that in the event of a warning of an imminent nuclear attack we would disperse “V” bombers all around the UK in units of four so that they could not all be wiped out in one attack. I was sent with one flight of 207 Squadron from Marham to Cottesmore with mechanics and ground equipment. We then had to practice getting four Valiants in the air in a four minute scramble. We were given the scramble order about 11 pm one night and managed to get all four aircraft airborne in less than four minutes. We then had to take all the ground equipment back to Marham. An interesting few days. I saw Johnny Johnson talking to others in the Mess one night and have a copy of his book.

I met Wing Commander Trent V.C. at Marham when he was C.O. of 214 Squadron. After leaving the RAF, and while reading a Hotspur comic in the Dentist’s waiting room , I discovered that he got his VC leading a Squadron of Hudson Bombers to bomb a bridge in Belgium before the fall of France.

Whilst on a short detachment to Malta with 148 Squadron (Valiants) I had lunch with Air Marshal Sir Kenneth.B.B. Cross. I think he reached Air Chief Marshal before he retired. I later discovered that Ken Cross had been the C.O. of a Hurricane Squadron in Norway. They were told to evacuate and he and all his pilots successfully landed on the carrier HMS Glorious in the North Sea. That night the carrier was sunk and Ken Cross was the only survivor from his squadron. I did not know this at the time I met him. Unfortunately, many years later his wife was murdered while working in an art shop in London.

At Marham we were inspected on some special occasion by Air Marshal Sir Harry Broadhurst. Sir Harry was a World War I fighter pilot. Only about three months before his visit to Marham he had ejected from an Avro Vulcan Bomber at Heathrow. They had been on a world tour and were returning from Australia with the press waiting for them but the weather was bad. Who decided to try to land at Heathrow I doubt if I shall ever know. They hit a fence, having got too low on the approach and broke off one or more of the elevons. The aircraft climbed steeply and Sir Harry and the captain, ejected as they had lost control. All three crew in the back were killed and there were rumours that some extra passengers were in the back but no more was heard about that. The aircraft crashed and burst into flames. Sir Harry looked a slightly shaken and sober gentleman when he inspected us. I think he still holds the record as the highest ranking RAF Officer ever to eject from an aircraft.

A few years before he died I met Sir Douglas Bader the fighter ace. He came to give a lecture at the Royal Aeronautical Society, Heathrow Branch, because a director of the Shell Oil Company had a heart attack and Sir Douglas was sent to speak instead.
He spoke with enthusiasm and it was easy to see that if he had that much “go” in him at 74 he must have been a hard one to handle when he was 35.

On another occasion we had the German ace fighter pilot Adolf Galland to speak.
He gave a good talk in English and told us some of the mistakes we made at the time.

Out C.O. at Marham, Sir Lewis Hodges, D.S.O, D.F.C, Legion of Honour and Croix de Guerre, retired as an Air Chief Marshal. He crash landed a Handley Page Hampden, that was damaged in a raid, near the French channel coast but followed advice and took the long route home via Toulouse, and Spain. He managed to get home from Spain and was posted to SOE, the Special Operations Executive at Tempsford on the A1(M). He and many others had to fly agents into France at night.
One night he brought out President Auriol and on another occasion he brought out Francois Mitterand, who also became a French President, using Lockheed Hudson light bombers. He got his French medals for this work.

Finally, in 1990, after 32 years, I met once again Squadron Leader Trevor Ware D.S.O, D.F.C, who had let me fly his Valiant XD 820 during a flight from Malta in 1957. He came down from his seat to get his soup during a 5 hour flight and asked if I would like to take his seat for a while. I eagerly said “Yes please” and once seated on his ejector seat I thought there is only one question left to ask so I said to the co-pilot, “Can I fly it please”? He agreed, so for few minutes I held course and then made changes as requested by the navigator.

The Valiant was smooth and easy to fly and was particularly enjoyable as I had worked on the drawings for the wing external fuel tanks (originally intended to be drop tanks) and a bomb bay fuel tank at Weybridge. It was a glorious afternoon at 49,000 feet over the Adriatic with Italy on the left and Albania on the right. A very enjoyable few minutes and to date the largest aircraft I have flown unless the Blackburn Beverley is larger. I flew one of these for a few minutes on the way to Malta. After meeting at several 148 Squadron re-unions Trevor died suddenly while walking his dog. He was still flying a small airliner as co-pilot at the age of 70 and had other flights planned at the time he died. Trevor baled out of a Lancaster bomber during WWII and spent several years in a Prisoner-of War camp in Germany.

Since this was first written in 1990 a number of veterans have died so links with the past are becoming memories only. In 2005 the Gulf War is some years past and we are now in Iraq for some undefined period of time. The lesson of history seems to be that there is always another enemy waiting or some other nation needing help so we should never make defence cuts, always do the maximum research and maintain the maximum forces we can. As the Bible says, until the return of Christ there will always be wars and rumours of wars. If we are wise we shall always be prepared for them, try to prevent them, but if we have to fight then we must do our very best to win whatever the cost and must remain well equipped to do so. Government please note.