Captain Group - From Fury to Phantom: An RAF Pilots Story - 1936-1970

August 1935 to September 1970

TYPES FLOWN AS SECOND PILOT

1916 to 1934

I was born in the midst of that other dreadful war. In 1917 the news of the horrors of Ypres and the Somme were being received at home with incredulity and despair. The frightening casualties suffered during the taking of Paschendaele Ridge brought home the horrors of the war in the trenches in France, and now, at home, rumours were rife that the German airships had dropped bombs on British soil. Indeed, it was revealed that for months the Zeppelins had freely roamed the night skies of England unchallenged, and on one night alone as many as fourteen had been reported over the home counties. The physical damage and casualties they inflicted were comparatively slight, but there was something uniquely horrible about these great dark menacing craft cruising almost silently above the English countryside. I was spared that feeling of terror, for I was only one year old at the time, but in later years any mention of Zeppelins encouraged me to tell an amusing family story in which I jokingly used to claim that I was a casualty of the First World War.

Old Eckits, the loyal and willing family retainer, although getting on and a bit slow, was only too glad to do anything that was asked of her. One Sunday morning, my parents had gone to church, asking Eckits to put the Sunday roast in the oven at noon, and at the same time keep an eye on the two baby boys. On returning home, as they approached the gate they heard a loud explosion, and to their horror were met by the sight of Eckits, her face blackened, her hair singed and in disarray, rushing out of the back door with a screaming child, equally be-sooted, clutched under each arm. The Zeppelins have come, the Zeppelins have come!, her hysterical shouts setting the dogs off barking. While Mother tried to calm the victims and settle the dogs, Father rushed into the house to turn off the gas oven before there was another explosion.

I was the baby of the family, and as well as the other casualty, my young brother, there was an older son and three girls in the family. Father had founded, and now ran, a small builders merchant firm in Gloucester. It was a hard struggle in the Depression following the war, but through considerable personal efforts he managed to keep the Firm alive, and in later years he was able to hand over to his eldest son a thriving company with excellent prospects. My second brother Mike was the brainy one, and understandably was favoured by my parents to go to university. Even in his schooldays he showed considerable interest and ability in electronics and physics, and he graduated later with a doctorate in electronic engineering. He became Director of the AEI Research Laboratory at Harlow and was Director of their Laboratory at Aldermaston, from where he visited the United States of America during the Second World War in connection with the current experimentation with nuclear physics. Back at Harlow he worked with a colleague in his laboratory and became the co-inventor of the electron microscope, an example of which can now be seen in the London Science Museum. His outstanding abilities were clearly a hard act to follow, but fortunately I, his younger brother, had no aspirations in the field of either business or electronics, and my preordained course was clearly defined in my mind. I was going to fly, and this ambition transcended all else. In those early days I must admit I would not have believed, even in my wildest dreams, that one day I would be one of the Few in the Battle of Britain, would be shot down in Holland and would return to England with a Queen, and at the end of my flying career would have flown more than a hundred different types of aircraft.