Commodore Air - Flying Scot: An Airman’s Story

In the sleepy Worcestershire town of Malvern in the twenties we hardly ever saw actual aeroplanes, although books and pictures of them had fascinated me since early childhood. On one memorable day, however, there arrived a flying circus not Monty Pythons, but a real one.

It was owned and operated by Sir Alan Cobham, who had been a First World War pilot. He had a miscellany of elderly aircraft, including an Avro biplane in which he offered punters short flights hops, more like for payment. I was crushed by my fathers refusal of my plea to be taken aloft. This was not, I think, because of the cost, but he was rather thinking of the danger.

The offering of these flights was known as barnstorming. Fast forward to my own flying days and I, like most pilots, had the job of giving cadets and other would-be airmen such flights so they could gain air experience. On one occasion, a boy from Eton College Air Training Corps thanked me for his flight and offered a tip. Noblesse oblige, or what?

There were no such offerings from ATC cadets from my own school, Charterhouse. Like other public schools, we were visited by liaison officers recruiting for the three services. At the time of one such visit, in July 1940, I was semi-idle, having passed the exams that qualified me to go to Christs College Cambridge to train as a doctor.

One evening, I went to an excellent lecture by a naval officer that propelled me into wanting to take part in a war that I feared would end before I could become involved. I thought of the Army, but was put off by the sotto voce assurance that those of us who joined up in the ranks of the local regiment, the 60th (Royal Surrey) Rifles, and behaved ourselves, would within six months be commissioned as officers. This, I felt, flouted my principle of paddling my own canoe. The Navy, in a sense, might have requited that. But life as a seaman seemed to consist of very long stretches of gazing at oceans and only rare opportunities for the sort of derring-do I had in mind.

That left the RAF. I consulted my father about deferring the medical training for which I had been promised; there would be a place for me at Cambridge after the war. Patriotically, he encouraged me to join.

During my final term at Charterhouse I had to go to a centre in Reading for medical testing, which turned out to be very thorough. On the way back from Reading I passed through Waterloo Station, where, to my surprise and delight, I saw King George VI in field marshal uniform and in a Rolls-Royce drive through the main entrance.

I soon heard that I had passed the medical test, which wasnt a surprise to me as I had always done my best to keep fit. Hopeless at football and a source of despair at cricket, I had resorted to tennis, squash and swimming, and these were soon to become sources of personal delight and points scoring from the RAF. There were squash courts at most airfields, and I used them enthusiastically until I reached the recommended age limit of forty.

Following my medical test a telegram summoned me to report to the RAF Records Office in Gloucester. This was a daunting surprise because I had hoped I would go to a training unit rather than a mere repository for personal particulars. Thankfully, it was simply part of the bureaucracy. I thought of Shakespeares dictum:

Theres a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will...

I was relieved when a posting to Cardington for initial training arrived. Even that seemed odd, because Cardington was well known as the centre for the RAF balloons that became integral to air defence. I was soon to discover that it also housed a reception centre for processing recruits. This comprised swearing them in, giving them the traditional Kings shilling and equipping them with their much-prized uniform.

Going through the system took all day and meant an overnight stay in a barrack block. My bed was one of thirty; occupants of the other twenty-nine insisted on keeping their underwear on and the windows shut on a warm August evening. The smell was awful.

Towards the end of a second day of processing it emerged that we were expected to stay another night, up with which (in the manner of Churchill) I would not put. I explained to the corporal in charge that I had friends nearby who I could stay with. He was surprised and told me that the railway warrants we were to be issued with had not yet been signed and that the flight lieutenant whose job it was to sign them had gone off duty. When I volunteered to go without one he let me go.

My destination was a large house at Ickwell, where a Mr and Mrs Hayward Wells would, I knew, be glad to put me up for the night: no smells, no underwear making do for pyjamas, and every comfort. Mary Wells was a lifelong friend of my mothers and Hayward part-owned the brewing firm of Wells and Winch, which was eventually to be taken over by one of the big breweries Greene King in 1961. The Wells welcomed young officers as guests during the war, me included.

Thus began the humble first phase of my RAF career, which was known as deferred service but turned out to be a boring wait in the queue for full-time training.