CHAPTER FOUR

ARRIVAL IN BRITAIN

 

Our convoy eventually reached Liverpool. After disembarking there our Air Force contingent entrained for Bournemouth, in peacetime an upmarket holiday resort on the South Coast of England. It was the reception centre for overseas aircrew. At train stops on the journey south, women in welfare organisations were on the station platforms handing us tea and buns.

I felt very unclean by the time I reached Bournemouth because ablutions were primitive on the crowded troopship. It was like seventh heaven to get into a Turkish bath in Bournemouth's sumptuous Pavilion, which was not only a bathhouse but also a restaurant, theatre and dance hall. Following the Turkish bath I had a massage from a professional male masseur, then a sleep between spotless white sheets in a cubicle, to be awakened after an hour with a cup of tea. Indeed a seventh heaven after an uncomfortable Atlantic crossing! And well worth the modest cost.

A day or two after our arrival in Bournemouth we were paraded to be inspected by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (later to be the Queen Mother). They had gone down from London to greet us and to thank us for coming to help Britain, as they did with every contingent of Commonwealth aircrew. I was fortunate to have the Queen talk to me - an experience I was to enjoy on a couple of occasions in New Zealand later in life (when she was the Queen Mother).

Apart from parading every morning to see whether we had been posted, we had a good deal of leisure in Bournemouth. During the days I went sightseeing in company with some New Zealand mates into the beautiful Dorset, Hampshire and Wiltshire countryside. These outings made me aware of the antiquity of English culture and gave me an awareness that it was part of my own heritage, three of my grandparents having come from some part of the British Isles and of course my father was born in London. But the reality was that I was a New Zealander and my pride in that was not diminished. Exploring such historical sites as Stonehenge and the ruins of Corfe Castle, which was blown up by Cromwell, and Dorset Harbour, where Alfred the Great established the Royal Navy, created a sense of affinity with one's ethnic background. And as a link with more recent history I saw the tomb at Wareham of Lawrence of Arabia, the distinguished British Army liaison officer with the Arabs during World War I. Incidentally,in a pub in Wareham I asked the landlord for a drink out of the oldest pot he had in the house. He quite casually produced a pewter which was 700 years old.

In the evenings in Bournemouth we sampled English pub life. This was a totally new social experience for us who had been used to the 6 o'clock closing, with its characteristic crowded male dominated bars and last minute swill before closing. The English had a more civilized way of drinking. Alternatively for evening entertainment we went dancing at the Pavilion. There was no shortage of girls for partners because some 10,000 staff from London government offices had been evacuated to Bournemouth to escape the London Blitz. And since they worked in shifts there were always girls available for either the afternoon “tea dances” or the evening sessions.

One day I travelled by train for my first visit to London. As the train rolled through the southern suburbs of London towards Waterloo Station I was intrigued by the clusters of quaint shaped chimney pots on the drab-looking pre-war semi-detached, grime-covered brick houses stretching for miles in row upon congested row.

No sooner had I stepped off the train at Waterloo Station than a man, recognizing my New Zealand shoulder patches, stated his eagerness to buy me a drink ìn gratitude for the comradeship he had with New Zealand troops in World War I. This was my first experience of the tremendous hospitality of the British people to what they called we “colonial troops”. They were so spontaneously appreciative of our coming to the assistance of Britain at war.

London seemed so familiar to me because I came across places which I had read about in books. This eradicated any homesickness one may have felt from being so far away from home.There I saw the Old Curiosity Shop immortalized by Charles Dickens; Piccadilly Circus [so called because the land there was once owned by a merchant who made a fortune supplying “picadils”(ruff collars) to the Elizabethan and Stuart Courts but in wartime missing the statue of Eros on the roundabout because it had been removed the country for protection against the bombing of London]; Trafalgar Square, with its tall monument topped by a statue of Lord Nelson victor of the great naval battle of Trafalgar; Buckingham Palace, home of King George VI; Big Ben (the clock at Westminster Palace home of the British Parliament); the Tower of London and Tower Bridge; St Paul's Cathedral and Westminster Abbey (both mercifully spared by the ravages of German bombing).

These all seemed such familiar landmarks stepping out of the pages of my youthful reading. The markets of Covent Garden, Petticoat Lane and Smithfield provided the reality of what I had previously read about them. And history sprang to life. Temple Bar and the adjacent Temple Inn (the location of barristers' offices) were so named because there the Knights Templar of the Crusades built their headquarters which they called The Temple.

The spirit and fortitude of the British people, particularly in the London area in enduring the bombing, the destruction of their homes, the loss of family and the shortage of food and normal comforts such as home heating was inspiring. In the pubs at night the people kept their spirits up by robust sing-songs. Thousands of them slept on station platforms of the Underground railway system as a shelter from bombing. It was said that sparks from the live electric rail as trains roared through protected the huddled sleepers from catching contagious illnesses. Only four feet at the edge of the platforms were marked to be kept clear for passengers using trains.One shudders to think what the British people would have been exposed to had Germany won the war. The way people of occupied Europe suffered was an indication - particularly the massacre of millions of Jews in the holocaust.

On another day-trip from Bournmouth a couple of mates and I went by train to Southhampton, a major British port which had been heavily bombed by the German Luftwaffe. We saw the ruins of St Mary's Cathedral (the locale of the song “The bells of St Mary's....”). It had been completely destroyed except for the shell of one wall. I was unaware that in Britain it was forbidden to take unauthorised photographs of enemy bomb damage. As I clicked my camera I was accosted by a policeman who escorted me to his police station. Rather brashly, as I became aware in hindsight, I protested to the police chief that having come 12,000 miles from New Zealand to fight for Britain, I could hardly be expected to be familiar with the law of England. Whereupon the police chief suggested I might like to stay at the police station for as long as it took for one of his officers to read me the total laws of Britain. Imagine how small that made me feel! But the police chief (reflecting the gratitude all Britons showed for our coming to stand by them in war), benevolently let me keep my film on a promise from me that I would not get it developed commercially. I assured him I would get it developed only on an R.A.F.Station and that I would not give away any prints. I kept to this promise.

The idyll of Bournemouth ended after 10 days. I was then posted, strangely as it seemed at the time, to a navigation course. I was the only one in our contingent to be sent on such a course. It was at the No 3 School of General Reconnaissance at Squires Gate, near Blackpool in Lancashire. I was there six weeks. Apart from classroom studies of dead reckoning navigation and astro navigation, I flew as navigator on exercises in the air in Botha aircraft piloted by staff pilots. The Botha, incidentally, was not a very reliable aeroplane. It had been built by the Blackburn Aircraft Company to Air Ministry specifications as a torpedo-bomber for Coast Command. But when loaded with a torpedo it had neither the range nor the stability for operational flying. The prototype was reputed to have flipped on to its back and crashed in the sea when a torpedo was released. So it was relegated to operational training duties such as at the No 3 School of General reconnaissance.

I passed out of the course with an 86.8% mark with the citation “a good steady navigator who should be useful on long-range aircraft”. In addition to being a qualified pilot I was now also a qualified navigator - a fact that could well have saved my life when flying out to the Middle East some months hence. But more about that later.

On posting to the GR course I had arrived at Blackpool on a wintry Sunday afternoon in November 1941. I had been given a private address at Lytham, which was just south of Blackpool, where I was to be billetted. The billet was for sleeping only. All meals were to be taken in a nearby hotel which had been taken over by the R.A.F. as a mess. I knocked on the door at the address I had been given and announced that I was the billet from the Air Force. A grey-haired gentleman in his eighties seemed non-plussed. His home had been surveyed for billeting purposes six months earlier but he had never been notified that it was actually going to be used by the R.A.F., let alone being advised that I would be arriving that day.

The elderly man, Mr Sharples, and his wife, bid me come in. Once again, it was demonstrated to me the hospitality and gratitude the English expressed for men from the Empire coming to support them in their war against Nazi Germany. Every morning Mr Sharples would knock on my bedroom door and announce that he had hot shaving water ready for me in the bathroom and that he had drawn my bath. At night I would go to bed to find a hot water bottle had been placed in it.

On Sundays I went to Holy Communion with them at the local Anglican Church. They had no children and they seemed so proud taking me (in Air Force uniform,of course) to church as if I were a son. Although they had only wartime civilian food rations, they insisted that every Sunday I have tea with them. Winter having set in, they took tea beside their fire. I really enjoyed their company and the homeliness of living with them.One day a number of food parcels from my parents arrived altogether. When I unpacked them they filled half a kitbag. I took them to the Sharples' fireside one Sunday afternoon, emptied them on the floor, and announced that all the food was for them in thanks for their hospitality and motherly and fatherly care for me. Mrs Sharples was overcome. She burst into tears. And Mr Sharples also had tears in his eyes. They were a dear couple.

There was a party in the mess on New Year's Eve. I had become friendly with a Scottish pilot on the course. He introduced me to the Scottish custom of first footing on New Year's Eve. We wandered around the local houses from midnight knocking on doors to wish the people a happy new year. Generally we were invited in for a drink. For some of them I am sure it would not be a happy year because in wartime there was always the spectre of a son being a battle casualty.

From the GR School I was posted to No 3C Operational Training Unit (OTU) at Cranwell, Lincolnshire, the site of the Royal Air Force College. This posting put me into Coastal Command. I was the first to arrive for this particular course. It was a bitterly cold February day. Snow covered the ground. I entered a barracks room which had no heating turned on and there was ice on the damp floor! I was so cold in bed that first night that I finally donned my fur-lined flying jacket, flying trousers and flying boots and flying gauntlets and even my flying helmet in an attempt to get warm. Eventually I got to sleep.

I was the only New Zealander on the course. Consequently I was immediately nick-named “Cobber”. (“Cobber” Kain was a renowned New Zealand fighter-pilot who was killed in the Battle of France in the early days of the war.) My nickname stayed with me throughout the war.

The posting to Cranwell was my introduction to the Wellington twin-engined aeroplane affectionately known by R.A.F. aircrew as the “Wimpy”, after the hamburger-munching cartoon character, J.Wellington Wimpy, in the Popeye strip which had been running in the Daily Express newspaper for some time. During the war the ubiquitous Wimpy undertook every possible role with the exception of a fighter aircraft. It was the backbone of Bomber Command in the early stages of the war. More than half the aircraft in the first 1000-bomber raid on Germany which hammered Cologne in May, 1942, were Wimpys. It was flown by some Pathfinder squadrons and it was also widely used by Coastal Command in anti-U Boat warfare, bombing and torpedoing shipping and convoy escorting.

In all, 11,461 Wellingtons were on war service - more than any other R.A.F. aircraft. Sadly, only two survive. One is at the Royal Air Force Museum, at Hendon, near London. The other was being restored in the 1990's by a group of enthusiasts at Weybridge, Surrey, where the first of the Wimpys was manufactured at the Vickers factory. With a good deal of nostalgia I visited the Hendon museum twice on post-war visits to London .

Qualifying to fly the Wimpy solo required only two hours duel at Cranwell. I was then assigned my first operational crew. The first is the one to which a pilot has the most sentimental attachment. He remembers it throughout his service life and, indeed, for ever. Comradeship is a very strong bond among men on active service where lives depend on each other. It is a phenomenon not easily understood by non-combatants. I encountered instances during the war in which a romance was broken because a girl resented what she perceived as a boyfriend's closer bond with his aircrew than with her. I was fortunate in teaming up with a very good crew. My second pilot was Joe Des Champs, an American who volunteered to join the R.A.F. before the United States came into the war. He had held a private pilot's licence in America before joining the R.A.F. My navigator was a Canadian, Johnnie Devine, with whom I formed a close friendship. Later he was my best man when I married in England.

The first radar-wireless operator/air gunner was Danny Daniels, an Australian sheep farmer. The No 2 and No 3 radar-wireless operator/air gunners were Englishman Ian Buller and Welshman Bob Bland. We carried three radar-wireless operator/air gunners in the crew so that they could alternate with rests from the radar screen which required concentrated attention.

At Cranwell O.T.U. we did several long distance navigation exercises of up to seven hours flying mostly at night.This was preparation for Coastal Command operations which entailed long flights. We moulded into a very proficient crew. When the Cranwell course ended I had 300 pilot flying hours in my log book - an indication of the solid preparation for operational flying provided in the R.A.F. - certainly more than German Luftwaffe pilots were getting.

At O.T.U we began picking up R.A.F wartime slang and terminology. Everything that was good or pleasing was “wizard”. For example, a “wizard prang” was a target well and truly hit. But a “prang” was also an aircraft crash. A “piece of cake” was something that was easy to achieve. Getting the “gen” was getting the information or the facts. “Gremlins” were “little green men” that caused things to go wrong. For example, an engine failure would be blamed on gremlins.

The Mayfly was the roster of crews for the day's operations. An operational flight was also known as a sortie. A tour was a specified number of ops before an aircrew was rested from offensive operations. “Dicing” was flying, the description having its origins in the perception that wartime flying was a gamble with death. “Angels” were every one thousand feet of altitude, the QFE was the barometric pressure at aerodrome level which was reset on the aeroplane's altimeter to establish height above the runway in making an approach to landing. A QFM was a bearing from a ground radio station to an aeroplane. U.S. did not stand for the United States (of America ). It was an abbreviation for unserviceable, applied particularly to an aeroplane which was not fit for flying.

When aircrew went missing or killed, they were euphemistically said to have “gone for a Burton ” to superstitiously avoid a blunt reference to death. Burton was one of England 's beers. So we simply thought of a missing comrade as having gone to the pub for a drink.

We also became familiar with the “line shoot”. That was an exaggerated version of something that happened , particularly if it referred to flying but it could so refer to personal life. A typical example of a line shoot became familiar later when we were on operational flying in the Atlantic, particularly in the Bay of Biscay which was notorious for bad weather. We would “line shoot” that we had been flying so low that when we returned to base we had to hose the salt off our aeroplane! We did of course have to fly low.

A favourite “line shoot” in Bomber Command was: “There we were 10,000 feet over Hamburg, upside down and nothing on the clock (that is the speedometer) but the maker's name; the flak(anti-aircraft fire) was so thick we could have walked home on it....etc..etc”

And so the RafTalk went on.......