Category Archives: Bomber Command

by | October 5, 2023 · 6:17 am

Goose Fair (2)

Goose Fair always brought with it a host of what could be called “camp followers” who, to be honest, would probably have made their way to pretty well every large fair in the country.

Wandering the streets, therefore, were a good number of distinctively dressed gypsy women, who sold “tickling sticks”, bags of confetti, balls on elastic, ropes of beads and “monkeys on sticks”. All vital commodities in Victorian England!

The gypsy women were extremely popular as fortune tellers, and were always recognisable as such because they traditionally carried a linnet in a cage at the end of a long, thin staff.

And in this photograph of a gipsy woman, notice the boy’s funky pillbox hat. Eagerly, he ia waiting for the birth of  Bob Dylan:

A linnet was chosen, incidentally, because:

“When finches come into our awareness, it is a sure sign of joy-filled, happy times ahead.”

I knew that.

Here are some “sundry sellers, who no doubt had access to their own private supplies of tickling sticks, bags of confetti, balls on elastic, ropes of beads and monkeys on sticks:

And at the other end of the spectrum, a little further away, on Upper Parliament Street, around the columns in front of the Theatre Royal, stood the “nymphs of fashion”.

Here are the columns of the Theatre Royal which is to the left of the now long demolished Empire Theatre :

The “nymphs of fashion” were what we would nowadays call prostitutes. They charged men for their sexual favours. Here’s one of the hottest, preparing to drive the young men wild, or perhaps straight to their doctor:

And here she is without her make-up. Surely, I’m not the only one who thinks that’s a man:

Setting aside for a moment the delights of these disease ridden lovelies, I investigated the attractions which appeared most frequently at Goose Fair around 1900. I discovered that, on Long Row, there was “Wadbrook’s Ghost Exhibition” with the celebrated “Pepper’s Illusion”. In front of the Exchange Building, Pat Collins had his roundabouts including his “Mountain Ponies”, his “Venetian Gala Gondolas” and his “Pneumatic Steam Bicycles”. There was “music produced by electricity on the latest musical instrument, the “Gaviolophone”, equivalent to a String Band of 60 performers, playing Opera, Classical and Popular Music.”

Incidentally, here’s Long Row to the north of the Old Market Square. The western end:

The central area:

And finally, the eastern end, with the incomparable Black Boy Hotel, which, during the Second World War, supplied all of the beds required for the sexual adventures of every single member of Bomber Command in all the RAF bases for fifty miles around:

There may well have been “Wadbrook’s Ghost Exhibition” with “Pepper’s Illusion”. There may well have been roundabouts such as the “Mountain Ponies”, the “Venetian Gala Gondolas” and the “Pneumatic Steam Bicycles”. Despite all of them, though, despite even the “Gaviolophone”, many people, and all the children, still liked to see a few exotic animals, no matter how moth eaten they might have appeared.

By 1898, Day’s “No 1 Royal Menagerie” had returned to the Market Square after a short absence. Day’s was “a Special Engagement of the Greatest Lion Tamers on Earth” with “Captain Laurance & Delvonico, The Lion Kings” (96 years before Disney!). There were “20 noble lions of all ages and sizes” who provided the members of “Delvonico’s Wrestling Lions”, “Delvonico’s Boxing Lions”, “The Clown Lions” and “A Lion in a Trance”. All of them were acts which had been “The Rage and Talk of Europe”, as was “The Daring Performance of Captain Laurance” along with “the only Real Original and Absolutely Untameable Lion Wallace”. Wallace had also appeared in 1896 and 1897. He doesn’t look very fierce in this photograph, though:

Among the animals were “Many Specimens of Birds, Beasts and Reptiles” some of which must have been stuffed, as there was actually a humming bird mentioned, a species which, even nowadays, cannot easily be kept in captivity. At the same time though, there was an elephant called “Elephant Jumbo” who was surely a live animal, as an elephant would be a bit of a nightmare for the taxidermist.

Overall, the proprietors of Day’s “No 1 Royal Menagerie” were happy to call themselves, “The People’s Show at the People’s Price”.

Slightly less exotic as animals were Mr Pat Collins’ “Giant Nottingham Geese, All Alive and Kicking”:

“For rollicking fun, there’s nothing to beat them

If you are “out for the night” don’t miss them;

And while you are there, try the razzle-dazzle cars

Drawn by ostriches, and spinning round at lightning speed.”

And the judges’ verdicts……….. “No rhyme and very little reason.”

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by | September 23, 2023 · 6:17 am

Newark Air Museum (2)

Last time we looked at some of the Cold War aircraft in the Newark Air Museum, but there are a good many civil aircraft as well, most of them from this same period.

Let’s start with the exception, though, which would be the Avro Anson, even though this normally peace loving multi-engined aircrew trainer was originally designed as a maritime reconnaissance aircraft. In World War Two, the Anson finished up instead as the mainstay of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan in North America, training pilots, navigators, air gunners and radio operators. Newark’s Anson C.19, though, was used as a light transport and communications aircraft. Top speed : 182 mph. The Anson is the bigger silver aircraft. The custard coloured one is a Taylor JT.1 Monoplane.

The Handley Page Hastings began life as the C1 troop-carrier and freight transport aircraft. The aircraft married a completely new fuselage to the wings which had been designed for the abandoned HP.66 bomber development of the existing Handley Page Halifax. This particular individual, TG517, was used in the Berlin Airlift, and then in meteorological flights and finally in the Cod Wars against the evil Icelanders from 1958-1976 . It had begun its career as a completely ordinary C1 but in 1958 was converted for RAF Bomber Command, acquiring a ventral radome to train V-bomber crews on the Navigation Bombing System (NBS). Top speed : 348 mph

The DH.104 Dove was a short-haul airliner manufactured by de Havilland. The aircraft was the monoplane successor to the pre-war Dragon Rapide biplane and was intended as a short-haul feeder for large airlines and airports. The Dove carried eight passengers and two crew, and overall, it was very popular, sales being in excess of five hundred.  Top speed : 210 mph

Now we reach a few nasty foreigners, beginning with the Russkies whose simple plan was to enslave us all. To do that, they might well have used the Mikoyan-Gurevich Mig-27, codenamed “Flogger”. This was a swing wing ground attack fighter based on the basic airframe of the MiG-23, but with a revised nose, hence its Russian nickname of “Platypus”. The “Flogger” was also used by Sri Lanka and later it was licence-produced in India by Hindustan Aeronautics as the Bahadur (“Valiant”).      Top speed : 1,171 mph.

This next aircraft is French. It is a Dassault MD.454 Mystère IV and was used primarily in the 1950s and 60s as a fighter-bomber. It was the first French aircraft to break the sound barrier, and the first transonic aircraft to enter service with the French Air Force. It saw action with both the French and Israeli air forces in the Suez Crisis of 1956 and then again with the Israeli Air Force during the 1967 Six Day War, fighting Mig-17s and Mig-19s.

The Newark Air Museum also has a good many objects connected with the Dambusters’ Raid of May 17th 1943. They have a propeller from the crashed “S-Sugar” of 617 Squadron:

There is the relevant page from the logbook of Guy Gibson:

There is a piece of fuselage from a Lancaster:

And a man inside it demonstrates how many garments he has to wear:

There is a mid-upper turret from a Lancaster:

And finally, you can see the weight and distinctive shape of one of Barnes Wallis’ “Bouncing Bombs”, codenamed “Upkeep”. This particular bomb was built for testing purposes and was recovered from the waters off Reculver in Kent by Andrew Hemsley and the personnel of 101 Field Regiment TA, and 22 and 223 Squadrons.

All photographs courtesy of Lauren Knifton Fainberg

 

 

 

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by | September 11, 2023 · 6:17 am

Newark Air Museum (1)

The original Newark, or Newark-on-Trent, is a market town in Nottinghamshire in England. It stands on three important routes, namely the River Trent, the ancient Great North Road or A1, which ran from London to Edinburgh and it is also on the main East Coast railway line:

Newark has an historic castle which was “slighted” or put beyond military use in 1648.

Outside the town, Newark also has an air museum.

Nowadays going out to visit anywhere is not really feasible for me, so my daughter went as my ambassador, accompanied by her boyfriend, urged to take photographs of whatever she thought was a warplane. And she is no aviation expert, but she certainly knows a hawk from a handsaw and a Halifax from a Hastings. She wouldn’t know a Hampden from a Hereford, though, or a Harrow from a Sparrow or a Bombay. Who would?

The majority of Newark’s aircraft are from the 1950s and the Cold War. Here’s an English Electric Canberra PR7, the photo-reconnaissance version. This one, WH 791, served at RAF Tengah in the western part of Singapore. Top speed : 580 mph

This is a Gloster Meteor two seat conversion trainer, the T7. This particular aircraft, VZ634, was in service from 1949-1958 with 247 Squadron, 609 Squadron, 141 Squadron and 41 Squadron. As a fighter, the Meteor was used by 16 foreign countries and Biafra. Top speed : 585 mph

Here’s another fighter, the Hawker Hunter. At Newark, it’s an F.1 interceptor fighter, waiting eagerly for those Bears, Bulls and Badgers to show their evil Commie faces over the North Sea. Hunters were used by 21 other countries and had a Top Speed of : 623 mph. Nowadays everybody seems to have forgotten “The Black Arrows” aerobatic team and their manœuvre with 22 aircraft, certainly a world record at the time. There’s a link here.

The de Havilland Sea Venom was a two seater shipboard strike fighter, one of the comparatively few aircraft to have been twin boom. At Newark there’s an “FAW.22” or “Fighter All Weather”, WW217, one of only 39 built. There’s a family tree here, starting with the de Havilland Vampire, then the Venom, the Sea Venom and finally the Sea Vixen which operated from carriers as late as 1972.

This is the Avro Shackleton, the last in the line which ran from the Avro Manchester to the Avro Lancaster to the Avro Lincoln and finally to the Avro Shackleton. It was a long-range maritime patrol aircraft, and was used by the British and the South Africans. Top speed : 302 mph

Here’s a closer view of some of those propeller blades:

The only American warplane here is the North American F-100D Super Sabre, a single-seat fighter-bomber. This individual was used by France’s Armée de l’Air, and served in France, Germany and the old French colony, Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, today’s Somalia. In total, it had a career of 4,459 hours in the air. Top speed : 924 mph, Mach 1·4.

I think it was an F-100 that dropped the napalm in “Apocalypse Now”:

Next time, a look at some of Newark Air Museum’s civilian aircraft, some more of its foreign aircraft and its various bits of aircraft.

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by | May 29, 2023 · 6:17 am

Enigma 4

Last time, I was telling the story of how the three Polish whizz kid mathematicians, Marian Rejewski, Jery Rozycki and Henryk Zygalski, had told the British and the French, everything they had discovered about Enigma. Here they are:

That generous act enabled the British to begin decrypting German messages almost straight away, and, very soon, to start affecting the outcome of the war. In March-April 1941, Enigma revealed, for example, that Crete was going to be invaded from the air, using gliders and paratroopers. Everybody was ready for them and the German invasion force suffered heavy casualties, with as many as 4,000 men killed.

I also talked last time about how, in May 1941, the Royal Navy was told the whereabouts of all the supply ships that were servicing the Bismarck. They also ascertained on one particular occasion, that the Bismarck was headed to a harbour in France, rather than in Germany.

The stories all came from the book by John Jackson which relates the story of Enigma, the German encrypting machine used throughout the entire Second World War, the Germans always confident that their codes could never be cracked….

In July 1942, if the Royal Navy had been clever enough to believe the Enigma decrypt given to them, they would not have told the Arctic convoy PQ17 to scatter, an act which condemned 24 ships to a watery grave and 153 sailors to an early death. Arctic convoys were dreadful:

Temperatures were always unbelievably low, and the ships were  attacked more or less constantly:                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

There was very little air cover, and the one constant threat was the mighty battleship, the Tirpitz:

Even Enigma cannot overcome the arrogance of unintelligent senior officers. And what was the reason for the mix-up?

Well, the great men at the top end of the Royal Navy believed that the Tirpitz had left port to attack the convoy. But, unbelievable as it may seem, they were actually mistaken and the biggest naval disaster of the Second World War ensued.

In April 1944, General Guderian went on a tour of the various armoured units that the Germans had stationed in Normandy. This enabled the Allies to know exactly which Germans were where, and gave them…….

“a splendid insight into the distribution of the armour a month before the landing.”

Here is General Guderian. He was the author of the definitive book on tank warfare called “Panzer”. If only one of the senior English officers had read it before the Panzers rolled into France in 1940:

Further Enigma decrypts in 1944 revealed exactly the strength of the Germans in northern France, with six top quality divisions in France and Belgium, along with fourteen divisions of lesser quality. Worryingly, perhaps, the Cotentin Peninsula, to the west of the D-Day beaches, was being heavily reinforced, although it was music to Churchill’s ears to hear the large number of complaints from a large number of various German units that petrol and oil were again in very short supply. The Prime Minister was also extremely pleased to hear that, day by day, Hitler and his generals were beginning to believe more and more strongly that the Allies would land not in Normandy, but in the Pas de Calais.

Enigma decrypts also revealed that in, May 1944, the Luftwaffe had a thousand aircraft including 650 fighters, although Allied numbers were much, much, higher. Interestingly, given that the weather satellite had not yet been invented, the Allies were delighted that on D-Day, thanks to Enigma, they would be able to use what were probably far more accurate forecasts than anything they had themselves, namely the Germans’ own weather forecasts.

In June 1944, Enigma also managed to decipher encrypted messages between Peenemünde and Blizna, a testing ground for the V1 and V2. Before long, everybody at Bletchley Park was familiar with the name of Werner von Braun, soon to give up being a career war criminal and to move to a cushy well paid job in the United States.

Here’s a V2 rocket:

They were tested initially at Peenemünde and then at Blizna. Not a lot went on without the Enigma decrypts letting the RAF know something about it. Peenemünde was heavily damaged after a huge number of RAF bombers bombed every square foot of the site. They included 103 Squadron, starring my Dad. The RAF were particularly keen to blast and obliterate Peenemünde, because they’d all been told……

“Destroy the secret weapon site tonight, or you’ll all have to go back tomorrow evening.” 

The main scientist in charge at Peenemünde was, of course Werner von Braun, not an SS war criminal who used slave labourers to build whatever he required but a helpful scientist who took Mankind to the Moon. Here he is, sharing one or two Slave Labourer jokes with his pals:

At the time, the people deciphering the Enigma messages were absolutely amazed at what the Germans were doing. They had never anticipated what were, after all, artillery shells, being propelled around a hundred miles to blow up either London or Antwerp. By late 1944, the so-called “Rocket Bradshaw” decrypts were providing everybody with the Germans’ timetable of all the V2 launches from the Hague area of the Netherlands, all of them targeted on London. The exact target was always Tower Bridge although they never got within a mile of it.

One final thought, which does not actually come from John Jackson’s book but from a TV programme I saw about the Final Solution. I hadn’t realised that there were still Enigma encrypts which had defied all attempts to decipher them. One of them was deciphered as recently as 2020. It was a careful record of how many Jews had been rounded up from the ghettoes in a score or more towns and cities in central and eastern Poland and had now been transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and murdered. They were apparently using their strongest encryptions for that one.

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by | May 17, 2023 · 6:17 am

Hendon objects 3

In my last blog post about the non-flying exhibits in the museum at Hendon in north London, we were looking at some of the objects and various pieces of metal which had been rescued from aircraft as they awaited their turn in the scrapyard. These treasures were all housed in the RAF Museum which my family and I visited as long ago as 2010.

In my first two blog posts, I made an effort to include mostly things that were associated with the ground, such as a battleship, medals and the metal cross from a dog’s collar. This time, though, the objects are supposed to be connected more closely with the air.

We have therefore, some examples of the nose art on RAF Lancasters and other Bomber Command bombers.

This one comes from an aircraft in one of the Polish squadrons of the RAF:

This aircraft has all of its missions marked carefully, although I do not know whether the white or yellow colouration has any significance:

This is the artwork on a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress. In general, American artwork tended to be less inhibited than in the RAF:

Here’s what looks like a wasp type creature on a B-24 Liberator of the Indian Air Force:

These bombing raid symbols are just about the neatest that you could ever get. Note the quotation from Herman Goering underneath them:

“No enemy plane will fly over the Reich Territory.”     Herman Goering

The bombing raid symbols also contain three medal ribbons for the Distinguished Flying Crosses or Distinguished Flying Medals won by members of the crew. The one with blue and red in the medal I do not know. The name of the medal recipient was painted underneath the engine nacelles. Here is Pilot Officer Tottenham:

And Pilot Officer McManus:

This aircraft was “S-Sugar” within the squadron. As well as on the side of the fuselage, the single letter appears on the nose:

And also on the tailfins:

I don’t know what the little aircraft is. Possibly, it is a training aircraft. If you know its identity, please indicate in the Comments Section.

The museum has a couple of bombs on show.

This appears to me to be a standard 4,000lb “cookie” which carried the maximum bombload inside a very thin skin so as to create the biggest blast possible. That would blow the roofs off and allow the incendiaries to get inside the buildings and start their work:

This is a “Grand Slam” ten ton bomb, designed to penetrate the ground at more than the speed of sound and then to explode, creating a vast empty space deep in the ground. The technical term for this is a camouflet, an artificial cavern created by an explosion. Whatever is above it, buildings, railways, bridges, whatever, can then collapse into the void.

It was an incredible sight, my Dad always said, to see a Lancaster getting off the runway carrying this enormous weight. The aircraft would invariably struggle and he always described its wings as “being like a huge crescent”, although somehow, the gallant aircraft always managed to get into the sky:

It was when he was with 617 Squadron in late 1944 and 1945 that Fred had seen Lancasters staggering into the air armed with these gigantic bombs. I did ask him in the latter stages of his life if he remembered any of the places he had bombed, but, alas, he was too old by then. He added that from his point of view, so many of the targets were names he had never heard before. And I suppose with “Mimoyecques” he does have a point!  The only target he did in fact remember were the U-boat pens in Brest. The crews were all told to make sure that they dropped their bombs well in the middle of each protective concrete roof. Otherwise, they would stand little chance of doing very much damage.

These extraordinary ten ton weapons were used operationally by 617 Squadron from March 14th 1945 onwards.

And finally, here’s one of those hypnotic spinner patterns beloved of the Luftwaffe. They always seem to appear in the newsreels from the early part of the war:

PS :  Forgive the weird colours in the previous photographs, but this entire floor was lit with special lighting to preserve the original Bomber Command matt black.

Here is some modern nose art from the 1970s. This was on the nose of a Handley Page Victor V-Bomber which had been preserved without the rest of the aircraft:

And finally, here is an English Electric Lightning fighter of the early sixties, proudly displaying its tiger badges. Firstly, on the nose itself, there are the two stylised versions either side of the RAF roundel:

And here is the  animal proper on the aircraft’s tail:

This Mach-2 fighter was operated by 74 Squadron and this is the Tiger scheme from the days when they were the RAF display team in 1962.

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by | March 17, 2023 · 6:16 am

Hendon objects 1

As you may have seen from previous blog posts, in 2010, I went with my family to the RAF Museum at Hendon. I did a whole series of articles, all of them based around one particularly iconic aircraft. In this case it is the Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter which you can read about here:

https://johnknifton.com/2018/07/27/the-messerschmitt-me-262-at-hendon/

If you want to read about any of the other aircraft, it would be easiest to search the whole blog for them. They were the Avro Lancaster, the Bristol Beaufighter, the Bristol Beaufort, the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk, the Gloster Meteor, the de Havilland Mosquito, the P-51 Mustang, the Short Sunderland, the Supermarine Southampton and the Supermarine Walrus.

It wasn’t all aircraft at Hendon, though. There were lots of identified non-flying objects and various pieces of metal rescued from aircraft as they awaited their turn in the scrapyard.

The famous German battleship, the Tirpitz, provided a battle flag:

There is also a decorated metal door from the ship’s interior. The ship itself was sunk on November 12th 1944 with the loss of up to 1204 sailors’ lives:

Here are the medals of Herman Goering the man in charge of Hitler’s Luftwaffe. As with many objects of this type, they are kept under glass and difficult, if not impossible, to photograph without reflections being included:

Here is the wall of an RAF hut, taken down carefully to preserve the artwork left on it by an anonymous artist. It shows a Short Stirling, the RAF’s first four engine bomber:

The particular aircraft in the picture is a Short Stirling Mark III of 199 Squadron based at North Creake in Norfolk. Its squadron letters were EX–N and its serial number was LJ531 and its name was “N-Nan”. At 2219 hours on June 16th 1944, the crew took off to accompany 162 Halifaxes, 147 Lancasters and 12 Mosquitoes on a bombing mission which targeted the synthetic oil plant at  Sterkrade between Duisburg and Essen. They carried no bombs, but instead were to use their Mandrel, a noise jammer, to overwhelm the signals from the German Freya and Würzburg radar sets. Between them, nine such aircraft were capable of creating a 200 mile gap in the Germans’ radar coverage.

In the official records, the aircraft was “lost without trace” but modern sources on the internet suggest that it was shot down by Unteroffizier Josef Ottrin (Bordfunker/radar operator) to Feldwebel Trenke, of the 6./KG 51, some fifty miles north of Ostend. This incident took place at 02.00 hours at an altitude of 14,800 feet. They had taken off from Soesterberg in the Netherlands in a Messerschmitt Me 410 A-1/U2 to carry out an armed reconnaissance of London, probably to find targets for the new wonder weapons, the V-1 and the V-2.

All the crew of “N-Nan”were killed. They were:

Thomas Wilson Dale RNZAF (pilot, aged 25), the son of James Murray Dale and Maude Mary Dale of Wellington, New Zealand.

John Martin Watts (flight engineer, aged 19), the son of John and Ethel Rosetta Watts, of Caxton, Cambridgeshire.

Ronald Joffre Whittleston RNZAF, (navigator, aged 28), the son of Arthur William and Grace Whittleston and the husband of Frances Hellena Bertha Whittleston, of Frankton Junction, Auckland, New Zealand.

Kenneth Matthew Francis Swadling, (bomb aimer, aged 21), the son of Frank and Louise Marie Swadling, of Wembley Hill, Middlesex.

Francis Charles Brittain, (gunner, aged 21), the son of Charles Frederick and Hazel Margaret Brittain, of Kilburn, Middlesex.

Frank Lofthouse, (Mandrel specialist operator, aged 23), the son of Albert and Miriam Lofthouse, of Lupset, Yorkshire

John Critchley Higginbottom, (gunner, aged 21), the son of John Elliott Higginbottom and Lilian Jessie Higginbottom, of Streatham Hill, London.

William  McCreadie  Latimer, (gunner, aged 19) the son of George C. Latimer and Mary Latimer, of Garlieston, Wigtownshire in Scotland

Also on display at RAF Hendon are the medals won by Guy Gibson, the Squadron Leader of 617 Squadron at the time of the famous Dambusters raid. On the left is the highest British award for gallantry, the Victoria Cross. The usual price at auction for this famous medal is usually around £500,000-£700,000. Guy Gibson’s personal medal, though, would be worth many millions.

And here’s the insignia on the collar of his dog, a big Black Labrador, which was run over and killed by a mystery car at the exact same moment as Gibson was leading the squadron in the attack om the Möhne dam.

The lettering reads:

“SQ.D.N LDR

C.P.GIBSON.D.F.C.

R.A.F.   

89 SQDN

His dog was buried at RAF Scampton and here is his grave today:

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by | January 23, 2023 · 6:17 am

Why I am what I am (3)

 

I have always had a soft spot for the RAF because Fred was in the RAF and he talked about it a lot.

I have alway been fascinated by aircraft because Fred liked aircraft, ever since one of Sir Alan Cobham’s finest landed in Startin’s Field at the back of his house.

Fred always admired the Spitfire as the aircraft that saved England……

And he always said that the Wellington was “a reliable old crate”……

But he always reserved his most emotional words for the Avro Lancaster. “It would always get you back home, no matter what”, which wasn’t strictly 100% true, but it gave him sufficient faith to get into the aircraft in the first place……

 

I have always tried to do my duty and to carry out all of my obligations. This is probably connected with Fred’s belief that there were two types of men in the world. One kind was the fighter pilot who was mercurial and brilliant, but occasionally capable of great inconsistency.

In contrast, the bomber pilot was always dependable like some kind of stolid, courageous bus driver, who could always be relied on to deliver the goods, in considerable quantity, to the right place at the right time.

When I was young, I as always very upset when I was told  that I was the bomber pilot type. I always felt that Fred was saying that I lacked flair and imagination, that I was boring and that I was incapable of the type of success which is spectacular and excites people. Only in later years did I realise how from Fred’s point of view the bomber pilot was exactly what you needed. As one author has put it, the relationship between the bomber pilot and the wireless operator was that “his fate was my fate”. At least nineteen times, therefore, Fred entrusted his very life to a bomber pilot, and then had this faith rewarded by not becoming one of the 55,573 Bomber Command casualties…..

As a negative, I have always been partial to a drink, because Fred always used to have a drink when he wanted to. With his PTSD, though, he had a much better excuse than me.

Another negative related to this is my own great anxiety in the face of any future event or, especially, a journey to somewhere unfamiliar. Fred had exactly the same problems. In his case, I suspect that he still had that old fear of getting into his bomber and facing the possibility of an imminent and violent death.

I always felt great anxiety about being sacked from my job because Fred  always had the exact same fear. That was because he worked for a clay mining company before the war, and they did not hesitate to sack people. “One strike, and you’re out!” as you might say. Here’s Fred at Ensor’s, with the rest of the workforce. It’s around 1937…..

I have very little self-confidence because Fred was always very keen that I should never stand out from the common herd. He therefore prevented me from getting big headed by criticising whatever I did and at best giving it minimal praise. He would say “Never stand out. Never be different” because that was what the upper echelons of the RAF hierarchy wanted to happen. Unfortunately, to succeed, you need to stand out, and you will have to be different to do that.

Fred always used to watch out for me coming home if ever I was late. He would lean over the front gate as if by accident or coincidence. I absolutely hated it, and I could cheerfully have shot him. I hated the idea of being controlled. Now I have my own daughter, and although my methods have always been, I hope, a little bit more subtle, I have always done pretty much the same thing. Still, worrying about your child is better than just not bothering where they get to.

When I was a little boy, Fred took me to a local medieval church where I could see where Robin Hood used to sharpen the tips of his arrows on the stones of the back wall. I now live in Sherwood in Nottingham. Less than half a mile away is an ancient ford over a stream. This site has been seriously suggested in at least one book as the location of Robin Hood’s camp.

The local medieval church was St Michael with St Mary’s in Melbourne, Derbyshire. ……….

Some of the grooves for Robin Hood and his Merry Men’s arrowheads are visible in the bottom right of the picture. The church is Norman as is shown by the shape of the arch and the many concentric rings of decoration around the top of the door……..

The columns are stout and broad, just like Durham Cathedral, and the arches similarly rounded, not pointed. Notice the Australian flag which commemorates the links between Melbourne in England and Melbourne in Australia……

And finslly, as I slowly but surely morph into my own father, I have started telling the same old stories over and over again, just like Fred did.

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by | December 29, 2022 · 6:16 am

Why I am what I am (1)

One day I started thinking about all the little facets of myself as a person and where they all came from. I didn’t take me long to work out that the vast majority came from my Dad. I suppose that was because when I was a little boy I spent a lot of time with him. I was nevertheless really quite surprised how many apparently insignificant activities took on a major importance in my later life.

My Dad, Fred, made it quite obvious to me that he liked football/soccer. He took me to games with Derby County although it was their sixth game before they won. Norwich City (1-4), Newcastle United (1-2), Stoke City (1-1), Grimsby Town (2-4), Blackburn Rovers (1-1) and , finally, in a friendly, Spartak Prague (7-1). Here’s the programme to the first match I ever watched. I was seven years old.

I have always read avidly, and, every Saturday morning, Fred used to take me to the old library in Alexandra Road  in Swadlincote, a small town in South Derbyshire. It was on the right hand side as you went down a very steep hill, just before the local cinema.

I have read books avidly ever since, and often wish I could see again the big green book of Norse Myths and Legends that was in that Old Library all those years ago. The library itself was plagued by subsidence caused by coal mining and it was demolished in 1960.Here are some houses in the same street. Just look at the cracks in those bay windows…..

And here’s a short video of the problem. I included this clip in a previous blog post…..

As a boy, I collected stamps because Fred had collected stamps as a boy and he gave me his stamp collection. I always remember that it was in a “Commando” stamp album, resplendent with a commando firing a sten gun from the hip on the front cover. As an adult, I do wonder what connection, if any, that had to do with stamp collecting but in 1961 nobody seemed to notice….

I like birdwatching because Fred talked about eagles in Scotland when he was in the RAF. On one occasion, as he travelled by train across the Highlands south towards Edinburgh, he was in a compartment alone with an old Scotsman. It was a fine, bright sunny day, when suddenly the Highlander tapped him on the knee, and pointed out of the window towards the distant mountain tops. There, high in the clear blue sky, was the unmistakeable shape of a soaring Golden Eagle….

I can actually remember going on a walk with Fred one morning when I was seven or eight. and at one point I was a little tired, so I went to sit on a clump of grass with my back against an old fence post. As I sat there, Fred caught my attention, and he pointed up to a bird that was singing its heart out as it hovered high in the sky. I asked him what it was, and he replied “a skylark”. In the sixty or more years since then, I have never lost that desire to identify birds:

One day when I was in my Dad’s class at Woodville Junior School he gave us all a printed sheet with his own hand drawn pictures of four common birds. We all coloured them in so that one day we would recognise them when we saw them. The birds were blackbird, thrush, starling and robin (the European version, Erithacus rubecula)  Here they are……

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And here they are in a modern version of what we received in class, almost a whole lifetime ago. There were no multicoloured worksheets on computer screens in 1961…..

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by | December 23, 2022 · 6:16 am

Phonetic Alphabets (1)

Signalling by one group of soldiers to another, or by one ship to another, has gone on for centuries. Signalling flags were used on ships in the time of Admiral Nelson:

And there was always semaphore. As used by the Beatles:

The advent of radio, however, made things a lot more difficult, because when men spoke to each other, interference was a frequent problem. Sometimes words, especially place names, had to be spelt out, and merely giving out a list of letters, such as L-O-N-D-O-N did not always work, especially if the interference was intermittent.

In 1904, British Army signallers started to use a partial spelling alphabet, where only the more problematic letters had their own code word. This produced:

ACK, BEER/BAR, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L ,  EMMA, N,O, PIP, Q, R, ESSES, TOC, U, VIC, W, X, Y, Z

Only seven letters needed! By 1918, the problems of using the 1904 alphabet had added  a few words:

CORK,   DON.   EDDY.    INK.    JUG.   QUAD.   TALK

Here’s a war artist’s rendition of a signaller:

Things got better once for the British army when they adapted horse drawn radios:

Overall, it is crucial to have only ONE spelling alphabet, otherwise the situation becomes downright confusing. There used to be different alphabets for:

the 1914 British Post Office with Apple, Brother, Charlie, Dover, Eastern,

the 1917 Royal Navy with Apples, Butter, Charlie, Duff, Edward

the 1918 Western Union with Adams, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Edward

Much more sensibly, during World War II, the US Army and Navy used the same alphabet. It is familiar from so many war films and so many comics:

Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog, Easy, Fox, George, How, Item, Jig, King, Love, Mike,

Nan, Oboe, Peter, Queen, Roger, Sugar, Tare, Uncle, Victor, William, X-ray, Yoke

These men were some of the members of the real “Easy Company” :

What is important here is to have no words whatsoever that sound like any of the others. In this alphabet maybe jig and king, or able and baker, or dog and fox might cause problems.

Here’s the RAF spelling alphabet until 1942:

Apple, Beer, Charlie, Don, Edward, Freddie, George, Harry, Ink, Johnnie, King, London, Monkey,

Nuts,  Orange, Pip, Queen, Robert, Sugar, Toc, Uncle Vic,  William, Yorker, Zebra

And here’s the RAF alphabet after 1942

Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog, Easy, Fox, George, How, Item, Jig, King, Love, Mike, Nan, Oboe,

Peter, Queen, Roger, Sugar, Tare, Uncle, Victor, William, X-ray, Yoke, Zebra.

Smart people will have noticed how close it is to the US Army and Navy alphabet. How sensible!

In actual fact, the RAF was already using quite a few other alphabets anyway, such as this one noted in 1942-1943 :

Apple, Beer, Charlie, Dog, Edward, Freddy, George, Harry, In, Jug/Johnny, King, Love, Mother,

Nuts, Orange, Peter, Queen, Roger/Robert, Sugar, Tommy, Uncle, Vic, William, X-ray, Yoke/Yorker, Zebra

And there was a further alphabet for the squadron letters on the side of the aircraft in the Dambusting 617 Squadron:

A-Apple, B-Baker, C-Charlie, E-Easy, F-Freddie, G-George, H-Harry, J-Johnny, K-King,

L-Leather, M-Mother, N-Nuts, O-Orange, P-Popsie, S-Sugar, T-Tommy, W-Willie, Y-York, Z-Zebra.

I presume that the missing letters were non-existent aircraft. Here is 617 Squadron and these are B-Baker, G-George and M-Mother:

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I wrote a number of blog posts about my wife’s friend, Len, who flew in 617 Squadron, in G-George. His full name was Len Dorricott, and this link will take you to the first of the three posts. If you copy and paste the surname “Dorricott” into “Search”, then finding Blog Posts No 2 and No 3 about Len becomes a doddle.

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by | November 17, 2022 · 6:16 am

Strathallan…………the lost air museum (2)

Last time we looked at just a few of the aircraft which my friend, Bill, and myself saw on our visit to Strathallan Air Museum, near Auchterader, in the mid-1970s. Strathallan, if you remember, was the aircraft museum which eventually went bankrupt and all of the aircraft were disposed of in one way or another. A look at the map shows why, in pre-motorway days, very few visitors came to see the aircraft:

One of the most easily identifiable aircraft at Strathallan  was their de Havilland Comet, the world’s first jet airliner, which made its maiden flight on July 27th 1949.

Here’s my photograph, taken with a plastic camera whose controls for light were “bright” and “dull” :

And here’s a de Havilland Comet, by a much better photographer, which I found on the internet. On second thoughts, though, perhaps that may be a model. If so, it’s a really good one :

Of course, it’s a model ! But what are the other articles on this 1950s table? Is that the pilot’s map?

The Strathallan Comet (XK655) was eventually broken up for scrap metal, and in 1995 its nose was sold to Gatwick Airport for display purposes on the Spectators Terrace. Not a fate I myself would care to share. Here it is:

On an internet forum I found “G-ORDY” who said that XK655 was built for BOAC as the first Comet Mark 2, G-AMXA. It was eventually converted into “a Comet 2R, an aircraft of electronic intelligence gathering (ELINT) configuration, by Marshalls of Cambridge, and flew with 51 Squadron from Wyton. The forward fuselage of XK655 is now in the Al Mahatta Museum, located at the old Sharjah airport, UAE, and is restored in BOAC colours.”

There was another de Havilland aircraft at Strathallan. This was a De Havilland DH-98 Mosquito TT35, “TT” standing for “target tug”. Here’s my photograph:

And here it is in a much better photograph which I found on the internet:

In the RAF, the Strathallan aircraft had a serial number of RS712 and had featured as one of the bombers in the film “633 Squadron” and the later film “Mosquito Squadron”. The aircraft is currently displayed at the EAA Museum in Oshkosh, in Wisconsin, as RS712 and EG-F, the aircraft flown by Group Captain P.C.Pickard during the attack on Amiens prison in 1944:

I have actually already written very briefly about the book featured above, in a post called “Books for Christmas 1”.  I said:

“A famous incident of the air war is investigated in this book by Jean-Pierre Ducellier. Its title is “The Amiens Raid: Secrets Revealed: The Truth Behind the Legend of Operation Jericho” and Ducellier has spent the majority of his adult life attempting to put the evidence together into a coherent whole. And his solution is not a lot like the official version.”

Here’s Strathallan’s Grumman Avenger, a TBM-3W2 of the Royal Netherlands Navy, the Koninklijke Marine. Here’s my photograph:

And here’s a much better photograph, of an Avenger in a much better state of repair:

When the museum closed, the Dutch aircraft went back to the USA and is now registered as N452HA at Hickory Air Museum, a private museum in North Carolina whose proud boast is that they never charge a penny for entrance.
The only other aircraft I can remember seeing at Strathallan was the RS3, built in 1945 at the Reid and Sigrist factory at Desford, some seven miles from Leicester:

It was designed as a small, twin engined trainer, although the RAF showed little interest. In 1948 it was adapted for prone-pilot experiments, with a lengthened, glazed nose, and a set of controls for another pilot who lay on his stomach. Here’s a better photograph from the internet:

The RS3 flew in this form in June 1951, and eventually went to the Institute of Aviation Medicine at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough.

When I went to Strathallan, there may have been some other aircraft there which today, just over fifty years later, I have simply forgotten. It all depends on which year I went to the museum and in which year certain aircraft were sold off. The aircraft which I can no longer recall were an Avro Anson, an Avro Lancaster, a Supermarine Spitfire and a Westland Lysander. To be honest, had they been there during my visit, I do think I would probably have taken some  photographs.

This picture from the Internet was the closest I got to the ex-Strathallan Lancaster, KB976 and GB-BCOH. It is currently held at Polk City, Florida:

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