This is a continuation on from Page 1 in the series...
We were lodging with friends of my elder sister (by nine years), Honor, in an already crowded flat (apartment) at 'Clevedon Mansions', just over the Twickenham side of the River Thames at Richmond Bridge, and on the corner of Cambridge Road, the road that the Ice-Drome was in, a skating arena that was very popular then and still. Honor worked for the government in Whitehall, so the flat was fairly conveniently located to the Richmond UndergrounD station.
Honor was a product of mother's previous marriage, to a dashing young naval officer who had served in World War 1. Jock (Campbell)'s health failed a few years later, and I believe it was due to delayed shock at his commanding landing craft who took soldiers ashore on the beaches of Galipoli during the Dardanelles campaign where the ANZACs distinguished themselves so greatly.
Jock would have been perhaps sixteen or seventeen at the time, and one would imagine that the horror of seeing the troops he was landing being shot up would have had an horrific effect on him. Apart from the personal danger of himself and his very small crew, and their having to repeat the routine time and time again with the same results.
It was also a hop, skip and a jump by two double-decker red London buses to Wimbledon, where overlooking Wimbledon Common was Kings College School.
I was enrolled in its Junior School, next door. I remember three things from there. One was unusual, the Senior School were presenting a dramatic production of Dorothy Sayers' just published play, called 'The Man Born to be King'. This was a departure from her detective stories about aristocratic sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey - alias de 'Ath Bredon. We juniors were allowed to stay after assembly one day and watch spellbound as these seniors did their stuff in a dress rehearsal.
The second was my discovery of what Camembert cheese was, from the stinking breath of a grossly overweight small boy in my class, whose desk was at the back of the classroom. I have never liked it as a result!
The last was a doggerel rhyme we made up a year or so later when our classroom was on the ground floor at the back of the school instead of the upper floor at the front. We had a Latin master, who like the others wore an academic gown, and often a mortar-board. His name was Gerald C. de la Condamine. He had a habit of perching himself on an empty front desk - funny how nobody ever fills up the front ones! Anyway, one day the inevitable happened. The desk collapsed, and poor Mr. de la Condamine was on the floor with bits of timber under and on top of him. I think he must have been okay, because I don't think we would have been nasty enough to joke about it if he had broken something. The rhyme went:
By the way, if you have never learned any Latin, that is unlikely to make much sense to you.
This school nowadays also has a website, and is also referred to in a general schools index.
Most of my schooling in the UK from the age of about 11 was accomplished either while living with friends, or in boarding school, because of dad's military postings. He had the dubious honour of commanding the last prisoner of war camp in England to close, one that was high security, and which had a large garrison of soldiers to ensure the security. Prior to that, his command was a 'working' camp where the prisoners were hired out to work in the fields of local farms (mainly in the planting and harvesting of sugar beet) because the farmers and farm hands were still away in the army doing the last bits of 'mopping up'. That was during the very cold winter of 1947, where everything got isolated because of enormous snowdrifts.
That was near a World War II constructed R.A.F. airfield, close by a little village called Seething in Norfolk. Sheep now grazed what was previously the grassed areas between the the runways and associated roadworks. Mother and father lived in a pair of Nissen Huts which mother very capably furnished and turned into a home.
During the Seething period, I boarded with friends in North Cheam, an outer southern London suburb, while still attending Kings College Junior School at Wimbledon.
Father's final posting was just outside Bury St. Edmunds, in the East Anglian county of Suffolk. Fornham Park was a large country house with extensive grounds, and he and mother had their quarters in a portion of the house, the rest of which was occupied with all of the offices associated with a military unit, rather like a colonial era Government House.
It was rumoured that Rudolph Hess, one of Adolf Hitler's aides-de-camp, was detained at what was eventually father's camp at Fornham, after his capture in Scotland, and the Allies not entering into the negotiated peace he appeared to have parachuted in to arrange. Hess's whereabouts were never actually divulged, so this is all pure speculation.
Interestingly, visiting the U.K. briefly during 1990, I discovered that Fornham Park appeared to be deserted, either still, or again, with no sign of habitation in the house, and the grounds apparently being vacant too. Many wartime military conversions of stately homes resulted in an enormous cost to return them to a usable condition, so perhaps Fornham had never seen civilian use since about 1948 when no.186 Base Camp closed. As a child I remember during school holidays (while staying there) being sneaked into the soldiers' movie theatre, run by the Army Kinema Corporation, and the film being shown was 'Of Mice and Men', hardly appropriate, but I don't remember any detail of the film. This would undoubtedly have been another Nissen Hut, and thinking back they had two projectors in a make-shift 'bio-box' like a real cinema, and were thus able to do reel changeovers on the run.
While at Fornham Park my parents looked for somewhere to retire, and found a delightful two-story thatched cottage with a nursery garden and extensive outbuildings on a back road, part of the village of Beyton, some five miles out of Bury St. Edmunds, heading towards Ipswich.
I then became a boarder at the recently moved-to-the-country Norwich High School for Boys, known colloquially as 'St. Giles' because it had previously been located at St. Giles Gate in the city of Norwich. The relocation was to another country estate, much like Fornham Park, ten miles out of Norwich, just outside the village of Loddon. Langley School, as it was renamed in the late 1940s, was located at Langley Park, is listed on the English schools' internet register here and it has a web presence here. Apparently father had tried to get me placed at his old school at Framlingham ('Fram') not far out of Ipswich, but they didn't have any places available so close to the end of the war, even for the son of an old scholar.
It was from there that my parents' military aspirations for me germinated. I joined the school's Army cadet unit, was completely inconspicuous in any real ability apart from always winning the fastest time in dismantling and reassembling a Bren automatic gun. I went to three summer camps, one near Colchester, one at Catterick in Yorkshire, and I think the third was at the Norwich garison of the Royal Norfolk Regiment to whom we were attached. That was all paid for by the army, with us receiving travel warrants and adult subsistence allowances while travelling.
I remember marching across the northern city of Shefield between the two principal railway stations en route to Catterick.
For the first few years of these camps, up river slightly from the Victory was located another and slightly larger ship-of-the-line, the retired wooden wall H.M.S. Implacable which was eventually towed out into Spithead and blown up towards the end of my association with Portsmouth. It was at this time that my parents decided I should go to sea like my paternal grandfather who was never mentioned in our household because of a family feud, and never discovered by me until 1990 - forty years later.
Indeed here we can see above an image of the two sides of the medal that Cottle and I won against the odds - which we considered wasn't really bad going!
So, I joined the Royal Air Force as a "Cadet Pilot". My initial training (we called it "square-bashing", the American equivalent is "Boot Camp") was at No.1 Initial Training School at Kirton-in-Lindsey in England's Lincolnshire, and then my flying training was at No. 2 Flying Training School at Cluntoe on the west side of Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland. The airfield was actually between the lake and Arboe, a small village 10 miles (16 kilometres) from Cookstown, where there was held an annual motor race (the Cookstown 500 from memory) named after its course which included the extremely wide main street.
The Percival Prentice 2-seater side-by-side trainer was used at that time for basic training, followed by the North American Harvard for advanced training. The Prentice was effectively a development of the Proctor, and the Prentice was followed by the Provost, and shortly after by the Jet Provost which quickly became the only trainer the RAF used, apart from the Operational Conversion Units which took qualified pilots and gave them experience in combat aircraft. Photographs or links to photographs of these aircraft will hopefully be included if I can find any.
Kirton Lindsey was an interesting time; for a start I found that the son of the people who I boarded with in North Cheam some years before, Peter Heaver, was an officer at Kirton! Our schedule of duty and work made it almost impossible to have any social life.
Another interesting thing was an initiative exercise which each of us had to carry out, I forget if it was solo or with one or two others, but I seized on the idea of of borrowing an official push-bike and surveyed a disused local airfield at Hibaldstow nearby, with a view to restoring it to active service within seven days. I was an accomplished four finger typist (as I still am) and I believe I was the only officer cadet to hand in a typed report on his assignment. Having spent many school holidays on the deserted airfield at Seething, I knew what to look for. Perhaps this was unfair on the others, but I became a Pilot Officer under training shortly afterwards!
At that time, the RAF, and the Air Ministry (the government department overseeing the Air Force) had a policy they told nobody about. They were not going to be caught napping in the case of another war, with no aircrew to fly their aircraft in defence of the nation.
Sixty-six of us went for a week-long series of interviews and aptitude tests at the R.A.F. station at Hornchurch in Essex, just east of London. Those accepted from a number of such selection procedures then met - about sixty of us - at Cardington in Bedfordshire, previously the barage balloon headquarters during the war. We were then sent for our 'initial training' of twelve weeks (as opposed to the ordinary airmens' 'square-bashing') of eight weeks.
Every single trainee pilot on that course - all of us had eight year engagements with an option to extend to twelve - was eventually grounded on qualification as pilots, and 'remustered' to become trainees in ground trades, with our term of engagement reduced to the 2 years of 'National Service' conscription liability. The only concession made was that we would be paid at 'regular' enlistment rates, in my case it had climbed to 12 shillings a day as a Senior Aircraftman on my demobilisation. A 'nasho' of the same rank received seven shillings a day. That was multiplied by seven for the weekly pay parade, on the basis that we were available for work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and this was often enforced not so much as a disciplinary thing, but because of the requirements of the RAF at the time.
Converting that into Australian dollars and cents, 2 English shillings equalling 2 shillings and sixpence Australian - or twenty-five cents in decimal currency - as a Senior Aircraftman, having passed an advanced trade test for the rank, I 'took home' ten dollars and fifty cents as a week's pay in 1955 for anything up to sixty or seventy hours work, less deductions for taxation and accomodation and messing (meals)! I believe that conditions while quite bleak and harsh, were very effective in forming stamina and the ability to work under direction without feeling compelled to answer one's supervisor back. As a comparison, my first job in civilian life was at seven pounds (seventeen dollars fifty) for a thirty-five hour week as a laboratory assistant. This was while working for a company developing airborne military and civilian DME (Distance Measuring Equipment) radar.
My speciality, one would gather, was now airborne radar, and after completeting a trade course at the Radio School at Yatesbury on Salisbury plain (just a couple of miles from the RAF Apprentice Training Scoool at Compton Bassett) I became qualified as an 'Air Radar Mechanic' in 1954. I saw the balance of my two years' National Service (conscription) liability out at a windswept Maintenance Unit - 30MU, later 291MU - north of Wolverhampton, between Newport and Market Drayton, and called Stoke Heath, next door to the pilot training school at Tern Hill which was the only one left operating by that time. The map shows this location
The Air Ministry seemed quite surprised - maybe even shocked - when each of us successively told them where they could go with their wish to keep us "trained" by an annual 14-day camp every year over the next 10 years! Actually, I only ever went to one of them, managing to keep on deferring them year after year. Finally they refused to allow another deferment, and the sole one I went to was at great expense to the taxpayer with three trains to get there, taking all day, and three to get back, and on arrival the dozen of us were told that we were a thorough embarrasment to our supervisors who briefed us on arrival that they had absolutely nothing at all for any of us to do, but please would we not to go AWOL because they would then have to lock us up! You might consider that taxpayers' money was being really wisely spent.
As mentioned, I was initially employed in radar development as a laboratory assistant in one of several British engineering conglomerates contracted to the defence industry. This was the General Electric Company, at their "Applied Electronics Laboratories" in the northwest London leafy residential suburb of Stanmore, then the terminus of the Bakerloo UndergrounD railway line. I lived in a caravan (a trailer home), an almost unheard of thing in the 1950s - except for gypsies and the like - roughly midway between Rickmansworth, Bovingdon and Watford. For a while I commuted by two buses, but in reasonable weather rode my lightweight racing cycle - a fixed wheel job with a high geared single speed which I had bought and rebuilt while in the Air Force - until one day I nearly came a cropper in the dense traffic on the A41 - the main road from London to the North-West of England, which I followed between Stanmore and Watford, and which, incidentally, continued on through Wolverhampton and Tern Hill to the North-West of England.
My responsibility was to "ride shotgun" in an empty single axle gondola towed behind a kerosene powered pre-war Fordson Major agricultural tractor fitted with non-standard inflatable tyres (Solid rubber ones were standard). We would journey backwards and forwards between the gasworks and the pier, fill under a hopper bin whose rusty discharge chute gate I would operate, signalling the driver to move on slowly, rather in the way a coal train is loaded at a mine these days. Then, when filled, I would sit on top of the load ensuring that lumps of coal did not fall on to the road en route back to the gasworks. Once arrived, it was hand winding (with the help of the driver on the other side) the trailer's tray until the load discharged itself into a grating above the coal storage. Not quite as hard work as shovelling the coal, but just as dirty.
I was eventually appointed to "Relief Lamp Attendant", a job which attracted an extra shilling (twelve and a half cents Australian) a hour, which incurred a "split shift" involving a nominal one hour ride of my push-bike around the route of lamps for which I had responsibility, and the following morning reporting those which had not lit. Failure to accurately report outages was taken as evidence that the lamplighter had not done his "round" the night before, and was prima facie evidence for disciplinary action.
There were about a dozen full-time lamp attendants, each of whom had his pushbike, ladder, bucket and cleaning cloths, and who looked after his own round. With two weeks annual holiday per employee per year, this meant that I was guaranteed six months' work as the relief guy, further augmented by two weeks training on each round before taking over someone's patch while they were away. This effectively guaranteed me a year's continuous work, which was far less back-breaking than shovelling coal, and very handy living in an area which had no available work during the winter months.
My first association with the boat and crew was when she put to sea to rescue a sailing boat - with the appropriate name of 'Rabbit' - which got into difficulties offshore one saturday afternoon. I watched as she was towed into Margate harbour by the life-boat, and shortly afterwards enquired how to join the crew. The general meeting place for us was the front bar of the pub nearest the harbour, the 'Northern Belle'. An English pub is more of a social gathering spot than somewhere to get stone drunk - at least in those days it was. It was also to the 'Belle' that we would head after our Sunday 'Make and Mend', a quick 'pint' before heading home to lunch.
Starting as a "helper on shore", whose tasks ranged from cleaning and greasing the pan down the middle of the slipway, to standing at the bottom of the slip and ready to heave a line when the boat was returning from service or exercise, to polishing brasswork on board.
After this appropriate 'apprenticeship' period my expertise as a sailor was put to use by being appointed one of those individuals who were allowed to 'run for a belt' - the first half dozen to arrive at the boathouse for a call-out grabbing a lifebelt and boarding, making the life-boat ready for launch and then going to sea. Our boat was a 46ft-9ins Watson Cabin class, built in 1951 from memory, and at the time I was involved, she did not have an enclosed wheelhouse. The boat was funded in part from the Civil Service Lifeboat Fund, a voluntary fund many civil servants contributed to, and in part out of the gifts and bequests the Royal National Life-Boat Institution received. She was called the "North Foreland (Civil Service Number 11)"
Every Sunday morning we would 'make and mend' - clean and polish, check fuel and cooling water levels, and participate in the weekly 'call-back' of all 151 life-boat stations on HF radio, first on 2182 KHz (Kilocycles, then) - the international distress frequency, and then immediately afterwards on our local net frequency. Each of the major coastal radio stations would call each boat, travelling in a clockwise direction around the British Isles. North Foreland Radio was our net control, which followed after Humber Radio (at Kingston-upon-Hull) way up north.
It was interesting to observe how with weather and climatic conditions sometimes we could hear other boats, and at other times not. Once we had checked in, then we would switch frequencies and chat with Deal Coastguard, as they were our net control while we were out on service. Nearly all of us had a radio receiver at home with what was referred to as 'Trawler Band' on it, the non-broadcast comnmercial band that wasn't quite 'short wave'. Most of us kept them running 24 hours a day, monitoring the distress frequency, listening for weather reports at 3 minutes past each hour from coastal radio stations, and keeping watch for mayday calls. Just the other side of the English Channel was the high-powered coastal radio station of the Netherlands, at Schevingen.
It was at that time that I learned the second of the phonetic alphabets in regular use, that used by merchant ships of all nations, the 'Amsterdam - Baltimore - Casablanca' alphabet, which was to change within ten years along with the military 'Able-Baker-Charlie' alphabet to the American military one which now is used internationally by merchant ships, warships, military and civilian aircraft and general communications. It still goes against the grain to say 'Romeo' instead of 'Roger' as a response meaning 'Message Received and Understood'!
Crew were summoned by a very effective and simple method. There were no complicated communications, really very few people had telephones then, either. On the stone harbour pier stood a coastguard observation post which had a mortar for firing rocket signals... a chemical rocket with an explosive head and a coloured star-shell which would light the waterfront when it exploded some 150 feet up in the air. Referred to as 'Maroons', these were about the size of a Christmas pudding with a string wick. Red ones were used to summon the life-boat crew, with two being fired a few seconds apart. They were never used for practice drills, only for distress. Green and White maroons were used for other purposes, from memory the white ones summoned the cliff rescue squad.
I lived at the top of the hill overlooking the harbour; in fact if you look at the picture, the dark building to the left side, was where I had a flat (apartment) on the second floor to the right of the building. Next door was my sister-in-law's pub, the 'Britannia Hotel', where I was a member of the darts team, and learned how to win at 'shove-ha'penny' without actually cheating! Families were always helpful when the crew was summoned; usually you had your sea boots on and were already grabbing your coat by the time the second maroon fired, and in my case I then jumped on my push-bike and freewheeled down the hill, through the bollards at the end of the jetty and hoped like crazy that the front wheel of the bike didnt go down the gap between the timbers on the pier deck!
We would also do practice drills if there hadn't been a launch on service for four weeks, and I remember one glorious summer day we headed out for about an hour, turned round to come back in, and saw people fishing off the rocks at the foot of the cliffs towards Broadstairs, waving at us. So we waved back. After we had winched the boat back up the slipway and washed the salt water off her, we discovered that the two wavers nearest us had been stuck and couldn't get back to shore because there was a strong rip! Oh dear. Took a while to live that one down.
The Sunday before Christmas we would always spend the whole day at sea, delivering Christmas hampers to the crew of the Tongue Lightvessel, some 20 miles or more out at the end of the Thames Estuary. For the three or four years of my involvement, the weather was never unkind on this trip.
One of the employers I worked for - a newcomer from London who had bought out a Ramsgate TV sales and repair business known as "Rogers of Ramsgate", and who was unfamiliar with seaside town solidarity - objected to my failing to report for work two days running because our boat had launched in the early evening, and apart from returning to refuel, was out both nights and the two days as well. In those days, nobody 'expected' to be paid for time away from work, even where it was a service for the public, and consequently it was an eye-opener to find that a 'local' employer would be anti-social to that degree. It was different with my original employer, Mr. Dennis Henry Poupard, who had a business called 'Henrys Radio' in the High Street of Margate. Mr. Poupard was also a yachtsman, so I suppose he understood about the maritime code of searching for survivors.
We had gone to sea to search for survivors from a mid-air collision over the Thames between Margate and Herne Bay of two USAF Sabre fighters from their nearby Manston base. This was the only occasion that I have been seasick in my life. About three in the morning, in a heavy swell just off Herne Bay pier, the three life-boats from Herne Bay, Margate and Ramsgate tied up together in a really heavy sea to plan strategies for searching the next day. The motion of such a wide platform, say fifty feet square combined with the smell of unburnt raw diesel spilled on the deck was just too much!
Sadly my employer went of of business when the grapevine picked up what had happened to my job. His Service Manager, a Mr. Tutt, had arrived from London two weeks earlier to take over on behalf of the new owners, told me his objection was because he had had no 'prior warning', something obviously impossible to give. However I know that the Coastguard radio station on those two mornings had telephoned him at opening time, and had personally advised my unavailability, and why.
After a lengthy period of being out of work as a result of that dismissal, I left the area in about 1959 and went to work for a company developing one of two British Ground-to-Air weapons (the English Electric Company's Guided Weapons Division, which later became 'English Electric Aviation', then in amalgamation with the Bristol Aeroplane Company, became 'British Aircraft Corporation' and then British Aerospace in more recent years). I was later transferred from their production facility to their trials unit where test missiles were fired. Later I joined the team that operated the rocket range, and after several years got itchy feet to come to Australia, which I eventually did, arriving in January 1965.
Please take this link to go to the next part of my story.
To Be Continued....
