Twenty-five of us were told to report to ‘Luton Hoo’. At least, that was the address on our draft chits. I arrived at Luton station with my kitbag. Cars were not allowed, and I asked a taxi-driver to take me there. He seemed to be a bit surprised, but we set off into the blackout, through the deserted streets and out into the country. I asked him why everything was shrouded in mist in the built-up area of Luton. He told me that it was a new secret device for hiding the factories from German bombers. They would then bomb all the wrong places and not the car factories or Napiers — who had a secret aircraft engine on test — or the ‘shadow’ aircraft factories so much. “They would then concentrate on the private houses instead,” he said with a certain sharpness. I asked him where Luton airfield was, and he said: “By Vauxhall’s car factory.”
We swept up the gravel drive to the magnificent Luton Hoo — back entrance — and I got out. Even the back entrance looked like a Greek palace and I wondered how the Navy managed to afford such a place.
After a while I heard a drawing of bolts, the sliding of locks and a huge door opened — not the one on which I had been knocking — and a man appeared. I said that I had come to join Number 24 EFTS. Seeing my sailor’s uniform, “Oh”, he said, “you’re round at the stables. Straight down the road, you can’t miss it,” and closed the doors again.
My bed space was in the hayloft above the horses. The Petty Officers and the RAF had the grooms’ quarters. Down the wooden ladder from the hayloft was another ‘dormitory’. The stable partitions and mangers were still in place, although the horses and the hay had been removed to make way for the beds. The bottom ends of the beds lay in the gutter and looked a bit down by the stern. Of heating there was no sign. There was as much fog inside the stables as outside.
With my shaded torch and half-a-crown, I groped my way outside towards some noise that I could hear coming from a separate building in the stable yard. I pushed my way in through the heavy blackout curtain and emerged into the brilliant light of a canteen. There were tables and chairs everywhere, with soldiers and a few sailors and ATS (fore-runners of the Women’s Royal Army Corps) seated with them. A couple of stewards were at a long bar at one end of the hut. They were dispensing baked beans on toast — without butter — and beer in tall glasses.
In the far corner, near a pillar stove, I could just make out David Ogle, ‘Clunk’ Watson and Dennis Holmes. So I was, indeed, at the right place. Everyone was still in greatcoats with collars turned up. Dennis was warming his beer by dipping a red hot poker in it. “Otherwise,” he said, “it’s impossible to taste.” Dennis could best be described as “Every thinking-woman’s dream-crumpet”. He was soft-hearted, brave and resourceful as well as being marvellous company. Two more of Rodney Course came in — Tich Madden and Phil Broad — and they joined us. We soon fell into the scheme of things, continuing the conversations we had been having at St. Vincent almost without interruption, and, of course, looking forward to flying, in new leather helmets and flying boots, perhaps on the morrow.
The Course at Luton lasted about three months. Ours took a little longer because the weather was so bad. The Elementary Flying Training was the first of three parts of our flying training which would take about nine months in all. At the end of this time we would, in theory, be ready to join a squadron. We were supposed to do a minimum of 50 hours flying at each school. In fact I only did about 35 at each, about a third of the hours attained by trainee pilots by the end of the war. At this stage they must have been very hard-up for pilots in the Fleet Air Arm.
My instructor was Pilot Officer Jack, an ex-civil flying instructor of immense experience and much respected by the others, it seemed. I was extremely lucky to have him as my instructor, as his wise counsels, which I still remember, saved my life on many future occasions.
We turned out of our ‘pits’ each morning at 0630. The NCOs at Luton Hoo stables were the most inconsiderate crowd of RAF Sergeants and Corporals. They would brook no sky-larking at any time. There were no washing facilities at the stables and we had to pile into open lorries. These took us to the airfield canteen and washrooms, come snow, rain or fine. Each morning there was usually a fair amount of hoar frost or dew on the oilskins we had put over our bedding, as well as condensation on the inside. There was therefore no point in getting up until the last moment before rushing for the transport, for fear of shivering to death.
It was only the blessed thought of daylight, the warm crewroom, breakfast, and the yellow Magisters lined up outside, that kept us going. How I longed to hear: “Crosley, you’re next. We’ll do a few steep turns and side-slips this morning.”
What utter joy this flying was. It all seemed so logical and easy. Strapping in, with Pilot Officer Jack’s breath misting in the cold morning air as he reminded me not to put my boots through the wing as I climbed up to the front cockpit. Then starting up, the chocks in position, brakes on, petrol on, throttle half an inch open, ‘suck in’ with the two magneto switches off, then ‘contact’, and she might, or might not fire with the first pull of the propeller blade. ‘Chocks away’, and the tentative opening of the throttle to get moving over the hard, frosty ground; arriving cross-wind at the down-wind end of the airfield, my instructor passing reminders to me through the ‘Gosport’ tubes leading into my flying helmet.
When I got a ‘green’ Aldis light from the Duty Pilot’s hut, I turned into wind, opened the throttle gradually and got moving. I kept straight with rudder, easing the stick forward to get the tail off the ground, so that I could see over the nose and where I was going. Then, with about 50 knots on the clock, I eased back on the stick until she left the ground with a final bump on the rough grass. The earth melted away, the ground became a blur, rushing backwards and downwards as we soared into the air. This was the life.
The Miles Magister was one of the first monoplane training aeroplanes. A requirement for all trainers was, and is, that they should give good stall warning and be easy to get out of a spin. The Magister was exceptionally good at getting itself into spins, as it had a vicious wing-drop at the power-on stall. Thereupon, it entered a spin automatically without the pilot having to do a thing. It would then frighten its pilot even more by not coming out of the spin for a turn or two when ‘anti-spin’ action was taken — ie stick eased forward and ‘opposite’ rudder applied. Consequently it had a bad name in some flying schools. Pilot Officer Jack had just taken me on a spinning trip. During the hectic manoeuvres, the Gosport tubes had become disconnected and I was no longer getting any help from the back cockpit. I glanced over my shoulder and I saw Jack point to the ground and I knew he wanted me to land. In spite of a windy day with about 20 knots of wind shear in the last quarter mile of the approach, I made a reasonable ‘power-on’ landing, more or less on three points, where I thought I should have done. It was quite nice doing it all in silence — without the usual comments: “And how many landings do you think that one was?” — and so on. As we came to a stop across-wind, at the up-wind end of the airfield, I glanced back to see if everything was alright. I just had time to catch sight of Jack heaving himself over the side and onto the ground, then running like a hare in the direction of another Magister taxying round in circles nearby. Gawd, I thought, what on earth did I do wrong that time?
Jack came up with the Magister as it was still moving and ran to try to get into the cockpit. As it swerved a bit nearer, I could see that there was no one in it at all. However, there was a muddy figure of a pupil-pilot, in bell-bottoms, being dragged round and round, hanging on to its port wing. Jack threw himself head first into the rear cockpit, grabbed the throttle back and the whole lot came to a halt. What he said to the pupil pilot — Naval Airman Second Class Smith — was later translated to all of us by ‘Smithy’ himself. Smithy was on his second solo and, having got himself bogged down in the middle of the airfield and with no-one noticing in the control tower, he had used his initiative. This was a bad thing for anyone to use at this time in our training. He had climbed out and tried to get the aircraft clear by himself. He had not tightened up the throttle-lever friction control sufficiently and the Maggie’s throttle had slowly wound itself open until it was going at full chat. He was made Duty Pilot for a week.
Spring eventually came to Luton and the sun came out. One day, full of fine, white cumulus clouds which towered up to 10,000 feet and more, Phil Broad and I managed to get our solo trips to coincide. We made an assignation over the cooling towers at Dunstable at 3000 feet, intent on having a dog fight. We went in and out of the clouds, flicking off steep turns, doing home-made versions of Immelmann turns, loops, rolls, dives and stalls and chasing each other in line-astern, terrific fun.
After about half an hour or so, we signalled each other that we had had enough. Phil went off one way and I went off in the other. Then it suddenly occurred to me that I was lost. I looked down for the cooling towers, but they weren’t there. Then I looked at the fuel gauge and that was showing a hairsbreadth from zero. We had used it all up while we were at full throttle doing our dogfight — at three times the normal rate.
There was only one thing to do; as Pilot Officer Jack had said: “Land early before the fuel situation gets desperate, then you can pick a good field. Otherwise, you’ll end up in someone’s back garden and do yourself a mischief.” So I made my first forced-landing approach to the first large field that I could find which was into wind. I came in far too fast, as the fuel gauge was reading zero by then and I didn’t want to land short. Unfortunately, I floated over most of the field I had chosen without getting anywhere near a touchdown. As the far hedge came nearer and nearer, I thought: “Crosley, this is getting dangerous”. I had to avoid the hedge, so I hopefully opened the throttle, hauled back on the stick, and, seeing a perfectly good second field in front, stuffed the stick forward again and managed to land in that. It was a bit too short for comfort and I had to avoid the iron fence at the far end by putting on full port brake and sideslipping the Maggie to a standstill as I had practised in the Morris at home. She just nicked the leading edge of her starboard mainplane on the iron fence. There was an 80 foot road-cutting below the fence so I was glad that I’d made it, for lorries were whizzing up and down it at a high rate of knots.
I got out of the cockpit, trembling a bit, and, with my parachute climbed over the fence and thumbed a lift. They all swept by like Pharisees. Perhaps they thought I was a German who had been shot down. Eventually one stopped. He gave me tuppence for a phone call and I spoke to Pilot Officer Jack. This was lucky, for he did not make a fuss at all. If the Wing Commander had found out, he would have been bound to punish us — pour encourager les autres, and we might have been ‘dipped’ off the course. Pilot Officer Jack forgot about it, especially as Phil Broad had landed correctly at a proper airfield — Abingdon.
It was War Weapons Week in Luton, and three of the most daring of the instructors took their pupils up to do a formation ‘beat up’ of the Mayor and Corporation. Unfortunately, ‘Clunk’ Watson’s instructor stalled his Magister in a steep turn and spun in, in full view of everyone in the town square. They lifted the wreckage but the instructor who was underneath was dead. Then someone who was smoking set the whole lot on fire. The minor explosion of the leaking petrol dislodged one of the wrecked pieces of the starboard wing, and there, with its arm through the side of one of the petrol tanks in the wing, was a sailor’s body. The crowd bravely dragged it free, just in time before the flames seized upon it.
‘Clunk’ was alive. He spent almost a year in hospital and, through sheer determination to fly again, recovered fully. He eventually made Admiral in the Canadian Navy, and retired in 1973.
We finished the Course at Luton in May 1941. Five or six failed the Course, mostly due to airsickness. We concluded that pilots were made, not born, but some were made easier than others. In wartime, time is short, so we had to learn quickly. Slow learners were at risk. The difficulty was knowing who was suffering from nerves and who was not, for we were all so keen that we tried to hide our anxiety. It required a very experienced instructor to recognise ‘twitch’ before it became dangerous.
On the last day at Luton, we put up our ‘hooks’ — single ‘foul-anchor’ on the left arm, denoting (Temporary Acting) Leading Naval Airmen. Naval pay was about seven shillings (35p) a day, enough for about two and a half gallons of petrol — if you had any coupons — and a gallon of beer. I was very lucky indeed, for I got my pay made up to £4 per week by the Metropolitan Police, and I was rich.
During our 10 days leave, we received our draft chits. Mine was to the Service Flying Training School at RAF Netheravon in Wiltshire. As we were allowed to have cars there, I drove down in style in the Morris Minor. Spring was in the air. Things were improving.