Netheravon is on the A345, about 12 miles north of Salisbury, between Amesbury and Upavon. In those days it consisted of two grass airfields, one alongside the other. As with Upavon, the RAF’s Central Flying School a few miles to the north, it dated from the days of the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War.
I arrived late. This was because the car’s petrol pump — one of the early electrically-driven types and nearly as large as the engine itself — was not working properly. It had to be helped by a blow with a hammer, administered over the windscreen by the driver, and with the engine bonnet removed for easy access. The clutch was also slipping, the brakes were fairly useless, the generator was oiled up and the battery kept falling out. Luckily there was nothing much on the road.
Our Course of about 20 joined the two other Courses already at Netheravon. We lived in the same buildings, wooden huts built to World War I standards and far superior to the Nissen huts of our war — as did the ‘real’ officers, who were mostly our RAF instructors. There were also two genuine, straight-striped Naval officers learning to fly. They were, however, rather superior and understandably had very little to do with us rabble next door.
Life was serene compared with the existence in the stables at Luton Hoo. Civilian stewards made our bunks and, in theory felt the bath water. They also advised us on the RAF’s funny habits. ‘Colours’ parades were particularly difficult to understand, with everyone marching about in different directions, apparently for no reason at all. Tich Madden was having trouble keeping a straight face — again.
I was moved in with a chap from a senior Course. He was a son of a famous chocolate manufacturer. I felt a bit awkward busting in on him so late in the evening, but he was quite nice about it. I asked him why an RAF Corporal was standing outside his cabin door with a rifle and everything. He said that there had been some sort of misunderstanding about some aviation petrol which had found its way into his MG Magna, but as he was engaging a QC (a famous and very expensive criminal lawyer of the time) at the Court Martial, he would probably get off.
Apparently the RAF authorities were worried about the misuse of petrol. They had observed the chocolate king’s MG Magna, with its row of hissing carburettors and a full load of Leading Naval Airmen and blondes, on the road to London and elsewhere, nearly every weekend. They had ‘dipped’ the MG’s tank. The petrol was bright green, the colour of 100 Octane aviation fuel as used by the Merlins in the Fairey Battles we were going to fly.
I sympathised with him entirely as everyone else did. “There but for the Grace of God,” we said to ourselves, for we had all used His Majesty’s petrol from time to time. However, in my case, I was very lucky, for my father had still managed to retain some of the 400 gallons of pre-war petrol in his tank at the nursery, and he gave me some whenever I visited him.
I asked my temporary cabin mate about the flying. He said the Hawker Hart and Audax were particularly nice aeroplanes to fly, and we flew Fairey Battles as well. They had 900 horse power R-R Merlins. The Harts and Audaxes used a sort of scaled-down version of the Merlin, the R-R Kestrel of about 510 hp. The Battles had three-bladed propellers with a ‘two-speed’ gear. This gave 3000 rpm for take-off in fine pitch and about 2200 rpm in coarse pitch. Two chaps had, so far, been slung off the Course. One for landing with his wheels up — the Battle had a retractable undercarriage — and the other for trying to go round again after a missed landing in coarse pitch.
On this ‘go round again’ he had disappeared into the dip in the airfield and reappeared over the top, still only doing about 30 knots. He had piled in through the hedge by ‘A’ Flight. “Naturally”, said Coco, “we all rushed out with our Jerry cans and filled up. Everyone hates to see waste, don’t they?”
RAF Netheravon was the ‘halfway house’ in our flying courses. Luton had taught us the basic principles — landing being by far the most difficult — but Netheravon taught us how to do these basic skills in much more powerful and sophisticated aircraft. We did some navigation, dive-bombing, formation flying, and night flying as well.
Before attempting night flying, we practised flying ‘on instruments’ in daylight — cloud flying. We also practised instrument flying (‘I/F’) in the ‘Link Trainer’. This was a small box-shaped device with vestigial wings — the forerunner of the multi-million pound simulator of today. It was equipped with a set of blind-flying instruments, engine instruments and controls. Shut up in darkness, the pilot was given various courses and speeds to fly at various heights and for set times, by the instructor. Everything the pupil did was repeated by a row of instruments in front of the instructor. He acted like a back-seat-driver, nagging away until the pupil got it right or went into a spin in desperation. A small pen would trace out the course that the pilot steered on a large piece of squared paper. The instructor would then show the pupil what he had done, together with his various rude remarks alongside. The final passing out test was the ‘T’. We had to steer a set of courses and speeds such that we came back to the same place that we had started from, mapping out a ‘T’ the while. The results were then pinned up, for all to see. Some disappeared clean off the paper, others were interspersed by accidental spins, stalls and various other interruptions. The perfect ‘T’ was a matter of practice — just as ‘Space Invaders’ can be vanquished once the operator has got used to the machine’s habits. The ‘Link’ was so crude that it could never teach anyone to fly safely in real conditions, but it was a help and saved flying hours and doubtless many lives.
Compared with the ‘Maggie’s’ 90 mph top speed and the Hart’s 170 mph, the Battle did about 210 mph at about 4000 feet. The Battle was a dangerous flop in France in its role as an Army recce-bomber, but the Hart series were very popular with the Naval and RAF pilots who flew them in their many peacetime variants. Unlike the early Magister, both types of aircraft at Netheravon were so easy and safe to fly, that it was entirely your own fault if you crashed one.
The forward view from the Hart’s front seat was restricted, though not seriously, by the upper mainplane and by the longish nose of the Kestrel in-line engine. The view downwards and backwards was, however, excellent. It was great fun listening to the screech of the wind through the struts and wires. It even had a ‘blow-back’ airspeed indicator — a sort of early head-up display. The faster the aircraft flew, the more this spring-loaded piece of metal blew back, ticking off the mph on a crudely painted scale.
I was detailed to join nine others in ‘A’ Flight. The Flight buildings consisted of a shed or two for the ground crew, instructors, and the CO. He was Squadron Leader The Hon. David Douglas-Hamilton, DFC and Bar, and like some others at Netheravon, was an ex-Battle of Britain fighter pilot. In the warm sunshine and surrounded by the Wiltshire chalk Downs with the skylarks and the white clouds overhead, flying was a marvellous pleasure compared with the gloom of the midlands in winter. Butterflies — the Small Copper warming its wings, the Chalkhill Blue; birds — the curlew, cornbunting and the kestrel quartering the hillside or perched on any convenient pole, watching.
The first solo take-offs and landings were a great responsibility, for there were no spare aircraft at Netheravon and if we ground-looped, and broke a lower mainplane we were not only very unpopular with the instructors, but even more so with the pupils.
One day, the instructors, led by the Wing Commander, carried out a flying demonstration for OC Flying Training Command. They made a formation landing. The two outer Harts swung outwards on their landing runs in a beautiful Prince of Wales’ feather, and each ended up on its nose, with perfect timing. The OC was not impressed, but we thought that it put the whole thing into its proper perspective and relieved some of our tension.
David Douglas-Hamilton was a keen sportsman as well as a popular Flight Commander, and he organised an inter-station boxing contest. The future British Light-Heavyweight Champion — a milk roundsman from Bournemouth and one of the bravest boxers there has ever been — Freddie Mills — was our ‘Springer’. He was particularly keen that RAF Netheravon should win. Geoffrey Russell-Jones, on the Course ahead of ours, was also a good boxer and he gave me one or two practice bouts, which I lost rather painfully. At the contest itself, held in the gym with a thousand watching, I was drawn against a pale, mean, wiry individual, a little shorter than me. Geoffrey, who had already won his bout, advised me to use my longer reach and not get too close to him. I began to wish I had taken Naval advice — not to volunteer for anything. My chap’s face was so narrow I couldn’t hit it once with the straight jab that Mr. Geary of Winchester College had taught me at the Pilgrims’ School, and I stupidly tried to mix it, throwing the clever stuff to the winds. He immediately realised that he had nothing to fear and swooped upon me and by the third round I found myself on the floor, knocked out for the first time, ever. I stupidly got up and another blow came from somewhere else and that was that. Next morning Douglas-Hamilton told me that I could not fly for a day after a knockout, “just in case”.
Night flying was the most difficult hurdle to jump at Netheravon. Although the Link Trainer was supposed to give a sprog pilot an insight into the business, it had an artificial horizon amongst its array of flying instruments. This told you immediately whether you were diving, climbing or banking to the left or right and was about the best invention since the bicycle. However, the Harts and Audaxes did not have this vital link with reality — only a ‘turn-and-bank’ indicator. Thus, the only way of finding out whether you were diving, climbing or turning in the Hart at night was to study the turn-and-bank. If its two needles were wobbling all over the place, recourse had to be made to the ‘rate of climb/dive’ instrument and the compass. As this instrument only told you what you had been doing, but never what you actually were doing, you spent much time and energy chasing its exhortations up and down, never finding touch at all. The final pair of instruments in this search for knowledge was a very large air speed indicator and a very small altimeter. If the airspeed was winding itself down and the altimeter was winding itself up and the noise in the rigging got less, it was safe to say you were climbing — and vice versa. Night flying in Harts was therefore interesting and dangerous, particularly on dark nights with no stars, no horizon, and, in wartime, no lights on the ground. As the nights which were chosen for night flying practice were always the darkest possible — because the Germans came over on moonlight nights to see what they could find — and as we also had to operate well away from Netheravon at a small grass field near Shrewton, the whole thing was asking for trouble.
As we waited our turn to fly at Shrewton, we crept around aimlessly in darkness on the ground, not knowing what phenomenon to expect next. When our time came, we searched the blasted heath with care, looking for our aircraft and our instructor in all directions. Then, just as Macbeth might have stumbled upon the three witches, we, too, suddenly came across our instructor and some ground staff and followed them into the darkness towards a distant, silent aircraft.
Once we got into the air, our wanderings were not over, for we then had to try to find the airfield again, which had disappeared astern somewhere. There were only two or three ‘goose-neck’ flares visible from the air and once we had lost sight of them — perhaps while looking for a few intelligible instruments in the dimly lit cockpit — life became very lonely.
One of the pupils on an earlier course had been airborne at the same time that a Ju 88 had come over. It had dropped a bomb near the goose-neck flares. These were immediately extinguished by the ground crew and the pupil became lost. He suddenly thought of his yachting days and flew south to Portland Bill, identified Portland Light, still operating in wartime, and flew back on a compass course to Shrewton. By that time they had turned on the ‘Chance Light’, a sort of searchlight at ground level, to give him an emergency landing direction. We had heard of these tales, told with such sang-froid by the people concerned, and we wondered if we could hope to live up to such heroism and skill ourselves. Night flying was, therefore, not just a test of our flying but a character test as well.
After passing our night flying test, we were transferred to Battles, flying from the northern airfield. At about this time, an officer, Midshipman Williams RNR, distinguished himself by achieving the ‘blue note’ in a Battle. This immense propeller noise, the blade tips going round through the air so fast they were supersonic, could be achieved by selecting fixed fine pitch on the Battle’s airscrew and then pointing it earthwards from a great height and at full throttle. We heard the screaming noise at lunch-time one day, and we left our soup plates to watch.
As it is not possible to hear much of the noise in the cockpit of an aircraft making a blue note, Midshipman Williams was unaware of his success when he landed. However, as his aircraft was covered from stem to stern in black oil and smelled awful, he had to say something about it on Form 700. He put the aircraft U/S (unserviceable) due to a “slight oil leak”.
When the fitter came to check the oil, there was none left, only white metal and black sludge in the filters. The engine was a write-off, and questions were asked. A farmer rang up complaining that a Battle had just whipped over the top of his barn and frightened his cattle; and even more questions were asked. The Wing Commander had to act and Williams was posted to a target-towing squadron in Gibraltar on Skuas. As this was a fate worse than death, we decided we would never be caught out like that.
The Battle, had, of course, been designed to dive-bomb as well as level-bomb its targets. The RAF at Netheravon reckoned that its dive-bombing capabilities should be used in the training role. Before being allowed to drop the 25 lb. ‘smoke’ practice bombs and use up valuable ranges, we all had to do practice dives without bombs, using painted circles as our aiming point on the nearby Army firing range. Some of the Battles were dual two-seaters and two pupils often went up together, doing their dive-bombing sorties and then carrying out instrument flying practice. The spare pilot had to keep watch for mid-air collisions, while the other pilot had his head stuck ‘in the office’, with the blind flying hood pulled over so that he could not cheat.
Phil Broad and I were detailed for such a trip one day, and we thought we would do a bit of unauthorised low flying. I sat in the front of the Battle and Phil sat in the rear seat, some 20 feet down towards the tail. We polished off our bombing very quickly and started our instrument flying practice. As Phil and I were so far apart, it was too far to expect the ‘intercom’ to work so that on changing control from one pilot to another, we decided to use a stick-waggling drill. One waggle — “you take her”. Second waggle — “I’ve got her”, sort of thing. Of course, even this method of transfer of control was chancy so Phil and I determined to use this characteristic to excuse us in case we were caught low flying. If caught, we would plead that the transfer hadn’t worked, and neither of us had “got her”.
Phil ‘did’ a couple of Army pubs at Downton and then it was my turn. I chose a patch between two poplar trees — the local dare — and just as I was pulling up from my second dive, I glanced to the port side and saw, as clear as daylight, a Hawker Fury II, right alongside us. As this could only have been flown by an instructor — as these beautiful fighter versions of the Hart series were in short supply — I knew we were in trouble. Mistake number two and with Phil Broad, too. But perhaps the excuse would work?
So Phil and I flew carefully back to Netheravon, obeying all the rules that we could think of. We climbed furtively into our cars at dispersal and drove to the mess for lunch. Five minutes after sitting down we heard the Tannoy tell us to report to Wing Commander Flying.
We told him our “you’ve got her, no you’ve got her” story, separately and without putting a word wrong. The Wing Commander then asked us both back into his office — to give us, we hoped, a combined “Now be more careful next time” talking to. Instead he said: “That accounts for one dive, now what about the other five?”
We were extremely lucky that we were not thrown off the course. Instead, all we had to do was a week’s extra Duty Pilot — shining lights at aircraft and counting them out and counting them all back. We also had our leave stopped, but as we had no money left it hardly mattered.
The last fortnight of the Netheravon Course was spent at RAF Stormy Down, an airfield at Porthcawl in South Wales. We did some dive-bombing at a mark in the Bristol Channel. Four Battles were taken down, three by instructors with terrified passengers in the back — and the fourth by a pupil, chosen for his sangfroid, reliability and various other qualities. No one volunteered to fly in the back with him, so he had to go alone with our baggage.
Someone also brought a huge Austin 14 tourer down as well, with the remaining half dozen or so of us. It was summer and we all looked forward to a holiday by the seaside at His Majesty’s expense, with a little flying on the side.
The target was a 40 foot yellow triangle of wood, with a flag on top, floating in the sea. As we dived at it using the front gunsight to aim with, a team of four WAAFs plotted our dive direction and angle with theodolites. We were supposed to hurtle down from 6000 feet to the release height of 3000 feet. The WAAFs aimed their theodolites at the smoke, and, where the bearings crossed, the hit was marked on the target chart. The results were telephoned to the airfield and we were told how well we had done by our instructor. There was a complicated system of Aldis signals as well. These told us to stop or to start our dives when everything was ready. There were no radio transmitters in any of the aircraft.
My results on the first day gave me an average error of about 80 feet. On the second day I determined to do better. It was flat calm and, with no wind, I thought it would be easy to get good results. I had worked it out that by releasing the bomb a good deal lower then the 3000 feet prescribed, I could confound the critics and actually hit the target. I might even qualify for flying the fourth Battle home instead of risking it in the Austin. The first dive was normal, the second dive was a bit lower and the third, I thought, was about 50 feet lower still. However, I misjudged the height for the pull-out in the glassy sea conditions and I remember seeing floating debris go by the same level as me, and very fast. I had to pull-out very sharply indeed.
This had far reaching consequences. In order to relieve the pilot’s ‘out-of-trim’ control loads, each flying control surface — aileron, elevator, or rudder — has a trimming tab which pre-sets the main control in the desired direction. It is usually operated by a graduated wheel in the cockpit. I had therefore set the elevator slightly ‘nose-up’ to assist with the pull-out. When I added my pull to the stick — and a sharp one at that, having misjudged my height so badly—the poor old Battle whipped up out of the dive very sharply and I blacked-out. When I came too, having become unconscious, I remember looking down at the red throttle knob in my left hand and wondering what it was. The noise had come back to my brain a bit after my vision, and touch sensation also returned, but all at slightly different times. The brain was therefore hopelessly confused at all these weird, mistimed inputs, and I must have spent several seconds in a condition of ‘masterly inactivity’. Luckily, this was exactly the course of action which Pilot Officer Jack would have recommended: “Do nothing, Crosley. Leave the bloody thing alone. It’ll get out of trouble better than you.”
This is what the faithful old Battle did. When I came to, I worked out eventually that the aircraft must have been on its tail, slightly inverted, still going upwards and with one wing low. It must have fallen out of the ensuing stall, on its own, just like a child’s paper aeroplane. I came back shaken and stirred. This was booboo number three, and with only about 60 hours in my log book, too.
After I had signed in and put ‘DCO’ (Duty Carried Out) in the Flight Authorisation Book, my instructor came over with my results. He said that the WAAF Sergeant plotter had said that I had pulled out of the last dive too low. The surface had been ruffled by the aircraft’s slipstream as it pulled out, missing the water by about two feet, she said. Luckily it was the last bomb, so that I had appeared to have obeyed her Aldis red light — which I never saw, and, “after a few aerobatics” she said, I had gone home immediately. She wasn’t annoyed as a result and I managed to get away without the matter being referred to higher authority. The results were fantastic, the average error being about 10 feet. However, I was extremely lucky not to have pulled the wings off the aircraft. The Battle was stressed to take fighter-type wing loadings, as it was a dive-bomber. In this case it must have withstood over seven ‘g’. The basic reason for the overcontrol was because it was being flown with its CG well forward of the position allowed for dive-bombing. This encouraged pilots to use the trimming wheel to give extra pull-out of the dive with the unfortunate results which I have described. Yet, had I pulled the wings off, it would probably have been classed 100 per cent ‘pilot error’. There was general ignorance of such things.
Back at Netheravon for the last week, there was time to consider the Morris Minor. It had not reacted well to 100 octane poured down its clutch housing to prevent the clutch from slipping, and the Flight electricians had not been able to understand the fuel pump. The brake shoes were down to the rivets and the steering wheel seemed to have less and less effect on where the car was going. Furthermore, the general tone of the car was not in keeping with a dashing fighter-pilot image.
Close by the George Hotel at Amesbury there is a garage. It was then run by a certain Wally Scott, who exhibited in the front of his garage courtyard a beautiful blue M2-type MG, featuring two P100 chrome headlamps. It also had an overhead camshaft — a very good thing to have — cycle-type mudguards, knock-on hubs, a noisy exhaust and a benchtype seat for easy poodle-faking. Furthermore, the air in the seat could be adjusted to any pressure to suit any female bum which happened to be there. The MG was decorated in a tri-colour, a blue/black and silver motif. On the radiator cap was a chrome flagstaff with a large Union Jack. Wally wanted £75 for it. I sold him the Morris Minor for £45 and cashed £30 Post Office savings.
The snag was, as my father, the owner of the Morris pointed out, that I had lost his 1934 car and gained a worn-out 1931 model and, had had to pay £30 for the privilege, adding that the Morris’s and MG’s engines were identical except for the overhead cams. But I told him he had gained a very marketable car if anything happened to me before anything happened to it, instead of the dreadful Morris. He kindly forgot to ask for the MG back as the war progressed and it became my unofficial property.
The final two joys in my life at Netheravon were first, to be measured by Gieves for a Sub-Lieutenant’s uniform complete with wings. The next was to drive down to Yeovilton in the MG to begin training on a real single-seat fighter, the Hawker Hurricane Ib. (Appendix 2 — Naval Air Power — describes the Fleet Air Arm and some of its ‘props and scenery’ at this period in the War.)