October 1937 to June 1938
On 28 October the unbelievable happened and the squadron was told that it must give up its splendid Super Furies and exchange them for the clapped-out Demon two-seater fighters of No. 41 Squadron at Catterick. This order considerably dented our pride, for we really thought 25 Squadron was held in high esteem, particularly after its acclaimed performance at the Hendon Air Pageant. However, Slim, my flight commander, optimistic as always, convinced us that the exchange was no detriment to our squadron but was probably intended to prop up the morale of 41 Squadron, and he soon had us flying tight-formation aerobatics in our acquired Demons. But the loss of our splendid Furies was deeply felt and strongly resented.
As our training continued with the added needs of our air gunners we couldn’t help wondering just what plans the Air Ministry had in mind for our future role. It was clearly a retrograde step to re-equip the squadron with an aircraft of inferior performance to our single seaters. The Fury was capable of 223 mph, with a good climb performance, whereas the Demon’s top speed was only 202 mph, with much inferior manoeuvrability. It seemed that the Air Staff planners’ policy exemplified the compromise of economy enforced by the Treasury (the Demon was a comparatively cheap aircraft to produce) and the needs of a sound defence strategy. But plans for the introduction of a heavy multi-gun turret for the Demon supported the idea that the planners believed that our future fighters needed only to have heavy firepower to shoot down bombers, and ignored the likelihood that they might also have to tangle with high-performance escorting fighters. The fighter pilots only hoped that this thought would get through to the planners in Whitehall and that new suitable fighters would be in the pipeline, but at squadron level we were kept in ignorance of the pending arrival of the monoplane eight-gun fighters. In any event, the squadron had to make the most of its Demons for a further eight months until our Gladiators arrived, but even these were, of course, still one step behind the Hurricanes.
As our squadron training continued we suffered a bad accident. Two Demons of the squadron collided while flying in formation between Dover and Deal. One aircraft spun out of control and the pilot parachuted to safety, but the gunner died later when the aircraft crashed on Sandwich golf course. The sergeant flying the other aircraft, with commendable skill and a lot of luck, managed to land his Demon back at Hawkinge, with badly damaged mainplanes and interplane struts.
During the winter months Wednesday afternoons at Hawkinge were usually devoted to rugby games or away matches with local units like Manston or Lympne and Army teams at Shorncliffe Camp or Colchester. However, on Wednesday 9 December 1937 I was ordered to report to Headquarters No. 11 Group at Uxbridge. After my previous experience at the station I felt nervous of what was in store for me. But I was relieved and excited when I was called in to an interview with the Air Officer Commanding to discuss the prospects of a commission. I knew that I had been recommended by my commanding officer but never thought that it had progressed so far. After the interview, which seemed to have gone reasonably well, I went on from Uxbridge to Gloucestershire, where I was eager to tell the family this good news. A few days later the whole family foregathered for a Christmas party at my sister Noni’s delightful home at Longhope, which nestles under the shadow of May Hill.
On my long drive back to the squadron at Hawkinge, I boosted my little Riley to its maximum performance in the hope that the thrill would cheer me up. The next day I applied myself with enthusiasm to the intensive night-flying programme in which the squadron was now engaged. On 25 February I was airborne on my first-ever solo night-flying, and I found it both frightening and demanding. In the daylight I never tired of the thrill of first getting off the ground and feeling that I was fully in control of the aircraft with a clear horizon to refer to. But at night, as I lifted off from take-off, there was a moment of anxiety, particularly on a dark night, as I searched for a reference point on which to confirm the aircraft’s attitude. It took a good deal of training before I learned to refer to the instruments at once and wholly rely on them and rid myself of these moments of panic. This first night solo in the Demon was made all the more scary when I was conscious of the long exhaust pipe that ran down the side of the fuselage, glowing a fiery red down the whole of its length. No one had warned me of this phenomenon. Hawkinge was not a very big grass field and it had a high hedge on rising ground on the western approach and the cricket field leading up to Hawkinge village and its burial ground at the other end. In the course of our first night-flying programme one of the Demons overshot on landing and finished up in the village cemetery through an error of judgment, but understandable in view of the short runway available and the inexperience of the pilot.
In those days the night-flying lights consisted of a row of paraffin flares (goose-necks) and a large floodlight (Chance Light) at the touchdown end of the runway. The latter was only switched on as an aircraft was on the final approach and was not always fully reliable. I was made aware of this some months later when it was the part-cause of my first crash, when I ended up in my mangled Blenheim over the end of the runway at Northolt, the squadron’s war base.
Tactical exercises were being held regularly, and flights from the squadron were detached for several days at a time to Biggin Hill and Kenley. During one visit to Kenley the resident squadron had just received the first of its Hurricane 1s, which was an early production version and had the large fixed-pitch wooden propeller. This aircraft was quite a handful for an inexperienced pilot perhaps coming from a Fury squadron, and was unforgiving on the approach and landing if its pilot was at all careless in maintaining adequate flying speed. At the very moment of my landing approach to Kenley airfield I had one of their Hurricanes ahead of me. I watched in horror as it turned slowly, much too slowly, towards the airfield, and suddenly dropped a wing, flipped over and struck the ground in a ball of fire. A very sad sight when both pilots and Hurricanes were going to be desperately short in the coming battle that now seemed inevitable.
In May we had the last of our rugby games, a match against Rydden’s Brewery of Faversham. This was a most popular fixture, and although there is no record of who won, the hospitality afterwards was most generous. But the game remains in my memory because I foolishly drove home in my muddy football boots, and parking my beloved Riley in front of the sergeants’ mess my foot slipped off the brake pedal and we rammed the car in front. I could have cried! Luckily not too much damage was done, and in due course the Folkestone garage managed a very good repair job.
Later in the month our popular flight commander, for the first time, let us down. He was leading nine Demons of the squadron to Northern Ireland, staging at Catterick and West Freugh. We took off in formation with Slim leading as usual, but after an hour’s flying the weather deteriorated and the cloud forced us down to a few hundred feet above the ground, and we grimly hung on to Slim’s wingtips in deteriorating visibility. After a while he started to circle round, and it was clear that he was lost, and therefore so were we. Fuel was getting low and so he did the only sensible thing and told us all to break formation and find a suitable field in which to force-land. It is surprising how many large green fields there are below on a normal cross-country flight, but when the weather is closing in, fuel is running short and one is lost, no suitable field seems to appear. Whichever way I turned I seemed to run into sloping ground covered in cloud. In desperation and determined not to wait until I was out of fuel, I opted to attempt to land in the first field with any possibility at all. I reduced height and speed, and looking ahead I saw a minute field with a wood on one side and a low hedge to approach over, and luckily the field seemed to slope towards me. I set up a low approach, and just about on the stall I slammed the throttle shut, cut the ignition and turned off the fuel and let the Demon drop into the field. The ground was soft, the grass was long and I managed to come to a stop some few yards from the far end of the field.
Relieved to be safely down I felt very silly as I climbed down from the cockpit to be standing there, miles from anywhere, in the depth of the country, with an aeroplane. But it did not take long for the village bobby to appear on his bike, puffing up the hill of an adjoining lane. He obviously didn’t deal with this situation every day, but he soon caught on and pedalled off to the nearest telephone with the number of RAF Catterick and the map reference of the field where I had landed the Demon. Within an hour an officer and a refuelling tanker had arrived. A small amount of fuel was pumped into the Demon’s tank, as Catterick turned out to be quite close, and discussions took place as to whether I was capable of taking the aircraft off again from such a small field or whether a more experienced pilot should come over from Catterick. Considering my inexperience it certainly was a challenge, and I would look pretty stupid if, having got it safely down, I was to crash it on take-off. The difficulty was not so much the short field but the considerable slope on it. There was little wind and the cloud had lifted, so the decision having been made I decided to take off down the slope, which would give me added acceleration and a low hedge to clear. I soon had the two ‘erks’, one either side of the engine cowling, frantically turning the engine starting handles. The Kestrel roared into life and they extricated themselves from the force of the slipstream and the rigging wires and at my signal, pulled away the chocks that they had brought with them. I taxied up the hill to the top of the field, and with a slight wind behind sent the Demon bowling down the hill, the far hedge getting closer all too rapidly. I could feel the difference that the bit of tailwind was making to the build-up of flying speed, but with a silent prayer and gentle backward pressure on the stick we lifted over the hedge with feet to spare, and I was soon in the Catterick circuit and landed happily. It turned out that most of the squadron’s other aircraft had found Catterick and had landed safely.
The squadron aircraft were soon reassembled at Catterick, and took off for Ireland next day for bombing and gunnery training at the Practice Camp at Aldergrove. A few days later it was Empire Air Day, and the squadron, together with No. 23 Squadron, carried out a Wing Formation Flypast over Belfast and adjacent towns led by Sqn Ldr Eccles. We managed to put up a total of eighteen aircraft, and this considerable armada duly impressed the Irish populace, according to the Belfast press. After a day of low-bombing attacks with smoke bombs and days of more gunnery exercises, the squadron aircrew were stood down for a day and were taken on a tour of Ulster.
Few of us had ever visited the country before, and inevitably our opinion of the Irish people was tainted by the stories we had heard of IRA atrocities and the bigotry and violent hatred that still seemed to be prevalent between the two sides. We found it hard to believe that the kind and generous folk whom we now met were the same race of people who continued to harbour within their society a few wicked terrorists intent upon their own policy of gaining their political ends by fear and intimidation and the threat and use of violence. Such thoughts went through my head as we were driven down to see the Giant’s Causeway, the most unusual rock formation that I had ever seen: thousands of hexagonal columns of basalt, apparently formed by the flow of a volcanic river many aeons ago, seeming to march out into the sea. Perhaps the mythical giant’s road to Scotland? The scenery that we saw that day, the rugged unforgiving wildness of this coast exposed to the cruel Atlantic, compared dramatically with the benign softness of the green and pleasant hinterland, providing, perhaps, a clue to the unpredictable and volatile nature that seemed to exist in the make-up of the people of Ulster.
On 20 June we flew back from Ireland in a formation of six Demons from Aldergrove (Ireland), to West Freugh (Scotland), to Sealand (Wales) and back to Hawkinge (England) – six hours’ flying on a most glorious summer’s day, and a nice change from the flight out to Ireland during the previous week when we had got lost. A few days later the squadron suffered a tragic accident when our popular Canadian officer crashed his Demon into the side of the hill just below Hawkinge trying to scrape in for a landing when thick cloud clung to the hills. He and his gunner were killed instantly. I was a bearer at the funeral a few days later. It was a particularly sad occasion because none of the Canadian officer’s relatives were able to get over to be there, and it was only his colleagues from the squadron who mourned his passing. Many years later I paid a nostalgic visit to Hawkinge to try and recapture the spirit of those days, but little remained to help me recall the happy comradeship of my first squadron. As we drove down the hill towards Folkestone I imagined that I could still see the scar in the chalk of the hillside where the Demon crashed and killed this Canadian. I thought what a slender thread it was that held our fate, and that this young life so suddenly snuffed out here on this Kentish hillside might easily have been spared to fight and find immortality perhaps in the battle that was to save a country that was not his own. As we drove on down the hill and I woke from this reverie and looked across the valley I could see Capel le Ferne, where the splendid Battle of Britain Memorial now stands with its graphic figure of a fighter pilot gazing sadly from the cliff-top out to sea, remembering, perhaps, the many friends whose watery grave it was. The figure evoked such graphic memories that it brought to my mind the words of a poem written, I think, by a former Secretary for Air:
On Weald of Kent I watched once more
And thought I heard the thundering roar
Of fighter planes, but none were near
And all around the sky was clear.
Born on the wind a whisper came
Though men grow old THEY stay the same.
And then I knew, unseen to eye
The immortal FEW went sweeping by.