1965
I began April with a Hastings trip on Exercise Kinsman to Ballykelly and Cottesmore and return to Lindholme. For the rest of the month I continued with several Hastings and Varsity navigator training flights. This pleasant routine was sadly interrupted on the 12th of the month when Lindholme suffered a most tragic accident. One of our Varsitys on a routine training exercise was returning from the bombing ranges and descending through light scattered cloud when it collided with a civilian Cessna light aircraft that had recently taken off from a small airfield south of the Humber and was climbing up to its normal cross-country height. The Cessna broke up in the air and the pilot, the only occupant, plummeted to the ground. The Varsity’s right wing was badly damaged and the aircraft was only kept under control with great difficulty. The captain ordered the crew to bale out and did so himself. However, the second pilot took over the controls and managed to establish a reasonable state of control and crash-landed the badly damaged aircraft in a field without serious injury to himself or to a student who had remained in the aircraft. This was a very commendable effort on his part, but he did not know until some time later that the senior instructor who was in the aircraft at the time of the collision had also baled out, but for some reason had not secured the straps of his parachute properly, and as he got out and pulled the rip-cord the chute opened but he fell through the harness and also plunged to his death.
The investigation into the accident was long and protracted, and particularly thorough as a civil aircraft was involved and a civilian was one of the casualties. Sufficient to say that the incident cast a cloud of gloom over the station and many questions were asked and had to be answered. This first tragedy at a station under my command caused me a good deal of anguish and heart searching, particularly as it involved my being interviewed by my AOC. However, normal station life had to go on, and at the end of the month I was lucky enough to get my hands on a Chipmunk again and enjoyed a glorious hour of aerobatics and low flying, a welcome change from the ponderous and clumsy Hastings. Two days later, after landing from a long Hastings training flight, I was told that one of the Varsitys was still airborne and had been diverted by Prestwick radar control from its bombing mission to search for the crew of a two-seater Lightning who had ejected somewhere off the North Yorkshire coast. It appears that the pilot of the Varsity, a Polish master pilot, had soon spotted the airmen in their dinghies and alerted the rescue services. He remained circling the crew until a rescue helicopter had sighted them. The Varsity landed back at Lindholme after eight hours in the air to a hero’s welcome.
It was at this time that I had a most welcome surprise. My daughter Sue, from whom I had been separated for many years, sent me a cable from Hong Kong on her 21st birthday, just saying, ‘Dad . . . isn’t it time that we got together again?’ It was such a generous and forgiving gesture that I felt horribly guilty that I had abandoned her, even though it had been during the chaos of the war years. We did indeed get together again when she returned from Hong Kong a few months later, and we celebrated a most loving and happy reunion when she came to stay with us at Lindholme. Happily I am still blessed with that loving relationship that was revived with so much mutual pleasure on that day of her return.
During the next three months I did regular Hastings and Varsity training flights, and also two air tests on the Hastings. The first was after a normal regular inspection, but a fairly probing air test was usually carried out to ensure that all was satisfactory. My crew and I had done all the necessary tests prior to landing except the feathering of the propellers. This was carried out in turn, but finally number four engine, having been feathered, would not unfeather, so we did a three-engine landing without trouble. Some months previously the Hastings had suffered a fatal accident when a tailplane had come adrift in the air and all Hastings were grounded for some time while all tailplanes were examined and changed if necessary. My second air test was on a Hastings that had just been fitted with a new tailplane in the Lindholme workshops. The CFI came along with me and there was obviously a little anxiety after such a major repair. However, to show our confidence, we both invited the SNCO and his riggers who had done the job to join us on the test flight. All went smoothly, and to show further confidence we did a fighter-type beat-up of the airfield, which was greeted with enthusiasm by the ground crews below as well as those aboard the Hastings.
In December Mr Ware flew in as he promised he would, and let me borrow his Cessna 310 G. ASZZ for a flight-handling trial, which I found most enjoyable. I offered Ware a Hastings, but he did not show much enthusiasm for the chance to fly it. The weather turned bad at the end of December and several training flights had to be recalled or were cancelled. In the New Year, however, the weather cleared and I was able to fulfil my promise to my station officiating chaplain to take him for a flight over his parish and take a look at his church from the right-hand seat of a Varsity at 1,000 feet. Ted was one of the nicest men that one could wish to meet, and Eve and I kept in touch with him and his charming wife over the following years.
I continued to fly Hastings and Varsity training flights during January and February and into March, when I also flew forty girls of the Girls’ Venture Corps in two sorties in the Hastings to give them air experience. At the end of the month I flew the station sports team to Wyton for a Command Competition, together with the AOC, AVM Stapleton, and several senior officers. It gave me even more satisfaction to fly them all back again with our team the winners of the golf cup and runners-up of the rugby. I was able to get in a flight in a Chipmunk on the 11th, and a second-pilot flight in a Dominie XZ 128, in which I enjoyed doing several approaches and landings in command. When August came around I suddenly realized that I would be handing over command of Lindholme in a few weeks’ time. I was sad that the time had passed so quickly, and I felt I had so much more to do. At the start of the month I took twenty-four of my station staff in the passenger Hastings to Luqa (Malta) and the next day to Akrotiri in Cyprus, where we stayed two nights, returning to Lyndhome via Waddington for customs on the 9th. On 16 September I took my instrument flight test so that I could walk away with my ‘Master Green Card’ once more, and perhaps for the last time, as I knew I did not stand a chance of another flying job for what would be my last posting.
Before my final departure from Lindholme, Eve and I were ‘dined out’ in regal fashion, with the AOC and several senior officers from HQ present. The evening was notable for an incident reported, surprisingly, on the front page of the Express and the Mirror, and in the Telegraph. ‘An RAF band that had played during the evening had struck up its last number, the Post Horn Gallop, and at its conclusion Bandsman Chief Technician Titchmarsh, playing the very last note on his trumpet, hit high note “E” above Top “C”, and to everyone’s astonishment the opal ring worn by an officer’s wife and valued at £50 just disintegrated and left only a pile of dust on the dining table.’ On that note the party broke up and the outgoing group captain and his wife were escorted to the front door of the officers’ mess. There, resplendent in its new paint and a floral canopy, was a bomb trolley disguised as a unique flying machine, with a luxurious double settee behind the nose and cockpit of an aircraft in which sat one of my squadron commanders, complete with flying overalls and ‘bone dome’, ready for take-off. As we took our place on the settee, at a given command the whole contraption set off at a brisk pace, pulled by nearly all my officers manning a pair of ropes! Thus we arrived at the door of our married quarter at the end of a most happy and memorable evening. On the 29th I handed over command of Royal Air Force Lyndholme, satisfied with the thought that during my sojourn there it had been an efficient and happy station. I could not have imagined then that it would become in a few years a far less happy place as one of Her Majesty’s prisons.