LIFE AFTER THE RAF
I was sad to leave the service in September 1973 but I was nearly fifty-eight and had had a good innings. On leaving I was given a dinner by the Air Council and received a note from Secretary of State for Defence Lord Carrington which read as follows:
‘I have it in command from Her Majesty the Queen to convey to you on leaving the active list of the Royal Air Force her thanks for your long and valuable services.
May I take this opportunity of wishing you all good fortune in the future.’
However, the most memorable of my farewells was the thirty-minute audience I had with Her Majesty the Queen.
I was not prepared to sit back, not least because my retired pay was just £7,032 per annum and I still had John’s school fees to pay at Hai-leybury. Within a month or so I became military adviser to the British Aircraft Corporation (BAC), later to become the privatised British Aerospace, and a director of the board of their Preston division.
On the domestic front, on returning to the UK we moved into a quarter at RAF Bicester for my final few months in the service. My first job was to find us a home, for we had never owned one. In October we bought a flat in Latymer Court, Hammersmith which was convenient for both Weybridge, where I had my office, and Heathrow from where I frequently flew.
Apart from making aeroplanes, BAC had a big contract in Saudi Arabia where, in addition to local labour, we had over 2,000 British pilots, technicians, civil engineers, teachers, doctors and nursing staff. As well as providing the technical support for their three Lightning squadrons and the Strikemaster trainers, we were responsible for the training of the pilots and the technicians for the Royal Saudi Air Force. In 1977 I became the director of this operation and Het and I, joined by John during his holidays, moved to Riyadh.
Het and I enjoyed our time in Saudi where we lived in some style in Riyadh but managed to get away into the desert most weekends. The main reason for being onsite rather than directing long-distance was to ensure that the British retained their influence with the Saudis against stiff opposition from the USA and France. In September 1977 I was therefore delighted to represent British Aerospace at the signing of Great Britain’s largest ever single export order, worth in excess of £500 million between Saudi Arabia and the British Government. Three years later in 1980 at the age of sixty-five, I retired again.
While on leave from Saudi we bought a cottage, Ty Haul, overlooking the Dee valley close to Llangollen in North Wales and also close to Wrexham and Corwen where Het and I had spent the first twenty years of our lives. Following my retirement we divided our time between London and North Wales but spent as much time in North Wales as possible.
One of the things that brought me to London was that, having been chairman of the Victory Services Club from 1974 to 1977 before moving to Riyadh, I became president from 1989 to l993.
In May 1990 I was ‘installed’by Her Majesty the Queen as a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath in the Henry VII Chapel in Westminster Abbey. In order to do so I had to have a coat of arms drawn up by the heralds at the College of Arms. My son David helped me do this and we eventually agreed that the ‘supporters’should be a Welsh dragon and a Polish eagle. In the centre of the shield was the portcullis and sword of Fighter Command. This was surrounded by red roses. The crest, which sat on an astral crown, was an arm holding the Arabian ‘Jambiya’ or curved knife from the crest of the Middle East Air Force. I chose as my motto ‘Be Bold’ – which was also the motto that Mac Macguire and I had chosen for 229 Squadron early in the Second World War. This crest can be seen in the introduction to the book.
A memorable moment in the early 1990s was the occasion when I was a guest on the ‘This is Your Life’programme when the subject was Mike Graydon, by then CAS.
Having for some years been chairman of the Polish Air Force Benevolent Fund, I was very pleased that in 1990 the Polish Government awarded me the honour of a knighthood in the Order of Polonia Resti-tuta. I subsequently led the appeal to restore the Polish air force war memorial at Northolt which was unveiled in the presence of HRH The Duke of Gloucester in September 1996. I was even more delighted when in 1998 I was given the Commander’s Cross with Star of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland.
Of our children, Lis lived the life of an American air force wife until Chuck retired as a lieutenant colonel and they eventually settled in Montgomery, Alabama. David, after Oxford, spent five years in the army before becoming an investment manager in the City. Nicholas trained at the Middlesex Hospital and became an army doctor for seven years before becoming a GP in Wisbech. Finally, John our youngest also went to Oxford where he won a rugby blue and then, like David, became an investment manager in the City. From their marriages we were very lucky to have had the joy of eleven grandchildren.