WE ARE BACK to that 1933 trip to Southend with this photograph. It’s the summer before my first term at Brettenham Road Elementary School. My sister Maisie is in the middle, with one of her friends, and my brother John is on the right. As you can see, I’m pulling a daft face or maybe on the brink of yet another tantrum. It’s hard to tell, but John’s weary expression suggests I’ve been up to no good all day. It’s lovely to see my mother clutching another bunch of flowers. I bet my father picked them for her. She looks so happy.
You can just about make out a beach ball at my father’s feet. We’ll have enjoyed a lot of fun with that as a family. The five-year age gap between my brother and myself meant that we didn’t play together much at home. Football, occasionally, but that was about all. And my father was always working so hard in his garage that he didn’t really have time either. Holidays were the exception.
My brother was a fairly serious young man. He loved engineering and was terribly interested in the mechanical side of the motor industry. When my father first introduced John to the world of cars, understanding how the engines worked came easily to my brother. He was fascinated by all that, quite the opposite of myself. That didn’t worry Dad: he was happy to embrace the difference between his two sons.
WHEN WAR BROKE OUT my brother was determined to become a pilot. In early 1941, as soon as he turned eighteen, John volunteered for the RAF and was immediately stationed in Torquay for basic training. Judging by the wintry look in the photo overleaf, it must have been taken within days of his arrival on the south coast. That’s John, top right.
My parents were very proud of my brother and also happy for him, despite the obvious danger. They knew he was realizing an ambition. The RAF offered John an opportunity that would otherwise have been beyond him. How could he have learned to fly while living with us in Edmonton and working in the garage? Lessons would have cost far too much. Without the air force, flying would have remained an impossible dream. I have no doubt that, come the end of the war, John would not have returned to working in the garage but would instead have pursued a career as a pilot, perhaps with a civil airline.
FROM TORQUAY, JOHN WENT to Pensacola, Florida, for flight training. He must have sent home this portrait from there – Tooley-Myron was an American chain of photographic studios. The white flash on his cap indicates that he was a trainee pilot when this was taken.
Seeing my brother’s handwriting here generates powerful emotions. Just to know with certainty that there had been a day, more than seventy years ago, thousands of miles away, when John sat down, thought of me and wrote out my name – that’s very precious. It’s also interesting that he chose ‘Brucie’. There’s a strong sense of intimacy in his use of that name. Normally it was Bruce or Bru or, yes, Boo-Boo, but ‘Brucie’ was more affectionate.
Impossible for John to know, of course, but many years later ‘Brucie’ became the show-business me, as opposed to the everyday Bruce. Brucie would have driven me, and everyone around him, mad, if he’d existed all the time. When I’m waiting to walk onstage I’m Bruce, thinking about what I’m about to do, in my own bubble. I’m quite serious. I don’t want to talk to anyone. Then, when the music starts up and I walk out, this other person, Brucie, turns up and takes over. He’s a different character altogether. And thank God he does turn up because without him I’d be lost, I really would.
John was presented with his wings when he was still in the US, which meant my parents never had the opportunity to see him pass out. He was incredibly proud of those wings. Having completed his training, he flew a Catalina flying boat over to England. This was a vital undertaking that many newly qualified pilots who had been based in America undertook, transporting aircraft back home that were essential to the war effort. John would have been nineteen. That’s an incredible thing for him to have done. Only a few months previously he had been a kid, learning as much as he could about aircraft, before being taken halfway across the world to learn to fly in little biplanes. Then, in a heartbeat, he found himself piloting that big machine all the way across the Atlantic. A bewildering thought.
THIS IS JOHN IN his flying suit, with its fleece-lined boots, gloves and collar. When I look at this I realize just how cold and uncomfortable it must have been up in those military planes.
This is clearly a studio shot, taken somewhere John was stationed. He must have mailed it home, to show us how proud he was of what he was achieving. After he arrived back from Florida, John was sent up to Turnberry, on the west coast of Scotland, to the School of Aerial Gunnery and Fighting. The photograph may have come from there, although I can’t say for sure. What is almost certain, however, is that this is the flying suit John would have been wearing when the awful tragedy struck. I will never forget that day.
Friday, 21 May 1943, St Neots near Bedford. I am fifteen years old, having recently joined up with an accomplished accordionist and drummer called Peter Crawford. We’ve managed to land a handful of cabaret bookings and have recently been taken on by the American Red Cross in a touring party performing at US military bases throughout England. It’s been a fantastic experience so far, very professional. They’ve even supplied us with hand-tailored uniforms and forage caps sporting the US Red Cross badge. I play the accordion, accompanying Peter’s drumming, then finish our set with a big tap number. We’ve even played in front of Hollywood royalty – Clark Gable came to see one of the shows, although unfortunately I didn’t get to meet him.
It’s been incredibly exciting, but I’m happy now to have a break for a couple of days. It’s the start of a free weekend and the cast of the show have decided to enjoy the early-summer weather. We’ve found a field by a brook, where we can swim and play games. Someone suggests rounders. Great. We all join in. I’m enjoying myself until, running to catch the ball, I trip on the uneven ground and fall heavily on my hand, jamming my finger back at an unnatural angle. It hurts like hell and immediately I feel sick.
My friends gather around me. ‘Bruce, are you all right? You look terrible. You’d better go back to the bus for a lie-down.’
The Americans have converted Green Line coaches into ‘club-mobiles’ for all their shows, with bunks in the back, space up front for our instruments and a small piano strapped to the side. I’m lying down, not feeling at all well, dizzy, nauseous, disoriented …
Suddenly I’m in a plane, flying over the sea. No, not flying. I’m plummeting downwards, out of control, at an acute angle. There’s nothing I can do. I stagger towards the open door of the aircraft as the dark water rushes towards me. I jump …
… and I’m falling, out of my bunk and on to the floor of the bus. The jolt wakes me from my troubled sleep. A strange, unpleasant dream, obviously. What makes it particularly disturbing, however, is that I’ve never been in an aeroplane.
I gave no further thought to that horrible vision until I returned home the following day to visit my parents. Normally my mother would call out cheerfully the moment I walked through the front door. Not this time. I found her sitting in her chair, gazing into space.
‘What’s up, Mum?’ That was when she told me that John had been posted as missing.
It wasn’t until many, many years later, after my parents had passed away, that I received a letter and documentation from a Mrs Margaret Morrell, explaining what had actually happened to John that night. She had been undertaking research into accidents that occurred in the Turnberry area during the war, and quite correctly thought I would want to know what she had unearthed.
The sea that night had been unusually calm, which made the low-level exercise that John and his fellow airmen were undertaking all the more dangerous. They were practising laying sea mines, hazardous enough at the best of times, but with no waves to produce whitecaps, flying at virtually zero altitude became treacherous. In the pitch black it must have been incredibly difficult to ascertain the distance between your aircraft and the water.
One of the Wellingtons ditched ‘in the drink’, as the report stated, and John’s plane, plus another, went back to help in the search and rescue. With their lights on, flying just above the water in an attempt to spot survivors, these two Wellingtons collided. Of the eighteen men from the three aircraft that crashed, only seven were picked up. John was not one of them.
In many ways I’m pleased my parents never knew the details of John’s accident. I think they would have found it even harder to cope with, had they learned that their son died in a collision between two planes searching for survivors rather than in the course of an active and dangerous exercise.
As it was, when we lost my brother we took it hard and personally. Of course we did. This was our tragedy. It was only some time afterwards that we began to understand just how many other families were facing up to exactly the same thing, that shocking grief and despair. The magnitude of what was happening across the globe came home to us. Similar telegrams to the one my parents received were being delivered all over the country – in fact, all over the world. Somehow that realization made us feel less alone. We were sharing our loss with so many millions of others.
WE WERE SHARING OUR LOSS WITH SO MANY MILLIONS OF OTHERS.
John’s body was never recovered and this lack of closure, as people say nowadays, was very hard for my mother in particular. For such a long time she clung to the hope that John could have been picked up by a tramp steamer bound for South America and, suffering from amnesia, ended up on the other side of the world, unaware of who he was. It was agony for her. It would have been far better if my parents had received a telegram confirming John’s death.
We went on to enjoy happy times as a family in the years that followed, but never for a moment forgot about John. I think about him often to this day.
JOHN’S LIFE AND DEATH are officially commemorated in two locations. One is at the Runnymede Air Forces Memorial, pictured below, near to my home in Wentworth. His name is there on a panel headed ‘1943, Royal Air Force, Flight Sergeant’. It’s a comfort to have him so close.
The second is on Turnberry golf course. One weekend while I was in the RAF I joined my mother and father at Turnberry. They wanted to be near to where their elder son was lost. We stood on the beach and looked out at the sea. I have been there many times since to play golf, and I always make sure to spend a minute or two by the memorial the people of Kirkoswald parish erected in 1923. It is a large, impressive Celtic cross, situated on a hill overlooking the twelfth green of the Ailsa course. You can see it from some distance away. Originally the memorial was built to commemorate those stationed at Turnberry airfield who died in the First World War. In 1990, sections were added to the base to include the dead from the Second World War.
My big brother is listed there. Alongside his RAF comrades, John’s life is honoured.
