5
When the war broke out there was no repetition among the civilian population of Britain of the ‘tragic enthusiasm’ of August 1914. Most of those of fighting age fell in reluctantly, but quietly, with the demands that a succession of government decrees made of them, starting with the April 1939 Military Training Act. They accepted the need to serve, not because they wanted to, but because Hitler had given them no choice.
Full-scale conscription began on the first day of hostilities with the passing of the first National Service (Armed Services) Act and all males (with significant exemptions) between the ages of eighteen and forty-one were liable to call-up. The upper age limit for men was later increased to fifty-one, and from December 1941 single women and childless widows between the ages of twenty and thirty were required to report for war service.
On call-up, men had first to register, usually at their local Labour Exchange. There, they were asked to make a profoundly important choice. Which branch of the armed services would they prefer to spend their war in? Thus was created a popularity contest between the Army, Navy and Air Force. Initially, the RAF won it hands down. Of the 230,000 men aged twenty to twenty-two registering for the first conscription proclamation of 21 October 1939, nearly 30 per cent said they wanted to join the Air Force. The Navy was second with 17 per cent.1 The rest appear to have taken the fatalistic decision to go where they were sent. In February 1941, when the conscription net was thrown wider to scoop up nineteen-year-olds, nearly 50 per cent opted for the RAF against 18 per cent for the Navy.2
Many decided not to wait to be summoned but reported to one of the Combined Recruiting Centres dotted around the country to volunteer for the Air Force. Indeed, enlistments by those outside the conscript age range outnumbered pressed men until well into 1940.
RAF recruiting staff could therefore afford to be choosy as they surveyed each new crop of sprogs. In the first five years of the war, of those who volunteered before waiting to be called up about one in six were rejected. Among those who waited to be summoned before plumping for the Air Force, the washout rate was brutal. Less than half of those interviewed by recruiting officers made the grade (463,773 out of 1,054,348), and many of them were shunted off to the Army.3
In the first sixteen months of the war, 203,239 volunteers were accepted into the RAF, together with another 140,462 who opted for the Air Force on being called up.4 Having succeeded in joining their preferred service, each man had another crucial – and potentially fatal – choice to make. At an early stage they were asked whether they wanted to serve in the air or on the ground. Of the 343,701 who entered in that initial period only about one in ten – 35,267 – were assigned to aircrew duties.5 Among younger men, a figure of 13 per cent of aircrew optants was normal until recruiting tailed off in 1944.6
Why was it that so many ended up earthbound? It was not a simple question of choice. One reason was that far more technical tradesmen were needed than aviators, and anyone with a relevant skill would be steered towards a ground job. Another major factor was the high standard of physical fitness and intelligence set for those who volunteered for flying duties. Flying required a higher degree of academic ability than most military activity and, initially, priority was given to those with more than the legal minimal level of secondary education.
In 1939 four out of five children left school at fourteen when free education more or less ceased.7 The result was that the great majority of the first-wave applicants were automatically excluded from a flying career. Gloucestershire boy F. S. Reed had enjoyed a ten-shilling joy ride at the RAF aerodrome at South Cerney and was ‘hooked on flying’. When the war came he decided to join the Air Force but ‘having no academic qualifications I didn’t have a hope of being accepted for pilot training’. Instead he ‘applied to join the RAF … as a flight mechanic. If I couldn’t fly them then at least I could work on them.’8 Fate determined that he would spend most of the war servicing aircraft in a flying training school in South Africa.
A job on the ground had many attractions. Working as a skilled tradesman brought greater standing and a higher level of satisfaction than an Army or Navy other rank could expect. This status was reflected in the uniform for, unlike his counterparts, from 1938 onwards the ‘erk’ wore a collar and tie (it was six years before the Army caught up). Initially at least, there seemed a diminished likelihood of being sent overseas. It was also evident that ground crew duties carried less risk than serving in the air, or indeed anywhere. The importance this factor played in the decision-making process is hard to calculate. Wing Commander Jimmy Lawson of the Air Ministry Personnel Department recorded in a memorandum that ‘it is believed that a number of young men enlisted voluntarily or opted for the RAF on ground duties with the knowledge that such employment was the least dangerous in any of the services’.9
How Lawson, who elsewhere in the document shows himself to be sensible and humane, arrived at this conclusion was not made clear. It cannot have been his intention to portray aircraftmen as shirkers. Those who served on the ground anyway displayed their own brand of fortitude, enduring long hours in all weathers and often miserable conditions, and could show the same selfless disregard for their own lives when duty called, as an entry in the diary of 217 Squadron recording an air raid on their base at St Eval in Cornwall in May 1941 shows: ‘A/Cs Collier and Ball put up a very good show by towing a bowser which was on fire away so that it could burn out in safety. One of them actually had to climb under the bowser to attach a cable to it. Their prompt and courageous action undoubtedly saved another aircraft from destruction.’10
There was a steady flow of non-flying personnel who, despite intimate knowledge of the dangers involved, gave up a safe billet to volunteer for operations. It was not as straightforward a process as the authorities made it appear and answering the call did not guarantee acceptance, even at times when the need appeared to be urgent. ‘Chaps, driven by boredom, volunteer continually for Air Gunnery, but they aren’t accepted,’ wrote John Sommerfield to a colleague in November 1940. He was a former public schoolboy and a Communist who had fought with the International Brigades in Spain before joining up as a lowly aircraftman. ‘In the meantime the RAF goes on inserting 11 inch double column ads [in newspapers and magazines] for men to be aircrew.’11
An initial insistence on education to School Certificate standard was eventually dropped on the grounds that it ‘debarred many excellent candidates otherwise suitable’.12 Nonetheless it is clear that many who wanted to fly could not because they had not been given the basic education that would prepare them for the rigorous classroom training that all aircrew roles required. Geoffrey Goodman was bright and ambitious but his war-invalid father had been unable to find steady work and he had left school early. He was seventeen when the war broke out, working as cub reporter for a small magazine in Camden Town, north London. His Jewish background and left-wing sympathies reinforced his determination to fight Fascism and he felt flying with the RAF – ‘the most dramatic of the three services’ – was the best way to do it.13 When, having added a year to his age, he turned up at a recruiting office near Euston station, he found it was not as easy as that. ‘I wanted to go straight into aircrew [but] I didn’t have the required qualifications,’ he said. ‘I remember arguing with the recruiting sergeant who told me that once [I] was in I may be able to remuster.’ At the reception centre at Cardington he was advised to volunteer to train as a radio mechanic as an entrée to aircrew. While training at Cranwell a flight lieutenant told him he would be better off specializing in photography – a tip he followed and which led to him eventually being commissioned as a reconnaissance pilot. Goodman found that ‘about a third of the groundcrew lads wanted to get into aircrew – it didn’t matter what it was. If it wasn’t as a pilot then as a navigator or air gunner.’ The stumbling block was education – or lack of it. They ‘wished to do so but they were very much aware that they didn’t have the … qualifications to tackle the aircrew course’.
In the first five years of the war RAF numbers increased sixfold – from 175,692 in September 1939 to 1,185,833 in July 1944.14 This stupendous growth spurt required production-line methods to manage and for many recruits the plunge into uniform was disorienting, often shocking. They were passing from the realm of the comfortable and familiar into a baffling new domain that seemed unconnected with the civilian universe, filled with noise, discomfort and a total absence of privacy. The first stop for all, whether you were destined to be a pilot, a fitter or a ‘general duties’ dogsbody was one of the reception centres like Uxbridge, on the fringes of west London, Cardington in Bedfordshire, or Padgate, Lancashire, where you swapped your civvies for a uniform and acquired a service number that would henceforth be welded to your name.
Padgate was a vast, ugly, hutted camp near Warrington. No one who passed through its gates retained any happy memory of the place. ‘My main impression of Padgate is parading and waiting in biting cold and rain,’ John Thornley, a twenty-nine-year-old printer’s rep from Preston, confided to his diary after arriving there in December 1940. ‘The camp is built on marshy ground and is open to all winds.’15 Even young men who knew poverty and overcrowding felt the rawness of the place, and cringed at the constant state of exposure in which it seemed they would henceforth live. The nakedness was literal. Almost the first order an RAF entrant received was to drop his trousers and pants, prior to an inaugural ‘FFI’ (Freedom from Infection) inspection, one of many he would undergo in his career.
Nineteen-year-old Norman Lee, who had left his reserved occupation job with an engineering firm in Yorkshire to emulate his twin brother and volunteer for aircrew, arrived in Padgate in November 1941. For his first FFI he and his comrades ‘were lined up in a hangar facing the open side with only a sheet of hessian as a very inadequate screen between us and a crowd of WAAFs who giggled and made faces through the window of a low building opposite.’16 Then ‘to complete our embarrassment, as soon as the inspection was over we were marched straight into that self-same building’ where the female spectators served them plates of gristly brawn.
For gently brought-up young men like Sam Pritchard, the son of a Wesleyan minister who turned up in the spring of 1940 on his way to becoming a navigator, Padgate brought his first, rather dismaying, close encounter with the British proletariat. The thirty men in his barrack room ‘contained what I suppose must have been a cross-section of British society; a few types with a reasonable education and the remainder representing rapidly dwindling standards [down to] a group of foul-mouthed objectionable young men’.17 His first night was ‘miserable and unforgettable … lying in a bed with no sheets on; a mattress and a pillow filled with straw, looking round for a sympathetic or understanding face …’
By this rough immersion, the RAF might have unintentionally been doing the new boys a favour. It was sink or swim. To survive you had to cling to the nearest kindred spirit, and the experience encouraged instant and often lasting friendships. There was sanctuary, too, in the humour that pervaded everything: strong, black and subversive. Surreal wit combated their surreal new circumstances. As everyone constantly told everyone else, ‘if you can’t take a joke, you shouldn’t have joined’.18
Sam Pritchard and his comrades soon discovered ways to circumvent the obscenity-flecked rule of the NCOs who drilled them. A ‘favourite stratagem was to start giggling or laughing on parade whilst punctiliously and smartly obeying all the orders barked at us. This would first puzzle the corporal and then drive him to foul-mouthed hysteria … eventually when [he] finally accepted the impracticality of charging all of us under King’s Regulations, he would lower his voice to offer an extra pass out of camp if we “stopped our bleeding laughing”.’
Any manoeuvre that thwarted authority or made it look ridiculous delighted men who were, on the whole, determined to hang on to their status as civilians in uniform. During his initial training my father Ernest Bishop was in a group being taught self-defence by an overbearing PT corporal instructor. One by one, the teacher invited each man to ‘take a swing’, then promptly knocked him flat when he obeyed. Come my father’s turn, he warned the corporal that he had ‘done a bit with the gloves’, as indeed he had, fighting as ‘Tiger’ Bishop at the Blackfriars Ring in London. ‘They all say that,’ sneered the corporal, and waved him on. Moments later the instructor was stretched out cold on the gym floor and Ernie did not have to buy beer for a fortnight.
Places like Padgate were purgatorial rather than hellish and the suffering was temporary. Sam Pritchard’s grim memories were soon blotted out in the summer of 1940 by the far more agreeable experience of No. 2 Initial Training Wing, based in Cambridge University. Pay parades took place on the lawn in front of King’s College Chapel and in the evenings he and his fellow trainee pilots and navigators toured the pubs. They were a superior crowd to the reception centre clientele. The majority were grammar school boys like himself but there was also ‘a goodly proportion from Public schools, and some even who had completed a university course’, as well as Australians, New Zealanders and Canadians.19 For the first time he ‘met other young men in their early twenties who were smarter, richer, better-looking, better-educated and more amusing than I considered myself to be’.
In the RAF you tended not to linger anywhere for too long. Specialized requirements and constant technological advances meant long training periods at a variety of establishments. It took Ted Mace, who signed on as an aircraft electrician, a full year of more or less continuous instruction at various technical schools before he was posted to a squadron.20
Aircrew training was more intensive. Pilots went through nine phases of instruction before they flew their first operation, and when bottlenecks in the system developed early in the war, periods of ‘deferred service’ at home extended the process. Even training for a relatively uncomplicated trade such as air gunner was a protracted business. Norman Lee volunteered in November 1940 but did not take to the air with 428 Squadron until the summer of 1943.21
The RAF’s geographical reach spread enormously in the course of the war. The empire had greatly helped its training needs by agreeing to flying training schools in the wide skies of Canada, Australia, Rhodesia, South Africa and elsewhere. With expansion, new bases sprang up all over each new theatre of war and old ones were enlarged. Air Force life could thus be amazingly peripatetic, with constant moves from training course to training course, from station to station, from one end of the country to the other and to every corner of the globe. An airman might find himself shivering in Iceland, hard up against the Arctic Circle, cursing the flies in the Nile Delta, or sweating in the sultry humidity of Takoradi on the Gold Coast (Ghana) of Africa.
However grim your current circumstances there was always the prospect of change. ‘It is like living in a cross between a public school and a concentration camp,’ wrote John Sommerfield, in 1941 shortly after arriving at Silloth, a remote station in Cumberland.22 ‘The town of Silloth is hideous, small and unpleasant … Cumberland has the highest average rainfall in Great Britain …’ Before long, though, he was writing notes on the nature of the Western Desert (‘the sinister shadows of stones at sunrise, the purplish sunset shadows that dramatize sand ripples into mountain ranges …’) that he would put to good use when he resumed his career as a novelist and short story writer after the war.23
Wherever they went, the airmen carried with them a comforting, familiar ethos to sustain them. In its short life, the RAF had developed its own way of speech, some of it the legacy of its Army and Navy origins, much of it new. Like Sommerfield, Roderic Papineau was a writer who served in the ranks. Both acted as field reporters for Tom Harrisson, one of the founders of Mass Observation, set up in 1937 to study the lives of ordinary people and which continued its work into wartime. In May 1941, while with 256 Squadron in Blackpool, he compiled an ‘Airman’s Vocabulary’ recording the usages he heard around him in workshop, NAAFI and pub.24
He and his comrades were ‘erks’, a term that applied to all other-ranks ground staff. Its origin would never be satisfactorily explained. Even Eric Partridge failed to nail it and his theory, proposed in his 1945 Dictionary of RAF Slang, that it was a corrupted abbreviation of ‘air mechanic’, does not convince.25 ‘Type’ was a handy alternative to ‘bloke’. Aeroplanes were ‘kites’ or ‘crates’. The rumours that hung like ground mist over base and depot (as they did over all military establishments) could be graded for reliability as ‘the real griff’ – almost certainly true, through ‘pukka gen’ – quite possible – to ‘duff’ or ‘shithouse gen’ – almost certainly bollocks. An expression that seems unique to the RAF was ‘by the centre!’, usually with an expletive inserted, to indicate ‘amazed and outraged disgust or surprise’. It does not appear to have lingered long in use after the war though Sam Pritchard chose it as the title for his memoir.
Some phrases had a different meaning for ground staff than for fliers. According to Papineau, when an erk was ‘shooting a line’ he was ‘pretending to unwarranted expert knowledge’. When a pilot did the same he was making some exaggerated boast, usually in the bar, and his utterance might well be recorded in the squadron ‘line book’. The 9 Squadron book reports Pilot Officer Arnold announcing loftily one night: ‘No I’m not keeping a diary, but I have the press cuttings of my flights …’26 A ‘shaky do’ on the ground was a ‘disappointing or unsatisfactory affair’. In the air, it meant a terrifying near-death experience, and was all the more eloquent for its understatement. A word that meant the same to all was ‘wizard’ – ‘superb’, according to Papineau.
Life in the RAF may not have been uniformly ‘wizard’ and, as in all branches of the military, the hours passed against a background buzz of moaning about the incompetence, laziness and stupidity of those in authority. Yet the overwhelming impression received from contemporaneous diaries and letters and subsequent fictional and factual accounts of the experience was that it was, by and large, positive, even enjoyable at times, and that if there had to be a war and you had to be in it, then the Royal Air Force was the place to be. The strong desire not to end up in the Army – still regarded as a stronghold of bovine generals and ovine troops – is often cited as a motivation, particularly in ground staff memoirs (which are far less numerous than those left behind by aircrew). But there was more to it than that. The RAF seemed modern, dashing and somehow less formal. Like the Navy, it also seemed to actually be doing something. According to Papineau, the Air Force nickname for sailors was affectionate and respectful – ‘tars’ or ‘matelots’. The Army, however, were ‘brown jobs’ or ‘the unemployed’. They themselves were ‘The Firm’, a term that indicates pride, purpose and efficiency.
Naturally this ebullience could easily be interpreted as cockiness and there were some, not just among their military peers, who found the high spirits of the junior service irritating. The avalanche of admiring mail published in the innovatory illustrated news magazine Picture Post in the early months of the war, following a letter from an anonymous erk complaining that ‘no decent girl seems to look at an airman’, contained a few caveats. ‘I must say it’s not true that no decent and respectable girls look at airmen,’ wrote A. M. ‘I know several … (I for one). But some of them are so sure of themselves, always talking about drink etc.’27 ‘I have come to the conclusion that foul manners are the badge of the Air Force,’ wrote a middle-aged woman who had served with the Army in France in the First World War, after being subjected to rough or ribald comments from RAF men in Kensington Gardens on two occasions. The bulk of the postbag, though, was gushingly, blushingly positive. ‘I was very surprised at your letter as I always imagined airmen were considered heroes’ ran one from a nurse. ‘I envied my girlfriend whose heart is in the sky and who is now knitting air-force blue socks! The fact that it’s such a stiff test to get in always made me imagine that airmen are he-men!’
The RAF’s appeal was felt everywhere. The Duke of Edinburgh confided in a BBC interview on his seventieth birthday that he would have volunteered for aircrew had he not been pressured by his uncle Louis Mountbatten to join the Navy.28 It seemed to attract a disproportionate number of celebrities of one sort or another. Aircrew trainee Edwin Thomas was delighted to tell his mother that among his intake group at the Torquay reception centre was the England fast bowler Ken Farnes who was so tall that ‘he has got to wait three months for a uniform because the RAF can’t find one to fit him’.29 Farnes was later killed when his aeroplane crashed on a night-flying exercise. His England colleague Bill Edrich flew with Bomber Command, won a DFC and finished the war as a squadron leader. Another famous cricketer Cyril Washbrook served as a PT instructor.
Tommy Farr, the Tonypandy ex-miner who had fought Joe Louis for the world heavyweight boxing title in 1937, volunteered the day after war broke out and ‘wanted to be an air gunner or an observer’. During a routine medical while training he was found to have a defective ear and eye, probably the result of punishment in the ring, and given a medical discharge. ‘I feel very miserable about it all,’ he said when the news became known. ‘I was very happy with food and conditions in the RAF and believe me I am terribly sorry to leave the force.’30
Actors flocked to the RAF. Richard Attenborough, Richard Burton, Denholm Elliott, Rex Harrison, Christopher Lee and Donald Pleasence all served. So too did the playwright Terence Rattigan whose Flare Path was an early example of the dramatic potency of the RAF experience. Not all showbiz aspirants were welcomed. David Niven made his way back from Hollywood in the autumn of 1939 but withdrew after a bruising first interview. On arrival at the Air Ministry he was besieged by secretaries asking for his autograph which got him off to a bad start with the group captain assessing him.
‘The man restored order and eyed me with distaste,’ Niven remembered.31 ‘He knew who I was. Unless he was blind he couldn’t have avoided it. Nevertheless, he went through the motions of asking my name and occupation and what I wanted to do. When I told him, he pursed his lips, sucked in some breath with a whistling sound and shook his head.’ He then asked him whether he knew Wilfred Lawson, a highly regarded theatre and screen player who had flown as a pilot in the last months of the First World War and had rejoined the colours. Niven replied that he was a ‘wonderful actor’.
‘He’s also a heavy drinker,’ said the officer. ‘We took him on and we’ve had trouble with him ever since.’ By now Niven was losing patience and told him: ‘I’ve come seven thousand miles at my own expense and I’d like to join the RAF.’
‘So I’ve read,’ the officer replied. ‘But we don’t encourage actors to join this service.’ At this point Niven stormed out, and ended up in the Rifle Brigade after a chance encounter in the Café de Paris nightclub.
Musicians were also drawn to the Air Force. The number of well-known artistes volunteering or choosing to join encouraged the authorities in 1940 to form the Royal Air Force Dance Orchestra. Among the fifteen members were several who had played in the Bert Ambrose Orchestra, the hottest act of the day, including saxophonist Harry Lewis who was married to the band’s vocalist Vera Lynn. They became famous as The Squadronaires, by far the best known of the service dance bands, and played all over the country as well as being broadcast on the BBC and cutting records for Decca. They generated a lush, big-band sound, and their great hit ‘There’s Something in the Air’ would ever after evoke for hundreds of thousands of servicemen and women memories of crowded dance halls, the smell of cigarette smoke, perfume and spilled beer and the last bus back to camp.
The Squadronaires (© Imperial War Museums, CH 15079)
For aircrew, the progress to a squadron was long and jerky and there were many obstacles to overcome before you finally got into action. Edwin Thomas was eighteen and a half when the war started. Like many, probably most, who aspired to fight in the air, he wanted to be a pilot. He was summoned to the combined recruiting centre in Romford on 29 October 1940 for assessment for the RAFVR, by now the conduit for most wartime entrants. Edwin had the benefit of a secondary education at Canterbury Road Senior School and Snaresbrook College in east London but his reports marked him down as a plodder. ‘He is a thoroughly honest and trustworthy lad,’ declared his head teacher, T. H. Moore. ‘He has shown earnestness and painstaking ability in his work. In manner he is quiet, serious and gentlemanly.’32 Thomas’s weekly letters home to the family’s semi-detached mock-Tudor home in the east London suburb of Wanstead describing his life as a trainee provide a detailed account of the rigours and disappointments of the process, as well as a touching picture of youth, innocence and devotion to duty. The meeting with the selection board went well. A week later he was installed at the Babbacombe Hotel near Torquay, about to begin a fortnight’s drilling with forty-nine other novices before being sent off to a two-month course at an Initial Training Wing (ITW).
They were starting on the lowest rung of the ladder, classified as Aircraftmen 2nd Class (Group V) and receiving 2s. a day pay. From the beginning cash, or the lack of it, looms large in the correspondence. ‘It is amazing how much money is spent on necessities such as copying ink [and] the VR badges that aren’t on the uniform and cost 6d a pair,’ he wrote on 13 November. There were no complaints about the food, though. ‘For breakfast yesterday we had porridge, fried egg and mashed potatoes, bread and butter, marmalade and a terrific mug or two of tea,’ he reported. ‘For dinner: a lovely stew with potatoes and veg: for sweet an apple conglomeration with custard and an apple: for tea plenty of liver and gravy, bread and butter, jam and a piece of fruit cake. Cake every day. Supper: jug of milk, liver between two crusts and a slice of cake.’ In the evenings there were trips into town ‘to play billiards snooker or table tennis and end up with a glass of Devonshire cider … we are too broke to get tipsy.’
By mid-December he was at the Initial Training Wing at Pembroke College, Cambridge, one of five colleges requisitioned by the Air Ministry to house about a thousand trainees. The course was a mixture of gruelling classroom work – navigation, signalling by Morse and Aldis lamp, armaments, maths, law and administration, hygiene, ship and aircraft recognition – combined with large doses of PE. Like all the armed forces the RAF was keen on the noble art, believing it cultivated a fighting spirit. ‘I put my name down for boxing,’ he wrote, ‘and in the afternoon had three rounds with a fellow of my own weight.’ His partner ‘had never boxed before and his defence was an opponent’s dream’. Later the PE instructor, a corporal called Harry Mizler and a celebrated East End Jewish bantamweight who represented Britain in the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, ‘bounced medicine balls on our stomachs to strengthen the muscles’. They then set off on a two-mile run.
Soon after arriving at the ITW Thomas suffered the first of a series of disappointments. He learned he had done badly in a grading test and his chances of selection for pilot training had taken a blow. To keep his hopes alive he would have to get more than 60 per cent in the maths exam. If he failed, he would have to re-muster as a wireless operator/air gunner. With characteristic stoicism he knuckled down to ‘special maths swotting with friends after hours’. Like many others, he was learning that ‘if you want to be a pilot you have to work like blazes’. However, he told his mother ‘if I get through the maths test it will all have been worthwhile’. It was not to be. It is not difficult to imagine his mother Helen’s feelings as her first-born child reported sheepishly in his next letter that he had some ‘rather disappointing news to tell you. I did not pass the maths exam.’ After learning of his failure he had been interviewed by a squadron leader who told him that he would be given another chance. It meant, however, that he would be assigned to another group of trainees: ‘I shall not leave Cambridge but I shall lose all my friends.’
A few months later he was writing with the ‘sad, sad news’ that he had failed his navigation exam. His bid to become a pilot was over and he was offered the choice of being discharged from the service, re-mustering as a wireless operator/gunner or being assigned to a ground job. ‘Naturally I said I would go for WOP/AG,’ he told his mother. ‘If I had my discharge I should only go into the army eventually – and I do want to make a go of it in the RAF.’ His pride had been hurt. A postscript to the letter adds, ‘Tell anyone who enquires that as I failed the exam for pilot I have volunteered for WOP/AG.’
Edwin spent the next two years moving around the country from training unit to training unit, until at last, at the end of March 1943, he was posted to 78 Squadron at Linton-on-Ouse near York. On 2/3 April he took part in his first operation, bombing the port area of Saint-Nazaire. The relief of getting the first trip out of the way and ‘without a scratch on K for Kathleen [their Halifax]’ shone out of the letter home. ‘The whole business was little different from an ordinary cross-country flight,’ he wrote. ‘But what gave us all a thrill was when we crossed the French coast and knew we were well on our way to the target.’ He finished by reporting that ‘we have been searching for ideas for a name for our kite. Most names fellows have chosen for their kites are indelicate. Much to my crew’s pleasure I hit upon the idea of “Happy Go Lucky.” The decision was unanimous.’
Bad weather meant that it was two weeks until the next mission. On the night of 16/17 April 78 Squadron took part in a mass attack on the centre of Mannheim, a regular ‘area’ target at this stage of the war. Eighteen aircraft were lost. Edwin’s was among them and all the crew were killed. A friend of the family called Lydia wrote a few days later offering what little comfort there was. ‘It is some consolation to know that Edwin was so very keen on the Air Force and would not have wished to be in any other Service,’ she wrote. She added: ‘The RAF are marvellous boys and to hear them going over night after night does make one’s heart ache.’
In the search for words to soften the blow of death it was often asserted that the victim had died doing what they wanted. In the case of Edwin Thomas it was obviously the truth. His letters brim with the pride of belonging and pleasure in the company of his fellow airmen. He never seems to have been lonely and made friends early who meant a lot to him. ‘I am with a grand set of fellows,’ he wrote after arriving in Blackpool for his wireless operators’ course. On his twentieth birthday ‘the whole gang went on a binge … Stanley, Stinker, Baxter (wee Scotsman, ex-Corporal Gordon Highlanders) and Ronnie Wells plus two girls who are holidaymaking and staying in Stanley’s billet. I’m afraid we all had too much to drink.’
The arrivals and departures of wartime life meant friendships were often fleeting but no less real for that. Edwin’s friend Malcolm, who he met at the Cambridge ITW course and was selected for pilot training, wrote to him in Blackpool months after they separated to say, ‘I miss you like anything, you know, Edwin and I don’t think I’ll find a friend to replace you in this service.’ He signed off: ‘My best wishes to any of the lads up there and the same a hundred times over to yourself. See you soon, maybe over Berlin …’
Compulsory female war service only come into effect in early 1942. Until then, the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, which was created on 28 June 1939, was staffed by volunteers. Between September 1939 and December 1940 14,546 came forward. The following year the numbers jumped to 81,928. The increase was largely due to the introduction of a second National Service Act in the autumn that made it clear that conscription for women between the ages of twenty and thirty was in the offing. The result, the Air Ministry narrative noted, was that ‘recruiting offices were inundated with applications … just before Christmas in one week alone over 7,000 completed application forms were received’.33 After January 1941 the WAAF started receiving conscripts. Over the course of the war, however, volunteers greatly outnumbered National Service recruits by 180,704 to 33,932.
For women, the attraction of the Air Force over the other services was not as obvious as it was for men. They would have little contact with aeroplanes, as at first they were not considered for ground trades and there was no question of them serving as aircrew. Later some women were used as delivery pilots in the Air Transport Auxiliary but these had already obtained pilot’s licences for themselves and it was only in 1944 that seventeen WAAFs were trained to do the job.34 At the outset, the Air Ministry’s attitude was more restrictive than had been the case at the end of the First World War. The majority of the 32,000 women in the Women’s Royal Air Force – the forerunner of the WAAF – had done traditional jobs as typists, clerks, cooks and cleaners, but some broke into fields that were hitherto the preserve of men, working as fitters and riggers.
According to the RAF’s own account the early WAAF recruits were ‘in the main patriotic women who were inspired by the spirit of adventure’. Sylvia Drake-Brockman was a well-educated forty-year-old spinster from a military family who was employed as private secretary to the Chairman of the Stock Exchange in the City of London when the war broke out. It was an ‘easy job’ and she had ‘elegant hours and no Saturday work’.35 As time passed she became ‘increasingly restless and anxious to do something for the war effort’.
In July 1940, at the start of the Battle of Britain, she applied to join the WAAF. Turning up at the RAF’s recruiting headquarters at Victory House in Kingsway for processing she found the place awash with like-minded women. ‘What a crowd was waiting with me,’ she wrote. ‘All sorts of conditions of girls and of all ages …’ The applicants had a first encounter with ‘one RAF and four WAAF doctors to examine different parts of our anatomy’. There was a long wait for the result. Then a ‘card was handed to me marked FIT. Great relief and joy.’
A fortnight later she arrived at the West Drayton reception centre to the west of London where recruits were rolling in at a rate of a hundred a day. She was feeling ‘rather tired and depressed’ when she got there, not helped by ‘some small boys outside the camp calling out “turn back before it’s too late!”’. The message was repeated that evening when the newcomers were ‘addressed by a Flight Officer who spoke to us all sufficiently sternly about not joining if we were, any of us, under age, so that one little girl bobbed up and admitted the offence and was told she would be returned to her home the next day’. They were also given a final chance to ‘get out of the WAAF if we felt we could not take the final plunge … twenty-four hours to think things over before taking an irrevocable step’. This practice would continue until 1941, whereafter there was no allowance made for second thoughts.
Sylvia spent a restless first night in a quarter ‘like a council house’ with some other new girls. Almost every WAAF memoir makes unaffectionate mention of the ‘biscuits’ they had to sleep on, three thin three-foot by three-foot squares of straw-filled canvas, laid down on a slatted bedframe. Bedclothes consisted of two unbleached sheets and three hairy blankets in Air Force Blue and there was a straw-filled bolster for a pillow. The next day was taken up with ‘waiting for enrolment, getting enrolled (which meant turning into a cipher – 896991), waiting to get kitted, getting kitted – waiting for meals, waiting again and more waiting’.
Sylvia’s secretarial background meant she was selected as a ‘clerk, general duties’. Her job meant that, somewhat to her regret, she was excused much of the initial drilling. Instead she attended endless lectures. ‘It seemed to my somewhat confused mind that the system was; when in doubt, send the recruits to a lecture. In this way I heard lectures on service etiquette, office routine and correspondence, hygiene, sanitation, VD and again hygiene, sanitation and service etiquette.’
During the two-week initial training she was called to an interview by the female camp commandant and asked if she would like to put her name forward for a commission as an administrative officer. Sylvia was pleased to accept the offer as ‘much as I was enjoying my experience in the ranks I knew that I would get very tired of the continual herding and lack of privacy before long’. There was also ‘a better reason – I felt confident that I would do more good as an officer as I was and always [had] been very interested in my fellow human beings’.
Sylvia’s name was duly submitted to the Air Ministry. Later she discovered that she had been recommended on the grounds of her ‘education, personality and service connections’.
When a woman officer arrived to interview her ‘the first question I was asked was “why I had joined the WAAF when I had so many relations in the Army”. I replied that I liked the sound of the WAAF and thought it was a good idea to break fresh ground.’ She did not confide ‘another childish reason which influenced me: that I liked the uniform better than the khaki of the ATS!’ The drily humorous and humane memoir that Sylvia Drake-Brockman left behind on her death in 1978 makes it clear that the next five and a half years were among the happiest in her life. She thrived on the responsibility denied to her in civilian life, was appreciated by her superiors and held several important command and staff jobs. She also found fulfilment in the camaraderie of service life and in acting as a stern but affectionate big sister to her charges.
Sylvia was born at the tail end of the Victorian era and came from the sort of family whose members made a profession of serving Britain and its empire and had been well rewarded for doing so. To a younger generation of women growing up in an era of expanding independence and diminishing deference, the pull of duty was felt in different ways. Marjorie Chaffe was twenty when the war began and working in a book-binding plant in Southwark. She did not volunteer for war service but when the Blitz began in September 1940 worked as a part-time firewatcher and member of Air Raid Precautions. For reasons she could not understand she was classed as doing essential war work in a ‘reserved’ occupation. Even if she had not been, as she explained in a frank memoir published twenty-five years after the end of the war, there were ‘lots of reasons’ why girls like her held back from rushing to the recruiting centres.36 There was the ‘obvious one of discipline and regimentation. Once you’d signed on the dotted line your life was no longer your own. What’s more you didn’t even know how long you would have to serve because you signed up for the duration of hostilities.’
But there were ‘lots of other reasons too, petty no doubt, but all having to be taken into consideration when deciding just how far our patriotism was going to stretch’. One was uniform. ‘Stockings must have lost more recruits than any other item,’ she wrote. ‘All the girls loathed them. They were thick, a ghastly blue and made the slimmest legs look twice their size.’
WAAF headgear did not suit the styles of the time. ‘Rita Hayworth and Dorothy Lamour wore their hair cascading onto their shoulders … so civilian girls did the same. But on joining up, you either had to have your hair cut, or else dress it in such a way that it not only fitted under your cap but was also well above your collar.’
A bigger deterrent was family pressure. Almost all war work, be it in the services or employment in a war industry factory, meant moving away from home. Parents who had lost one or more sons to the forces were reluctant to see a daughter fly the nest to some possibly distant and inaccessible location.37
Boyfriends also presented a major difficulty. They ‘didn’t like their girls in uniform. They didn’t mind who else’s girl joined up, as long as theirs didn’t.’ Marjorie considered this ‘natural enough … if he was a civilian himself he didn’t want to walk down the road with the equivalent of an able seaman or an aircraftman who saluted every officer that came into sight, and if he was in the Forces he didn’t want his girl running the gauntlet of hundreds of his own kind in camps all over the country.’
When conscription for young, single women came into force in January 1942, the matter was settled. When Marjorie was eventually summoned to do her National Service like everyone she could choose between the nursing services, the Land Army, the fire services, work in a war factory, or joining the WRNS, ATS or WAAF. She ‘didn’t like blood’ and ‘by no stretch of the imagination could conjure up a picture of myself mucking out a pigsty at five o clock in the morning’. She had had enough of factories and felt she had done her time firewatching, ‘so it had to be the Forces’. Having lived through the Blitz she wanted to do something that had a direct impact on the enemy. ‘The most aggressive jobs that a girl could do in the Army or Air Force was either to work on a gun site or the balloon barrage. So as I was feeling pretty aggressive after two years of air raids … and preferring blue to khaki, I decided to go on the barrage.’ Teaming up with two other Londoners, Rene and Dolly, who would be her best friends for the rest of her service, they set off to the reception centre at Gloucester, ‘pleased at having gained the service we wanted’ but with ‘a few qualms about what sort of reception we would get as conscripts among a lot of volunteers’.
Marjorie’s natural bolshiness made her impatient of the ‘rules and regulations … flung at us from all sides’ which Sylvia accepted as the inescapable idiocies of service life. They were different ages, came from different backgrounds and had different expectations of what life could and should bring. Yet their years in the WAAF seem to have been among the most fulfilling in their lives, never to be regretted or forgotten.