CHAPTER FIVE

First Squadron

No. 247 Squadron was equipped with the Hunter Mark 4 when I arrived in April 1956.¹ It also had a Vampire T11 on its strength for simulated instrument flying and dual checks, and a Meteor T7 for target towing, a mix that was pretty standard equipment for Hunter squadrons at the time. The Mark 4 was basically the Mark 1 with an upgraded engine, some extra fuel giving a total of 414 gallons, and a ‘follow up tailplane’.² I was allocated to ‘B’ Flight, commanded by Flight Lieutenant David Craig. I was welcomed, shown around and then taken to meet the ‘Boss’, as squadron commanders were and are, traditionally nicknamed. The Boss, Squadron Leader Charles Laughton, mentioned nothing about my poor showing at Chivenor on cine and air-gunnery, though he would have had my report from there, but I rather got the impression that he was not over-enthusiastic about my potential as a squadron pilot. Although my belief in my ability as a pilot had been dented by the episode with the T11 canopy and by my poor weaponry performance at the OCU, I felt no serious doubt about being able to hold my own on the squadron. Maybe nobody else shared my confidence. But, so what, I thought; surely all that was required was to show willing, and avoid being careless.

I started badly, however. The squadron currently had a thing about flying battle formation without transmitting any orders or instructions. Formation members had to watch the leader very closely and act instantly when he began to turn, particularly if he was turning away. Near the end of my second battle formation practice, flying about half a mile down sun from Flight Lieutenant Bob Poole, one of the ‘old hands’ on the squadron, I thought I saw him turn towards me. I immediately began to turn away from him, expecting to see him appear shortly on the inside of the turn. However, he was going the other way and, as a result, I lost sight of him completely. Probably to teach me a lesson the hard way he beetled off back to base and I got a rasping when I returned alone. Two weeks later I again lost my leader, Ted Skinner, this time during a tail chase. I had been hanging on at about 150 yards as he hauled us around above and among a bunch of cumulus clouds, and I lost him when he rather mischievously dived into one and was nowhere in sight when I emerged from it. I didn’t mind this little bit of one-upmanship at the time but I can’t say that I was very happy about it later when Boss Laughton suggested that if I couldn’t stick to my leader I had no right to be on a fighter squadron.

Esmé was meanwhile in Ireland, with her parents. I had parked her there during the short spell of leave I had after Chivenor, to stay until I could find accommodation for us in the Odiham area and, as soon as I had an opportunity, I started looking. Also, on leave I had bought a replacement car, a 1947 model Armstrong Whitworth Hurricane coupé. It would have been a lot better if I could have found something cheaper to run but the coupé was on offer at the relatively knock-down price of £250, probably because there was very little demand for a second-hand luxury model that did only 13 mpg. I reckoned that I if I didn’t run it too frequently or too far, I could afford it. However, as I drove around the local area looking at houses, and discovering how much I was going to have to pay to rent one, this rationale was a little undermined. A house that was reasonably cheap to rent and close enough not to break the bank on petrol costs was not easy to find. In the end I took on a dilapidated seventeenth century cottage, five miles from the airfield, at four guineas a week³ and felt that I might just be able to remain solvent.

A few weeks later the squadron deployed for a fortnight to RAF Horsham St Faith, now Norwich International, to hold the southern day-fighter readiness commitment. This required a pair of Hunters to be held at cockpit alert from dawn to dusk, relieved for the dark hours by a pair from a night-fighter squadron. Pilots were nominated to take their turn in the cockpit, or as back-ups to come to cockpit alert should the prime pair be ‘scrambled’. I was scheduled on the third day to hold alert as number two to the Boss. Because the weather was pretty poor – rain and solid cloud from a few hundred feet above the surface to over 30,000 feet – none of us seriously expected that we would be required to fly, a presumption reinforced by being stood down to holding alert from the crew-room. However, our complacency was suddenly shaken by an order to come to cockpit alert and, in time-honoured fashion, the Boss and I sprinted to the aircraft, some 150 yards away on the parking apron. I was so puffed, or possibly so apprehensive about taking-off on the Boss’s wing on my first operational scramble, and in rain and low cloud, that my legs had a touch of the trembles as I hastened to do up my straps and concurrently have a check around the cockpit.

I had hardly completed strapping in when the air defence radar controller’s voice came over the tele-brief – an open telephone line to the pilot via a cable plugged into the aircraft below its tail, tensioned to self-release once the aircraft started to move – ordering us to ‘scramble’. We started, taxied, lined up as a pair, and were off, entering cloud at about 400 feet with me in close formation on my leader’s wing. We broke cloud into clear blue sky at 33,000 feet only to be told within a few minutes that our ‘target’ had been identified as a civil flight deviating from its notified flight-path. We were directed to return to base and were guided back towards overhead Horsham. As we approached the overhead we were handed over to Horsham Approach Control and given the standard descent instructions. I had by this time closed from battle formation and was determinedly tucked into close formation for the ride down through cloud, conscious that my White Card rating did not qualify me to land back at Horsham other than on my leader’s wing. Down we went, on the reciprocal of the runway in use, turning inbound at half the height from which we started, minus 2,000 feet, a routine designed to bring the descending aircraft to 2,000 feet agl, roughly in line with the runway and 10 nm from it. At 2,000 feet we were given continuous directions to steer, continuous readings of range from the touchdown point, and advice on the heights we should be at with each mention of range. This was the ‘earlier and inferior’ model of GCA mentioned in the previous chapter.

We came partially out of cloud at about 500 feet, able to see the ground directly below but not much ahead. I was still tucked in, holding formation, and at the same time trying to get glimpses out of the front windscreen. We had already put our undercarriages and flaps down in preparation for the landing and I expected that we would see the runway approach lights at any moment. ‘Cut! Cut!’ yelled Boss Laughton over the radio – the standard aircrew brevity code for ‘close the throttle’. I did so, assuming he had the runway in view. Almost immediately he yelled ‘Buster! Buster!’ – the standard code for ‘apply full power’. I did so, still maintaining close formation on his wing. Sneaking another look ahead and down I could see a runway, now very close underneath, but there were no lights on it and it was strewn along its length with what appeared to be chicken coops – it was the disused wartime airfield of Rackheath. Almost at the same moment we picked out the lights of Horsham not far ahead and the drama was over. I thought it best to say nothing at the debriefing about chicken coops – and I never had another harsh word from Boss Laughton.

Practice Interceptions, or PIs, were an everyday routine on fighter squadrons. Pretty straightforward for the pilots, they were what kept the fighter controllers busy in their bunkers at the air defence radar stations. There were still a number of these spread around the country at sites once selected to defend against the Luftwaffe. The Odiham-based squadrons worked variously with radars at Box in the Malvern Hills, Ventnor on the Isle of Wight, Sopley just north of Bournemouth, and Beachy Head. The continued existence of these in 1956, and the number of fighter airfields still active in southern England, sometimes raised a question in the bar as to whether or not we entertained serious doubts about the French.

As far as the Hunter pilots were concerned, PIs were simply a matter of being directed by a fighter controller onto a target, generally the other Hunter of a pair, and controlled into line astern of it. We would track, range, and film our efforts on the way in. A skilled controller could bring the fighter to where the pilot simply had to complete a curving approach to gun-firing range; an unskilled one might put it into a lengthy stern chase.

Most of our PI practices were conducted with the fighter flying at 40,000 feet with occasional sorties at 45,000 feet. The Hunter Mark 4 flew quite nicely at Mach 0.9 at these heights with a top speed, straight and level of Mach 0.94 when pushed. Mach 0.9 – or, strictly, Mach 0.89 – was in fact both the Hunter’s best climb speed and the best manoeuvring speed at high altitude. If speed was allowed to drop below this optimum the only way to get it back in the thin air at those levels was to dive, regain Mach 0.9 and climb up again. If the target was below the fighter to begin with gravity could be used to tighten the turn while maintaining speed. If it was above, and sometimes we would get a Canberra bomber flying as target at around 48,000 feet, the pursuit was more interesting; the Hunter could be pulled up in a poor approximation of a zoom climb in the hope of getting within a plausible ‘firing’ bracket behind the target before running out of speed.

The bread-and-butter routine of PIs was of course relieved by other things – solo aerobatic sorties, cine quarter practice, some pulling around the sky trying to stay on an opponent’s tail, ‘boom’ flights, formation flying, practice diversions, the odd flight at night, and by periodic air defence exercises organised by Fighter Command during which we could expect an abundance of varied targets and a lot of scrambles.

Boom flights were simply authorised dive accelerations to above the speed of sound and were normally remarkably unsensational in the Hunter. Shortly after I joined the squadron I was despatched by another of the old hands, Mike Norman, to carry out a supersonic flight with the briefing that I was to turn the aircraft upside down at maximum height – I managed 47,000 feet – and to pull through. I found this sufficiently sensational to cause me to wonder if he had been having the new boy on: although I had the stick pulled fully back in an attempt to pull out of the resultant near-vertical dive the tailplane was completely ineffective until I had lost about 30,000 feet when thicker air, increasing the speed of sound and raising the indicated airspeed, began to give it a bit of bite. The surprising thing, given the later objections lodged against Concorde’s supersonic booms, is that nobody in Britain in the 1950s seemed fussed about the ones that fighter squadrons were dropping pretty well on a daily basis.

Landing from an aerobatic sortie one day I noticed a couple of Hunter wheels lying in the hut from which routine servicing on the flight line was organised and supervised. The aircraft log-books for the serviceable aircraft that the engineers in the hanger sent out to the ‘line’ were laid out in the hut for signature by flight line servicing crews and by the pilots before and after flight. The log for each aircraft, the Form 700, held a record of everything found wrong with it, and what had been done to put things right. The tyres on the wheels that I spotted were new but both had patches where the tread was worn completely away. Someone had managed to defeat the Maxaret anti-skid units momentarily, perhaps by applying the brakes on the point of touching down. Our new and very recently arrived successor to Boss Laughton, Squadron Leader Steve Carson, landed shortly after me and spotted the tyres as he entered the ‘700 hut’. He asked which aircraft they had come off, and looked in its Form 700 to see who had been the last pilot to fly it. As it had been me he assumed that I had done the damage. A further word or two with the line chief would readily have elicited the information that they had been taken off the aircraft before I had been in it. He stormed into the crew-room and in front of most of the pilots told me that he would not have me on the squadron if I could not land an aircraft properly. I didn’t say anything because I couldn’t be entirely sure at that moment what the true story was but, convinced that I was taking the blame for something that I particularly took pride in not doing – landing too fast and braking too hard – I went out to the 700 hut and asked the obvious questions. I was also getting rather tired of being the subject of the ‘give-a-dog-a-bad-name syndrome’. My tyres were in perfect condition. My immediate reaction was to find Boss Carson and point out his mistake to him, but I didn’t; attacking the squadron commander did not commend itself as a sensible action by an irritated junior pilot, so I decided just to take his rebuke on the chin and leave things as they were. However, David Craig had also asked the appropriate questions and sometime later pointed out to the Boss that he had jumped to the wrong conclusion about the tyres. A couple of days after the incident I got a grudging apology which, in the circumstances of the poor reputation that seemed to have attached to me since I joined the squadron, was very welcome.

We deployed to Biggin Hill in September 1956 for a week for the annual autumn air defence exercise. This reproduced very largely the atmosphere that must have prevailed in the autumn of 1940 – lots of sitting around on the grass in the sunshine outside the squadron offices, being scrambled from dawn to dusk to intercept a variety of target aircraft, many of them from European bases coming in over the south coast at high level. Only two things were different: we were not being shot at; and we were operating at much greater heights and speeds than was the case in 1940. I don’t recall having any briefings on the squadron about likely Russian tactics, but the conventional wisdom of the day was that Soviet bombers would have to fly as high as possible to achieve maximum range and therefore a low-level threat could be discounted.

Odiham had five hangers, three large solid pre-war ones and two smaller corrugated iron jobs that had been added sometime later. Our sister squadrons on the base, Nos 54 (Hunters) and 46 (the first squadron to be equipped with the Javelin night-fighter), each had one of the large ones. No. 247 Squadron had one of the latter, positioned as far away from the main area of the Station as it was possible to get. The other small hanger housed the Station Flight whose purpose was to look after visiting aircraft and the Vampires and Meteors belonging to ourselves and the other squadrons, an old Anson that could occasionally be misappropriated for a visit to the Channel Islands (for cheap booze), and a splendidly polished DC3 kept on standby for use by a near neighbour, Field Marshal Montgomery. Because of 247 Squadron’s poor accommodation we were viewed with mild pity by the other squadrons but we more than compensated for any disadvantage – which we didn’t really feel – by making our presence felt in the Mess and in the local area. It may of course simply have been coincidental that there was a particularly happy bunch of people on the squadron at the same time but it didn’t take much to spark a party. And every Saturday night started without fail with the pilots – including our NCO pilots – and all the wives and girlfriends, meeting in the King’s Arms in Odiham village, the pub that we had adopted as our own. And there were sorties to other pubs in the surrounding area sometimes ending in mild mishap, such as on the night twelve of us went out to a pub in the very ancient Rolls-Royce owned by Ian ‘Bungers’ Whittle, the highly intelligent but mildly impractical son of the man who had developed the jet engine in Britain, Sir Frank. On the way back Bungers somehow managed to drive off the narrow Hampshire byway we were on and into a flooded ditch. We had a few beers from the crate we were carrying for emergencies, and thought about how we might extricate the car. Only Ginger Bosley initially showed any initiative, spending about an hour in a nearby field unsuccessfully trying to persuade a horse to let him attach a towrope to it. In the end there was nothing for it but for eleven of us to get into the water up to our waists and shove.

In March 1957 the squadron began the process of re-equipping with the Hunter Mark 6. This aircraft was an improvement on the Mark 4 in several respects, the most significant being the introduction of hard points, ancillary pipe-work and wiring to enable four 100-gallon drop tanks to be carried. Two drop tanks instantly became the standard fit for routine flying on Mark 6 outfits, giving scope for longer sorties – hitherto, with the Mark 4, we seldom managed more than forty-five minutes at a time in the air.⁴

In April, in anticipation of a deployment to Cyprus scheduled for the end of June, we started flying long-range cross-country sorties with four drop tanks fitted. On landing from these, the fuel we had used was carefully recorded. The new B Flight commander, Brian Cox, slide-rule and graph-paper at the ready, took charge of the collation of the figures we produced, and as the results emerged, became increasingly enthused with the idea of making an attempt to fly from Odiham to Malta non-stop. This would have been, at the time, a record-breaking distance for the Hunter and, as it seemed well worth a try, a request for permission to do it went from the squadron up the chain of command to the Air Ministry.

In March, also, I reached the magic age of twenty-five at which I both qualified to receive Marriage Allowance and go on the Married Quarters List. As Married Quarters had never been provided in sufficient quantity to meet demand for them, and I had no hope of qualifying for one at Odiham, I set about looking for the next best thing, a Hiring – a rented property taken on by the Station for which the occupant paid a subsidised rent to the Government. I found a rather good flat in Odiham village and life began to look up. On 28 May Esmé gave birth to a daughter, Caroline, in the military hospital at Aldershot. She had a difficult birth, not a very pleasant time in the hospital, and was not at all happy about either the new baby or my coming absence with the squadron. Although we had moved out of our ancient hovel and closer to the Station, and she could therefore be more readily in contact with squadron wives, she decided that she would be happier with her parents while I was away. She knew and accepted that I had no grounds for trying to get out of the coming trip and put no pressure on me to do so. However, she was beginning to suffer from what I now know to have been post-natal depression, and it was not a good time to desert her. I was therefore more than relieved when her mother came over in the middle of June and took Esmé and baby under her wing and back to Belfast.

The first twelve of the squadron’s sixteen aircraft left Odiham for the Cyprus detachment towards the end of June. They were headed for RAF Nicosia, then the main airfield in Cyprus, landing for refuelling stops en route at the French Air Force base at Istres in the Rhone valley, and RAF Luqa in Malta. Four of us, with Brian Cox straining at the leash, waited behind for permission for the nonstop flight to Malta to come through.

For reasons that were not disclosed to us, permission was refused. We got the message late on a Friday afternoon – just before desks were cleared in London for the weekend. Perhaps the fuel consumption figures that we had assiduously collected were not accepted. Or perhaps it was thought that the Hunter’s lack of serious navigation equipment would make a flight with marginal fuel reserves imprudent. As we had nothing more than map, compass, stop-watch and a bit of equipment showing distance from ground beacons (where they existed), the DME, or Distance Measuring Equipment, and would have had to rely on the accuracy of the forecast wind strengths and direction plus, possibly, the odd steer from French Air Force radar, the Ministry’s lack of faith was not too difficult to understand. Brian was so annoyed by the refusal that he decided that instead of trying to break a record at high-level we would fly the Odiham to Istres leg of our flight to Cyprus at low-level.

We set off early the following morning, flying in battle formation at 250 feet, with me in the number four slot. The weather was perfect as we coasted out just east of Brighton, dropping even lower over the sea, creaming along at 360 knots, and feeling that this was the sort of thing that we had joined for. We hit the French coast to the west of Dieppe and sped on south-eastwards in bright sunshine and excellent visibility, not in the least concerned that we might be disturbing a multitude of French citizens enjoying a Saturday morning lie-in. Over the Puy de Dôme the visibility began to deteriorate and, dropping down into the Rhone valley we found ourselves in quite a thick haze, its effect made worse by the fact that we were looking into sun. I hoped that Brian knew exactly where we were as I was getting rather low on fuel by this stage. Istres is normally not difficult to spot as it is close to the western shore of a reasonably large body of water, the Etang de Berre. However, we didn’t see it and burst out over the Mediterranean at the mouth of the Rhone, the tail-end men slightly disorientated as we had just passed another body of water on our starboard side. Luckily Brian ignored that, turned port onto north, climbing a couple of thousand feet to make both visual and radio contact with Istres more practicable, and made both within the next few minutes. I should like to assume that he had as carefully calculated the feasibility of the low-level trip as he had the hoped for high-level one but, from the quantity of fuel put into our aircraft after we landed it was clear that three of us had touched down with little flying time left. We flew the remaining legs of the trip to Cyprus at high altitude, and without drama.

The next three months in Cyprus were a delight, with flying during the mornings and ‘dinghy drill’ as our excuse for driving up to Kyrenia in the afternoons, our revolvers strapped to our waists in case any EOKA terrorists attempted to interfere with our visits to the beach. The principal reason for our being on the Island was to maintain an air defence readiness state there and this involved us, in turn, spending hot hours in a stone-built, tin-roofed hut beside two armed aircraft on a remote part of Nicosia airfield. The flying itself provided an interesting departure from the normal routine at home with a number of army-cooperation exercises allowing us to become familiar with visual reconnaissance work and with simulated ground attacks. We were also introduced to air-to-ground firing. This was done, diving against 10 feet square targets, on an air-to-ground range on which Larnaca Airport has since been built. This was a highly satisfying exercise as it is a lot easier to put cannon shells into a static ground target than is the case with an airborne one. Unfortunately we had only a couple of live air-to-ground sorties each so our appetite for it was hardly satisfied. In fact, we didn’t do very well at all for firing practice on 247 Squadron: apart from the bit of air-to-ground in Cyprus, I had a total of just three air-to-air firing sorties during my time on the squadron – but enough to lift me to ‘Average’.

Between flying in the mornings (the working day was still the long-established British hot climate one of 0700 to 1300 hours, and the Airmen’s meal at 1300 hours was still referred to, as it had been in India, as ‘tiffin’), afternoon trips to Kyrenia, and evenings spent in the bar drinking brandy-sours at gloriously cheap duty-free prices, our time in Cyprus went by very pleasantly indeed. Initially, we didn’t venture out after dark for, although there was something of a lull in EOKA terrorist activities while we were there, going out at night was not recommended. However, as time passed and we persuaded ourselves that we were becoming aware of what was sensible and what was not, we became a little more venturesome. We went into town mostly in pursuit of a change from Mess food, and just occasionally to sample a cabaret that had been mentioned as worthwhile. Not that there was much in Nicosia to attract one to take risks; the food would hardly have won any culinary awards, and the nightlife was pretty downmarket. We did enjoy one cabaret, however, but that was because it featured, along with the usual performances by scantily clad ‘artistes’, a monkey on roller-skates, and only then because the monkey took exception to the Boss and bit him.

No. 54 Squadron replaced us in Cyprus in early October and we started home with mixed feelings. The flying had been varied and good, and most of the squadron had thoroughly enjoyed the detachment. I found a whole range of odd things appealing about it and, specifically, about Cyprus. For example: bringing my aircraft to readiness in the cool of the dawn and watching the sun spectacularly lighting the Kyrenia mountain range as it came up; relaxing with tea and a sticky bun in the Mad Hatter’s tea shop in Kyrenia at the end of an afternoon spent in the sea; the balmy warmth of the evenings; the scent of the local vegetation; and, in fact, just the middle-eastern foreignness of the place. However, it was time to get back to families and pick up again where we had left off.

The trip home was totally uneventful apart from a rather hairy descent into Malta through a cluster off towering thunderclouds, typical of that time of year in that part of the Mediterranean. As Luqa was unusable owing to strong crosswinds we had to land on the slightly shorter runway at the Naval Air Station at Hal Far – a runway which, I recall, started alarmingly close to the edge of a steep cliff. We stayed overnight in Malta, and took off in brilliant sunshine the following morning, refuelled at Istres, and set off on the final leg as a formation of fifteen (we had left one of our aircraft for 54 Squadron). The Boss’s aim was to arrive over Odiham in some style and we did so. We flew across the airfield a couple of times in three diamonds of four and a ‘vic’ of three in close formation line astern, finally running in for a ‘break’ in echelons line astern. Waiting to welcome us, and totally unmoved by our display of formation flying, was a clutch of seven customs officers who fell on us like hungry piranhas as soon as we taxied in.

We had heard before we went to Cyprus that the squadron was likely to be disbanded as part of the cuts presaged by the then Minister of Defence, Mr Duncan Sandys, in his 1957 Statement on Defence. Scientific advances, Mr Sandys had said, were going to ‘fundamentally alter the whole basis of military planning’. Missiles, he predicted, would in the future provide air power. Accordingly, provisions would be made for the V-force to be ‘supplemented by ballistic rockets’, and the fighter force would ‘in due course be replaced by a ground-to-air guided missile system’. I don’t recall that, at the time, any one of us was thinking much beyond how 247 Squadron’s demise was going to affect us personally. We were a happy, companionable bunch, who enjoyed being on the squadron, and the shared experiences of three summer months in Cyprus had made us wish all the more that life could continue as it was. Some even vainly hoped that what they saw as a very successful overseas deployment might be recognised as a reason for an eleventh hour reprieve. However, the Air Ministry was working on other considerations – factors such as the length of time each squadron had been in existence, whether or not it had been awarded Colours, where it was based, and so on. No. 247 Squadron was too far down the list to have any chance of survival as a flying unit. By the end of December the Duncan Sandys Axe, as the culling instrument came to be known, was swung against us and the squadron ceased to be.

We were not alone in getting the chop. The process had started in March with the disbandment of all twenty RAuxAF flying squadrons. This was followed by a progressive reduction in the twenty-eight RAF fighter squadrons that had constituted the strength of Fighter Command at the beginning of 1957. The same happened to the twenty-three RAF fighter squadrons in 2TAF.⁵ By 1962, when the situation had stabilised somewhat, the number of fighter squadrons left in Fighter Command and in RAF Germany was eleven and five⁶ respectively.

There was initially quite a number of redundant fighter pilots, many of whom found themselves posted to jobs that made no sense of the cost of their training, such as those of Married Families agents on Stations, or range safety officers at remote bombing ranges. I was very lucky to be posted to another flying appointment, albeit not one that I would have asked for under more fortuitous circumstances: target-towing on Meteors at Chivenor.

Esmé and I had made a wide circle of friends at Odiham, both on and off the Station and I was sorry that she was not present for the squadron’s final few weeks. The farewells were numerous and prolonged, and just a little sad. However, following the squadron’s disbandment parade and final formal guest night, there was nothing for it but to pack up and depart on our various ways. Mr Sandys had seriously disturbed the even tenor of a happy existence.