Appendix 4
Readers may find the goings-on at Wearsby’s Christmas party (p. 180) implausibly exaggerated. If so, they should consult ex-members of the RAF of that generation who are temporarily prepared to sacrifice loyalty for honesty. These now staid and often respectable members of society will probably be able to give accounts of similar occasions, perhaps including the Dining-In Night on an RAF station in the Middle East during which the officers’ mess was set on fire and gutted. They will almost certainly have heard of the most notorious of them all, the legendary 1 Group Dining-In Night.
This took place at Waddington in 1965 and was vastly bigger than the event at Wearsby. Virtually the entire V-force’s crews were present, some 750 guests in all. It is still not clear what the idea behind this grand occasion was but it is presumed that the Air Officer Commanding 1 Group at the time, Air Vice-Marshal Stapleton, thought it would be a way of congratulating and even thanking the V-force for its dedication and success. What officialdom completely underestimated was the depth of feeling among the men: the smouldering grievances caused by the rigid and often petty regulations that governed practically every aspect of their lives; the endless QRAs and target study; and the feeling that things might drag on indefinitely thus – or as long as the nuclear stalemate lasted.
A great many of the diners at Waddington had arrived already drunk and armed with bangers and other fireworks, some eager to settle old scores with members of rival squadrons. Sir Harry Broadhurst, a former Air Officer Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, was a guest of honour even though he had retired from the RAF four years previously and was therefore technically a civilian. As he walked in to take his seat at the top table he was loudly hissed, a breach of manners that must have been shocking to many of those present, and savagely so to Sir Harry. ‘Broady’ had once been a popular senior officer; but this popularity was irrevocably – if unfairly – damaged as the result of the Vulcan crash at Heathrow in 1956 when he quite rightly ejected to safety. It was not his fault that the four men in the compartment behind the cockpit did not have ejector seats. However, for this final leg of the celebratory flight – which was due to be met at Heathrow with a good deal of pomp and ceremony – he had insisted on swapping places with the aircraft’s usual co-pilot, who had to go and sit behind. Visibility was poor, with rain and heavy overcast, and on a final approach in such conditions it was customary for the man in the right-hand seat to call out the altitude while the pilot flying concentrated on his other instruments and on picking up the beacons at the end of the runway visually. In the aftermath of the accident many airmen argued that had the usual co-pilot been in the cockpit the disaster might never have happened. ‘Broady’ was not only inexperienced on type; he wasn’t calling out the heights. The result was that the pilot, Squadron Leader Donald Howard, must have been made additionally tense by the weather conditions, the restricted vision from the cockpit that all Vulcans shared, and from having the chief of Bomber Command sitting next to him. Instead of aborting and diverting to a backup airfield where conditions were better, he evidently decided to go ahead and risk a landing. Fatally misjudging his approach, he touched down in a field of Brussels sprouts 600 yards short of the runway.
All the crew who died in XA897 at Heathrow that day had been Waddington men, which probably contributed to ‘Broady’’s reception at the 1 Group Dining-In Night there nine years later. Thereafter the dinner swiftly and famously descended into total anarchy, so much damage being done that reparations eventually had to be levied from all 750 guests via their mess bills.