Arriving at their first posts, the newly qualified pilots learned quickly that henceforth everything would centre on the squadron. It became the focus of their professional and their social lives. Nothing could be more exciting than flying and no one could be more fun to be with than ones fellow fighter pilots. It was a wonderful time for most of us, remembered John Nicholas, who joined 65 Squadron in December 1937. It was very pleasant to be with a number of young men of ones own age, most of whom believed in the same things.33 Some of the pre-expansion pilots had worried that the influx would dilute the clubby character of the old organization and dissolve its tenderly guarded esprit de corps. Peter Townsend, a sensitive, reflective career officer who had passed out of Cranwell as the Prize Cadet, returned to Britain to join 43 Squadron in June 1937 after a posting to the Far Bast, to find that gone were the halcyon days of the best flying club in the world Tangmere was now peopled by strange faces, different people with a different style. I resented the new generation of pilots who had answered the RAFs urgent appeal and found heaven-sent relief from boring civilian jobs.34 Townsend accepted, almost immediately, that these feelings were unworthy. In a subsequent mea culpa he admitted that my prejudices against them were ignoble, for they were soon to become the most generous-hearted friends, then, a little later, die, most of them, for England. The reasoning was, anyway, wrong. At any time in the years before the run-up to the expansion programme, a majority of officers in the admittedly much smaller RAF were serving on short-service commissions.
The newcomers took to the existing traditions quickly, offering no serious challenge to the way things were done. Many were familiar with the routines of sport, joviality and boisterous high spirits from school days. Most of the short-service commission pilots entering in the expansion years had a public-school background of one sort or another. Roland Beamont was at Eastbourne College, Geoffrey Page at Dean Close, Cheltenham, Paddy Barthropp went to Ampleforth and Arthur Banham to the Perse School, Cambridge. Bob Tuck attended a small fee-paying day school, St Dunstans at Catford, and Pete Brothers a similar establishment, North Manchester School. Billy Drake, James Saunders and John Nicholas were educated abroad. Pat Hancock went to a day school in Croydon before moving to the technical college. Dennis David had been to a boarding school in Deal before changing to Surbiton County School. Of the Cranwellians, Tim Vigors had been at Eton and Brian Kingcome at Bedford.
Most of the entrants, even if they had not been to a proper public school, knew something of the ethos, if only from the pages of the Magnet and the Gem. Bob Doe, a secondary-school boy, felt out of place. Of his fellow short-service entrants he was probably the poorest of the lot. I hadnt done all the things other people had done. I felt very much an outsider. I was very shy as well, which didnt help. They were friendly enough but I always felt I was inferior.35 The barriers were lowered when he was invited to club together with three others to buy a Hispano-Suiza saloon for £20, this enabling them to go on occasional forays into Cheltenham, twelve miles from Little Rissington, where they were based.
The overseas entrants had little difficulty fitting in. Their status as colonials put them beyond the rigid categorizations of the British class system. Desmond Sheens father was a plasterer, but he found at 72 Squadron that everyone got on, with a lot of hilarity and a lot of fun, extremely well. There was no conflict. There was a lot of taking the mickey out of each other, but it was all very friendly. They were all good sports.36
Being a good sport was the essential quality in fitting in. Taken literally, it meant that athletic ability would count in a pilots favour, a factor which benefited the outdoorsy arrivals from the Empire. Deere found that the natural reserve of all Englishmen gave way to a more friendly approach after a game of rugby in which New Zealanders took on the rest, beating the English pilots by a colossal score. He was a boxer who had taken part in the New Zealand amateur championships. He was reluctant to don the gloves again, but was persuaded to do so by a senior officer who advised him it would be good for his career. The abbreviation of a first name, the bestowal of a nickname, signalled you were in. Alan quickly became Al.
Being a good sport, however, went beyond the observance of the conventions, attitudes and observances of middle-class males of the time. A mood of tolerance prevailed so that individuality, even eccentricity, was prized. The business of aerial warfare meant that the type of military discipline applied to soldiers and sailors was not appropriate for airmen. Junior officers addressed their squadron superiors as sir on the initial meeting of the day. After that it was first names. Once in combat in the air, everyone was essentially on their own and beyond the orders of a commander. Good pilots, anyway, succeeded by initiative and making their own decisions.
From the earliest days on the Western Front, pilots took a relaxed view of military conventions and often displayed a sceptical attitude towards senior officers, though seldom with their own immediate commanders if they had earned their respect. Pomposity was ruthlessly punished and shyness discouraged. Coy newcomers learned that a certain amount of leg-pulling and practical joking was the price of belonging. Deere, like all new arrivals, spent his first few weeks at 54 Squadron at Hornchurch doing dogsbody tasks like overseeing the pay and clothing parades. He was also required to check the navigation inventory and found to his concern that an item called the Oxometer was missing. On informing his flight commander, he was told that this was a very serious matter and the station commander might have to be notified if it was not found. It was some days before he realized that no such item of equipment existed and that it was a trick played on all new pilots and one in which everyone from the station commander down participated.37 The joke took on a further refinement when a particularly earnest pilot officer was told that the missing Oxometer had been found. A fake instrument was rigged up and the relieved officer invited to blow in it to check it was working, which resulted in him being sprayed with soot.
The boisterous and extrovert tone of squadron life disguised a level of consideration and fellow feeling that perhaps marked out the RAF from the other services. The testimony of survivors, and what little was written down by those who died, is imbued with an overwhelming affection for fellow pilots and for the units in which they served. The camaraderie that came with membership of a fighter squadron appears to have provided a degree of spiritual sustenance, augmenting the warmth of an absent family or making those with dislocated backgrounds feel they had arrived at a place where they belonged. The simple cheeriness that was the Fighter Boys chosen style masked some complicated stories. Geoffrey Pages parents were separated. His father frightened him and he resented his miserly attitude toward his mother. Dennis David was brought up by his mother after his father, who drank and had financial troubles, abandoned the family when he was eight. Brian Kingcomes mother had returned to England with her children, leaving her husband to continue working in India. He returned only once every two and a half years. As Kingcome was at boarding school, he barely saw his son during his childhood and adolescence.
The modern assumption is that such experiences must leave a mark. Feeling sorry for oneself lay outside the range of emotions allowed to adolescents in Britain in the 1930s. Kingcome admired and respected his largely absent father. Paddy Barthropps mother died in childbirth, a tragedy that meant his father resented my very existence almost up to the time of his own death in 1953. I never blamed him. At Ampleforth one day in 1936 a school bully approached me to say that it would be a good idea if I read page four of The Times in the school library. There it was for all to see In the High Court of Bankruptcy, Elton Peter Maxwell DArley Barthroppthe fact that one was skint was not acceptable and carried a long-lasting social stigmathe next few days were the most embarrassing of my life. He was farmed out to a step-grandfather, extremely rich and very nasty, among whose many possessions was the Gresford Colliery near Wrexham. On hearing that there had been a disaster at the mine killing 264 miners, the old man replied that he didnt want to be disturbed. He disgusted me.38 Barthropp eventually got an apprenticeship with Rover Cars in Coventry before deciding to join the RAF after a visit to the Hendon Air Display.
Barthropp was hopeless academically. He failed the school certificate five times, and only scraped through his RAF board by gaining a phoney pass from a crammer. Roland Beamont also failed his school certificate and had to resort to coaching to get the qualification he needed to be eligible for a short-service commission. Denys Gillam, who joined the RAF on a short-service commission in 1935, had been kicked out of his prep school, then his public school, Wrekin College, for drinking and exam irregularities. He later joined 616 Squadron and commanded two fighter squadrons. Against the wisdom of the pre-war days his preferred pilots were non-athletic men between the ages of eighteen to twenty-three, who had better resilience to stress than the successful rugger player or his equivalentall the best pilots that I knew tended to be rather weedy, though there were exceptions. The best pilot were ones that hadnt had much success in other spheres and were determined to succeed. Teaching a course to a class of wing commanders later in his career, he discovered that out of a group of twelvefour had been thrown out of their school before they left. This was, I think, fairly typical.39 Kingcome was to deliver the opinion later that, Fortunately for us, and, I believe, for the RAF in that generation, there were [no]psychological and aptitude tests, which would have failed a majority of candidates for short-service and permanent commissions and I suspect might have cost us the Battle of Britain.40
Expansion increased the flow of men from the lower reaches of the RAF into the ranks of the fliers as candidates were selected from among the ground crews to serve as sergeant pilots. Of the 2,500 pilots originally sought to man the new aircraft and squadrons, 800 were found from among those already serving as aircraftmen or non-commissioned officers. The RAF apprentice schemes allowed a trickle of fitters, riggers and other tradesmen to receive flying training, on the understanding that they would return to their trades after five years. There were also two places set aside for the top performers at Halton to go on to Cranwell to take up a cadetship. Many, perhaps most, apprentices had dreams of flying. Realizing them was difficult. There was an obvious necessity to maintain the supply of highly skilled, expensively trained ground staff to keep the service flying and prevent apprenticeships from turning into a back-door route to a career as a pilot. None the less, in the pre-expansion years, some of the keenest and most talented felt themselves baulked by what was supposed to be a system that worked on merit. George Unwin was brought up in South Yorkshire, where his father was a miner. His mother encouraged his education and he won a scholarship to Wath Grammar School, and aged sixteen passed his Northern Universities matriculation exam. There was no money for him to take up a place. The only work on offer was down the pit. When, a month before he was due to leave, his headmaster showed him an RAF recruiting pamphlet, he decided to join up.
Unwin chose the Ruislip administrative apprentice school rather than the technical school at Halton, as the course there was two rather than three years. It was a spartan life. The food was horrible. They seemed to live on gristly mutton rissoles, and food parcels from the outside world were eagerly received. They shaved in cold water and lived twenty to a billet. Unwin initially had no thoughts of flying, but the sights and sounds of the aerodrome kindled his ambition. After passing out in 1931 as a leading aircraftman, the minimum rank to qualify for pilot training, he applied, but discovered that only one per cent per six months was taken.
He repeated the process twice a year without success. I was getting a bit fed up at not being accepted. I had everything else. I was playing for the RAF at soccer, and that was one of the things you had to be, to be very good at sport. I couldnt understand why I wasnt being selected. You went through a very, very tedious process. First of all you saw your flight commander, then your CO, and then your station commander. If you got past him you saw the air officer commanding. Id reached the point when I was going to see the AOC and I was getting desperate. At the time it was Air Vice-Marshal J. E. A. Baldwin, who loved polo and kept his own polo ponies. Unwin decided that when the inevitable question about hobbies came up at the interview, he would be prepared. I said horse riding. He pricked up his ears and said, Really? I said, Of course, I cant afford it down here, but the local farmer at home has a pony and lets me ride it. The only time Id ridden a pony or anything on four legs was in the General Strike when the pit ponies were brought up and put in fields. I was thirteen and we used to catch them and jump on their bare backs and go haring down the field until we fell off.41
It worked. He was on the next course. It was 1935, four years after he first applied. In August 1936 he was posted to 19 Squadron at Duxford as a sergeant pilot, where his flight commander was Flight Lieutenant Harry Broadhurst, an ex-army officer who had joined the RAF in 1926 and flew in the campaigns against unruly tribesmen on Indias North-West Frontier. Broadhurst had played a large part in building the squadrons reputation for flying excellence, which had won it many trophies, and he was regarded as the best shot in the RAF.
Unwin, despite his background, fitted relatively easily into the squadron. His best friend was another ex-apprentice whom he had met on the flying course, Harry Steere, who had gone to Halton from his secondary school in Wallasey in 1930. The two were to fly together for six out of the next seven years. Unwin found that 19 Squadrons competitive streak was compatible with a relaxed approach to duty. You didnt fly Saturdays, ever. You could take an aeroplane away for a weekend any time you liked. You used to fly away for lunch. You were encouraged to do this because it helped your map-reading. There were no aids at all, so you [navigated] visually. Radio telephony wouldnt work more than three miles from the aerodrome and then the background noise was so terrific you couldnt hear anything anyone was saying. On annual exercises at Catterick, Unwin would take his aircraft and buzz his home village of Bolton Upon Dearne.
Making the transition from ground to air was a hit-and-miss affair and required the patronage of an interested senior officer. Ronald Brown left Halton in 1932 to be posted to the RAF station attached to Cranwell, where he worked as a fitter overhauling the engines of the aircraft on which the cadets at the college were taught to fly. Every morning the instructors would have a ten-minute flight to check the aircraft was safe for the cadets, and as they were dual-control aircraft we were able to jump in the back or the front. Inevitably that meant we were allowed to fly the plane with them, and long before I went on a pilots course I was looping and rolling aeroplanes to my hearts delight every morning.