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We were relieved by the 16th Lancers. I had been convinced from what I’d heard while I was listening in the watches of the night, that the Germans were sapping under our trenches and so I reported to my commanding officer. He reported to brigade and nothing happened. The night after we left, the Germans blew a mine under the very trenches we had been in. And it cost the lives of five or six 16th Lancer officers and about twenty men, partly in a futile counter-attack which ensued from this episode.
Shortly after this, a circular came round all cavalry divisions asking for lightweight – specified lightweight – officers to become observers in the Royal Flying Corps. It came at a very opportune moment for me.
For Walter Ostler, the flying services offered an alternative to the trenches:
I well remember, one night, I was in a very crowded tramcar, going home from Finsbury Park to Wood Green. This lady – if I may call her so – simply pushed up alongside me and stuck this white feather in my buttonhole, much to my embarrassment. It was time to think about service in one of the Forces. For me, it was the Royal Flying Corps because the thing I wanted to avoid most of all was the Army and trench life in France. I’d spoken to soldiers returning from France during the winter of 1914 and they had two words for life out there: ‘Bloody awful.’
T. E. Rogers was an officer who had spent too long in the trenches:
I knew what war was like. I had seen death – too much of it. When I left the trenches, my brother officers said ‘Good heavens, haven’t you seen enough planes come down in flames?’ I said, ‘Yes, but haven’t you seen enough death in trenches?’ With flying, it would soon be over if you’d come to the end of your life. You didn’t have to sleep in mud, night after night, day after day, in mud and water.
When R. J. Duce’s wounds prevented him from continuing in the infantry, he saw the Flying Corps as an opportunity to continue the fight. The path that led him to the RFC began many thousands of miles from France:
I had been in India with one of the merchant banks before the war, and during my five years there, I had joined the equivalent of the territorial force. We were fully trained, to the extent that we were better armed with the Lee Enfields rifle than the British army in England. When the war started, after a little while, a notice came in the clubs, from the Inns of Court Officers Training Corps, asking if we would come home and join, and be commissioned into the British army. I asked the bank if I could go, and they told me that there were other people, senior to me, who should have the choice before me. I pointed out that these people weren’t going. They said that I couldn’t go, but I was going to go, anyway.
I didn’t expect to come out of the war alive. I had been living on the North-West Frontier, up near the Khyber Pass, and I had a lot of nice books and various other things, and I gave them all away, I had the idea, as did a lot of my friends, that I shouldn’t come through it, but I was of a very religious turn of mind, so it didn’t bother me.
I went down to Karachi, and I shipped on board a Japanese boat as a purser. There were forty-nine Chinese crew, six Japanese officers, and an English captain. I paid the captain six shillings a day for my food, and I got one shilling pay when I got to England. The bank sent my resignation after me. Just after I arrived in England, I was stopped, and asked, ‘What about joining up, young man?’ I said, ‘I’ve just come six thousand miles! Give me a chance!’
In the end, I didn’t join the Inns of Court, I joined the Artists Rifles. I was fully trained, so myself and three others, one from India and two from South Africa, were put on as orderlies in the sergeants’ mess. We waited so well on the sergeants that they were delighted. But we wouldn’t take that on permanently. Next, I was made an officer’s servant. Considering that I’d come from India where I’d had eleven servants, it was rather amusing. But then, I was commissioned into the 20th London, Royal West Kent Regiment. In due course, I went out to France.
On my first day in the line, I was on duty – and I remember looking over and seeing that the Germans were shelling from an armoured train that ran along a track. I was so interested to watch the shells suddenly appear like a panther approaching. You could see the shells coming over the last five yards. There was a young fellow there, named Atkins, and I chatted to him for some time. He said to me, ‘Yes, sir, this is my first time in the line.’ And then I walked about twenty yards away from him, to our company dugout, and I looked round, and in that second, a shell came over right on top of him, and the blast blew me down into the dugout. It was quite a first experience.
A while later, we sent over a party of twenty men, their faces blacked, to do a raid. A couple were officers, a few were NCOs and the rest were Tommies. I was in the front line, and a heavy barrage opened up, from behind our second line. We had to keep our heads down in the trench. Then, suddenly the Germans started shelling as well, for all they were worth. Something came down and hit my tin helmet, knocking it off. I picked up the helmet, put it back on, and one second later, something else hit it, and knocked it off again. It showed the value of these helmets. Once the shelling had stopped, we found a strange thing in the back of the trench: one of our own shells had hit a German shell in mid-air, and come down straight behind us in the trench. It should have burst – but it hadn’t.
I don’t know that I ever felt frightened – because I was too dedicated a patriot. And the finest patriot you can get is the Englishman living abroad. Having said that, I remember one incident – we were in France and I was in billets. I had a room by myself, and I woke up in the night to find that I was half hanging out of a dormer window. In my sleep, with the nerves that I must have had, I had thought that I’d been climbing out of the dugout.
At the end of June 1916, we marched down to the Somme. We were detailed to go over the top, in an attack on High Wood. I had No. 5 Platoon, B Company, and we were detailed to go all the way through. I was darned annoyed because I was going over first. We were to go over at 3.15 on Sunday afternoon, and while I was waiting, there was nothing to do but go to sleep, and I found that I was able to sleep at the side of the trench. When we went over, I was quite fortunate. Of the three officers of my company, two were killed and I was only wounded. Out of 480 men, 160 were killed, 160 were wounded and 160 got through. It was rather extraordinary. As I was stepping over the wire, I was shot straight through the foot, which knocked me down. If I’d put my foot down before, I’d have got it right through the knee. I laid out there for some hours, and then as I started to crawl back, parallel to the German line, a German came over the top, and stood, looking out, holding his machine gun. I just had to freeze. I can tell you, it’s quite a nervous tension to lie there for ten minutes, without moving, so that he thinks you’re a dead body. Gradually, I turned my head round to look, and saw that he had gone, and I crawled back. As I was crawling back, I followed a small trench, in which I came across a dead man. All I could do was crawl straight over him. It wasn’t a pleasant thing.
When I got back to the UK, I was on crutches, and I realized that I would be lame for a while, so I went into the Royal Flying Corps headquarters, and saw them. I said that I wanted to transfer to the Royal Flying Corps, and I was abruptly told to clear off, and come back when I hadn’t got crutches. I was then offered a job with Motor Transport, but I said no. I’d come all the way from India, and I didn’t want to take on a non-combatant role. So I put in again for the Royal Flying Corps and this time, I was accepted pretty quickly. I was given instructions to report to Edin, near St Pol, and I was sent to 98 Squadron.
William Berry, some way down the social order, was so keen to join the Flying Corps, that he accepted the only job available:
I didn’t think about volunteering straight away when war broke out. I rather fancy my parents were against it. They didn’t want me going out and getting killed. There were lots of posters up. Kitchener with a finger pointing, Kitchener wants you. There were all the recruiting meetings in Trafalgar Square with Horatio Bottomley very much to the fore. There were also recruiting sergeants who stopped you in the street and I was quite frequently stopped: ‘A young fellow like you, why aren’t you in the army?’ sort of thing. That was the general line, which was quite true, and I resented it very much because I really wanted to volunteer, but my parents weren’t very amenable. They were very patriotic, but in those days you obeyed what your parents told you, and I wasn’t twenty-one years old.
Then one day, I happened to go to the cinema in Croydon, and one of the newsreels showed a house in Belgium. There were German soldiers knocking in all the windows with the butts of their rifles. They then set the house on fire because it was in the way of their guns. I was very upset at this. I sympathized, and I thought, ‘Right! I am going to do something about it!’ So I wrote to the Royal Flying Corps at Farnborough.
I had had a pre-war interest in going to Hendon and seeing all the early pioneers. If you saw an aeroplane in those days, it was quite something. Flying, I thought, was the coming thing, and the RFC was open again for recruits. Directly the Flying Corps was opened, in about five minutes, it was full up, as they’d got all the recruits they wanted. They had no difficulty getting recruits of a good calibre who knew their trades and knew what they were doing. I wrote and said I wanted to enlist and I got a letter back immediately, saying that they would welcome me as a wireless operator, and would I go to the recruiting centre in Farnborough?
So I went to the recruiting centre and they said, ‘I’m sorry, you can’t join the Royal Flying Corps, it’s closed.’ I said, ‘That’s impossible, I’ve got this letter from them!’ and they said, ‘It closed this morning! You’re too late! Why don’t you join the local regiment, the Seventh King’s Royal Rifles?’ As my father had been in the ‘Shiny 7th’, I thought, ‘Well, that’s an idea.’ So I got the recruiting form and got three-quarters of the way through it when I thought, ‘No! I’m going to join the Flying Corps!’ I tore up the form and put it in the wastepaper basket.
I told the Recruiting Major that I was very disappointed that I’d got his letter but that now I couldn’t join, and he was very much impressed with the trouble I’d taken to get all that way from London to Farnborough. He said, ‘We are short of cooks. Have you ever done any cooking?’ I said, ‘I really can’t say I’m a cook, but to get into the Flying Corps, I’m willing to take it on.’ He said, ‘Right! Hold up your hand!’ I was sworn in, and I was a recruit and I spent that night at the recruits’ barracks at Farnborough.
Leslie Murton joined out of a desire to exact revenge:
I was born in Magdalen Street, Norwich, in my grandfather’s shop. My father was one of the finest turned shoemakers there ever was. One of the fastest. My eldest brother was a printer at the Eastern Daily Press. The next brother to him, Bertie, was training to be a hotel manager in London. Another brother, Sidney, was a motor mechanic.
I left school at fourteen, in the year that war broke out. At the time, it didn’t mean much to me. But one day I came home from school, and my mum told me to read this letter. She could never read or write. It was from my brother in London. He said the girls were putting white feathers in his cap as he walked through the streets. He said he couldn’t stand it, so he’d enlisted in the King’s Royal Rifles. At the same time, my eldest brother had enlisted in the 7th Norfolks. Well, after a period, my brother in London said he couldn’t stand the London people, they were rough to him, and in those days, you could transfer from one regiment to another, provided you had relations in the new regiment. So he transferred to the 7th Norfolks to be with his brother.
A little later, Sidney was sent straight to France as a transport driver. When he was there, he was sent down to the docks, where he met the regiments coming in, and he ran into my two brothers in the 7th Norfolks. He told me later that he’d said to them, ‘Thing is, I won’t see either of you two again.’ And he was true to his word. On 13 October 1915, the two of them were killed side by side.
When we got the news from the War Office, I had to go to my father’s place of business. I told him. He took his apron off, threw it down. I can see him now. He’d been a teetotaller for years but he said, ‘I’ll never come back till I’ve spent every penny.’ And my dad never came back to work again, until he’d drank his money away. And after that, my poor old mother tried to do something to herself, but she was saved. You can understand it, can’t you, when you lose two young boys of that age? It affected me as well. When I was old enough, I was going to get my own back.
From the time my brothers died, my mother put a memorial, every year, in the Eastern Evening News, where my brother had been a printer. One day, a man came to my office, where I was working, and said, ‘Excuse me, Mr Murton. Could I ask you a question?’ ‘Certainly,’ I said. ‘I see in the paper, last night, there was a memorial to the Murton brothers.’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I would like to know whether you’re a relation,’ he asked. ‘Matter of fact,’ I said, ‘they’re my two brothers, who were killed.’ ‘What I want you to know,’ he said, ‘is that I buried one of them. I was a stretcher bearer at the time, in France, in the 7th Norfolks, and I buried him, but the other one, his brother, was blown to pieces.’ And that’s the tragedy of my two brothers.
In the later part of 1915, the Royal Flying Corps formed a boys’ section. I was sixteen, and I forged my mother’s signature, and went up to Britannia barracks, where I was sworn in, and they told me that a month before I was seventeen, I would hear from them. And I did.
When I got called up, one evening, two military policemen came to my house with a warrant and said, ‘Leslie Murton?’ and my mother said, ‘Yes!’ because I was out with the boys. They said that I had to catch such and such a train tomorrow to London and then another to Aldershot, for the Royal Flying Corps. Next day, I took the train to Liverpool Street Station. I’d never been further than Yarmouth in my lifetime!
So at Liverpool Street, I got off the train and there was a policeman, and I said, ‘Excuse me, old chap, how do I get on the Underground?’ So he told me where to go. I followed his directions, until I saw a dustman, who was sweeping up the horse manure. I said to him, ‘Excuse me, where’s the Underground?’ ‘Down there!’ he said, pointing down some steps. ‘Look, old chap,’ I said, ‘I may have just come from the country, but I’m not daft enough to go down there! You’re trying to send me down the toilet!’ I thought he was. I’d never seen the Underground before. So he took me down and I got the train and went off to Aldershot. When I got there, I was really hungry, so I went out into the street, to a fried fish shop. I got some fish and chips, and just as I opened the paper to eat some, I saw my fish and chips going up in the air. Two military police had kicked it out of my hands. ‘You don’t do that here!’ one of them said. I was in the services now.
Those who joined the other ranks of the Royal Flying Corps often considered themselves a cut above the humble infantryman. Cecil King:
Everyone who joined the Royal Flying Corps in the other ranks held some trade or other, whereas the men in the general regiments – they might be anyone. All us recruits in the RFC had some kind of training or apprenticeship; we actually had to pass a trade test before we got in. And therefore we considered ourselves a bit superior to the infantry and cavalry who may have come from any walk of life. We also got more pay than they did and when they found that out, they were a little bit jealous.
George Eddington was not a born soldier:
The Flying Corps interested me because the army was rather a brutal affair full of big hefty Irishmen and that type of person. I was neither that way disposed nor that way built. It didn’t attract me a bit. I was a tradesman rather than a soldier, so the Flying Corps sounded attractive.
The Great War was a time of intense patriotism in the British colonies. Frank Burslem was born and raised in Trinidad, but he considered himself as British as any man born in the British Isles:
I thought that any enemy of England was an enemy of mine and I wanted to be in the war. When I was sixteen years old in 1917, I was six foot two tall, and I knew that there was a ship going from Trinidad to England with eight vacant berths. Local merchants paid for the berths and sent eight young fellows who wanted to join the army over to England. My father allowed me to go, but when he gave me my birth certificate, he told me I was to do some kind of war work like munitions or working the land. But when I got to England, I never showed my birth certificate to anybody. I told them that I was three years older than I really was, and I joined the army. I had no difficulty going against my father’s wishes – I was a patriotic youth and I wanted to be in it.
When we arrived in England, the eight of us went to New Scotland Yard, where we saw a fatherly sergeant and told him we wanted to join the army – and he put us in. Being volunteers, we had a choice of what service or regiment to go for. As the other fellows were going into the Artists Rifles, that’s what I chose too.
I went to the basic training camp at Gidea Park, but I didn’t like it very much. The marching was so strenuous and I found it numbed and cramped the muscles in my thighs and calves. I stood it for a week, but after that I reported ill, and went before the doctor. He expected somebody ‘swinging the lead’. He asked what the matter was, and I said, ‘Anchhylostomiasis, sir.’ ‘Good God, what’s that?’ he asked. It was hookworm. I told him that just before leaving Trinidad, the Rockefeller Foundation had tested me and discovered that I had hookworm. I knew that I still had it. It meant that I wasn’t strong enough to do the strenuous work in the infantry. So they sent me to hospital and gave me the remedy. After that I was cured, and I went back to the regiment, where I could stand the drill. But by now, I’d seen what life in the infantry was like, and I thought it would be better for me if I didn’t do that kind of work. As they didn’t form fours, or anything like that, I changed my papers for a commission in the RFC.
Stanley Walters had problems reaching Britain from Rhodesia:
I did my damnedest to join the Royal Flying Corps, but I hadn’t got any money to get to England. Eventually, I persuaded somebody to let me go in and see the manager of the Union Castle Company. He asked what I wanted to see him about. I said, ‘I want to join the Royal Flying Corps!’ ‘How praiseworthy,’ he said, ‘how commendable, what have I got to do with that?’ ‘I can’t get to England!’ I said. ‘How disappointed you must be,’ he said. I slid off the chair and went away. Six weeks later, at three o’clock in the afternoon, I got a message. The Land Steffen Castle sails at six o’clock. I could go in her as an assistant purser. He didn’t call my bluff. I made it. I got to England with one golden sovereign so I was compelled to join the Royal Flying Corps immediately on my arrival.
Frederick Powell was stuck in an infantry regiment with no immediate prospect of joining the fight. He knew nothing of flying. He merely saw the Royal Flying Corps as a passport to France:
In November 1914, a circular came round to our battalion asking for volunteers to be an observer for the Royal Flying Corps. I didn’t know what I was volunteering for; my only interest was to get out to France. There was no sense of my wanting to fly, but my regiment seemed to have no chance of getting out to France before Christmas. One point is that, at the time, an observer’s weight had to be ten stone or less, so when I got down to ten stone, I was transferred to the Royal Flying Corps.
They had asked for one officer from each battalion, and there were two of us who wanted to volunteer; a man named Knowles was top of the list, and I was second. They only wanted one, but Knowles told me that he didn’t really want to volunteer because he was engaged to a girl. So if we were asked for one from each battalion, he would stand down. In point of fact, when the moment arrived, he did not stand down; he went. But by great good luck, they asked for another officer from our battalion, so I went too.
Even though I went as an observer, after I had been there two days, I was put down as an orderly officer, which meant that I had to go and report to the adjutant at six o’clock in the evening, and sleep in his office all night, in case the telephone went.
As I reported to the adjutant, the colonel called him into his office. The adjutant went, leaving the door ajar. I didn’t want to eavesdrop but I heard the adjutant say, ‘We’ve got another officer called Knowles, who’s been posted to us.’ The colonel said, ‘Is he an observer or a pilot?’ The adjutant said, ‘An observer.’ The colonel said, ‘Oh, we don’t want any more observers! We’ve got nothing but observers!’ The adjutant said, ‘Well, what shall I do with him?’ The colonel said, ‘Send him back to his regiment!’ And that was the end of Knowles. It frightened me, so that first thing in the morning, I reported to the adjutant and said, ‘Is there any chance, sir, of me being able to learn to fly, to become a pilot?’ I thought he was going to say, ‘Oh no, certainly not!’ but to my astonishment, he said, ‘Really? Do you want to become a pilot?’ ‘Yes sir,’ I said. ‘Oh, good lad! Then start away. We’ll put you down as a pilot!’
Arthur Harris, a man who was to achieve notoriety as commander-in-chief of Bomber Command during the Second World War, used his connections to jump the queue into the oversubscribed Royal Flying Corps:
I went round to the War Office where I was interviewed by a rather supercilious young man. When I said I would like to fly, he said, ‘So would six thousand other people. Would you like to be six thousand and one on the waiting list?’ So I retired rather disgruntled and when I got back, my father had just returned from India. When I told him what had happened, he said, ‘Why didn’t you go and see your Uncle Charlie?’ I had many uncles. I didn’t know who or what or where Uncle Charlie was but my father gave me a note and I went back to the War Office. When I handed the note addressed to Uncle Charlie to the same supercilious young fellow, he said, ‘Oh, please sit down a minute, sir!’ which was rather a change from the day before. He came back about ten minutes later and he said, ‘Colonel Elliot is in conference and unable to see you at the moment but if you will report to Number 2 Reserve Squadron at Brooklands this evening you can start flying.’
Ernest Tomkins, from a humble background, demonstrated that ambition and enthusiasm could defeat social disadvantage:
I asked how I could get into the Flying Corps. I was mad on flying. ‘Not a hope!’ said my brother, ‘You’d have to apply for a commission.’ ‘That’ll do’ I said. ‘Don’t be stupid,’ he said. ‘You haven’t got a certificate of education.’ But he had a word with our CO, who agreed to get in touch with a schoolmaster who’d give me a test. So I took this test – I did some arithmetic and I wrote an essay on a subject I liked. About a month afterwards, I was sent in front of an Air Commodore. I was only eighteen – no age – and he had his staff with him and he said, ‘You’re applying to become an officer. Do you think you’re old enough to become an officer and a gentleman of the British army?’ I said, ‘Yes, sir,’ and I was marched outside. After everyone had been interviewed, the sergeant called out, ‘3659 Private Tomkins’. I took three paces forward and the Air Commodore was very friendly. He said, ‘You’re very interested in flying?’ I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ He had the essay that I’d written in front of him, called ‘The use of aircraft in modern warfare’. He complimented me on it and asked me questions about flying and engines. He said, ‘What makes an aeroplane fly?’ I said, ‘Air has weight. It will resist motion. Flight is secured by driving through the air a plane inclined upwards and forwards of the direction of motion.’ He was surprised and started asking me about combustion engines. Then he asked me questions about my school and family. I knew what I was in for because there were a lot of public schoolboys going in for commissions. So I withdrew while they deliberated. And when I went back, they all agreed that my papers should be forwarded to the War Office.
The Royal Naval Air Service, as befitted the flying branch of the senior service, took a rather high-handed attitude to its entrants. Donald Bremner remembers:
I went up to London once a fortnight to sit on the selection board for candidates for the Royal Naval Air Service. The officer in charge was Commander Samson, known as Sammy. He was a well-known character. He said what he thought to anybody. If you got on well with him – as I did – you got on very well. If you didn’t, you got out. Sammy instituted a procedure where we each had a pencil and paper and all the time we were asking questions of the wretched candidate, we fiddled with our pencils. When we’d asked enough questions, we laid our pencils down. If we were satisfied with him, we held the pencil point upwards. If we wouldn’t have him at any price, we held it point downwards. If there was anyone who was reasonable but we didn’t like him enough, Sammy advised him to try the Royal Flying Corps. Our decision was really based on whether we liked the fellow. We wanted young people, about nineteen was the best. We always felt that someone who rode horses had the right kind of hands for flying and that somebody who rowed on the river could be useful. Social class counted because we were choosing officer pilots. I don’t think people from a working-class background came before us – they were filtered out at an earlier stage. We wouldn’t have turned down a really good candidate just because he didn’t come from the right school but the organization of the RNAS was very similar to the organization of the navy – there was a bit of snobbishness.
Once the interview was passed, the medical examination posed fresh challenges. Vernon Coombs was fortunate to meet a friendly fellow candidate:
I was shortsighted and when no one was looking I wore glasses. I worried how I was going to get through the eyesight test. So I asked one chap what I should do and he said, ‘It’s easy! The bottom two lines of the eye-test chart are UBHDN, HRDNA.’ So I passed with flying colours – and I’ve never forgotten those letters. When I was flying, I always slipped glasses on underneath my goggles. No one ever noticed and I never found it any disadvantage at all. I never wore my glasses on the ground. When my goggles came off, so did my glasses.
George Eddington took a gamble which paid off:
At Warley Barracks, I saw a medical officer who stripped me and gave me a very thorough examination. I was rather deaf in the right ear but I was fairly sharp-witted. In one of the tests, he whispered into each ear whilst plugging up the other one. First he plugged up my right ear and asked me my brother’s name. I answered him. Then, he went to the other side and whispered something I couldn’t hear. I took a guess and said, ‘I haven’t a sister.’ He gave me the all-clear.
The Royal Flying Corps was not a male preserve. Women served with the RFC in a variety of roles. The Zeppelin raids inspired Florence Parrott to join up:
I never knew my own mother. I was brought up by an uncle. He was an engine driver. I went to school in Bletchley, and I was very happy there. We used to have lovely little operettas – I loved singing and dancing. I left school when I turned fourteen, and the next day, I was in London, in service. As quickly as that. Lady Leon lived at Bletchley Park, and she always took Bletchley girls when they left school. I was in her London home. I wanted to be a children’s nurse, but I wasn’t old enough.
I had to get up first thing in the morning, get the stoves going, and wash the steps outside. I was lucky, really, because I received a good insight into cooking, because I’m sorry to say that our cook liked the bottle more than anything else. She’d get halfway through a dinner and then she’d hand it over to me to finish. I was only fifteen, but I managed. The family never knew I was doing the cooking. The family was only Sir Herbert and Lady Leon, and their son, but they used to give big parties. All the beautiful fresh stuff, fruit, vegetables, flowers, used to come from Bletchley to the London residence, by road every day.
I got on all right with Lady Leon, but there was one French maid, and she apparently didn’t like me from the first, and I certainly didn’t like her. But at the finish, I ran away because I wanted to be a children’s nurse. I ran away and I got myself a job with a Japanese family. He’d been the Japanese ambassador to London, and they were returning to Japan, and they wanted to take an English girl with them. I got the job – but somehow my aunt got to hear about it and she fetched me back. I was packed up and ready to go, but my aunt wouldn’t let me. In those days, people didn’t trust the foreigners like they do today.
So I went back to Lady Leon and tried to settle down again, but I couldn’t. I ran away again. This time, I got with an extremely nice family. He was a captain in the army, and she was a tall, beautiful lady, and they had a lovely little boy. That little boy idolized me, and I idolized him. The mother always used to go in to say goodnight to the little boy, before going in to dinner, and one night, she fell, from top of stairs to bottom. And it killed her. It was terrible. The captain asked me if I would carry on with the child. One Sunday night, the head nurse left me to see to the bathing of the boy, and to put him to bed. She told me how to do my sleeves, and what to do. I did everything as nanny told me, but the old Victorian grandmother came in, walked to one side of me, discovered I hadn’t been vaccinated, and she sacked me there and then.
So I came back to Bletchley, where my uncle, being on the railway, got me a job in the refreshment rooms at Euston Station. Then some of the girls from Liverpool Street Station came to see me, and they said that they were getting a pound more than I was, so I went off there, and was taken on as a wine waitress in the dining room. I lived in a hostel, with a housekeeper, and that was very nice.
On a particular day, in 1917, while I was working at Liverpool Street, we had to serve a troop train. We gave each soldier a little box, with sandwiches, cake, cigarettes and an apple. When we’d served them, we let the guard know, and they started pushing all the boys onto the train. When they were all in, there was a shrill whistle and a blast of steam, and the train was ready to move out. The wheels were just turning, when three or four Zeppelin bombs came down. One after the other. Before we knew where we were, the corner of the station was blown apart. I got hit in my arm, by glass from the roof overhead. I was taken to St Bartholomew’s Hospital, where they got the glass out of me. There weren’t enough beds and we had to lie on the floor, and I said to the girl next to me, ‘When I get out of here, I’m going to join up! If I’m going to get knocked about, I’ll go where I expect it!’ I’d never thought about joining up before. It was the air raid that did it. When I was out of the hospital, I went along Oxford Street, to the Connaught Club, and went in and joined the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps. I was interviewed by several officers, who asked me what I’d been doing, and when I said wine waitress, they said they didn’t have anything like that, but they put me down as a cook. And they sent me to Denham, to the Royal Flying Corps, where the boys were training to be pilots.
Raynor Taylor served with the Glamorgan Yeomanry. He cared nothing for aeroplanes, or for class:
William Spencer was a member of a very well-to-do family. We did our infantry training together and after a week or two, when we’d found out how to form fours and march in step, we were sent on a route march. Coming back into camp, we felt just like soldiers, with our full pack, and we watched a motor car drive through the gate. It was William Spencer’s mother and father. They’d come to visit him. I can see the mother now – a big blousy woman, very arrogant. She stood there and Billy was in the same four as I was, and he couldn’t say hello to them because he was marching at attention, so he acknowledged them as best he could and marched on. Well, his mother wasn’t having that, at all! Her Willy, carrying a pack! Unheard of! He became embarrassed because she started ranting and raving, playing hell. Anyway, she made such a noise that he got transferred to the Royal Flying Corps as a pilot and an officer. He was shot down and killed on his first flight over the lines in France. His memorial’s in the cemetery, and every time I pass it, I think, ‘Eh, Billy. Your mother put you there. Because she couldn’t abide to see you carrying a pack.’
3 (#ulink_1c8f7f98-ba78-57cb-9aa2-ad00f149b2df)
A Flying Start
It is an extraordinary fact that, of the 14,166 pilots who lost their lives during the Great War, well over half were killed in training. Even without the obvious perils of combat, flying was a dangerous activity. In the years before the war, it had been even more so. Aircraft had been underpowered and slow. They were too fragile to risk being thrown around the sky, and flying – even for the thrill-seekers who pursued it – was usually more of a struggle to remain in control, than a dynamic effort to push the aircraft’s limits. Simply maintaining straight and level flight placed considerable strain on flying wires. When coming in to land, early pilots would push the nose of the aircraft down and lose height with the engine running. Their turns would be made flat, with the minimum of bank. Flying was hazardous enough, without seeking to add to the dangers.
There were those, of course, who sought greater thrills. Intrepid individuals competed in circuit races, where they would fly close to the ground and race around pylons, attempting to overtake each other. It was only on 25 September 1913, however, that British aviators were shown the true potential of their craft. On that day, a French airman named Adolphe Pégoud came to Brooklands Aerodrome to give a flying demonstration. Placing terrible strain on his Blériot monoplane, he performed a vertical dive, a tail slide and a loop. The public was inspired and so were fellow pilots. Gustav Hamel, the first man to carry airmail, wrote that ‘Pégoud’s flights have given us all a new confidence’. Confidence might have been misplaced, however. Eleven months later, Hamel died in a flying accident, and less than two years after that, Pégoud was killed in combat – by a German pilot whom he had taught to fly before the war.
For men entering the infant flying services, loops and tail slides lay in the future. First, they would have to master the basics of flight. Very few of them ever forgot their first trip in a heavier-than-air machine. Ronald Sykes, who was taught to fly by the Royal Naval Air Service in 1917, might speak for thousands:
I remember every minute of my first flight. Going round, feeling as though the world was whizzing – it was a terrific thrill. The great surprise was the effect of centrifugal force. When we were doing a sharp turn and the aeroplane was on its side, there was a pressure on me that pushed my head into the seat. That was a shock – I wasn’t expecting it. On another turn, I couldn’t lift my feet off the bottom of the aeroplane. After that, I did nothing but think about flying.
Nowadays, we are blasé about flying. The idea of looking down on the earth from a great height holds little wonder for the package tourist. During the Great War, however, for men such as Ernest Tomkins it was an unimaginable novelty:
It’s a very funny thing. Say you look down over the Clifton Suspension Bridge, you’re a little bit scared of the height. But when you get up high in an aircraft, you’re detached from the earth and you don’t realize you’re so high. You don’t feel a bit ‘windy’ about being up that high. Even getting on top of a house and looking down gives you more sense of height than if you’re up at 20,000 feet. It’s like you’re looking at a map.
Until late 1914, men joining the Royal Flying Corps had to pay for their own tuition. They attended the civilian flying schools where they trained on some very primitive machines. In October 1914, Graham Donald trained on the most primitive:
I got started training on a genuine American Wright Biplane with twin propellers, chain driven – one of them with a cross chain which makes most engineers shudder. It was completely, inherently unstable and a lot of people said that if you could fly a Wright Biplane you could fly anything. Well the fact remains that it flew. The speed range was about three knots: it flew level at 43 knots, began diving at 42 and stalled at 39 or 40. So you hadn’t got very much to play with. The instrumentation was simple – there was a length of fine cord about eighteen inches long tied to one of the struts in front of you. You kept your eye on these cords, the idea being that if they went sideways you were sideslipping. If the chord went limp, the only thing to do was to start singing ‘Nearer My God To Thee’…
In these basic machines, there was room for only one pilot. The instructor might give the novice some guidance, but essentially he was on his own. This method of training, known as the ‘French School’, was used to teach Eric Furlong to fly a Caudron, at the same school at which Donald Clappen, from the last chapter, was an instructor:
I learnt to fly at Hendon in 1914 at the Hall School of Flying. I learnt on Caudrons. The Caudron was a small aeroplane with a nacelle rather than a cockpit. A nacelle was rather like a wooden bath that you sat in and the engine was stuck in front of you. There were open booms to the tail rather than a fuselage. It only had 35 horse-power and we used to say that if one horse died, you did, too. In fact the stall point and the maximum speed were very nearly the same. The engine was going flat out all the time you were flying and if it stopped for a fraction of a second, the machine came down as though you were falling down stairs. One thing I remember – the Caudron burnt neat castor oil and the pupil inhaled a good deal of it with the result that we all needed to go to the lavatory constantly.
At first, you were strapped into the nacelle and told about the engine and the rudder and told to keep the control stick in the centre. At Hendon, there was a white patch on the fence at the far side. I was told to taxi the Caudron over to the fence. The Caudron was extremely difficult to steer. The two booms at the tail made it want to run in one direction only and the only way to steer it was to give a burst of throttle, which lifted the tail and allowed you to swing it a bit with the rudder. Invariably you swung it too far and you made your way across the aerodrome in a shocking series of S turns. Eventually you got the hang of it until one day – to your great surprise and consternation – you kept the engine on longer than you were expected to and suddenly you were in the air. You felt as though you were fifty feet up – in fact you were probably three feet up. So you stopped the engine until you were on the ground again. After that, the instructor would tear you to ribbons but he didn’t mean it because you’d done a fairly straight flight and you’d landed all right. So then he’d tell you to go and do the same thing again. And as you got used to flying at five or six feet high, you gradually kept the engine on a bit longer and pulled the stick back a bit further and you got up higher until you were up to about fifty feet. And you’d go up and down the airfield, straight down the middle.
When you got that comfortably wrapped up, you’d try a turn. You would start off on the ground with the aeroplane at forty-five degrees to the white patch on the fence and you’d take off and when you’d levelled out at fifty to a hundred feet, you kicked on the rudder, which spoiled the aerodynamic state of the aeroplane and it dropped its nose and turned. It came as a shock because it felt like putting a brake on. The machine did a right-angled turn and down you went and landed. And you kept doing this, turning to one side and then the other, until you’d got it wrapped up. Nowadays, of course, one would be told to put on bank when turning, but at that time, the instructors knew nothing about aerodynamics. There was never any banking taught. So we were told to keep our turns absolutely flat, suicidal as it sounds. And after that you were allowed to struggle around the circuit. You sort of flew around the outside of the airfield and when you came back to where you started, you shut off the engine and landed. That was a circuit. And that’s how I learned to fly.
Another very basic machine used for training was the Boxkite. In this aircraft, the pupil was able to wrap his body around that of the instructor. Donald Bremner flew a Boxkite from Chingford in September 1915:
Boxkites were very queer old machines with a 50-horse-power Gnome engine. They had practically no instruments – just a rev counter. There was a petrol tap and a joystick and a rudder bar. The joystick was alongside the pilot and came up from the right, across in front at a bit of an angle. There was a little wicker seat, bolted to the lower wing. The instructor sat in that and you sat behind him – not strapped in at all – you just put your legs round his waist and hung on round his shoulders. When he took the machine up, you leant your right arm round his shoulder, and caught hold of the joystick. You both had your hands on it and that’s how you learnt to use it. After he’d taken you round a bit, you were then allowed to taxi the machine around the aerodrome using the rudder bar. Without taking off. Then the most heroic thing happened. You changed places with the instructor. He couldn’t reach the rudder bar. All he could do was put his hand on the joystick round your shoulder. And together you flew off. When he thought you were ready – or perhaps when he’d had enough – you were allowed to do hops. You took the machine up on your own and flew about ten or fifteen yards and then put the machine down again. When you’d done enough of that, you started doing circuits.
The Boxkite might have been basic, but its slow speed and limited climb allowed Humphrey Leigh to perform a feat quite beyond any modern aircraft:
My Boxkite was on the far side of Hendon Aerodrome. A mechanic started up the engine and said ‘Give me a lift to the other end of the aerodrome.’ I said, ‘All right,’ and he stood on one of the skids and held onto the frame. I started taxiing across the field. ‘No!’ he said, ‘Let her go!’ So I told him to hold on tight and I took off and landed on the other side of the aerodrome. He was a very brave chap – stood firm, held on and didn’t falter at all.
As the Royal Flying Corps began to justify its presence on the Western Front in the autumn of 1914, it increased the scope of its flying training. The Central Flying School at Upavon was expanded and several civilian flying schools (including Brooklands) were purchased. Most importantly, the Royal Flying Corps began to teach pilots to fly from scratch. Young men no longer had to pay for their own tuition – although those that joined the reserve squadrons continued to do so. The training aircraft of choice, remembered by Donald Bremner, was the relatively advanced Maurice Farman Biplane:
The Maurice Farman Longhorn was a big, clumsy aeroplane but rather pleasant to fly. It was a pusher, so you were sitting out in front of the engine in a nice comfortable seat and you weren’t looking straight down onto the ground like you were in a Boxkite. And it had an airspeed indicator.
Gerald Livock also preferred the Maurice Farman to the Boxkite:
I flew a Maurice Farman at Hendon. Oh, it was terrific. Magnificent. We didn’t have altimeters so I don’t know what height we went to, probably 2000 feet, and circled round Hendon. I’d only ever been up about 300 feet in my Boxkite. One felt like a God, looking down on these poor mortals below. One almost forgot to be frightened.
The Maurice Farman came in two versions – the Longhorn and the Shorthorn. The Longhorn was so called because of its pronounced outriggers to a forward elevator, giving it the appearance of a breed of cattle. Both aircraft were ungainly structures. Sixteen wooden struts joined the upper and lower wings together and they were interwoven with such a tangle of piano wires that it was said you could safely cage a canary inside. Nevertheless, they constituted a great leap forward for pupils as they were capable of dual-control flying – in other words the pupil and the instructor sat one in front of the other, each with his own set of controls. This meant, in theory, that pupils were able to learn in far greater safety. Although, as Eric Furlong discovered, theory and practice did not always overlap:
My application to join the Royal Flying Corps was finally accepted in the middle of 1917. I was posted to the flying training station at Harlaxton in Lincolnshire. I didn’t tell them at first that I’d already learned to fly in 1914. I thought that I would learn more if I kept quiet. Whereas in 1914, all my training had been done on solo machines, in 1917, the system was dual training with the instructor in the other seat. Well, the instructor realized on my first flight that I knew something about flying so he told me to take control. He didn’t like the way I turned using the rudder only, as I’d been taught. By 1917, training had progressed to proper banked turns. So he wrenched the controls out of my hand and said, ‘This is what I want! Do it like this, you see?’ and when we got to the next corner, he wrenched it out of my hands again and when we got to the last corner, I left it to him again. And then I just sat there and watched as we came gliding in. Wallop. We slapped into the ground and smashed the machine to smithers. He looked at me and said, ‘What did you do that for?’ I said, ‘I didn’t touch it!’ He said, ‘Neither did I!’ He thought I had control of the aeroplane and I thought he had control. That was my first landing in a Maurice Farman Longhorn.
In the early days, as Frederick Powell remembers, communication between instructor and pupil was difficult:
The instructor sat behind me in a dual-control Maurice Farman and he flew the machine while I lightly put my hands on the controls. We had no intercom in those days – so the conversation was shouting over the noise of a rattling engine. It was difficult to hear. Sign language came in handy. The sign I used most was the two-fingered salute.
Take-off and landing both presented difficulties for the pupil. Landing, argues Laurie Field, posed the greater challenge:
Landing was the most difficult thing of all because it’s the one thing that mattered! If you made a mistake in the air it didn’t matter – if you made a mistake in landing, you were in trouble. The knack of the landing is that when you come down, you’ve got your gliding height, your engine is off. You gradually pull your nose up as you lose flying speed, it stalls your aeroplane and the perfect landing is to have the wheels and the tail skid hit the ground together. This happened once in every twenty times. A bad landing is when you pull your nose up too early and you’re too far off the ground and your plane drops. If it drops sufficiently badly, your undercarriage is gone.
Reginald Fulljames was wary of taking off:
I was more anxious about taking off than landing because you were entirely dependent upon your engine and if the engine coughed or spluttered as you took off, you had very little chance of avoiding a crash. Whereas if the engine failed at two or three thousand feet, I had every confidence that I could land the aircraft somewhere. And in those days – according to my logbook – one in every five or six flights ended up in some sort of engine failure which necessitated a forced landing.
If a pilot did have to carry out a forced landing shortly after take off, then Brooklands was not the place to do it, as S. S. Saunders recalls:
One corner of Brooklands happened to be a sewage farm. This caused quite a lot of trouble with some of the boys because if they hadn’t climbed up sufficiently high and then had engine failure, they just came down in it. Everyone was warned to avoid it because if they didn’t … well … everyone avoided them …
Once dual-control training had become the accepted method of training, the first ‘solo’ flight became a critical event for every pupil. Vernon Coombs made his first solo by accident:
I was terribly anxious to fly solo and after I’d done one hour and thirty-five minutes dual, my instructor jumped out of the machine and shouted something at me. I thought he’d said, ‘Take it up!’ so I turned the machine round and I took it up. After I’d landed, he tore strips off me. ‘What the hell do you mean doing that?’ ‘You told me to take it up,’ I said. ‘No, I didn’t, he said, ‘I told you to take it in!’
F. D. Silwood failed to make it off the ground:
