The Armourer’s Tale (3): E.F.T.S.

After a week's leave during which time I bought my betrothed (hereinafter called not Elisabeth, her real name, but Ibby, in case her friends should read this) a ring, I was posted to 32 Elementary Flying Training School (E.F.T.S.) situated in Bowden, a small town in Alberta, Canada. This was part of the Empire Training Scheme (strange sounding name) which involved Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Southern Rhodesia. As Britain was too small and too vulnerable to train the number of aircrew needed, it had been agreed that these countries would provide aerodromes and training facilities for up to 50,000 aircrew a year. In fact, more than 167,000 had been trained by the time the scheme was wound up in 1944. I did not realise what a small part of this great enterprise I was when we set sail from Greenock on a cold April morning in 1942. We sailed at dawn and I stood on deck, as countless thousands of others must had done, to see the coasts and coves of Scotland disappear in the mist. As day dawned and we eventually reached the open sea I was amazed to see that we were part of a large collection of ships. Gradually, a convoy was formed as we steamed into the Atlantic. It was not until the following morning when I looked through a porthole that I could see the grey shapes of destroyers flanking our convoy, and giving a great sense of security as day after day they were still in the same place, effortlessly slipping through the water, the patient watchdogs.

But, as in the best romantic films, on a bright sunny Spring morning, we sailed into New York, past the Statue of Liberty, the Manhattan skyline and eventually berthed safely in the harbour. From there we were moved on to a train and I remember saying to a passing stranger, "Excuse me, please could you get me a Sunday Paper?" He duly came back, refused any payment and handed over more newsprint in a single paper than I had ever seen in my life. All the Americans and Canadians we met were generous, open-hearted and only too willing to help us in any way they could. I had written to Ibby every day of the voyage and when I asked a passer-by if he could post the fairly voluminous package, he willingly agreed, and my letter duly arrived home, uncut and uncensored, and my experiences are still somewhere in the family archives.

In time we were entrained, as the RAF called it, and journeyed up the coast to Boston where I waited to be transported across most of the United States and Canada. The journey to Alberta took six days and travelling across the Prairies conveyed more than anything else the sense of the vastness of the continent. For about three days when we pulled up the blinds in our compartment the new day would show us exactly the same scene as the day and night before. The train seemed not to have moved. The same rolling fields, showing the faint green of Spring stretching into the distance as far as the eye could see and, although we rumbled on, once or twice a day passing or sometimes stopping at tiny wayside stations, where a few enthusiastic countrymen shouted and waved, the view remained exactly the same, thousands upon thousands of miles of miles of fertile farmland.

Eventually to Calgary, famous even then for its Annual Stampede, and the some sixty miles north to Bowden, a tiny settlement with an airstrip on which we could see actual aeroplanes, the first in all our training. We had been issued with flying kit, and were very soon told who our instructors would be. Rumour had it they were ex-Battle of Britain pilots who were resting after combat and had been given the not very popular job of instructing very raw recruits. I certainly got off to a very bad start. As my instructor and I walked out for my first flight, I was foolish enough to say in the jargon of the day, "Which kite shall we be flying, sir?. He growled in reply, "McArthur, small boys fly kites, we fly aeroplanes!" After that we took off, and… it seemed to me wildly clinging on to the side of the cockpit, performed every aerobatic trick known to man: we spiralled, we looped the loop, we spun, we dived to the ground, we did a falling leaf, we recovered from a spin and went into another one several times but, at least I wasn't sick. I think he was disappointed.

We were flying in a training aircraft a Boeing Stearman. According to the Internet, I now find out that apparently 300 of these aircraft were ordered and arrived in February 1942. By November 1942, they were so unpopular that they were replaced by Fairchild Cornells. They had an open cockpit and no heated carburettor which made them totally unsuitable for winter conditions. They were also accident prone, of which more later!

In one of my first trips under my grumpy instructor, I found that the earphones supplied would have been better replaced by two cocoa tins. No matter what he said, I sitting in the back cockpit, could hear no words only disgruntled buzzing sounds. He adopted a wild semaphore system which resulted in me putting the aeroplane into a spin. He promptly took over the controls, recovered into straight and level flight and angrily landed. After one or more lessons he insisted that I should fail the course, and I was given a testing flight by the Chief Instructor. I managed a jerky take-off and a very bumpy landing. He decided I should carry on but gave me another instructor who was good and patient enough to allow me to, at last, attempt to fly solo.

This was a harrowing enough experience for most of us not helped by the way the ambulances and the crash tender would foregather at the edge of the field ghoulishly awaiting disaster. Legends abounded about failed solo attempts including one ex-police sergeant who flew quite competently around, came into land too steeply, bounced high in the air, opened the throttle, pulled back the stick and continued flying. He came round three times bouncing ever higher each time, and finally flew up and away out of the circuit and was lost to sight. He was recovered some time later having lost his nerve completely and had taken the decision to trust his parachute rather than the plane and jumped out.

I had always believed the reason for my own crash was that I did not see some telephone wires directly in the path of my intended landing. Having seen the history of the ill-fated Stearman on the web, I have a feeling that I too suffered from the in-built difficulty of flying the plane. According to the Bowden web-site, the Stearman had brakes and a tail-wheel which made it liable to turn over or tail spin on landing. No-one actually told me that was had gone wrong, but when I recovered in hospital after concussion and some cuts and bruises, someone gave me a photograph of a crash which I probably wrongly assumed was mine and which may be somewhere in the family archives, which seemed to show broken telephone wires. I now believe I had a nose-over. Whatever over it was, my flying days were finished. After some very flaky flying and a fairly expensive accident, the Station Commander decided my particular talents could be more useful in other fields and so after a relatively friendly interview I indicated that I would like to re-muster as an air-gunner for which I would have to return to England.

And so I handed in my flying kit, took out the white flash from my cap which signified aircrew under training, and unpicked the propellers from my arms, for I had now reverted to being once again the lowest of the low - an Aircraftsman second class or AC2 - and boarded the train for home.

The journey back through the vast prairies and Great Lakes was very memorable because no longer was I travelling in some dilapidated wagon with wooden bunks which pulled down from the ceiling and only intermittent supplies of ice water, but on a regular passenger train with most of the creature comforts I had long forgotten. We, the passengers, mostly civilians, ate very well and in particular I remember the fish which had been caught that day from the lake we were passing. I felt a little guilty, but not for long.

I detrained, as they said, at Trenton, Ontario and there reported to a very small RAF Holding Unit. There were not many of us, about 50 as I recollect and we were all RAF personnel on the way to somewhere else. Trenton was a training centres for the Royal Canadian Air Force and we were paraded well out of sight where could not act as a shocking example to the enthusiastic Canadians. Rumour had it that after the day's drilling and marching, these recruits were set to dig a defensive trench all around the camp several miles in length. After it was completed the next intake of recruits would start to fill it in. Apparently, so the story went, if you looked hard enough the filled-in scars of several previous trenches could be seen circling the camp. It was, I suppose, the equivalent of polishing the dustbins.

After some days, I was interviewed by an RAF Squadron Leader as, miraculously, my records had caught up with me. He was apparently an old boy of my own school. He reminisced enthusiastically about some members of staff who were still there and in particular he remembered Drum Major Edges who was in charge of the School Officers Training Corps. Incidentally, my father who had been wounded while serving in the Royal Horse Artillery during the 1914-1918 war would not let me join the OTC. as he said "No son of mine should serve in the Infantry, after what I've seen. After we had talked for some time about schooldays, he asked me what I wished to do next. I had, after all, volunteered for aircrew duties and presumably that, and our mutual acquaintances, made for a more favourable interview than some others I had heard about. I expressed a wish to train as a Air Gunner and I believe he told me that my best chance would be to train as an Armourer, and then request a transfer to flying duties.

He suggested that as I would probably have to wait for some time before a boat became available I should explore Canada and enjoy myself. Which I did, and amongst other many and varied delights hitched a lift to Niagara Falls, some four hundred miles there and back. All we had to do was wait outside the camp with a thumb upraised and very soon a car stopped and always helped us, sometimes going far out of their own way to do so.

Eventually, I was posted back to Britain as a trainee Armourer and set sail from New York. I can still recall the emotion I felt when we approached the harbour and there in all her glory, despite the war-time camouflage, was the Queen Mary. We embarked and the contrast between my journey out and back was almost unbelievable. Instead of a labouring and overcrowded troop ship which, and I’m no sailor, probably did, at best, 14 knots, we were in luxury, a liner stripped of all her finery but sailing without any form of escort at 24 knots, apparently too fast for any U-boat. During the day we set a zig-zag course but when night fell you could hear the engines change to a new urgency and the ship surged forward, the wake now luminescent and straight as an arrow. The journey took four days and as we approached Britain we were shepherded into port by RAF Coastal Command.

I was given ten days leave and managed to arrive home at 503 London Road, Thornton Heath, Croydon at a quarter to midnight on my twenty-first birthday. Miraculously, the house was still standing and undamaged as was also Ibby's house, 19 Park Hill Road, Croydon where she lived with her mother and her younger brother John. She had tragically lost her father who suffered with a stomach ulcer and her elder brother in the Croydon typhoid epidemic during the 1930s. I rang her the next day which I believe was a Wednesday, and she said, "I think we should get married on Saturday". So we did.

In those war-time days a special licence was available for around 7/6d (35 pence) at three days notice from, my future wife informed me, the Archbishop of Canterbury. As far as I remember we filled in the forms at Croydon Town Hall and were married on Saturday 14th November 1942 at 11 o'clock. John, Ibby's brother with whom I went to school, gave the bride away. He was a recruit in the Royal Navy at that time, wearing the uniform of an Ordinary Seaman, and when asked for the ring, had to unbutton the flaps of his trousers, let down what looked like a trap-door in the blue serge and then ferret about before producing the ring. After the ceremony ("No confetti, please, this is wartime") we had the unknown luxury of a taxi to take us back to Park Hill Road. Ibby and I had been to our local pub "The Railway Arms" which was just opposite East Croydon Station, the night before and told Vera, our favourite barmaid, of our imminent wedding. She disappeared into the back of the pub and reappeared with a paper parcel. "Three shillings", she said and when we later unwrapped the parcel it was a bottle of sherry!! That deserves two exclamation marks for it was, in those days, an unknown luxury.

Our honeymoon was spent at "The Pilgrims", a guesthouse in Goashall, Surrey owned at one time by E. H. Shepherd, the original, pre-hideous-Disney, illustrator of the Winnie the Pooh stories. It was a glorious Autumn and the neighbouring villages of Share and Abinger Hammer seemed like another world in their peace and tranquillity, but even there from time to time you could hear children with not- so- country accents. They were, of course, the evacuee children from London.

I cannot well remember the passing of time after that. I know that some time later I was posted to RAF Kirkham for training as an Armourer. I think the training lasted twelve weeks but perhaps longer. There was, of course, the usual "square-bashing", and many, many lectures from well qualified instructors. We were introduced to the real world of bombs and guns and this time they were actual and current weapons, not the antiques of ITW. I still have, somewhere, a file with many diagrams and notes which I took down during these lectures, including, if I remember rightly, the mechanism of the Clay-pigeon Shooting Trap which was used by aircrew as part of their "aiming-off" practice. It was wet, very wet, and our only solace at the end of the day was the rather barren NAAFI canteen with so often the depressing news "No fags, no razor blades".

At least, after a few weeks, I was given a sleeping out pass and Ibby came to stay with me in a B.& B. in Freckleton. This was not a great success and after a few trying days with a rather truculent landlady, she stayed in a hotel in Preston. I remember one rather splendid occasion when we went to Blackpool and danced for some time in the famous Tower Ballroom together with music from the Grand Wurlitzer Organ played. I think, by Reginald Dixon of BBC fame. Eventually, I qualified as an Armourer (Bombs and Guns), passed out with the rank of Leading Aircraftsman and the propellers came out of storage and were sewn back on.

More leave and then a posting came through to No. 59 Squadron based in Thorney Island, fairly close to Bournemouth where Ibby had started her teaching career. I had visited her there during this end-of-course leave, but she was not in the best of form and, in fact, confined to bed with her eyes bandaged. Earlier in that week, she had been working in the Science Lab with some girls and had handled some phosphorus which I believe had been bottled for so long the liquid which kept it relatively safe had dried out. Somehow the bottle slipped from her hand and fell to the floor, the phosphorus fell out and burst into flame. Ibby tried to put it back in the bottle with the tongs but it exploded covering her with burning bits. Luckily, although her eyelids had scorched, her eyes were not damaged. We sat and held hands quite a lot and planned for the future, which as far as I can recall involved having at least ten children. She then confided that she was already pregnant!

After those few days I reported to Thorney Island to join No. 59 squadron. The dialogue at the Guardroom where I reported on arrival at the camp:
Me: "Hello Corp. I'm reporting for duty".
Corp: "Wot for?"
Me:"59 squadron"
Corp: "Oo?"
Me: "59 squadron"
Corp: "Never 'eard of 'em. Ere Charlie, there's an airman 'ere who says e's for 59 squadron".
Charlie: "Yeah, they went orf las week".
Me: "Where?"
Charlie: "Northern Ireland, mate".
Me: (catching the dialect) "Oh Gord!"

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