Classic British Flight Sim

Ralph, another absorbing read. Please continue as and when you are able, it really is very interesting.

By the way, Moderators and Admins...would it not be an idea, with Ralph's permission, to archive all this just in case of a site crash or something ? It would be a terrible shame to lose it.

Thank you Ralph for your posts. I'm another who is enjoying them very much.

I'd never thought about how cockpit canopies were made and your description of the process was brilliant.

I don't know about preserving them here but if you keep this up much longer you'll have a book on your hands.

Jon

RAF Basic Training

National Service carried on after the end of WW2 until the mid-sixties. In 1951, you did 2 years exactly, to the day. It was possible to get deferment if you were on an academic or training course and I had done that. Normal call up age was 18 but I was soon coming up to 22 (an old man!) when I got my papers. Previously I had had a medical test and also opted to join the Royal Air Force. If you didn’t fancy the Services, you could do 2 years in the coalmines instead. No thanks! Got my papers plus a railway warrant early in July and reported to the kitting out and distribution depot at Padgate, where you were issued with your uniform, eating irons, etc., and assembled for distribution (deployment is the ‘in’ word these days) to the various square-bashing camps throughout the country.

Tell me, among you ex-servicemen, has anyone ever reported to Padgate, or any other similar depot, who did NOT hear about the recruit who had hanged himself from the water tower during the previous week?

Although the posting was a ‘cushy number’ some of the kids of 18 wanted their mothers and were crying on their beds at night. When the time came for demob, we all went back to Padgate on the same day and those kids had turned into 20 year old, confident, disciplined and mature men. The changes were astounding. Don’t tell me that National Service was a bad thing for the individual. Might have been costly for the country in financial terms but the social benefits were incalculable. Just look around you today.

I was posted to Credenhill, Hereford, currently home of the SAS. We were collected from Hereford station by contract civilian buses. This is OK we thought - until we entered the camp where ‘they’ were waiting for us. One sergeant and 4 corporals, each of them immaculate, superbly smart, everything gleaming and shiny, and all carrying sticks under their left arms (what the hell are they for?). As the bus stopped, they started shouting at the tops of their voices telling us to get off the bus with our kit and line up. The racket was deafening. It only quietened down when they ran out of breath.

Opposite from where we had stopped was something that turned out to be unique in my RAF service. It was a gate guardian in the form of a silver painted Hawker Typhoon I believe, mounted on a pedestal. That was the only aeroplane that I saw, close up, for the next 2 years.

In retrospect, I think that the whole process of turning raw recruits into useful servicemen via Basic Training was superbly organised. Of course, this had been going on for many years but the whole thing worked like clockwork. The scheduled tasks were arranged to keep you fully occupied whilst there was increasing pressure to get you to attain higher standards. This, despite the fact that ‘regulars’ didn’t want us ‘bloody 2-year wonders’ around .

Anyone who has watched ‘Bad Lad’s Army’, et al, would get a quite erroneous view of what National Service was like. Incidentally, those corporals are pretty scruffy compared with our NCOs. True, all the bull was there, but the main difference was that there were Kings’/Queens’ Regulations in place and anyone who chose to be a smart-arse prat, could ultimately end up in a glasshouse, instead of being able to walk off the set. Also, the bad language that was used was never stronger than ‘Bloody hell, man’. What it was like in other places I do not know. One of the corporals was a lay preacher and I never heard a single word out of place from him. Again, no NCO ever physically touched a recruit. So what you see in that rubbish on the box is what TV producers think will bring in the revenue. I am not saying that it was not hard, it was, and at the end of 8 weeks, I had never felt so fit in all my life (and I had been doing some amateur boxing before the RAF). I do know that it was after Basic and Trade Training that frustration and boredom set in for some. I was lucky.

I won’t go into the antics that occurred during Basic Training because I am sure that there are many others who have better yarns to tell than me –: Rifle Inspection - ‘Have you cleaned your rifle today, airman? ‘Yes, Corporal!’ ‘You bloody liar! There’s a spider crawling up it! You’re on a fizzer!’ And there was a spider. However, I had actually seen him pull his rifle through that morning but he was one of those unfortunates for whom things were always going wrong. Trouble was he was a misfit and a bit odd and therefore ‘stood out’. The golden rules for a quiet service life, if you just want to do your time, are to keep your head down, don’t stand out, do as you are told, never complain and always get into the middle of the crowd. I am sure that many of you ex-servicemen will confirm this.

I was about 3 years older than our corporals, which is a lot at that age. I could look on their arm waving and posturings with some detachment and see them for what they were. But generally, they were a good set of lads and I am talking about the corporals who were mostly National Servicemen. One day I had to clear up the sergeant’s room at the end of a billet. He should not have told me to do that, according to regulations, but I wasn’t going to argue, he was a regular,. The rest of the billet was tidy and spotless. His room was like a pigsty. Ah well! What did you expect?

The commander of our flight was a Czech Wing Commander who was a pilot with zillions of medals. We found that he and other ex-aircrew officers were the strictest martinets on the station. Non-aircrew types were relatively benign. Perhaps it was because they were training bottom of the barrel airmen instead flying in the wide blue yonder.

During this time, we were interviewed and allocated a ‘trade’ for our remaining time in the RAF. At about that time the Hunter was about to enter service according to the press (actually it was about 3 years away). That’s good, thought I. I am probably the only one who has a bit of experience on Hunter repair schemes and I knew that the RAF has the odd drawing office around. So I told the sergeant about this. He looked at my paperwork and said ‘Clerk Accounts, Clerk Movements, Clerk Stores, Clerk GD, . . ..I told him again about my experience, and gave me a blank look (obviously a regular with a bloody nuisance in front of him) and said, ‘Clerk Accounts, Clerk . . . etc.’ I forget which I opted for. Didn’t really care.

A few of us from the flight were then sent to Wellesbourne Mountford, a little used airfield near Stratford-on-Avon, – you can guess how little because its temporary officer commanding was a flight lieutenant! Nobody told us what we were doing there or what was going on. Between us we had discovered that we all had school certificates (GCSEs today) but that was all. Came the day and some visiting officer got us together and said he was looking for volunteers. We had been selected because we all had at least a 50% pass mark in a foreign language and they wanted people to learn Russian. Oh yes, he assured us – you will all be commissioned. . How long the course would be? Where it would be held? What would you do after the course? Other than what he had said, he had no other information whatsoever. Clearly he had been sent out to get as many names as he could on the list and his lack of knowledge was intentional because, as we found out later, there was considerable secrecy about this matter. We all volunteered – anything would be better than nearly 2 years of clerking – and were promptly told that we must not discuss this with anyone and were reminded darkly about the Official Secrets Act and its penalties.

What had happened was that whereas in WW2 there had been a plentiful supply of people who were fluent in German and who could be called upon for intelligence work, in 1950, with the Cold War getting under way, the authorities realised that hardly anyone could speak Russian and they needed hundreds of them (eventually 5,000). So they put forward a plan to introduce crash language courses for the 3 main armed services. There were quite a large number of east European refugees and émigrés as a result of WW2 and many of them could speak Russian with varying degrees of fluency and accuracy of pronunciation. But the services decided that they wanted a pool of home-grown Russian speakers and would use the services of some of those who could already speak the lingo as teachers, after very careful vetting. Some of the latter included Red Army defectors, so they had to be careful, bearing in mind the Russian propensity for spying.

After about 3 weeks at Wellesbourne just kicking our heels, we were told that we were being moved but we did not know where until we got our railway warrants.

I remember us discussing it on the way down. ‘Bodmin?’. ‘I’ve never heard of RAF Bodmin’. ‘Perhaps it’s a mansion that has been taken over as a college? ‘ It was a long journey because of waiting for a connection and we arrived in Bodmin, Cornwall, at about 10 pm and of course, being Bodmin, it was raining. Mansion eh? If only!!!!!!!!

Before I finish this post I would like to ask a seemingly irrelevant question. Has anyone been bemused by some of the strange words used in the film ‘A Clockwork Orange’?

Ralph

Gosh, are you going to tell us that Mr. B (Burgess not Booker) didn't just make them up. :shock:

I've got a copy of the film round here somewhere. The only book of his that I've read is 'The End of the World News'. I know he got the title for that from the BBC world service where each news bulletin would finish with the words "and that's the end of the world news".

Jon

Auster

Great stuff - and Im assuming your referring to Druig and Malchick????

The only reason I know is that my 3 1/2 year olds best friend is from the

Ukraine and he and she speak a mix of English, Russian and (thanks to

Dora the Explorer) Spanish :roll:


Btw the way he refers to Her as "His Droogggie"


Leif

Jon, He did make some of them up and used some cockney but the majority of his vocabulary was based on Russian words.

Leif, You are quite right, malchick is boy, chelovek is man and droog is friend. When I first saw the film, I became aware that Russian words were being used but Gulliver foxed me until he said that his Gulliver hurt and I realised that this was a corruption of the Russian for head which is golovah. He called his language ‘nadsat’, which a suffix used on the numbers 11 to 19 and basically means ‘on ten’ so thirteen is treenadsat, or three on ten and nadsat equals ‘teen’, his teen language. Key ‘nadsat’ into Google for all the details.

It must be charming to hear your young child using those words. We have a Ukrainian lady who does a bit of cleaning for us and I try and practice my Russian with her. Although I am pretty hopeless at it now, I did actually speak Russian many years before she was actually born. Ukrainian isn’t Russian but it is close.

Ralph

Keep it coming Ralph

..although your description of arriving at basic has my stomach churning..for me it was a wet Sunday night arrival at Darlington..then being ushered into the back of a 4-tonner for the ride to Catterick..no, not National Service

Derek

Trev,

I know this is a bit late but a month ago you mentioned the book 'Fly Like A Bird'. I have been looking for my copy with no success ( I do have a rather a large collection). In fact the book is called 'Think Like A Bird', and I have given up searching so have ordered a paperback from Amazon as you posted.

Many thanks,

Ralph

RAF – Back to School

We knew something wasn’t quite right when this army sergeant on the platform started balling his head off as the train drew in to a halt. ‘Get into line and file out of the station!’ One of our lot said ‘We don’t take orders from the Army’. ‘Don’t start telling me my job, sonny! Get into line!’ We filed out onto the forecourt, the night rain was pouring down, we covered ourselves with our poncho like rubber sheets, design circa WW1, and miserably climbed into the uncovered army lorry waiting for us. ‘This can’t be true!’

We hoped this was some big mistake but our hearts sank when we pulled into a camp with a sign at the gate ‘Joint Services School for Linguists’. So we were at the right place.

Dripping wet we were taken to the cookhouse for a meal, army style. To this day I can see the surly army bods, understandably tetchy having to work at that time of night, throwing at us the only food left, cod steak swimming about in water, the top charred with the blackened bones sticking up in salute. That was all there was. We couldn’t face it. Next we were marched along undulating unlit roads, past separate billets until we came to ours. We were a mixture of RAF and Army types and they detailed 14 (I think) off and told us to choose our beds. The Army NCO said ‘Right, settle down. Tomorrow, breakfast is at 7 o’clock and you parade at 8.30 with your small pack and gaiters blancoed, brasses polished and ready for inspection!’ . ‘ WHAT?’

To those of you who are unfamiliar with RAF life, as we understood it, after Basic Training, you went on a course to learn a trade. I am sure that different courses operated differently, but the general level of bull was much less than previously and when you were posted to a station, after this training, it got even easier with probably only one parade a month, CO’s parade. Perhaps some of you ex-RAF readers could comment on this. Obviously the Army didn’t work like that. We thought that to learn Russian the place would have a semi-academic ambience. Oh yeah?

What had happened was that the 3 main services had decided to combine the ‘students’ into several schools, each of them being run either by The Army, RAF or RN. We were unlucky. We got the Army. So we got an army camp with lots of discrete billets on a bumpy hill, built just in time to house some of the Dunkirk survivors, used by the US Army for some of its D-Day troops, taken over by the Education Corps and condemned by the Army a few years before we moved in.

The following day was quite a surprise. We walked up the hill to the parade ground. We were a mixture of groups of the 3 services. At the top of the hill stood an RSM from the Lancashires, shouting and telling us to get a move on whilst he jabbed anyone within range between the legs with a pacing stick (the pointed variety). Well! That was novel. On the parade ground was a mass of servicemen, 250 taken from every regiment and corps in the Army, 150 RAF types and 50 Navy chaps. They got them roughly lined up in blocks with the same coloured uniforms.

The NCOs were just as varied – Petty Officers, RAF Drill Unit Corporals, KOSB (King’s Own Scottish Borderers) Sergeants, etc. The structure of the school was as mixed as you could get. The CO a Lt Col from the East Kents, Head of Admin a Wing Commander, the School Principal a Commander, RN, his deputy a Flight Lieutenant the Adjutant an Army Captain and so on. Some of the other officers had been brought out of retirement, after service in the Boer War by the look of most of them. The Provost Sergeant was in the Royal Ulster Rifles with black stripes, piped in green and a funny, big green beret that was about to take off. Naturally he became ‘Black Jack’.

After ‘induction’ we were told that we were the very first intake for the Russian course, which we duly started. The Bodmin course taught Russian in a general way, the subject matter being similar to what one would learn at school and so there was no need to cater for the requirements of the separate services. It lasted for nearly a year. So, every day it was up on the parade ground for drill, inspection, etc., then 6 hours of Russian broken by one hour of drill, PT or weapons training. Apparently it was much more intense than any other language course being run in the country, including colleges and universities. It was a slog. At the end of the first day, when we learned the Cyrillic alphabet, we were given a list of 50 new Russian words and were told to learn them overnight for a test in the morning. The same thing happened the next day and every day for the first 2 months. The only concession we got was a low watt electric light above the bed!

Teaching was done in either groups of 4 students plus teacher or big classes - oral, written, conversation, Russian to English and vice versa, Russian films, both classics and the communist propaganda ones, newspapers, etc. Every week there was a test and every 4 weeks an exam after which you were assessed and if found wanting, returned to your unit. Nobody wanted that so it was quite a spur to keep at it and work hard.

As time went on, as in all things, you settled into a routine. The discipline eased off and the place did have its compensations. Our teachers were mostly East Europeans and some were quite eccentric with yarns to tell which some of us thought were pure Arabian Nights stuff. We didn’t believe one of them who claimed to have been in Ekaterinberg when the Tsar and his family were assassinated. We did believe the aristocratic Polish Colonel Godlewski with his big cavalry moustache who spoke of the lavish pre-war midnight balls and drinking champagne from ladies’ slippers. He taught us Tsarist drinking songs and his favourite expression was, ’My dears, you have no idea . . .’.

We also believed the ex-Cossack Colonel, tall, silver haired and distinguished, who took us through a regimental wild boar hunt in the birch forests of his homeland. The boar, chased by dogs ran in circles in the same way that people walk in circles in the desert when they have no reference point. He and his men on horses waited until the chase was over and then rode to where all the noise was coming from. The boar was back on its haunches taking on the dogs that were game enough to attack it. Some dogs got it wrong and the boar was able to rip them open with its razor tusks. The injured dogs would then be stitched up with needle and thread and retired for the day. Tradition demanded that some one finished off the boar with a knife (not a sword, not a bullet) and the one looking for glory dismounted and took on the exhausted but still game boar. Mostly they were lucky, occasionally not.

We had the 2 small Finns. One was young, and seriously serious, who never smiled once and castigated us for any diversion we created, telling us off for not keeping at the Russian. The other one was older, relaxed and funny and he taught us quite a few rude Russian songs and lots of Russian swear words.

We had Makarov, born in Shanghai of Russian parents who sounded English to us, who was as complete in his duffle coat and he used to smoke from a very long ivory fag holder. He started a trend among the students as well as other teachers.

A number of the students of these schools became well known in later life, Alan Bennett, Jack Rosenthal (‘London’s Burning’, ‘The Knowledge’, etc.), Michael Frayn, Dennis Potter, Peter Woodthorpe, Eddie George, Bank of England, as well as numerous professors, several British ambassadors and diplomats, leading members of the Bar and so on.

There was also a lot of schoolboy tomfoolery going on, sort of Monty Python stuff, like the parting shot at a retiring commandant when someone painted in large letters on one of the hut roofs ‘YAITSY’ in Russian. That’s ‘BALLS’ to you and me.

The worst things about Bodmin was the food and weather. Apparently, the army received about two thirds of the money per capita for catering compared with what the RAF received. Why? No idea! It was always in short supply. The rations were meagre and even the bread was hard to come by. The catering officer, a major brought in from retirement and probably one of the Boer War veterans, used local civilian staff in the kitchens. Now I know that we lads were grockles to them. That, combined with the fact that smuggling was in their blood, meant that our food was fair game (I don’t mean to offend any Cornishmen because my grandmother was Cornish, born and bred and lived in Penzance, so a quarter of me is Cornish and I know about these things, nudge, nudge). Some of our chaps saw them nicking our food. When we complained to the major, he would not hear a word against his staff and threatened to charge anyone who made any accusations. He was local and probably Cornish too. After we had moved out of Bodmin, someone showed me a newspaper clipping. An alert guard had been a bit suspicious of the plump passenger in the sidecar of the motorbike that one of the catering staff was driving. The passenger turned out to be a whole side of bacon wrapped in an army uniform. They were nabbed, fined and sacked. Too late for us.

The time came for the final exam, which everyone passed (they had spent too much time and money on us to chuck any of us out now), and we still didn’t know what we were being trained for. Some fool thought we were going to be spies although on that that point, Andrei Vishinsky, Stalin’s mouthpiece at the UN had protested about the ‘spy schools’ that were being set up in the UK.

Next stop RAF Wythall, immediately south of Birmingham, for about 3 months. Trust the RAF to get all dramatic. This was a small station surrounded by a high barbed wire fence with patrolling Alsatian dogs - for crying out loud!

At last we now found out what our purpose in life was. We were going to be radio telephonists listening to Russian military air traffic transmissions. At this point we asked about those commissions and were told, ‘Ahem. Slight snag there. Afraid you were misled. But you will all be senior NCOs’. Grumble, grumble.

At Wythall we received additional technical Russian instruction based on a vocabulary associated with aviation. In addition we were also instructed by a petty officer, RN, on the mysteries of the block circuit diagrams of the B.40 super heterodyne radio receiver with its beat frequency oscillator (whatever they were) and how to tune it. We were also instructed on how to operate the tape recorder that the Navy used. The recorder itself was a battleship grey monster, an 18-inch cube with the tape and spools on top and it weighed a ton.

We were played recordings of Russian military R/T transmissions with increasing background noise and unreadability and repeatedly tested.

Two things stick out re Wythall. They had a flight sergeant of the old school. Not much between the ears and not realising that he was dealing with men who were a bit different from his usual charges. He started to throw his weight about, quite unreasonably in my opinion, and the CO received 143 resignations on his desk in one package. After all, you cannot force someone to understand Russian, especially if you don’t understand the language yourself. The expression lion to lamb is appropriate here.

Second. The lecturer in Russian was Professor Tuplin. He was a lovely old boy and looked like a small version of Albert Einstein with the spread of white hair at the back I think he used to be a professor at Leningrad University and he would tell us tales. One was about the authorities in Leningrad who, long pre-war, were getting concerned about the falling birth rate. They hit on the wizard wheeze of encouraging everyone to strip off and walk about naked. Obviously, the birth rate sank even lower but it was hilarious to hear the Professor complaining in all seriousness, ‘It’s not very nice sitting on the wooden seat of a Leningrad tram with no clothes on except your boots!’

Training over. Off to Germany to listen to the Russians.

Ralph

I know this is a bit late but a month ago you mentioned the book 'Fly Like A Bird'. I have been looking for my copy with no success ( I do have a rather a large collection). In fact the book is called 'Think Like A Bird', and I have given up searching so have ordered a paperback from Amazon as you posted.

Yes Ralph, my mistake! I used to borrow a copy from my local library, so do not actually own a copy :redface: , I do have the follow up though...'The Unbridgeable Divide"