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3 ‘Free of Boundaries, Free of Gravity, Free of Ties’

The great RAF expansion gave thousands of young men the chance to realize an ambition that had seemed remote and probably unattainable when they first conceived it. That flying was possible was still a relatively novel idea. For most people in the world the thought that they would ever actually do so themselves was fantastical. The banality of aviation has hardened our imaginations to the fascination it excited in the years between the wars. Once, in Uganda in the 1980s, I was at a remote airstrip when a relief plane took some adolescent boys for a joyride. It was the first time they had been in an aeroplane. When they landed their friends ran out to examine them, as if they expected them to have been physically transformed by the experience.

So it was, or nearly so, in the inter-war years. ‘Ever been up?’ people would ask each other at the air displays that attracted hundreds of thousands in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. Those who could say ‘yes’ were admired for their daring, their worldliness, their modernity. The men and women who flew the beautiful treacherous machines were exalted and exotic. In the eyes of many, their courage and skill put them at the apex of human evolution.

Aviators were as popular as film stars. Record-breaking feats of speed, distance and endurance filled the papers. Men were the most avid readers of these stories, young men and boys. Almost every pilot who fought in Fighter Command in 1940 fell for flying early. Their interest flared with the intensity of a great romance. For some, the first magical taste came with a ten-minute flip in the rear cockpit of one of the rickety machines of the flying circuses that hopped around the country, setting up on racecourses or dropping in at resort towns. The most famous was led by Alan Cobham, a breezy entrepreneur who was knighted for pioneering flights across Asia. Billy Drake was sixteen years old, on holiday from his boarding school in Switzerland, when the circus arrived to put on a display close by his father’s golf club near Stroud. It was half a crown to go up. Drake was already intoxicated with aviation, but his parents tried to dissuade him, partly because flying seemed a dead end for a middle-class boy, but also because they feared for his safety. The brief hop over the Gloucestershire fields was enough to set the course of his early life. ‘When I got down,’ he remembered many years later, ‘I knew that this was it.’¹

Pete Brothers watched aeroplanes in the skies around his home in Lancashire, where his family owned a firm supplying chemicals to the food and pharmaceutical industries. In his spare time he made model aeroplanes. His family were wary of his enthusiasm. In 1936, on his sixteenth birthday, he was given flying lessons at the Lancashire Aero Club in the hope that the draughty, dangerous reality of flying would cool his ardour. ‘My father said, “You’ll get bored with it, settle down and come into the family business.” But I didn’t. I went off and joined the air force.’ He took his father flying and he, too, became ‘flat-out keen’.²

Sometimes, unwittingly, parents planted the germ themselves. Dennis David was seven years old and on holiday in Margate when, ‘as a special treat, my mother and I went up in an Avro 504 of the Cornwall Aviation Company. Though I was surprised by the din, this…sowed a seed inside me.’³

Just the sight of an aeroplane could be enough to ignite the passion. James Sanders got up at five one morning, in July 1933, at the villa in Genoa where his wealthy archaeologist father had moved the family, to watch a formation of twenty-four Savoia Marchetti seaplanes, led by Italo Balbo, the head of the Italian air force, heading west on a propaganda visit to the United States, and felt two certainties. ‘There was going to be a war, there was no question about it, and I was going to be in the air force.’⁴

Throughout the inter-war years, all around the country, many a flat, boring pasture was transformed into an airfield and became an enchanted domain for the surrounding schoolboys. On summer evenings Roland Beamont would cycle from his prep school in Chichester to the RAF station at Tangmere, climb on to his bicycle to see over the hedge and watch 11 Squadron and 43 Squadron taking off and landing in their Hawker Furies. From the age of seven, when he had been taken up by a barnstorming pilot, he had been entranced with flying. Watching the silver-painted biplanes, the sleekest and fastest in the air force, he decided he ‘wanted more than anything else to be on fighters’.⁵ Twelve years later he was in the middle of the Battle of Britain, flying Hurricanes from the same aerodrome.

First encounters with aeroplanes and airmen sometimes had the quality of a dream. Bob Doe, a shy schoolboy, was walking home after classes to his parents’ cottage in rural Surrey when ‘an RAF biplane fighter…force-landed in a field close to the road. I was able to walk around it, touch it and feel what was to me [the] beginning of the mystery of aviation.’⁶ Thousands of miles away on the other side of the world, near the town of Westport in the Southern Alps of New Zealand, a small, restless boy called Alan Deere had experienced the same revelation. While playing near his father’s farm he heard the note of an engine in the sky, looked up and saw a tiny silver machine. He had heard of aeroplanes but never seen one. ‘The fact that one was now overhead seemed unbelievable. Where did it come from? Who was the pilot? Where was it going to land?’ After the aircraft put down on a beach, he and his friends stood ‘for long hours…and gazed in silent wonder at the aeroplane until eventually our persistence was rewarded by an invitation to look into the cockpit. There within easy reach was the “joystick”…the very sound of the word conjuring up dreams of looping and rolling in the blue heavens.’ As he studied the instruments ‘there gradually grew within me a resolve that one day I would fly a machine like this and perhaps land on this very beach to the envy and delight of my boyhood friends.’⁷

Almost all of these recorded episodes feel like encounters with fate. Brian Kingcome was making his languid progress through another term at yet another boarding school when, one sunny afternoon, ‘there came the drone of an aero-engine overhead – not a common sound in the mid 1930s – and a small aircraft circled the school a couple of times at roof-top height. The whole school rushed out to watch spellbound as the tiny machine throttled back and, in that lovely, burbling, swooshing silence that follows the throttling back of an old fashioned aero-engine, glided in to land in the park in front of the house.’ The pilot who emerged, nonchalant and romantic in flying helmet and silk scarf, was a young man, four years Kingcome’s senior, whom he had known at one of the several previous schools his mother’s whims had directed him to.

‘Is there a Brian Kingcome here?’ he asked. ‘Have I come to the right place?’

He had, and there was. My stock soared…Basking in the gaze of many envious eyes, I climbed aboard and a moment later found myself for the first time in a world I had never dreamed could exist – a world free from the drag of earth’s umbilical cord, free to climb, swoop and dive, free of boundaries, free of gravity, free of ties, free to do anything except stand still.⁸

Whatever their differences of background, all these boys were children of their time. Their enthusiasms were stoked by what they read in the illustrated papers, aimed at the youth market, that sold in millions. These, just as others would do a generation later, leant heavily on the preceding war for their material, and particularly on the doings of the heroes who had emerged from the RFC. The anonymous editors of the comics of the era, with their almost infallible comprehension of the young male psyche, recognized at once the charge that old-fashioned swashbuckling married to modern technology would carry. The example of the first fighter aces fixed itself in the imaginations of a generation being born just as they had met their deaths. Even at nineteen the thoughts of Geoffrey Page as he left his public school to go up to study engineering at London University ‘were boyishly clear and simple. All I wanted was to be a fighter pilot like my hero, Captain Albert Ball. I knew practically all there was to know about Albert Ball; how he flew, how he fought, how he won his Victoria Cross, how he died. I also thought I knew about war in the air. I imagined it to be Arthurian – about chivalry…death and injury had no part in it.’⁹

Yet the most popular chronicles of the air war were remarkably frank about what was entailed. The deterrent effect appears to have been minimal. Perhaps Fighter Command’s single most effective recruiting sergeant was Captain James Bigglesworth, created by W. E. Johns, who had flown with the RFC in the First World War and whose stories began to appear in Popular Flying magazine in 1932. The first novel, The Camels Are Coming, was published the same year. Biggles seems unattractive now; cold, driven by suppressed anger, a spoilsport and a bit of a bully. He was a devastatingly romantic figure to the twelve- and thirteen-year-olds who went on to emulate him a few years later. Johns introduced them to a

slight fair-haired, good-looking lad still in his teens but [already] an acting flight commander…his deep-set eyes were never still and held a glint of yellow fire that somehow seemed out of place in a pale face upon which the strain of war, and sight of sudden death, had already graven little lines…He had killed six men during the past month – or was it a year? – he had forgotten. Time had become curiously telescoped lately. What did it matter, anyway? He knew he had to die some time and had long ago ceased to worry about it.

Many of the stories were based on real events, some relating to Mannock, who appears disguised as ‘Mahoney’. Johns made no attempt to hide the grisliness of the business, emphasizing the man-to-man nature of primitive air fighting. In one story he repeats with approval von Richthofen’s maxim that ‘when attacking two-seaters, kill the gunner first’, and goes on to describe his hero doing just that. ‘Pieces flew off the green fuselage, and as he twisted upwards into a half roll Biggles noticed that the enemy gunner was no longer standing up. “That’s one of them!” he thought coolly. “I’ve given them a bit out of their own copy-book.”’¹⁰ In another, Biggles notes an ‘Albatros, wrapped in a sheet of flame…the doomed pilot leaping into space even as he passed’.¹¹

It is not only Germans who die. Getting killed is presented as almost inevitable. An important and enduring message, one the young readers took to heart, was that there was no point dwelling on it. ‘One of the most characteristic features of the Great War,’ Johns wrote in the Foreword to Biggles in France, ‘was the manner in which humour and tragedy so often went hand in hand. At noon a practical joke might set the officers’ mess rocking with mirth. By sunset, or perhaps within the hour, the perpetrator of it would be gone for ever, fallen to an unmarked grave in the shellholes of No Mans Land.’¹²

The Biggles stories are practically documentary in their starkness, as good a guide to the air war over the trenches as the non-fictional memoirs. Their audiences were absorbed and inspired by them. They changed lives. Reading them reinforced Pete Brothers’s decision to seek a short-service commission in the RAF. He found them ‘beautiful stories that enthralled me and excited me and made me want to emulate them’. At the Lancashire Aeroclub before taking up a short-service commission in January 1936, he had been pleased to find his instructor had been a Sopwith Camel pilot in the war.¹³

Cinematic portrayals of the air were equally frank. The most successful was Dawn Patrol, starring Errol Flynn, David Niven and Basil Rathbone, which came out in 1938. The 59th Squadron is based on a sticky sector of the Western Front. Sixteen men have gone in a fortnight. Replacements arrive, fresh from a few weeks at flying school. Orders to send them up against hardened Germans come by telephone from senior officers, comfortably quartered miles behind the lines. New names are chalked up on the duty blackboard to be wiped off within an hour. Kit-bags are returned home without ever being unpacked. The Daily Express praised the film’s ‘lack of false sentiment or mock heroics’ and called it ‘one of the best and bitterest melodramas about men and planes’. It was a box-office hit and was seen, often several times, by hundreds of the pilots who fought in 1940. No one was put off. It was the glamour, camaraderie and romance of flying that pulled them back to the local fleapits, not the message of waste and futility. By this time every young man in Britain was facing a prospect of early extinction. Dying in the air might be awful, but it was better than dying on the ground.

With the expansion programme, thousands of young men were now being given a choice in how they would fight the next war. Before it began, the RAF recruited annually about 300 pilots and 1,600 airmen. Between 1935 and 1938 the average RAF intake was 4,500 and 40,000 airmen and apprentices. Air Ministry officials appealed directly to schools for recruits and advertised in the flying magazines and popular newspapers the young men they were looking for might be expected to read. One that appeared on the front page of the Daily Express, adorned by a drawing of three Hurricanes, promised ‘the life is one that will appeal to all men who wish to adopt an interesting and progressive career…leave is on a generous scale…applicants must be physically fit and single but no previous flying experience is necessary’. Pay, in cash and kind, was set at between £340 and £520 a year. A £300 gratuity was payable after four years’ service, or £500 after six years. Age limits were set between seventeen and a half and twenty-eight. The educational qualification was school certificate standards, although ‘an actual certificate is not necessary’.

Pat Hancock, a mechanically minded eighteen-year-old from Croydon, was at Wimbledon Technical College when he saw an advertisement in the Daily Express. ‘The ministry – bless it – was offering commissions to suitable young gentlemen – four years, and at the end if you survived you got a magnificent lump sum of £300, which was really a lot in those days. I pounced on it and sweet talked my father and mother into allowing me to apply.’¹⁴

Parental permission was needed if the applicant was under twenty-one, and many pilots seem to have faced, at first at least, family opposition. Flying was undeniably dangerous. In an era when men chose a profession, trade or occupation and tended to stick with it for the rest of their working life, it offered a very uncertain career. Despite popular enthusiasm, commercial aviation had been slow to expand. Air travel was confined to the rich. RFC pilots who hoped to make their livings flying in peacetime were mostly disappointed. Arguments were needed to overcome the objections. Billy Drake misunderstood the terms and thought the RAF would pay him an annuity of £300, a detail which persuaded his parents to grant their approval.

Geoffrey Page’s distant and authoritarian father summoned him to his London club when he heard of his plans to apply for Cranwell. Flying was the family business. Page’s uncle ran Handley Page, a leading British aircraft manufacturer. Over tea his father told him he had ‘spoken to your uncle at length about your desire to be a pilot and he has advised me strongly against it. Pilots, he tells me, are two a penny. Hundreds are chasing a handful of jobs.’ He refused to pay for the ‘stupidity’ of pursuing an RAF career. Page’s mother pleaded with him not to take up flying. Page rarely saw his father and resented the intervention strongly. Later he decided it had been motivated by concern. His father had lost a younger brother in the war, shot down and killed over the North Sea while serving in the Royal Navy Air Service.¹⁵ Page eventually made his own way into the RAF, via the London University Air Squadron.

The RAF set out to be meritocratic in its search for recruits, and Tedder, as director of training, decided to cast the net wide in the search for the best candidates. The requirement to have reached school certificate level meant boys from poor families who could not afford to keep their children on until sixteen were theoretically excluded. The rules were not always strictly imposed and officials occasionally used their discretion.

Bob Doe’s father was a gardener on the Surrey estate of the editor of the News of the World. Doe left school at fourteen without passing any exams and got a job as an office boy at the paper’s headquarters in Bouverie Street. One lunchtime he walked over to the Air Ministry headquarters in Kingsway and announced he wanted a short-service commission. ‘I was passed from office to office. They were very disapproving when they found I’d passed no exams. Then I found myself in front of this elderly chap with lots of braid on his uniform and he seemed to like me.’¹⁶ When he discovered that Doe had already joined the RAFVR and done seventy-five hours’ flying, any lack of formal education was forgotten. Doe sat the entrance exam, and with some coaching from his Air Ministry sponsor, got through. Doe’s case was exceptional. Most entrants had passed their school certificate and had gone to fee-paying or grammar schools.

One obvious source for the sort of healthy, uncomplicated, modern-minded young men the RAF was seeking was the Empire. Senior officers were sent overseas to Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa to supervise selection. The decision to leave home to cross the world at a time when war seemed to be stirring again in Europe was a dramatic one. Yet the populations of the colonies felt strong sentiments of loyalty and respect towards Britain. The RAF appeal offered broader horizons to ambitious and adventurous young airmen as well as touching a sense of obligation. The response was enthusiastic. On catching their first sight of the mother country, many of them wondered whether they had made the right choice. Alan Deere left Auckland in September 1937 aboard the SS Rangitane and arrived at Tilbury docks at the start of an English winter. ‘The cold discomfort of the railway carriage and the flat, treeless acres of southern Essex were depressing reminders of the warmth and sunshine of far-off New Zealand. We stared in amazement at the grim rows of East End houses, pouring their smoke into the clouded atmosphere, and were appalled by the bustle and grime of Liverpool Street Station, so different from the luxurious gateway to the London of our dreams.’¹⁷

Despite the relative elasticity of the RAF approach, the selection process was thorough and demanding. After the written test and a strict medical, candidates were summoned to a board and questioned by a panel of officers. The examiners were looking for some technical knowledge and evidence of keenness. Enthusiasm for sports was usually taken as strong proof of the latter. At first, short-service entrants were sent off immediately to an RAF flying training centre, but the existing facilities could not cope with the wave of new recruits and Tedder decided to pay civilian flying schools to give ab initio instruction.

The new boys learned in two-seaters, Avro Tutors and de Havilland Tiger Moths. A first flight in the flimsy, thrumming trainers left an indelible impression, akin, as some would remember, to their first encounter with sex. Dennis David had his first lesson in a Blackburn B2 at the grandly named London Air Park, near present-day Heathrow. In reality it was a tiny grass field with a clump of trees in the centre, surrounded by houses. Many years later he ‘still [found] it hard to find the words to describe my sheer delight and sense of freedom as the little biplane, seeming to strain every nerve, accelerated across the grass and suddenly became airborne’.¹⁸

Fantasizing about flying aeroplanes was no preparation for the reality. A few, not necessarily the best pilots, found it gratifyingly easy. Johnny Kent, an eighteen-year-old Canadian, had begun learning at the Winnipeg Flying Club, ‘and was absolutely thrilled with the experience of actually handling the controls and I managed to cope with all the manoeuvres including an approach…at the end of this first lesson I knew I could fly’.¹⁹ But many found flight in a small, sensitive aircraft unnerving. Bob Doe was ‘petrified when I first went up. The side of the aeroplane was so thin that when you banked round I was afraid of falling through it. In no way did I have an affinity for it.’²⁰ On Hubert Allen’s first flight as a new candidate for a short-service commission the instructor

put the Tiger Moth into a bunt [loop] and I was sick. He shouldn’t have done that, but perhaps he thought I was over-confident and needed cutting down to size. He was mistaken. I was under-confident so I probably acted the part of extrovert to conceal this. ‘Good God,’ he said, when after landing and turning off the magnetos he peered into my cockpit and noticed that I was covered in vomit. ‘I hope you’re not going to be one of those air-sick fellows…better give the rigger half a crown for cleaning up the mess.’…he strode off to the bar.²¹

Even those who had flown regularly as passengers discovered that the violent manoeuvres essential to military aviation differed dramatically from the pleasant sensations of straight and level flying. Tim Vigors, a sporting young man from a landed Irish family, had been taken flying by his godmother, who was an air enthusiast, and he liked it so much he applied to Cranwell. Starting flying training he felt fearful and nauseous. As the instructor put the aeroplane into a loop, a standard, elementary manoeuvre, a ‘queasy feeling engulfed me…then the whole weight of my body fell on my shoulder harness as we turned upside down in a slow roll…fear of falling out of the cockpit eclipsed all other sensations’.²²

Initial success did not mean that progress would then be steady. Robert Stanford Tuck was a confident young man whose long face, athletic build and pencil moustache made him look like Errol Flynn. He had lead an adventurous life in his teens, escaping the mundane horizons of Catford in south-east London for a career in the merchant navy before being accepted for a short-service commission. Tuck started off well. But he found it difficult to progress beyond basics and develop the instinctive ease of handling, the feel that was essential if one was to become a serious pilot. Tuck’s cocky judgement after his first go at the controls was that flying was easy. So it is, if restricted to the basic manoeuvres of take-off, straight and level flight, shallow turns and landing. But after that the learning ladder is steep. Diving, looping and banking tightly are disorientating. Mistakes lead quickly to panic as the actions required to retrieve the situation are usually counter-instinctive. Tuck found he was the dud of his intake, snatching at the controls, over-correcting and suffering potentially fatal lapses of concentration. He began to fear that something he had come to love would be snatched away from him. It was only when he learned that flying did not require great physical effort that his performance started to improve. The secret lay in relaxation, avoiding sharp movements and settling oneself into the fabric of the machine so as to become part of its nervous system. You had to feel the aeroplane. For the fighter pilots of the First World War, buttocks had been an important sensory tool. Pilots felt they lost something when, in 1927, parachutes, which they were obliged to sit on, became standard equipment.

By the time war broke out the RAF was mass-producing officers. The privately run elementary flying training schools dotted around the country taught a basis in practical flying, with a grounding in navigation and gunnery, that prepared pupils for an advanced course at one of the RAF’s own flying training schools. The idea was that, unlike in the previous war, when half-trained men were expected to learn while on squadron duty, pilots would now arrive at their units ready for operations.

The initial flying was done in biplanes. Pupils underwent twenty-two stages of instruction, starting with ‘air experience’ – the first flip – through to aerobatics during the eight- to twelve-week course. Emphasis was placed on learning to recover from a spin, and there was a compulsory practice every week. It was the only manoeuvre, apart from straightforward flying, that was taught previous to the first solo, which came half-way through the course. Most pupils got off alone after between eight and ten hours in the air. Alan Deere was so impatient to do so he forgot the last words of his instructor to fly for only ten minutes and to attempt only two landings. ‘I was really straining at the leash by the time he had delivered these homilies and, thinking he had finished, banged the throttle open…and so into the air, solo at last. One, two, three landings, around again and again I went, the ten-minute limit completely forgotten in the thrill and excitement of this momentous occasion.’²³

Aerobatics were promoted to give pupils complete confidence in their machines as well as preparing them for the stomach-churning reality of aerial combat. Flying blind, encased in a hood, relying only on the instruments, was also taught. Later this hair-raising method was replaced by means of an earthbound flight simulation trainer, the Link. The cost of elementary training was expensive at £5 per pupil per hour (double for advanced training) and those who showed little aptitude were weeded out early on. Those who finished the course successfully went on to a stint at the RAF Depot at Uxbridge for two weeks of drilling, physical training, familiarization with the limited administrative duties required of young officers and learning the niceties of mess protocol. During the fortnight, tailors arrived to kit out the fledgling officers and provide an opportunity for a laugh. Blond, raffish Paddy Barthropp remembered the response to the inevitable question, as they were measured up for their uniforms, which included mess kit with very tight-fitting trousers. ‘When the cutters asked their customers which side they dressed the reply would come. “Just make them baggy around the kneecaps.”’²⁴ The new officers were given £50 to cover everything, including uniforms, shirts, socks, two pairs of shoes and a cap – not enough if you went to the better outfitters.

Before candidates moved on to the next stage of training, the chief instructor at the elementary flying school made a recommendation as to whether a pupil’s abilities best suited him to fighters or bombers. Flying anything required delicacy. Flying fighters required a particular softness of touch. Horsemen, yachtsmen and pianists, the prevailing wisdom held, made the best fighter pilots. The decision was made on the pilot’s flying ability but also on his temperament. Success depended on a combination of discipline of the sort needed to maintain the flying formations beloved of the pre-war RAF, with the audacity and nerve inherent in the dazzling aerobatics which the service also prized as an indication of worth and quality.

The pilots themselves had a say in their fate. To some, like Dennis David, it seemed the choice was preordained, feeling from the outset that ‘it was inevitable that I was to be a fighter pilot…from the start I was a loner. It was just me and my aeroplane hoping that neither of us would let the other down.’²⁵ Alan Deere felt the same certainty, ‘had always determined to be a fighter pilot’ and pressed his superiors to be posted to fighters.

Fighters were not the automatic choice for all young pilots. The strategic thinking of the previous two decades had its effect on ambitious trainees. Most of Deere’s contemporaries thought bombers offered a better career and he was one of only four to go to a fighter squadron. But for the majority fighters offered a degree of freedom and individuality that was not available in a bomber crew – and, as was clear even before the war began, a greater chance of survival. Brian Kingcome, who after Cranwell was posted to 65 Fighter Squadron, considered that ‘only a man brave beyond belief would ever want to go into bombers. Us cards all went into fighters.’²⁶

After leaving the depot, the half-formed pilots moved on to one of the flying training schools to learn on service aircraft. In the early days of expansion, trainee fighter pilots started out on biplanes like the Hawker Hart or the Audax. These eventually made way for the Miles Master and the North American Harvard. The latter was a twin-seat, single-engined trainer with half the horsepower of the new breed of fighters, but which none the less gave a taste of what it would be like to handle a Hurricane or Spitfire when the time came.

The instruction was testing. Deere lost his temper after his teacher scolded him for his clumsy performance of the highly difficult manoeuvre of spinning a Hart, first one way, then the other, with a hood over his head to blot out vision. The tantrum nearly lost him his commission and he was told he had been given another chance ‘only because the Royal Air Force has already spent so much money on your training’.²⁷ The pilots were taught set-piece attacks against bomber formations, each one numbered according to the circumstances. There was some gunnery practice, a small part of which involved using live ammunition on towed aerial drogues.