Australians at War Film Archive

Well,

I suppose it’s many and varied. My father was a South Australian from the Spencer Gulf, Gawler, grew up there as a young fellow, stockman, that type of thing, lived on the land. Originally his parents came from England back in the early 1880s and my mother came from out

west a little placed called Kadina, out west of Orange, and they eventually all graduated by some means to Lithgow in the Blue Mountains here and that’s where it all started, the Richardson Dynasty. We just went from there. I was the youngest of our family, a family of five who were

six, one died at infancy, a boy. But there’s quite a difference between myself and my next brother, he was fourteen to fifteen years older than me and I was sort of an unexpected arrival towards the period that we all grew up there. And consequently we - well, they were fairly tough times

those days from what I can remember as a child in Lithgow. It was in the height of the Depression in the early 1930s when I was old enough to remember things. And my brothers did it pretty tough – my father, he was all right, he was an accountant, bookkeepers they used to call them in those days. And he also had a business in Lithgow, a tobacconist/hairdresser’s shop and we also had a

shop on the corner of Inch Street in Lithgow where my sisters used to operate, like Pauline Hanson, a fish and chip shop and that’s where it all started and we progressed form there. I was there until the age of four, I moved out of the business premises and we went to live in the western suburbs of Lithgow and that’s where my formative years started from there.

Well I can distinctively remember when we shifted, at the age of four, when we shifted from the shop in Inch Street and moved out to Cudrow Street in Lithgow and we sort of moved into residential life there more as a family rather than as a business family. And my brothers they

used to get some work at the iron works in Lithgow as it was called in those days because as you probably know Lithgow was the earliest place where the manufacture of steel in Australia started by the Hoskins people. And if they were lucky they might get one day a week work and that sort of thing but with that and the help of the Dole people they survived

and eventually lived through those sort of fairly bad years right from the 1930s leading right up to the beginning of World War II. Things never really started to kick on until the middle 1930s when there was, well preparation for war I suppose and money and jobs became a little bit more prevalent and life became a little bit more normal and everybody had a bit more

money and had a job and things started to look up. But basically I think the whole of Australia didn’t start to rejuvenate I suppose until the late 1930s when work and money became a little bit more plentiful. Of course it was all preparatory to World War II – that’s how it all started really.

Well, it didn’t affect me much - I was only a young fellow there. And school years, I went to Coolwill Primary School and eventually went into the Lithgow High School where I went to third year and there wasn’t much available for young fellows leaving school in those days. I left school at a fairly young age.

I wasn’t really amenable to school for some reason or another – I was more anxious to get out into the workforce and I finished up working at one of the, well it was the leading butcher's shop in town a place called Sutton’s Butchery. And with my limited outlook in those days I thought I was really something, looking after horses and trying to be a butcher.

But that didn’t last all that long, a year or so, and I had an uncle, my mother’s brother, in Sydney. He was in the business, well, he was in the radio world, he became the editor of the radio retailer of a publication, a magazine that was published for use right throughout the radio trade

and it became widely known and it was the official organ of the radio trade in those days, the Radio Retailer, and he said to my mother “That’s enough of this for this young fellow, send him to Sydney and we’ll do something with him”. That’s how it all started so they took me to Sydney and he got me a job in a radio manufacturing place and

I went to the Australian Radio College and completed a course there and finished up as a radio engineer, in those days, a very minor one at that particular time of course. Then I came back and entered into the servicing industry of communications in Lithgow, that’s how it all started. But it was quite an

adventurous year, or years, I learned a lot working down there and attending these courses and it set me up for a better education from there on.

Well, it was a course that was put out in those days – it was a

night-time course we attended and it was a course – it ran for some eighteen months which took you through the basic principals of radio in those days and it set you up with a broad outline of the basics of everything. It was quite an interesting study really, once you got a bit older and learned to

appreciate those things you could see where it was all going. As a matter of fact I’ve still got some of the books there that I used to use in those days and it stood me in good stead in later years – much, much better and I was always thankful to my uncle for doing that. Eventually, those things came to an end and I went back to Lithgow

and took a job in the communications industry there. I used to work for one of the big firms called Bracey’s in Lithgow and from there I went in with Watson Radio and that all led up to eventually the war started and after the war did start well eventually, as most young fellows did in those days, it led to me joining up, enlisting, which I did in 1941.

I thought that I would just be accepted into the radio field when I went down to enlist in Sydney and I told them my background in radio and I was quite surprised they said “Oh, we don’t want any of those, we’ve got plenty of those, you’re air crew material”. I said “I don’t know about that I only went to third year in high school”.

In those days you nearly had to have a university degree to get into air crew. And they said “You’ll be right” and they signed all the documents up and that was in October in 1941 and they said “Off you go” and they marched me out of the enlistment office with a great pile of books under my arm and said “Report to Mr Kirkwood at Lithgow High School

and complete this course in English and maths and physics and bring yourself up to Leaving Certificate standard in six months and then if you do that OK you’ll be in”. Well, that’s exactly what happened. I went back and went back to school and that was the best thing I ever did.

Eventually at the end of that course, I finished that, and in May 1942 in I went and that’s how it all happened.

Well, I suppose you only knew what you were told and what you read in the newspapers but

I think there was very much a feeling of loyalty to the cause and the flag in those days and it was just the done thing I think really in the end.

Conscription, it wasn’t a fact right then but everyone knew it was going to be and it did eventually come in. My mother was still alive in those days and we discussed this matter and I said to her then “Well, if I’m going to get called up:” (which I wouldn’t have been actually because I was in the communications industry and if I’d have wanted to I could have

stayed out, because it was a protected industry) and I said to my mother eventually “Well, eventually, if they’re going to call me up and put me in somewhere where I don’t want to be I’ll make my own arrangements and I’ll join up” and that’s what happened. So, in we went and that started a long

line of history.

Yes, my uncle. The uncle that eventually took me to Sydney, he was, strangely enough, he was a

telegraphist in World War I and he served in France and places like that and when he came back he was a telegraphist in Lithgow Post Office and that’s how the radio side of it all came into being. You know, it just progressed from there and he sort of introduced me to it and that’s how it

carried on but he was the only one, my other brothers, my two elder brothers, they worked in a small arms factory in Lithgow during the war. One of them only had one eye, he wouldn’t have been in the forces anyway, he was disabled, and the other chap was fairly well up in the munitions world and he stopped there but that was all of us.

so there was just my uncle and I that were involved in the forces and he was, not called up, but he was recommissioned during World War II and he was given the job of liaison officer between the Americans and the Australian forces and he was based in America

during World War II doing that sort of work, liaising with the Pacific Forces, so we had a bit of representation both he and I. He followed my career quite closely but that’s about how it all happened, Cath, there’s

nothing else to report really on that business.

Not a great deal because he didn’t talk much about it. I’ve got some books or photos he sent back there from France and Germany and those places. I do remember one thing that when he came

home he and my mother were very close and he gave her a German bank note and it was one hundred thousand marks and he said “You can keep this because” he said “It wouldn’t buy a loaf of bread in Germany”. That’s how the currency had depreciated over the years and it just wasn’t worth anything. And in later

years it was brought up, and brought about, and we did eventually have it re-valued and I think they said many, many years later that it might have been worth about seventy pounds or something but that would have been thirty or forty years later, you know, it was more of a relic, or historic value than any monitory value. But I was sort of too young to be on a

first, you know, first-name basis with him. I always looked up to him as an older man and respected him as such and we never sort of had much communication as uncle and nephew. But he was a pretty bright fellow and

he went a long way and a lot of my early, well, not successes but some of my introduction to the electronics world in those days was really due to him, you know, it was his influence and insistence that we worked this way, him and Mum worked very well together and that was it.

Well, I don’t think he had much to do with it because,

see, my mother and father died in 1940 and the war had started then of course but he, to the best of my recollection, it was something we never ever discussed much him and I. We used to talk – he was a big man, my Dad, he only had one leg

and he had quite an unfortunate incident with him, as a young fellow. He was a stockman in south Australia and he was riding along on a horse one day through studded bush and that sort of thing and the horse bolted and he was knocked off the horse

but unfortunately he didn’t get knocked right off and one of his legs got caught in the stirrup and he was dragged when the horse galloped away with him and of course it mangled his leg. And there were no hospitals or anything like that and he was on the back veranda of the local hotel they attended to him and they decided they would have to amputate the leg, what was left of it, and things would have been

fairly primitive I would imagine in those days – they obviously were and he always tells the story that the local paper in those days only came out once a week and the chap who was covering the local news apparently came and saw him being attended to on the back veranda of this local hotel and said to the

doctors that were available there “What’s the position with this chap?” “Oh, he’ll be dead tonight, don’t worry about him” - not don’t worry about him but they meant there’s nothing here, he’s just too far gone. Well sixty or seventy years later of course he was still around and he was one of the very few people that read his own obituary before he died. He used to tell us about that and laugh –

it just didn’t happen, he rallied around and they fixed him up and he walked, he only ever had one leg. They gave him an artificial leg after that, he stumped home with it, he took it off and threw it in the cupboard and it stayed there for the rest of his life, he never ever wore it. He just hobbled around on crutches for the rest of his life and they weren’t the modern crutches we have now. They were just a straight dowel like that with a P piece across the

top and that was it. He used to manage and he was a man who was probably seventeen or eighteen stone. He used to get around all right but he was one of the very few people who read his own obituary sixty odd years before it happened. One of Dad’s favourite stories that one. No, he sort of had no input into my

thoughts about going into the forces in those days. Apart from everything else, in Lithgow there was a terrific number of young fellows around about that age. I was a bit over eighteen, nineteen when I actually enlisted but any eighteen or nineteen year old in those days – well, it was just the done thing. All your mates went so you

went and that was it. And I must say, a lot of us we were lucky but it was the best five years of my life. I learned a lot, had a lot of experiences, saw the world and

I think that with service life, anyone that’s had service life, comes to have a better bloke.

Yes, well there was one chap that I actually lived with. You see my mother and father in 1940 they died within ten months of each other and when I actually went in the air force they were both dead

for some time and I lived with this old Welsh couple for a while in Lithgow and their son he’d been in, he was a bit older than me and he’d been in and gone and strangely enough, when I eventually got to England and was assigned to a squadron he was on the same squadron and we finished up on the same crew

and we flew together on the same aircraft. He finished his tour, he came home a bit earlier than I did and then went up into the Islands. But there weren’t all that many in that particular town that were associated with the air force but there was a lot of them went into the

AIF, into the army, and unfortunately a lot of them finished up prisoners of war. And the fellows that I used to get around with in Lithgow they all finished up, not all of them, but a lot of them finished up POWs [Prisoners of War] in Japanese prisoner of war camps. Of course, they went one way and I went another and you sort of all got mixed up. In those days you just

went where you were told and that was it. And there was quite a difference between army and air force and navy and you all went in different directions and I think there was a very good representation form Lithgow of the three services – a lot of fellows in a lot of them. No, it was an experience that I'll never forget and thoroughly enjoyed.

Of course it led to other things, too, naturally, afterwards but we were lucky we got out of it with no ill effects that I know of.

Well, for a start education-wise quite frankly I was never interested in school

but I found that I learned more in the air force education-wise than I ever learned in going to school except in the last period that I had to go back to bring myself up to date before enlistment. But education-wise I think thank the air force for what I’ve got today. I think it was because it was because it was a learn it or else attitude.

If you didn’t do it and you didn’t shape up you shipped out and that was the strength of it and of course no one wanted that. You were in it and you wanted to do the best you could. That’s the way it followed and I’ve tried to carry that theory out for the rest of my life and I think the idea is very, very good. I think also another

thing is it learns you to live amongst people. You see, service life, it’s a great mateship, you – where we were you lived in a big barrack block in Plymouth in

England and not only that, prior to that you lived in Nissen huts in your training days and you were thrown together with all different fellows and different types of creed and religion and it was just a complete mix. There’s a bond –

it’s hard to describe but there’s a bond that develops amongst people and if people that haven’t been in the services – well, I can’t describe it actually it’s just something that

exists and I think everybody’s all the better for it because you’re dependent on a fellow, at times you’re dependent on them for your life. I don’t know what more I can tell you really.

Of course there was the travel side of it – well, we’ve been all over the world. We went away by ship, New Zealand, America – this is – I was stationed in America for a while and then across the Atlantic on the Queen Elizabeth well, you know, they are the sort of things that in the normal course of events people in those days only dreamed about. You’d never ever have a trip like that ever. And then of course when you got to England you were

all over Europe. And we were there at the time of D-Day [Allied invasion of Europe] and that was a sight I’ll never forget and it’s an experience that you can never buy. But I don’t know that there’s much more than I can tell you about that. It’s something that’s built in you and

as I say you’ve got to experience it to know about it and that’s all there is about it.

Well, I -

there was a lot of talk about it of course and we eventually decided that I’d go down so I went down to Sydney, the enlistment centre was in Sydney, I was living in Lithgow at the time and I went down to the enlistment depot at Woolloomooloo, that’s where the air force place was. And I told you before about how I finished enlisting with air crew rather than ground staff which I thought they would take me.

And I filled in all the papers and then they said “Oh well, what are you nineteen? You’ll have to get permission to do this. Of course my mother and father were both dead and my brother happened to be In Sydney at the time, eldest brother and he was down on leave from the small arms factory and I happened to know where he was staying so I had to take the papers and go and round him up.

He was staying in a – it’s now the New Hilton, it was the old Adams Hotel there in George Street. Any rate, I got him out of bed and he signed the papers for me, for permission because he was the closest next of kin you see. Then we went back and the rigmarole of enlistment in those days was quite extensive - all the tests they put you through and

confetti books and noughts and crosses and wheels going this way and that way. But then eventually they come up with a decision and they say “Oh well, you’ll do”. They were quite selective in those days with air crew and I didn’t think I had enough basic education at that time to get in there because, as I say, a lot of it was based on

university degrees and there were not too many of those running around Lithgow in those days. Anyway, it all worked out, we passed the test in a couple of months time, a few months time and in we went. And that was quite an experience when you went down there when you took the transition from civilian to serviceman - and loaded on a

bus and over the bridge to Bradfield Park at Lindfield there and in you went in a Nissen hut with a bag of straw to sleep on. And I sat down, and it was Saturday afternoon, normally I’d be home getting ready to go and see if you could find your girlfriend and take her to the dance on a Saturday night

and here I was stuck over there on a bed of straw and I said to myself “My God, what am I doing here” but there it was, you were there. It’s only a couple of months after that or a couple of weeks after that that the Japanese got into Sydney Harbour and shelled the place with those midget submarines. I’ll never forget that night, there was wholesale panic and nobody

knew including the authorities, they had no idea what was going on. All there was, just gunfire everywhere and we were rounded up, they thought there was an invasion and they got us all out of our huts and took us down the bush between Bradfield Park and Lane Cove and we spent the night under a rock down there, out of the way, waiting to find out what happened. I’ll never forget that either because as you’ve probably read Sydney

Harbour was alive that night with depth charges and shells and guns going off all night. The upshot from that was for the next week we lived on fish, obviously thrown up from the harbour from the depth charges because all the bones were pulverised. They didn’t waste them so the fish they got out of there they put them to good use. But from there on it was just a

progression through training schools. Bradfield Park and then out to Parkes, six months out there at Parkes in the summer time and from Parkes over to Cootamundra, there was a radio school at Parkes and there was a Navigator’s school at Cootamundra and then down to Sale in Victoria where we did a

gunnery course down there. I’ll never forget those things – we flew in old Fairey Battles, they were aircraft that had been declared obsolete from the battle of Britain and they sent them out here because there was nothing else available. And we flew these blooming old things and they were quite a unique aircraft. They were the high

tech of those days it would have been, they had a Rolls Royce engine in them cooled by Glycol and the Glycol leaked everywhere and with the Glycol leaking and the engine fumes everyone just got sick. So every time you went up you just got sick all over the place and you were trying to fire a machine gun out of the back at a drogue being towed behind another aircraft half a mile away. Anyway, it was quite an experience we used to fly up and down the Ninety Mile Beach I think they called that in those

days, all along there - all good fun. And from there back to embarkation depot and the next thing I knew I was in America and we were only staging there for a while. Then across the Atlantic on the Queen Elizabeth, twenty-one thousand troops and six and a half days right across there – nearly all Americans of course.

We were in Lithgow at the time – this is long after we’d left the business and we lived as ordinary

people in the suburbs of Lithgow but my father was seventy odd years of age and my mother was sixty-two or sixty-three and she died of pneumonia at a comparatively young age, particularly these days. He died first and then

ten months later, within ten months my mother died as well so there’s not a great deal I can tell you about that really. After that my aunt – you see the war had started and my brothers were still at home living there and my aunt, my mother’s sister, came from Sydney and sort of took over the place where we

lived – well I suppose you could call her a housekeeper. She was a widow and she came and just looked after us there for some time. That didn’t last for all that long and eventually we all sort of went our own ways. And my second eldest brother, he and his wife came to live in the

old family home and my eldest brother, by that time he’d been shifted to Bathurst, to the munitions establishment in Bathurst. And I went to live with this Welsh family for a bit and I also lived with my sister on the outskirts of town but I was sort of farmed from one to the other. Then eventually I just went into the air force

well you never had much worry about where you lived in those days, they looked after you. We shifted from place to place and never stayed in one place for very long, except six months in Parkes. The course there – actually I never had much trouble with the radio course because I’d done a lot of it before and I probably

held a great advantage over most of the other fellows in the same class and I found the radio school not a problem at all and consequently I did quite well at that except one subject which Barbara has just reminded me about. I could never, ever read Aldis, that’s the theory of the flicking light with the morse code instead of

being sent to you over a telegraph key you did it with flashes of light. I could do it but not quick enough so when it came to the final examination I cheated, I got another fellow who could do it, to do mine so everyone was happy and we all got away with it. In later years I didn’t have much need to use it but it satisfied everybody

because if you didn’t pass that examination you didn’t get any Christmas leave and you had to stay back and do that part of it again. They wouldn’t fail you on it but it meant losing leave. Anyway, this mate of mine he stood in and did mine for me so I passed with flying colours.

In Sydney, it’s still there as a matter of fact I think on the corner of City Road and George Street, George Street West - a big round building above the AS & A Bank there, right on the corner. I don’t suppose the radio college is still there but it’s still there and was there for many, many years. I used to get the tram in from

Five Dock and go to the class there of a night time. It used to run from seven to nine o clock, I think twice a week I used to go there. It was very good, very comprehensive.

You could say that I suppose although this was a privately run thing, you know, you had to pay to go to it. My uncle paid for all that but it was,

I suppose, you could call it the same sort of thing as an apprenticeship or TAFE [Technical and Further Education] or something like that. But in conjunction with that he also got me a job with this place out in Croydon, a fellow called Slade’s Radio, an old English chap that had a radio factory out there and he used to manufacture radios and test equipment.

And in conjunction in what I used to learn at the college and take part in at the place where it all sort of dove tailed in and it produced some sort of result that was quite advantageous to the trade. It was a big thing in those days for kids to get some sort of a trade and I used to try and get in at Lithgow, at the

small arms factory but it was a procession most days. You’d get up of a morning and you always knew – in Lithgow the management houses there are built up on the hill at the side of the factory and the aspiring young lads that were looking for work – in those days when you were fourteen, fifteen or something like that,

sixteen, you’d go and stand (you wouldn’t be the only one there might be a procession of ten or fifteen, twenty young kids standing beside you) and as these managerial fellows walked from their big house up on the hill into the factory to commence work you’d remind them that you were looking for a job and was there any chance of getting work in the place. But in those days,

the fact that your father worked there would have been a big plus for the next one getting there – if you were an outsider you didn’t stand much chance of getting into the place. You tried your hardest anyway but not too many got jobs because it was always an aspiration to get an apprenticeship in the small arms factory – they used to take,

out of those they used to take probably one hundred each year in all the different trades but all that’s gone. As a matter of fact most of the small arms factory’s gone in Lithgow now but that’s what it was all about. I still remember the manager, the manager’s name was Ford and you’d go “Hello, Mr Ford, I’m so and so do you think there’s any chance of a job”. And he’d say “Oh put your name in at the gate son” and all

that and that would be the last you’d hear of it. In those days you were just coming out of the Great Depression – they were quite pleasant about it but there was never much hope of getting a job. If the young fellows got jobs there it usually came through the fact that they had connections inside the factory already. Anyway, that didn’t happen so you just had to make your own way.

It was quite an interesting time but things have changed a bit since then. A lot of the fellows that were friends that I went to the high school there with they went a lot further than I did and most of them finished up, my closest friends, either on the railway or getting to teachers college and they all did pretty

well. But it was at a time when they were coming out of the Depression and there was a bit of work around and a little bit of money and life became a little bit easier.

Well I don’t know

whether – the radio section of it, it wasn’t, you might have the wrong idea. Do you think I’m talking about radios, presenting or broadcasting or things like that? Oh, you’re not because it had nothing to do with that it was purely the principles of how a radio

works, that’s what it was all about. And they took you right back to the basics. You know, they started off with what electricity was – I’ve still got some of my old books in fact – and how the propagation of radio waves and how all that worked which was quite an interesting theory, very basic. And even today the present theory

it’s a lot more technical and more involved that that was but the basics are still there, that hasn’t altered one little bit. But it’s a good trade if anyone’s interested in it enough to do something about it they won’t go wrong.

Well, first of all it was a job. That was the primary objective in those days getting into something you could become proficient at and make a living out of, that was the main thing. But as I got into the radio side of things I became more interested in it and it becomes quite a challenge when you can build something up from nothing and sit down and turn it

on with the power and it works or if you’ve got something that breaks down and you can go through it with your test equipment and fix it. Not that they do that now days they just throw away a module and put another one in but in those days you had to sort it out and if that condenser was crook or that condenser was bad you replaced it. That doesn’t happen these days basically because of the cost factor it’s cheaper to

replace these days rather than find out why. In fact, from what I can see, its rapidly reaching the stage where it’s cheaper to not even bother to take it to get fixed these days just go and buy another one and throw the other one away. I’ve got a friend of mine in the television business and he’s slowly reaching that

opinion right now as he says it’s the cost of things now that it doesn’t make it feasible to repair them now. It’s the same with motor cars – it’s called progress, Cath, and I’m not sure that I think it’s a good thing. It’s a good thing in many ways but it affects so many people too. I think the basic knowledge is not there now and

it’s like comparing calculators with a pen and pencil and a bit of paper. You do this and this and this and you get the answer it’s very good, it’s nice and quick and fast but a lot of the kids these days they can’t tell you how or why but it happens and that’s it. It’s just an accepted thing now, you push that button and this happens and

they’ve got no idea why it happens. Anyway, it’s all progress.

Oh yes, no television in those days.

Oh yes, but I don’t know that I could quote it word for word or anything like that.

Oh, well, I was in Lithgow, yes, I was in Lithgow there’s no doubt about that. In 1939 we’d just opened a new shop – I was working at a place called Bracey’s a big departmental store in Lithgow and they’d built a new building down the bottom end of the

street and this friend of mine we were given the job of opening the place up and that’s where I was when it happened that day in 1939. For the first time we had a decent workshop and a showroom and the place is still there in

Lithgow these days and that’s where I was in 1939 when old Bob came on and said “We are now at war”. Well, he said that England, Great Britain had declared war on Germany and as such we were also at war and everyone accepted it because we were part of the British Empire and that’s it.

In those days, very good. Yes, too right.

Well, I don’t know, it’s you know, hereditary and ties, when it all boils down that’s where we came from.

Our family’s got very strong ties but that’s another story but it was just the thing in those days. I mean

to most people there was still the older generation and they were very much tied to Britain and you know there was a mix of the Scots, the Welsh, The English and the Irish and while they didn’t always agree with what went on and there was some pretty bad things done in the early days, particularly in the early days of colonisation and that sort of

thing with convicts being shipped out of here. Convicts, you could call them that, but they weren’t convicts because that was just ridiculous what they were sent here for, but the ties were still there, there’s no doubt about it and to an enormous amount of people they still are.

I think there’s no doubt about it there’s a lot of pride about the whole thing and that’s why there’s a lot for but there’s a terrible lot of opposition to ever – I don’t want to get into the politics side of it –

but I’d hate to see this place ever become a republic. As far as the flag is concerned well this one will do me.

Yes, there’s no doubt about that particularly some of the fellows you meet. And the first one we struck after they took us in from enlistment at Woolloomooloo and lined us up to get into these buses to go over the bridge to Bradfield Park. I suppose it was

a common name in those days, they used to have a DI, a Drill Instructor, they were the fellows that lined you up and they were the ones that marched you and did all that sort of thing but they all had a name for them and they were all known as the Screaming Skull, always. They looked like a skull and they screamed accordingly. But the old

story when you went in the door and you came out the other door you weren’t a Mr any longer, you were a number and your last name. But, you know, the old story you’re in the army now or you’re in the air force now, things changed over night. But still

they soon let you know who was running the show I can tell you that and rightly so too. It’s a pity we haven’t got a bit more of it these days. I think it’s the worst thing they ever did to do away with national training it’s the sort of thing that I think would solve a lot of problems that we’ve got to day.

Well, Cath, it didn’t suit everybody but I think you had to have a bit of a meeting with yourself and say well here I am, are you going to do it or are you not and if you’re not you might as well get out now. You couldn’t get out but I think anyone who thought about it

was of the mind that well, I’m here and let’s try and make it into a job or a career and make the best of it, that’s all you can do. Plus the fact that also to a lot of people it meant a certain degree of security. In my case, my

family, my mother and father they were gone and I was virtually on my own and it meant that I had no more worries about where I was going to live or whether I was going to dress myself or if I had any money. We never had much money we used to get six shillings a day I think it was when we first went in. And after I finished at the initial training school I think it went up to seven shillings a day.

But, no, I think that to a lot of people it just became another job because a lot of chaps that went in the army in the early days they were straight in, in the 1939s, that was the first job they’d ever had and I know people in Lithgow, these people, these Welsh people we stayed

with for a while, I lived with for a while there, he came out from England after World War I and he was seven years or something in Australia and never had a job and no money, no nothing. You know, they just existed and it was only with the advent of war that he got a job in the small arms factory and he had a bit of money for the first time in his life. And that was the case with a lot of people and

I think a lot of fellows that went in the services in those days were in a similar position. There was just nothing around and the depression although it never, ever affected me personally, it must have been dreadful for some of these fellows – lining up and getting a hand out of vegetables and that sort of thing from the police station. And you’d take your sugar back up and they’d give you a few potatoes and that sort of business.

I knew of it, it never affected me but I knew that it went on and it was only the war that got people into some semblance of decent living. But, no, I think that people went in there if you had any idea of doing something about it you made the best of it and tried to get the best out of it. I know that’s what I did

anyway and I think a lot of people would be just the same - that fellow that wrote that book that we talked about earlier and that fellow that I flew with, he was the same. So many people before they went in they were doing nothing and there wasn’t much hope of doing anything either. Things change and

it’s taught me a lot I know that and anybody that accepted it and took it for what it was and tried to do their best I think they came out of it experience-wise much better off educational- wise if they adapted themselves to it and, as far as character was concerned, I think they were much better people both men and

women. If you can learn to live amongst people these days it helps a lot.

No, it didn’t actually. I thought that they would put me in some radio communications unit, ground staff, and I just didn’t think about air crew when I went down there because I didn’t think I’d had the right type of education at that stage to make me eligible. But they thought otherwise but then on

looking back at it I suppose at the time they put you where they needed the people and of course they needed air crew and that was it. They probably didn’t need the other side of it so much. It’s the old story of supply and demand I suppose.

Yes, well, you did a six-week course there and it was Morse code, that played a big part in all your courses – it didn’t matter what you were going to do. Once you were selected

to get into air crew you had to have a good grounding in Morse code and that was a very difficult thing. Maths, quite a bit of maths which went on to show your aptitude for the navigational side of things and aircraft recognition, that was another thing that they put a lot of

focus on. They put up on the screen they’d put silhouettes or aircraft and you had to be able to recognise all enemy aircraft, you know, that sort of thing. They even went in for semaphore and that type of thing. What else was there?

Mainly general high school work and a little bit of service work appertaining to that type of thing, you know, they sort of focussed heavily on aircraft but it was more of a familiarisation, you know an entrance sort of thing, an initiation to life in the air force. And I

think they were fairly relying on your attitude towards it just to whether what you’d sort of do and how you’d figure in the whole sphere of things. I think that was just an overview they took of you - this fellow can do that and he can’t do this

because after each course there was a certain amount of drop outs. They would just tell you, you know, you can’t carry on you haven’t made it or something like that. You had to get to a certain degree of proficiency before you could go to the next step. After that,

of course, after that six weeks you got posted out to the various schools and it was up to yourself from there. I went to Parkes after we left Bradfield Park, after six weeks - promoted to the exalted rank of LAC [Leading Aircraftsman] from AC2 [Aircraftsman]. I got another sixpence a day I think in my pay. I think I was getting seven shillings a day when we were at Parkes and we used to make sure

there that you always kept enough to get on the bus after you finished work of an afternoon to get into town to the Paragon Café and get a decent feed of steak and eggs for two shillings. The food wasn’t so hot there in those days. A favourite trick of the fellows, because Parkes can be pretty hot in the summer time out there in the middle of the wheat fields,

and their favourite dish was mince. They used to slap it up and put it on the plate and of course living out there in the bush, flies, little bush flies they were everywhere and a few of the larrikins they’d catch a few flies and they’d shot them in with your plate and when the orderly officer came around “Orderly officer, any complaints?”

because it was only a figure of speech sort of thing. “Yes, can’t eat this, sir, look at this it’s full of flies”. That would be put away, you’d get something else then but that was the only way you got a decent meal out of it - flies and mince I wasn’t about to. They used to get up to some tricks like getting someone else to do your Aldis work for you. You always got the

larrikins in the service life but that was part of it, that helped, there was always a character there and it made life very interesting. That’s where we first started to fly up there because bear this in mind when I went to join the air force and that I had no illusions about flying or anything like that, I’d never been in an aircraft in my

life and it had just never entered my head. Anyway, we started to fly at Parkes.

Well, to put it bluntly the first time I went up I got sick all over the instruments in front of

me and I had a problem I thought at one stage I thought I was going to get put out because every time I flew I got sick. As soon as the wheels lifted off the ground I got sick and had to throw up all over the instruments in front of me. Anyway, we fixed it up I had an inner ear problem and it was all down to wax in my ears something that -

I still have the problem to this day - I have to get them syringed out every now and again because I get a build up. There’s no problem but it just builds up and builds up and they have to get rid of it but that was causing the trouble and they fixed it up so no more throwing up. We used to fly the little CAC [Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation] Trainers, the Wacketts, they were the fore runners of the Wirraways in those days, a smaller version of them.

They were quite an exciting little aircraft as long as you could keep them up. They had a couple of bad accidents out there – they had a flying classroom, they had an old DC3 out there that they used to send all the fellows up in, that’s what they called it, it was a flying classroom, and they crashed it over at the back of Parkes near the airstrip there just before we got there and it killed a lot of them.

Still, there was a lot of that in those days it was par for the course, you win some and you lose some.

No, not in training. We had a few close calls in operational flying, you know, in England but no, nothing in

the training in the early stages. You were only flying with the rookie pilots in those days they were just trainees the same as you and there were a few cowboys amongst them but you kept your fingers crossed and you got away with it. You didn’t worry much in those days, at nineteen years of age you don’t care

much do you.

Well life was only one big adventure in those days at that age, good Lord.

I’d probably say so, I’d say so. The old girls around

Cudrow Street in Lithgow around where I came from in their words I was a bugger of a kid. I think probably anyone with – if you were a bit high spirited I think most of Australians have got a bit of the larrikin in them and that’s a good trait.

Well, the Wacketts were a two-seater aircraft and you’d be in the back and they had it set up with, just as it is

normally set up in, you know, an operational aircraft with all the transmitters and receivers and that sort of thing. And you’d get up and you had two types of aerials. Out the front on the top of the aircraft there was a fixed aerial which was used for high frequency broadcasts and when you got up to a reasonable height you let an

aerial reel out underneath the aircraft and it used to loop down underneath, it was called the long trailing aerial and that was the one that you used for your low frequency broadcasts. And that’s when I get back to some of these cowboy pilots that you flew with, they’d get down and they’d love to buzz the wheat fields and of course if you forgot to trail the aerial in you’d lose them and they took a dim view of that because they were fairly

expensive. They’d catch on a fence or something and they were gone. And then you’d do exercises in transmission and receiving and making contact with various bases and that sort of thing. It was all training and you did it with radio telephony, that’s the voice speech, and

also morse code and telegraphy. They also had a fleet of panel vans set up in the same manner and we used to use those on ground work. We used to go out on the Peak Hill Road and they’d do it all on - exactly the same thing in the aircraft but you’d do it on the ground. They had quite a few

aircraft there, all trainers, but they were the fore runners of the Wirraways the COC trainers. They had a little propeller on the front of them, about 4 feet wide, and I look around these days and look at some of those aircraft that we used to fly in and I think to myself “My God, what was I doing up in those things”. And you look at a Jumbo [jet airliner] and you think, the flying we’ve done in

those, I often wonder how they get them off the ground but they do.

Yes, yes, I didn’t mind it at all . At nineteen years of age it was just a thrill because I was always a fellow that was interested in motor cars and I didn’t mind a bit of speed and that sort of

thing but it was all part of growing up, Cath, and it was good.

Well, the first fellow I met when I went into Bradfield Park, we were there for a while and there was a notice up on the board, anyone who wanted to play

football, put their name up on the board and we’ll accommodate you. I used to play a bit of local rugby league in the local competitions in Lithgow so I put my name down and consequently they selected a team to play and I got chosen as a fullback and then all of a sudden the realisation hit me that it wasn’t Rugby League at all it was Rugby Union of which I’d never heard

of because in those days Rugby Union in Lithgow was a dirty word. Anyway, I said I didn’t know anything about it at all and I was talking to the other fellows, it was early in the days in the hut in those days and you didn’t know too many people. And this fellow came to me and he said “Don’t worry about it, I’m so and so”. And the so and so happened to be a fellow called Callagher who was a Wallaby [footballer].

I was amazed, Jockey Callagher his name was and he was apparently he had been a Wallaby and he said “I’ll tell you what to do” And he said “Just stick close with me and you’ll be all right”. Unfortunately I got picked as full back and you know how the, (UNCLEAR) like there’s Gary Owens and I copped a few of them and hung on to the ball and I started to run with it and naturally I tucked it under

my arm and went down in the tackle and they nearly killed me, not releasing the ball and I might add that I that was my first and last game of Rugby Union. But I was always pleased that I met that bloke, he was a great bloke and apparently he was a very good union player too. Callagher, he’s got quite a big background I think some of his family or the

people that came after him some of them are still around in the game today. But he was a good bloke. But that was my introduction and exit from Rugby Union.

Well the cowboy side of it, a few of the pilots we used to fly with in the early days they were just rookies, rookie pilots, same as we were rookie trainees too

but nothing used to suit them better than to - out the back in the wheat fields in Parkes, to do a bit of low-level flying and buzz the wheat fields and do a bit of fence hopping and that sort of thing, it was quite a thrill in those days. But as you got a bit older and a bit more wiser you didn’t encourage them to do that sort of thing. And they used to lose

a few aerials, long trailing aerials out of the aircraft by hooking them up on fences. God knows how many are still around Parkes looped round something, some trees or something. But Parkes was a good town, a good country town and I think every country town has got a Paragon Café in it, a Greek Paragon café, and we used to look forward to that every night. Get in there, or whenever you had money, get in there you always got a big

steak and a couple of eggs for two shillings I think it used to be, it was good.

I don’t think I ever got into too much bother I probably had a habit of saying what I thought which unfortunately or fortunately I still do to a great extent but I don’t think I incurred their wrath too

much. I did run foul of a couple of blokes overseas but mainly through saying too much at the wrong time but nothing serious.

Well, we had another one when we went over there but he was – when we got on the squadron he was,

well he was the drill instructor, he wasn’t the instructor but he was a WOD, Warrant Officer Disciplinary and he was the fellow that kept the blokes in order around the place, a good bloke, Jack Forest, and he was known as Jungle Jack., and he was a fellow that you never, ever wanted to get on the wrong side of either. He was a good bloke but you knew where you stood with him at all times. And as I

said to Cath it’s a shame we just haven’t got a few more of those fellows around these days I’d like to see him stir a few of these blokes up around the streets these days, they wouldn’t know what hit them.

Well, it was an integrated set up – a transmitter and receiver and they were two separate components but they just sat up in front of you in a conglomeration of dials and

knobs and fairly self-explanatory after a while it all became sort of mechanical how you worked them. You did this, this and this and this, this and this happened and there was nothing really complicated about it they were all fairly self-explanatory and if they did what they told you to do everything used to work. But you need to know a little bit about the

theory of the thing to get through with it, you know, particularly the tuning of the receivers and the tuning of the transmitters otherwise you just didn’t get through to who you were looking for to contact. On the other side of it you also had the radio telephony side of it and that was just a straight out air to ground transmitter and receiver. There was nothing complicated about

that you just spoke into the microphone. And of course you had intercommunication or IC to everyone on board the aircraft. We had thirteen fellows on our aircraft and you had the earpieces and the microphones built into your helmet which you wore and you could communicate to anybody on the aircraft simply by calling

up who you were and what position you wanted to talk to just by pressing a button for your microphone. You know “Tail to Captain” or “Captain to whatever” “Radio Op to Gunner, to navigator” and they’d just pick it up and answer it and that was common on all that type of aircraft, just intercommunication that was all.

Oh yes, there was procedure, procedure we used. It’s the same with morse code you used certain symbols, certain signs, certain letters and everything had a meaning which you had to know. It had to be that way you had to have, well, it’s virtually international

procedure or it wouldn’t have been much good otherwise – if someone strange got onto the thing he would have to know and that’s why as I say it’s like driving a car, you’ve got rules and you stick to them and that’s all there was about it. But it was fairly straightforward, they’ve altered them all now, they’ve even altered the phonetic alphabet now much to my disgust but still that’s all in the name of progress.

Yes, there was – in the morse code it was, you know, they had –well if you happened to be on

duty on the radio bench and you were attacked by enemy aircraft you immediately sat down and tapped out “OA” and that’s what that meant. Da Da Da Da Di Da – and that meant I am being attacked by enemy aircraft. And you would follow that up with a list of co-ordinates which came from the

navigator, he used to update with those, he’d give you a little slip every half hour and that was your position. He’d give you the co-ordinates and you’d send this “OA” followed by the list of co-ordinates so if in the event that you got shot down and they thought that there was any chance of picking you up, that was the spot where you were and a search would be instituted if possible. So that was “OA” – that was

nothing new, that was international code. Like at the end of a message for morse code, when you came to the end of your message you always signed off “AR” That meant simply, message ends “AR” and that was Di Da Di Da Di.

Some of the blokes with a bit of a flourish they could play a tune on these morse keys and they’d string them out and they also had a few of their own words which weren’t in the international code either, they’d send a few letters to let you know what they thought of you too but that was highly irregular and it was frowned on

too but still they got away with it. They had a system there in England, when you came back from a night, if you came back of a night time when you got close to the coast of England you always had to identify yourself otherwise you

found yourself getting shot at from the ground defences and they had an identification electronic instrument on board, it was called the IFF. It was Identification Friend or Foe and it used to transmit a pulse

and this pulse was changed every day and gave the signal and if you weren’t sending out the right pulse they’d still shoot at you. And you also, when you got in close enough you had to fire off a flare gun, the colour of the day, as a matter of fact I’ve got an old flare gun still there, and you’d fire it out the side of the aircraft and the colours would come up –

red, blue, green or whatever the colour of the day was. And if it was the right colour you didn’t get shot at but if it wasn’t the right colour you did. The story I’m going to tell you about, they had a system there called Darkie, it wouldn’t be politically correct today, you wouldn’t be able to use it I suppose,

but this was known as Darkie and that was a frequency you used that you called up if you were lost, you didn’t know where your base was and you wanted to get down and our blokes they didn’t have to use them very much but the old Yanks were not known for their best at navigation.

Great fliers, a ton of guts, but their navigation abilities were not really as good as the Brits. And I’ll never forget this one – because once one called up everyone would hear because you’re all on the same frequency – and this bloke he must have been coming back in from over the Continent, some Yank, and we heard this voice come over the air “Hello Darkie, Hello Darkie, where are you, you little black bastard?”

It brought the house down, you know. They just called up, nothing was said, gave him his position and a course to fly to get him where he was and he was right but I thought it was unique that one.

Oh yes, the minute you called up they’d take a bearing on you, fix your position, your cross bearing and two stations would

operate on it and they would just, well, that’s basically what it would be, they’d take a bearing and where you crossed that was your position and they’d give you a course to fly to, to the nearest aerodrome or however you got down there. But it was just a thing that used to help a lot because you can imagine what it was like over there flying from England of a night time and that sort of thing with literally thousands of aircraft in the air at the same time, it’s just

unreal - some of those night-time bomber raids from England. I used to spend quite a lot of time in Brighton, that’s where my wife came from, and you’d see them forming up just on dusk and it was incredible. They’d just circle and circle and circle and gain height and away they’d go in the dark. And the Yanks used to go in the day time but it was just unreal.

I often smile these days when I read about these ground controllers and this aircraft was four hundred metres from this other one and it’s a walk in a park to what they used to do then. There was none of this business of control in those days either you just relied on a bit of radar and these things, the eyes. There were a few accidents but a lot of the stuff they do – of course they can’t afford to do it these

days with three or four hundred passengers in planes and that sort of thing. No, those daylight raids the Americans used to do, it was amazing and they’d get back and then the Brits would go of a night time – just amazing.

Oh yes, well you do – actually when I went through I finished up near the top of the radio school through the fact that I’d basically known it all before. But apart form that

I was also sent to Cootamundra to do a crash course on navigation. It was only a very short course and at that particular time I was supposed to finish up on Beaufighters up north. The Beaufighters were a fighter bomber but just what happened I don’t know. We did a short course at Cootamundra flying the old

Avro Ansons and we used to fly down over here in those days - that was one of the exercises from Cootamundra to Bateman’s Bay. But then for some reason or other I don’t know I didn’t go up north and the next thing I knew I was in England. You weren’t in the position to ask why in those days you just did as you were told. But the navigation side of it was

quite interesting, it was always handy and I did a little bit of it over there on a purely voluntary basis. Then of course you had to do a gunnery course which I did at Sale in Victoria and that consisted of being in one aircraft and firing from turrets or fixed guns at

a drogue, a drogue which was towed by another aircraft. That was a long sleeve which was placed out the back of the other aircraft on a long rope and it was just trailed a long way behind the aircraft and you fired at it and the machine gun bullets that you fired at it were all coded in a different colour. And when it came back if you were lucky

enough to hit it you left some colour on the drogue and that’s how they calculated your score if you were lucky. But the old aircraft we used to fly, the old Fairey Battles, they were hopeless, they were a good old aircraft but heavy.

Well, they were very heavy for a start and they were a single engine

plane, a single engine, Rolls Royce, they had the best of motors in them but they were a terribly heavy aircraft and very, very unmanoeuvrable. I wouldn’t have liked to have been flying in them in England in combat but they were a plane for their time and they did their job and they were at the end of

their serviceability when they sent them out here because in those days we never had any aircraft anyway. We used to get those and the old Avro Ansons, they were a good aircraft the Avro Ansons, they were a twin-engine plane but they had a long wooden spa – the main spa, they used to build the wings around that and when you flew them you looked out the side and the wings were flapping

because of the bend in the wood. But they were a good old aircraft and very easy to fly too. I flew in quite a few different aircraft – the Wellingtons in England and a lot of smaller aircraft, the old Sunderland. Well, of course, they were a

part land, they weren’t part land [capable of landing on hard surface], they were not amphibious those, not like the Catalinas ,but they were a very manoeuvrable aircraft the Sunderlands.

Well the results are in my log book there. I think I did fairly well at

it. They give you a score at the end of the business but you know, provided you followed the rules and you had a gunsight on these turrets and that sort of thing and provided you had a reasonable sort of an eye it was a, it was a

spray effect I suppose. You couldn’t fire one bullet and expect to hit something with it but it was generally a pattern that you put up and if you were lucky enough to hit it I suppose – I never thought much about it in those days but I think we did reasonably well – must have they passed you anyway. And then you had to have a night vision test as well, they fed you up with buckets of carrots before

that and that’s supposed to give you good night vision. There wasn’t much else to eat in those days in England – that’s how they won the war “Spuds and Spitfires”.

It was something that you never sort of worried too much about, Chris [interviewer], it was out of your hands and you were trained to do certain things and if the job that you were posted to came within that orbit I suppose that’s the best you could hope for. But Beaufighters, that was a different type of operation all together. They were a beautiful aircraft the old

Beaufighters, they used to call them Whispering Death and I came into contact with them in England later on, not as a crew member but they used to do a lot of escort work for us when we used to get stuck out over the ocean battling to maintain height. If you were in range you could

call up and you could get an escort to get back in because some of the old motors we had on these Sunderlands they weren’t much good and if you lost one or two you’d battle to stay in the air. And they’d send them out but unfortunately they looked very much like a Junkers 88 [German aircraft] and when they used to come on the scene you were always hoping that they were a Beaufighter and not a Junkers.

Well, there was nothing internal it was only just what you read in the papers. The air force in those days, what you were told

was on a need to know basis and I think if they adopted more of that today you’d have less trouble worrying about half a dozen boat people stuck on some island up north – sometimes a little information can be a lot more damaging than if they didn’t know anything about it at all. They only told us what they wanted us to know which is a good thing

anyway.

Well, I suppose it wasn’t, it wasn’t sort of highlighted as much as Fighter Command or Bomber Command but

then when you delve back into the other side of it and you get more on to the maritime aspect of it, the convoys and the U Boat war and that sot of thing it was a very vicious war. The losses in that sphere and the shipping tonnage that was lost, it was just amazing. At one stage

of the game they in fact virtually halted the transfer of stuff from the United States and other countries into England, they stopped them, they couldn’t get through, the U Boat packs they were just running rampant and it was a sort of an unseen war but the casualties were terribly high, there’s no doubt about that. We lost quite a few aircraft from our

squadron and we weren’t the only squadron involved in that sort of operation – they had them all around and different types of aircraft. The Americans, they had squadrons of Liberators, they lost a lot of those, but still it was

all part of the effort.

Well, there was no lead up to it at all. They posted us from Sale, we left there and they just gave us leave

and said at the expiration of the leave you’ll report to 2ED which was Number 2 Embarkation Depot which was Sydney and that was all there was about it. There was no word of where you were going. As a matter of fact we got on an American ship and we were just told nothing, just put on board this

ship in Sydney. And I’ll always remember it I didn’t know where the devil I was going and it was probably for the first time I ever felt completely alone in the world, you know, and I had no immediate family my mother and father were dead and here I was sailing out through Sydney Heads,

God knows where I was going and my sole possession was twelve pounds ten [shillings] in my pocket and that was it and I had no idea where I was going and we weren’t told anything. And the next thing, we were in New Zealand, three days later, and I reaffirmed my sickness performance only it was related to the sea, going across the Tasman.

We went to Auckland, we stopped there for a couple of nights and then we went up through the Pacific and finished up in San Francisco but we had no idea where we were going?

I just went back home to Lithgow and just went round your mates and that sort of thing. I was living with my sister at the

time and nothing particular. You knew you were going to go somewhere, there was nothing much you could do, there was not much holidaying business that went on in those days.

No, that sort of

thing, at nineteen years of age you don’t think about those things or I didn’t anyway it was one big adventure. You had a nice blue uniform on, you were a sergeant at that time, you know the highly exalted rank of sergeant and all you were interested in, you were having a good time

and you never used to worry too much about anything. As long as you had a few pounds in your pocket, and we had a few pounds, that was about all, a few. Money wasn’t a big item in those days because you never had enough of it to worry about.

Yes, that was the worldly possessions.

Yes, you had a kit bag, all your gear was in the kit bag. You had a couple of shirts and one lot of uniform, a summer uniform and a winter uniform and a little peaked hat and a little forage cap, a great coat. No, there

was not much, I don’t know, as I say, you didn’t think about those things in those days. You were there and you were alive and you thought life was pretty good.

Well that didn’t come until later. This was an American ship I was on going to America, the USS Washington it was and

it was good. The food – that’s one thing about the Yanks they looked after their fellows with food and there was a lot of Americans troops on it going back because the war was at its height in the Pacific then and they were sending a lot of their troops home. We used to make sure we – they had us working on food details in those days and that was where a few of the larrikins used to come

into force. You’d be carting the boxes of food from one place to another and you’d get to a junction and one would go this way and one would go that way but that particular box went into your cabin instead of going into where it should have gone. But they had the best of everything – it was where I made my first introduction to Coca Cola – we never had it in

Australia until the Yanks came here and I thought it was the greatest stuff I’d ever tasted in my life, Coca Cola. And the old Yanks, they lived on it, and the camp, on the ship they had little stations everywhere, little fridge units where you could go and buy a bottle. The same in the camp where we were in America, Camp

Miles Standish, it was an enormous big camp but under every second tree, they had a tree hooked up to the power and they had a fridge there and you could go and buy a coke there for a nickel or whatever it was. No, I enjoyed my time in America, I’ve got a lot of respect for the Americans.

I’ve got it there

somewhere – when we crossed the equator there was the usual ceremonies, you know, the dunkings and the lathering up with shaving cream and the throwing in the water and all that sort of business but there wasn’t a great deal of activity. It was basically a troop ship and there were so many troops on board, particularly the Queen Elizabeth, you only got

two meals and day and there were so many troops on those ships that that’s all they could give you. And by the time you lined up and got one meal and finished that it was time to start lining up to get in line for the second one and that was it for the day. On that American boat though it wasn’t too bad they had a cinema on that one but they didn’t have anything like that

on the Queen Elizabeth there were too many troops on it.

I think they do, don’t they?

I’ve got an idea they still have some sort of ceremony – I’ve got a little card there that says I’ve crossed the equator

and so and so and so and so. It was usually a ceremony where –I think it’s probably somewhat similar to these ceremonies they have in the army in Duntroon [Royal Military College] and places like that, I think they call it bastardisation [initiation] don’t they or something like that. I think it was something similar to that because they weren’t really fussy how they treated you.

You know, put the hose on you and, you know, goodness knows what but all in good fun.

Yes, anything at all.

No, I can’t really, it’s just a mock-up of old King Neptune. You know, he’d come out with his big trident and there was just a carnival.

If you participated in it you enjoyed it but you didn’t have to participate in it either – it was all good fun, all good teenage fun.

On that particular ship we mixed with them quite a bit – on the Queen Elizabeth not quite so much because there were just too many

on it. Most of them, you got, they did, they got twenty-four hours in a bunk and twenty-four hours out and there was just no room for anything like that. Most of the Yanks, they were negroes going over for ground reinforcements and they were done up in

full battle kit from the time they got on the boat to the time they got off and they were just watching over the side looking for U boats. No, we got to know them quite well as a matter of fact as I say I’ve got a lot of time for the Americans in that respect and for what they did in the war;

they might have been a bit late getting into it but as far as far as they’re concerned I don’t know what all this fuss at the moment’s over to be quite honest because we owe the Yanks. If it wasn’t for them the Brits would be speaking German now and we’d be speaking Japanese and that’s not to belittle any effort that we put

in but we just didn’t have enough troops or equipment and without the Yanks we’d have been uphill believe me. I’d much rather be speaking some sort of Australian ockerisms than Japanese.

Well in those days San Francisco – we actually landed at Sacramento actually which is just south of San Francisco between San Francisco

and Los Angeles and it’s the whole area now, I think it was then too, it’s known as Orange County. That’s what amazed me, the orange groves in those days. A lot of them have disappeared now but we were back there a few years ago and I was amazed, I couldn’t believe it, the disappearance of all that because it’s all

housing and that sort of thing but there were oranges everywhere when we were first out there and hence the name I suppose. Then of course we got onto their Pullman railway system and we went across, it took us three and a half days to get across America by train but that was good. We had the old Pullman with the pull-down bunks of a night time and the

negro porter and we got our ration of beer – a bottle of beer or two bottles of beer a day. I never used to drink in those days and I used to give my beer to the porter and in return he gave us certain favours, you know, it all helped. I thoroughly enjoyed that trip across, we went right across and over through Colorado

and unfortunately it was all too quick you couldn’t take much of it in. Then we got to New York.

Oh, the food was better, you know, a little bit extra and a few extra titbits that probably wasn’t on the normal menu.

Surprising what people in those positions do for a little return favour – it’s called, what do they call it “largesse”.

The first meal we had on the American boat – I’ll never forget that one. We lined up and put the tray out and flopped a big piece of steak on it which I thought looked very nice and before I could say a word there was a great big ladle of maple syrup poured over it before I could stop him. Oh God, that was my

introduction to American food and of course you learned to pick and choose after that. Things haven’t altered very much over there really – a few years ago we were back there and their bread to me it’s like cake, it’s not like bread as we know it but still it’s what they know and what they like and who are we to criticise.

They used to just – I think they brought it around, no, there wasn’t a dining car – I just forget it’s so long ago now but I think this porter bloke that used to look after us he had a certain amount of people who’d bring it around. But that was a very interesting trip that one, it was our first introduction to.

diesel locomotives because we were still in the steam age here then and they had these big diesel electrics on the three and a half days across America it was a big long trip.

Nothing specific, we had an idea that we were going to England by that stage.

But we didn’t even know we thought we might even be going to do a bit more training in America or Canada or whatever they were doing in those days. But they put us in this big staging camp up in Massachusetts, Camp Miles Standish, it was a big enormous place and thousands of acres I suppose and

that was quite an interesting place. They used to get out of a night time – of course we were all supposed to be back in by a certain time and our blokes never, ever took much notice of that. There was a little place, or a big place, nearby called Brockton and we used to get in there and of course there’s no pubs in America but they had the bars in

those days and they were our first introduction to bar life and that sort of thing and you’d get in there and of course the girls were a new innovation, the American girls, and of course they were always interested in a fellow in a blue uniform and you’d get back to camp and by that time everything was shut down and they’d take your name on the gate as you walked in and they’d want to arrest you sort of thing. They’d take your name and the

next morning they’d call you out on parade, all the blokes that were back late and were in trouble and you’d be amazed at the names that they called out the next morning. It was the old age when you know, Flight Sergeant Donald Bradman [Australian cricket idol] and Corporal Kingsford-Smith [aviation pioneer] and all this sort of thing went on. There were so many Australian XIs and Rugby League teams and goodness knows what. They had no idea these

blokes who they were anyway.

Well, we were billeted out with a family – as a matter of fact there’s some pictures there of them. I was with a fellow called Ted McAlpine, he later became a very good - when he came back here he was a Rugby League Referee in the West.

We were billeted out in this place – he was just an ordinary bloke, I suppose thirty toforty, this chap we stayed with him and his wife and a little girl and her mother I think it was and they treated us – they couldn’t do enough for us, there’s no doubt about that. The main complaint I had was they’d stop you in the street and they’d want to give you something

but the something was always a carton of cigarettes and I didn’t smoke in those days and of course by the time you got to England I had that many cigarettes running out of my ears and you’d give them to the fellows that smoked and that sort of thing but they smoked all over. In those days we used to get a

ration of cigarettes in England – you’d get 4 cartons every month, a carton wastwo hundred, of American cigarettes, Lucky Strikes, Chesterfields, Pall Mall, all that sort of things and we used to get four cartons for ten shillings, two and six a carton because they encouraged you to smoke. And every time we flew on operations there was always six packets of cigarettes

in with your rations because we were out so long – we had to cook our own meals and that sort of thing – there was a galley in those aircraft. Consequently you had smokes running out of your ears. The Yanks used to give you those things but that was the only problems I think they thought everyone smoked.

No they hadn’t – as a matter of fact I joined up shortly after Pearl Harbour, no, before Pearl Harbour. I went and joined up on the twenty-first of October and Pearl Harbour was, what, November wasn’t it?

And of course in

those days anyone in a uniform in America, oh boy, you were a hero you know. They’d pull you up in the streets and the main question “How are our boys doing over there?” because they had arrived in Australian then. As I say, I’ve got a lot of time for the Yanks.

Yes, there was,

yes, there’s no doubt about that. Well, with our blokes you weren’t there long enough to sort of get into any lasting relationships with anybody. I met a girl when we were staying at these people’s house, they introduced us,

and she wrote to me every day after I got to England, she wrote to me every day which was very good of her. They were pretty sort of, how can I put it, I think they thought pretty highly of their fellows that were in the forces they sort of looked

after them pretty well and the sentiment at home for the Americans was all very supportive of the fellows that were in the forces. It was a good interlude.

Only of a night time when you went to the

places of entertainment and that sort of thing and they used to run dances on the camp and that sort of thing, the PX [Post Exchange – American canteen unit] as they used to call it and the USOs [United Services Organisation], there was always plenty of girls there wanting to dance and that sort of thing. And the same thing applied in England there was always dances on and entertainment wasn’t a problem, you had plenty of

that.

In America?

No, not really, you never had much time for that you always had something to do. Boredom wasn’t a problem.

Well, one of the favourite activities was they used to do a lot of skeet shooting and, you know, that’s clay pigeon shooting and that sort of thing. That was a very good outlet and also quite good for practice and that sort of thing with firearms.

Then of course, round the pubs, no clubs those days, round the pubs you could always have a game of darts or shove halfpenny, have you ever played shove halfpenny?

Have you ever heard of it?

Have you been to England? I think that fellow Mortimer that

CEO [Chief Executive Officer] of Canterbury [Leagues Club] these days I think he’s got a business running where he’s introduced it out here. It’s only a board, it’s like a big dart board, it’s all squares like that and you put a halfpenny down at the bottom of it and you sit half of it over the edge of it and you hit it with your thumb and up it goes – quite a stupid game really but that’s what Shove Halfpenny

is. You know what a halfpenny is I suppose?

Halfpenny that’s right, for the uneducated and the young that’s a half penny.

We didn’t see much of it at all. No, we were sort of in and out of there and it’s one thing I know I didn’t see much of New York at all. But that’s where the Queen Elizabeth was, we were docked in there and we were put on it in the dead of night and I didn’t know anything about New York. Even the last time we went back there a few years ago and we didn’t go there at all. We flew in from Gatwick in England and landed at Los Angeles on the west coast.

Barbara could tell you more about New York than I could.

Oh they just mustered us all together up at Camp Miles Standish and put us on this troop train and the next thing we were in the docks, at some loading port in

New York and it was all done in the dead of night and ushered aboard and at first light we were out in the sea. As I say it took six and a half days to come across there. They normally used to do it in half that but with the submarine menace they used to be changing course every half an hour and there was really no danger of

them hitting the Queen Elizabeth because it went too fast and they changed course, they zig zagged course, changed it so regularly that they couldn’t, the subs couldn’t pick it up and line it up and do anything about it. There was no chance of them doing that.

No, never saw anything – completely uneventful. It was – one day you’d be in hot sun and then the next day you’d be freezing. You know, they’d go from south to north and it was completely uneventful sort of thing and the main thing, these troops, one significant thing about it

was that they had machine guns mounted on the decks in case we did see those because they reckon there could have been panic. And if there had have been panic they were quite prepared to shoot a few people just to quieten things down because most of the people were new to that sort of

thing and they weren’t very keen about being where they were and they were glued to the side off the rail and looking out all around the boat – no sub would have got within about ten mile of the place with all the look-outs we had but then the bulk of them they never slept. As I say you were supposed to have twenty-four hours in and twenty-four hours out – we didn’t, we were lucky we had

cabins but the rest of them they were all deck bunks and they just laid down and once you got a bunk you stopped there for twenty-four hours, you didn’t move around at all. We were all right, we were inside. An amazing ship that Queen Elizabeth was in those days – if you got down in the holds of it you’d get lost, completely lost, you wouldn’t know where you were.

No, I never had any bother with that, that big boat, you know, there was no worries with that but I didn’t get any more seasickness there after that first lot going across the Tasman to New Zealand. We came back to New Zealand on the way home as a matter of fact but that was on a British ship.

Well, you got off the

boat and they put us, we landed at a place called Renwick which is a port next to Glasgow and they shipped us down to Brighton then in Sussex and that was where the Personnell Depot Reception Centre was for all Australians that went to England they took them into Brighton.

Brighton, you know Brighton do you? Have you been over there? Well, you know Brighton, it’s the Bondi of England.

Yes, well you could call it that. The Australians had taken over the two top hotels, the Grand and the Metropole, the Australians had them

and I was billeted in one of those, I just forget which one it was now I think it was the Grand that I was in. And it was just a holding depot there and you were processed there and farmed out to the various places you went to, where they were going to send you, they worked out what they were going to do with you. I was there for a few weeks and the next thing I was sent up to

a place called Millham up in Northumberland and that was a Bomber Command OTU [Officer Training Unit] and I was only there for a week, ten days I suppose, and the next thing back to Plymouth. You never knew what they were going to do in those days – again a case of supply and demand, wherever they needed you, wherever they wanted you and the next thing I knew I

finished up in Plymouth in 10th Squadron and I was there until the end of the business.

It was very real, very real. When you got out in the country and various places like that where you got billeted out to and farms and that sort of thing, they lived reasonably well because they had the facilities to do so.

But the average Jo Blow he did it tough over there, particularly in areas where they targeted with bombing and that sort of thing you’d have had to see it to believe it. But the big thing about the Brits, they’d give you stuff themselves and go without

for themselves and go without just to make sure you had a decent meal or something like that but my period of living in Brighton in the Grand or the Metropole there we mainly lived on potatoes and I put on quite a few pounds in my first few months in England I can tell you that. As I said I reckon they won the war with “Spuds and Spitfires”.

I don’t know that you had a reaction – I’m here and you think they’re going to do something with you and, you know, what could you do? At around nineteen or twenty you don’t have much reaction at that age you just go with the flow.

Yes, that’s true. We certainly looked forward to having a look around the place and initially they had a scheme over there that was set up by a woman called Lady Ryder, the Ryder Scheme, and you signed up for

that and you listed your preferences an they sent you out on leave to various places that people would take you. And I finished up on a farm up in Yorkshire a placed called Hemmingborough and we saw quite a bit of the area when we got to places like that but they had various schemes like that. And the Red Cross was

another one and there was no shortage of places where you could go to for leave and places where you could get accommodation and all that part of it was looked after without any trouble at all. That part was very well set up and you were never far

from a cup of tea or something like that with the NAAFI [Navy, Army, Air Force Institute] they called it in those days and the Salvation Army they were very good.

Yes, they used to form up over the coast.

Well, it gave you an insight of just what the allies were doing – just to read about it in the papers and that sort of thing, apart from the losses it became sort of ho hum but when you see it actually happening and you see aircraft come back with bits shot out of them and

people dead and they’re staggering in with streams, you know, of smoke and all that sort of stuff streaming out of them and you wonder how the hell they ever get back. You start to realise exactly what it’s all about and what a waste it was the whole damned thing. It’s just ridiculous, I just hope it never happens again because

there’s so many young blokes that, you know – there was a mate of mine from Lithgow, he went in a bit before me, he was a bit older than me, and he was a fellow that - this chap I was with called Alf Manyon he was the fellow that I used to live with in Lithgow and I finished up flying on the same crew with him in Plymouth. We arranged to meet this bloke

in London, we knew he was there and we’d arranged to meet him the next time we were on leave, a fellow called Bob Crane, and he was flying Sterlings and just prior to the time we were to go on leave we were to meet him we got word that he’d been shot down and killed so that meeting didn’t

happen. But he was a fellow, he was what, he’d be two or three years older than me but he was a bloke – he never even had a car licence in Lithgow, he never had a car, he couldn’t drive a car and yet here he was six months later he was flying this damn great thing and he wouldn’t have had a clue what it was all about. And whether he was a good pilot or a bad pilot I will never know but he just had, you know, no -

that’s the sort of thing that was happening with people. They were thrust into these things here, there it is, look at it, a four or five tonner, whatever it was, there, get in and fly that and he could never drive a car that and he was only one of thousands that would have been just the same. The losses in training were great over there, there’s no doubt about that, I don’t know that they were never released fully but the training losses in all aspects of the air force

they were high purely through inexperience and what could you expect.

I was all right, I always felt that I could do what I was supposed to do anyway, it didn’t worry me. The only thing that used to worry me and I think that was uppermost in the minds of everybody, was

how you’d perform under fire. That was the thing that always worried you because I saw some, you know, bad aspects of that, fellows that just couldn’t handle it and one bloke in particular he just couldn’t handle it at all. He froze, froze and couldn’t do a thing but

when that happened they’d just ground them and they’d send them home. It’s no slur on the chap but, you know, they just can’t handle it and that’s all there is about it. That was all that ever used to worry me and I think that was uppermost in everybody’s mind but once you get over it what can you do it’s self preservation.

Well, he was a gunner on one of the aircraft and they were attacked by enemy aircraft and they were lining up on the – because when aircraft attack

you, fighter aircraft, they fly a course alongside you and estimate your speed and your bearing and what course you’re flying and all that sort of thing so that they can formulate their method of pursuit and they used to have what they called a curve of

pursuit attack where they’d come down underneath you and then they would come back up and they’d zero in on the tail of the aircraft like that in an upward circle. And apparently this fellow, this particular day, they were in there and the fellow in the top turret he started to fire and he was in the tail turret this fellow and there was no response whatsoever

and the other people in the crew were screaming at him, you know “You’d better fire now” and there was no response whatsoever and he just never fired a shot. And they had to go down and get him out of the turret and bring him back down and that was it. He just froze that was all there was to it but he never flew again.

I was there.

Yes. Still, that was history. He never flew again.

Attacks on us were fairly isolated because we used to operate fairly well out in the Atlantic or in the Bay of Biscay and the Mediterranean, down that way, but our worst troubles used to come from the German fighter aircraft that were based in Spain. Spain was supposed to be neutral but they had these bases down

there and they’d come out, you’d get down there and you’d see the fishing fleet would be out in the territorial waters. You’d see the mother ship there and up would go a few puffs of smoke out of the chimney of the smoke stack on the mother ship and within ten or fifteen minutes the fighter aircraft would come from somewhere and we always reckoned -

because Spain was supposed to be neutral but as far as I’m concerned that was only superficial, I reckon they were – they always told us if we ever got shot down and got down all right always try and get to Portugal rather than Spain because if you got finished up in a German POW camp whereas if you got to Portugal you finished up – you’d get back to.

England that way, through there. No, the old Spaniards they weren’t much help to us during the war.

Nothing, they just grounded him and sent him home.

As far as I know we never heard of him any more. They took him off the crew and I think he came back to Australia as far as I know. They’d just take him off flying.

Pardon?

Well that’s what they called it.

Well they wouldn’t -

they wouldn’t, nobody would talk to you officially about that they’d deal with the individual but it was something that existed and you can’t blame anybody about it, it simply means lack of moral fibre but that’s something that could happen to anybody

it just gets back to self-preservation I think. It’s not much good – you might as well have a go if it’s them or you what else can you do. When you’re stuck out four or five hundred miles out over the ocean there’s just nowhere to go.

I don’t -

there was not much of a thing made of it actually it just happened and they accepted it and he was replaced on the crew and that was it. But you always had people coming up – one crew never, ever stopped with the same people all the time. That book that Charles Leach wrote,

when I joined the crew he was the head man and I joined as the rookie but eventually you come up as they finish flying. So our tour of duty was sixty operational trips or one thousand hours flying and once you reached that you went off the crew and someone

else came on and took your place. Someone else didn’t come on he was already coming up through the ranks sort of thing, you know. He’d been flying but just getting familiarisation.

Well, I went straight to 10th Squadron then in Plymouth. Plymouth is the seaport for Devon there

and it’s a big naval base as well. It’s situated in Plymouth Sound across the front of the bay, I suppose you call it a bay there, the Sound they call it, there’s a breakwater across there and you’ve got to go through this breakwater to get – it’s a big wall that’s been put across the front of it and it leads out to, when you get out there it leads to Eddystone Lighthouse which was always used as a

landmark or a water mark in this case. We used to always use it as a navigational aid, Eddystone Lighthouse. It’s a big naval base as well as what we used it for, take off and landing, and Mountbatten is a peninsula in Plymouth Sound and we were based on that peninsula

which is across the way from the main centre of Plymouth over to the barbican where the Plymouth Fathers sailed from for America and Plymouth Ho of [Armada hero Captain Francis]Drake’s fame and all that sort of business and Lady Astor used to live up the top up there and used to make our life a misery. We were based in there and the station is still there. As a matter of

fact my wife and I went back there not so long back and revisited the old place and it’s still there, it’s a permanent RAF [Royal Air Force] station. 10th Squadron, I don’t know whether you’re familiar with that, but it was a complete Australian squadron, it had its own autonomy right through but it was based on an RAF

station so we’ve got an Australian squadron living there but it’s on an RAF Station who supplied a lot of the ground staff and was integrated with the workings of the squadron. But they were completely different, we had our own workings and our own command but you were based on an RAF station under their control

I didn’t know anything about it except that I knew this friend of mine, Alf Manyon, and a few other Lithgow fellows had been posted there because, strangely enough, 10th Squadron was known as the Australian Women’s Weekly Squadron for some reason

because they always had a feature on it. I don’t know if you know anything about 10th Squadron but it’s fairly unique what happened there was they sent, prior to the war, just before the war, they sent a detachment of permanent RAAF personnel to England to pick up a quantity of aircraft to bring out here to form 10th Squadron in Australia. While they were there,

war broke out so instead of bringing them back they left them there and based them in Plymouth and formed 10th Squadron overseas and that’s why they probably gained a fair bit of prominence and the local papers and in the Women’s Weekly there was always an article about them and they were known as such. These permanent fellows they stayed there and then of course as the war progressed reinforcements were sent from England of which I was one eventually

and they joined the thing but there always was an RAF Station and still is to this day. They’ve just unveiled a big memorial in Plymouth for 10th Squadron and they also put a stained glass window in the officers’ mess there in appreciation for the

efforts of 10th Squadron.

Oh the squadron?

Well, it was a case of welcome home because I knew a couple of fellows there and, you know, it wasn’t long before they integrated me into the sergeants’

mess which it was in those days and a good time was had by all. It was quite amazing because when I was posted up north up there I thought well now this will be a good chance because I was always rather thin on top with hair and I thought this will be good I’ll get this all shaved

off and I’ll get this all fixed up while I’m up in the wilds of Northumberland and of course about four days after I had that I was posted back into civilisation. Of course I arrived down there completely bereft of any foliage on the top and it took three years to grow back to what it was before I started and hasn’t progressed much since I might add. It was a good learning

curve.

Yes, Gristle they used to call me, Gristle – I don’t know where that came from but that’s what it was. Still, it’s the fashion these days – they say if you wait long enough it comes around again doesn’t it?.

It’s the sort of thing I never had – even at eighteen when I was at the radio school they used to call me Baldy then for some reason, fairly obvious I suppose. No, we are not a family of great hair growers. You can see my father up there he hasn’t got any and yet I’ve got a brother, or I had a brother, who had hair like a

wire broom.

No, no everything turned out pretty good.

Oh that’s a good question, I couldn’t give you any accuracy on that but there were some hundreds and we had our own

maintenance crew that looked after the aircraft. A lot of the services were provided by the station, the people that used to run the – you see we used to have a system of launches, little launches that used to take us in and out to the aircraft because they were always moored in the bay and that sort of thing. And they were all done by the English, the English RAF fellows and then all the

messing arrangements that was all done by the RAF staff and the radio operations rooms that was all RAF, we all worked in together that way. We just used to fly the aircraft and do that sort of work and the RAF did the rest.

It worked out pretty good – we never had any worries. We all worked together and they wore a light blue uniform and we wore a dark one. That was the only difference. That’s how it worked and it’s still working – they don’t have aircraft there these days they do all their operations by launch. At Plymouth,

by virtue of the fact that it was a Royal Navy Base and a lot of ships were always based there, it was always subject to heavy bombing and there was hardly a night went by that we weren’t subject to aerial bombing and it got to be a damned nuisance in the end. You couldn’t get sleep when you needed it and you got fairly blasé about it in the end and I don’t know that they ever hit anything

exactly where we were but they got awful close and you could hear the damn things. But Plymouth itself was wrecked, it was very heavily bombed, it was one of the heaviest bombed cities in England, Plymouth, and Coventry and places like that. Nothing like London of course but they used to give that a lot of attention because of the fact that the navy was there.

Not really, only the chap that I knew from Lithgow as a matter of fact, as I say, I finished up flying with him so he introduced me to the crew.

Manyon,

Alf Manyon. Elfed, he was a Welshman., Elfed, that was Welsh but he was named Alf for short and of course that got to something else, he was a big fellow, big, robust and he had a bristly moustache and he used to drink a

bit and he got the name of Moose so he became Moose Manyon. He stayed there, he was there for most of the time that I was flying with him. He eventually left before I did because he’d started before and he finished and he came back home. No, we flew a lot together, many hours.

Well, you just got – your crew’s there – it was different to other places, your crews there it was by progression. From the pilot for a start, there were three pilots, a captain, second and third pilot and the third pilot was always the rookie.

But he used to come through and he used to do the leg-work for the pilots and eventually, you know, he’d do a bit of flying, well we all used to do a bit of flying as a matter of fact. Our Captain, Sampson, used to always like– it didn’t matter who you were, he liked you to fly the aircraft occasionally just in case, you know. I wouldn’t like to say that you could ever put it down or take it off but at least you could fly it in the air

and that was a natural progression. There was only one navigator but then the radio fellow doubled as a sort of an extra navigator and there was a flight engineer and they always had somebody coming up the ladder all the time. As one bloke stepped off the next fellow stepped up into his shoes and they brought a new bloke on and

he started training then. I know when I first started I was third in line but eventually you were, through natural progression up the ladder you finish up as the top man and as you finish your time you step off and the second fellow goes up and that’s the way it was. Lots of other organisations in Bomber Command and those blokes they had a sort of a crew from day one and they

stuck together right through, if they got through, and finished as a whole but we didn’t – we finished, once you finished flying you went off and someone else took your place.

No, we did it on the squadron. That was virtually your OTU when you joined the squadron

you came up as a rookie and you worked your way through that’s how you got your OTU in actual training.

Nothing, you were straight into it, straight into it.

You’ll see by my log book there, you’ll see that. A little bit of familiarisation, just a few hours you used to do on the local training but there was no required time taken to do that you just got into it.

Well, you had in-flight training but you also had ground staff training as well. There were schools of which after you finished flying you became an instructor in – I think I showed you a photo of that but you,

then you had - when you weren’t doing operational flying you used to go and do training flights such as attacks on submarines of our own, of course, and you’d make dummy runs on those and drop, well they weren’t bombs, they were smoke flares but they were simulated bombs. Yes, they had plenty of

training that way and then gunnery courses you had to attend those and radio courses, navigational courses, you had to do all of that and aircraft recognition, they covered that fairly fully. It wasn’t just a case of get in and have a go sort of thing they kept on you all the time. But, you know, it’s a sort of a thing to get up

to that many hours flying it takes a long period really, eighteen months or something like that. If you’re lucky enough to last you’re glad to get out of it. I was quite pleased the day they told me I as finished. I’d had enough because I suppose it’s because you get very tired and knowing you’re getting near the end of the business you’re always a bit apprehensive and

a lot of the problems with that was remaining alert and that was always a problem to remain alert and make sure you did.

Well, that’s a question I don’t know how to answer really. You joined the crew – when you were going on a trip some of you, the pilots, the navigators and the radio operators, they had to attend the briefing in the operations room but the rest of the

crew they didn’t attend those briefings they just went out and got the aircraft ready. But the rest of us, you’d go to the operations room and they’d tell you exactly where you were going and what you were supposed to do, what sort of a search you were supposed to do, what you were looking for, what enemy activity you could reasonably expect to happen, what type of a search you’d do. They’d give you an area if there

was U boats in the vicinity of a certain area, they’d give you the co-ordinates. Basically, most of your searches were done in large squares, you’d fly four legs of a square and you’d cover the whole of that area and that information was always given to you at briefing. The radio fellow was briefed on the frequencies

he’d use, the colours of the day and all that sort of thing, he’d carry all that information and he’d have to bring that and set his equipment up accordingly. Nothing was left to chance, you knew what you were doing, you knew where you were going and you knew what you were supposed to do. The weather was the only thing that you didn’t have any control over of course and we struck some very dirty weather there, there’s no doubt about that. Flying out of

England it’s – we struck - one particular night there it transpired from what we learned later that there were three aircraft flying that night from the whole of England from all the commands and we were one of them and of course we were out and we couldn’t get back and that’s how it happened. It was the worst night I ever spent in my life. Sick, I’ve never been so sick in all my life, I just laid down in my bunk

I hoped the damned thing crashed that’s how bad it was. By the time - the next day, we were that far off course we finished up – we were supposed to be in the Bay of Biscay and we were up near Northern Ireland that’s how far off course we were blown. The old Navi got an MID [?] on that particular trip – but we got stuck in –

we used to – depending, we were never ever flew at any great heights except for compass swings and that sort of thing but normally we used to only operate at about one thousand or fifteen hundred feet or something and sometimes lower than that. And this particular night we got out and the weather closed in and

we ran into a bank, there was a bank of Cumulus Nimbus cloud, that’s thunder cloud and black thunder clouds, and we couldn’t get over them and we couldn’t get under them because we were down far and we just sat there and we couldn’t get back because the weather was too crook so we just sat there. At one stage

we were in a nose down position and we were climbing at the rate of about six hundred feet a minute, just going up like that, and it was terrifying really. There’s a report in that book about it as a matter of fact, Joe wrote about that. But still the old aircraft she hung together and we got back in the

morning – a very interest experience. But that was my initiation into English weather, English flying ad it wasn’t good and there was a lot of that, that sort of thing, you know.

It was, it was.

It wasn’t long after I joined the crew and he did a hell of a good job that night, Keith Sampson, there’s no doubt about that. There was nothing you could do about it as I say you couldn’t get over it and you couldn’t get under it so you just sat there.

A great bloke, there was no doubt about it. He was like me he came to the squadron as a sergeant and he was eventually commissioned. He was an older chap than the usual run of them and he was much more mature but he was the

best pilot I ever flew with there’s no doubt about that.

Well, as I’ve said to you, I’ve always been fairly good and fairly keen on cars and that sort of thing and the minute I sit in a car with someone else driving I can tell whether they can drive or not.

Some can and some just haven’t got any idea and they’ll never be drivers as long as they own a motor car. But Keith, you felt perfectly at ease with him, you just watched him, you knew what he was doing and he knew what he was doing which was more to the point. In a crisis he was completely calm and straightforward and a good leader of men and that’s what you look for. I don’t know what he

was in civilian life, the last I heard of him after the war he had some managerial position in Champion Spark Plugs so he might have been associated with the motor trade. I don’t know I’ve lost track of him completely since the war but he was very good. But some of the others, well they’re in that pre-spoken category of

cowboys and there were some of them like that but luckily I never struck too many of them. It’s a big responsibility those blokes, particularly, you know, we used to have thirteen on our crew and it was a big responsibility.

Yes.

Well basically the captain was – the first pilot, he was the captain, he was the fellow who called the shots.

No, the navigator had his job to do – in the case of – as is the case with all types of aircraft the navigator was the bloke who, in the case of aerial attack when you were attacked by fighter planes, the navigator used to stand up in the astrodome which was

a bubble on top of the aircraft, a Perspex bubble, in which he stood up and his head was above the fuselage and he used to see all around and he used to call the shots then mainly on telling the pilot where to go and what to do with evasive action and all that sort of thing but once that was the case he was the boss then but it mainly rested with those fellows. The rest of you, you all worked together, that was all there was to

it. The flight engineer, he had his job to do with – his main work of course in flight was to see the transfer of fuel from various tanks to other tanks to equal – to make sure you had equal weights on each side of the aircraft. Through various aspects of flights you had to transfer fuel from here to here to here to, you know, to even everything up all the time because when you

took off and you had a full operation you had about twenty-four hundred gallons of fuel in those days and you used to have to take the tops of those as quickly as possible and even them all down, a bit out of each tank because all your tanks were in the wings. They liked to get the tops off, off the tanks as quickly as possible because that got rid of the

fumes and then they’d tell you to smoke your head off then. But everyone had their own job and the armourers used to look after the guns and the gunners in the gunnery because we had a tail gunner who operated a four-gun tail turret, a mid upper gunner that operated a two-gun,

three hundred and sixty degree turret on top of he aircraft. You had four fixed guns in the nose for straffing. The second pilot had a gas-operated Lewis gun out his side of the aircraft and they had two galley guns down the bottom, the same things, they opened the windows, they used to have them down there. And then they cut hatches in the side of the aircraft a bit later

on and mounted a .5 each side of those so, you know, we had guns all over the place and you had to have fellows to operate them. We only got the .5s later in the day. I think they saw what affect, because the Yanks they only had .5s and they looked after themselves that way and I think they saw the benefit of them and they installed them in our aircraft then

too because that .5 Browning was a very formidable weapon. No, there were guns everywhere, they were known as the Flying Porcupine, the Sunderland, you needed them too particularly when 88s started flying around.

When you worked in the radio section you were right up the front on the top deck. You had two decks on them of course and on the top deck and you sat behind the first pilot actually. You were on one side, the navigator was on the other side, he was right next to you. You’re there, navigator there, first pilot there, second pilot there and the flight engineer was over there.

There was a bit of room you could walk around in those aircraft and then you had a set of stairs going down to the galley and then straight underneath the galley was wherever who was appointed cook used to cook us a steak – we always got steak to keep us going through the day. I’m not sure what type– I think it might have been a bit of horse sometimes but still it was steak. And then of course if you wanted to you could go for a walk to the back, back to the tail turret and

that was quite a good walk that. Someone would always have to go up with the tail turret bloke when he was going up to get in the thing. The doors of the tail turret were only about that wide and they were split and they’d fold back like that and he’d put his legs into the turret and then the bloke behind him would have to get behind him and you put your feet on his behind and shoved him in. And then you locked the door behind him and then he couldn’t move because you could hardly –

once you got in there, there was no room because he’d have a big flying jacket on and gloves and helmet and there wasn’t much room, they would just sit there and hope for the best. And the tail turret bloke he had a job to do apart from gunnery, he used to assist in the navigation. You see, you had to be constantly checking your course when you were out over the ocean

and to do that the navigator used to fly a three wind course – you’d fly three different courses on a different bearing and you’d plot it but to do that you’d throw out a flame float, a flare, and it would hit the water and then up would come the smoke and you could see where it was and the tail turret used to line his turret gun sight

up on that and by telling you, reading off the bearing on the scale relative to his guns he could tell you which way, which bearing it was on this flame float you see and by flying three separate courses you could calculate the wind and how fast it was and that was pretty important because there were no landmarks out there so you had to

check your course all the time and they used to do that by checking the drift on three different courses and you could pinpoint yourself straight away. You knew where you were all the time and that was pretty important because, as I told you before, the navigator used to give you your co-ordinates every quarter of an hour or whenever he could do it just in case of emergencies. Or if you did sight a sub, you’d send it back

"Sub sighted, dot co-ordinates", and then if there were any surface ships around they would come and they would guard him too. It was all a matter of co-ordination. And then there was the convoy escort, the same thing, there was plenty to do. You’d have enjoyed it.

Well, it was exactly the same stuff as we were using at Parkes. Designed and manufactured by Marconi and it was just a simple set up of a radio transmitter and a radio receiver and they were all enclosed in a metal box and they were locked down in the aircraft and sat up there in front of you. And you also

had a DF [Direction Finding] loop which is a loop that – it was a round circle like that sitting on a support that went out of the aircraft which you could turn around in all directions, it was this loop, that’s exactly what it was a loop on a circle which you could rotate from the inside of the

aircraft and again by taking bearings on certain stations, on radio frequencies, you could again calculate where you were then, that was a direction-finding loop and that was a job and that all tied in with the radio equipment as well. And then on the other side you had a winch which you released to let the trailing aerial go out into the -

I think it was about two hundred or three hundred feet which you trailed behind you which you used on low frequencies. Sometimes they’d forget to wind it in when you landed and of course away it would go and then you’d be in strife, you’d lose it straight away. They used to get a bit upset when you did that. That’s why they cut out letting us use parachutes,

we never, ever carried parachutes on those things. Well we did when I first went there but the trouble with the old Pegasus engines on the Sunderlands was that they weren’t very reliable and very much underpowered and of course a lot of the time they’d give you trouble and once they did you had great difficulty remaining in the air because if you lost one engine

it made it very difficult to maintain height. So if you weren’t careful you slowly drifted back down to the water even though you still had three engines going. And of course you had to hurl everything overboard that you could to lighten the weight on the aircraft to keep in the air. So they used to shoot the parachutes out first and at about a thousand pounds a time the Air Ministry got a bit sick of

that so they said no more parachutes – not that a parachute was much good if you were five or six hundred miles out to sea it wouldn’t have been to jump out in a parachute would it? So they cut out using those. Towards the end of the war they got better engines in them but basically the serviceability of the old Pegasus engines in the Sunderlands were hopeless, not very good at all.

But they put some Pratt & Whitneys, Americans engines, kind of towards the need of the business and it was a really good success. And then in the last stages of the war they were fitting Hercules engines in them and that made them a good aircraft then because they could fly – as a matter of fact on the Pratt & Whitney motors we could fly it on one motor

which, you know, made a big difference. But you’ll find in that log book of mine, you’ll find, many times you’ll see “Return to base, engine US” and so forth, US meaning unserviceable. No, that was a lot of he trouble with the aircraft in those days, well those aircraft anyway, those old motors they were just asking too much for them to do for the job that they were

doing. Still it was all part of the business and if you got, if you did get back within a reasonable distance you could always call up for an escort if you were having difficulty mainting height and if they were close enough they’d send the Beaufighters out and they’d come out and they’d escort you in.

So we were always happy to see them even though they did look like Junkers 88s.

Well I don’t suppose it’s much different now to what it was then really. You’ve always got sayings that they come up with and a little bit more

decorative these days I’m afraid. I told you about the Yank that got lost looking for Darkie and there’s a few things like that but that was a standard greeting whenever you met anybody they used to call it “shooting the line”. Skiting in other words but that was the favourite, one of the favourites,

“There we were”, “There we were forty thousand feet ass up and still climbing. “There was nothing on the clock but the maker’s name and that was fading fast”. He said “The flak [anti aircraft fire] was that thick we could put the wheels down and land it”. But we didn’t of course. There were lots of those things – I think each command fighter, bomber, coastal they all had their own sayings. And they used to run this monthly

magazine and it featured the adventures of Pilot Officer Prune and he was always a bit of the local yokel but he got into many adventures he was a bit like Biggles [popular adventure book series flying hero], you know, that sort of character, but he was P.O. Prune in those days – it was quite good.

Nothing, it was more or less a light-hearted look at life in the air force in those days. You had to have something that made you laugh. Whatever came up they used to print it and distribute it through the various messes, sergeants’ mess and officers’ mess. Things were fairly distinctive in those days,

in the RAF in England, the old class distinction was alive and well in those days and still is I think for that matter. It was a different war once you became an officer, all for the better I might add, for the individual anyway.

You wouldn’t have survived without a

sense of humour mate. We had an engineering officer, he used to love to get in the sergeants’ mess and get full of a night time and then he’d get up and dive off the piano into the floor, head first. He had a great shiny bald head and he used to dive straight into the ground. Every night he used to put on the same performance. How he never killed himself I’ll never know but blokes were like that, here today and gone tomorrow, what the hell.

But sometimes it was here today and gone tonight not tomorrow.

We had a pub outside the gates called the Borrington Arms, it was right outside the gates – we were on the peninsula and the guard house was right on the edge of it and the Borrington was the pub

just fifty yards away and it was a level and a road underneath it and a level on it there. We used to go down there and drink the old – because after a while you learned to drink over there, it was a pretty good outlet and some of the worst beer I’ve ever tasted in my life was English Pale Ale, not pale ale

what do they call it? The bottled beer was pretty good but they used to have a draft beer, I’ll get the name of it shortly but, oh dreadful, a bit like luke warm tea. Many a happy night was spent there in the Borrington and stagger out and you only had to stagger fifty yards

and you were back on camp again. We used to get in trouble with the police force a lot though. The police used to stand underneath at the bottom and then there was the pub and there was a little footpath and there was a railing and the road ran down underneath and some of the more uncouth members of our establishment used to get outside and instead of going to the toilet they used to just go to the other side of the road and of course if a copper [policeman] happened to be down below, many’s the time

he got the lot. And the next morning he was round at the camp complaining and there’d be a parade and they’d want someone to own up who did it but of course no one ever did. Still, it was one way of letting off steam.

We had a pretty good name, we had a pretty good name. We used to fight like hell with the navy blokes, that was a ritual. On the next level down and up a

bit there was a fish and chip shop that we used to go to after the pub closed of a night time and the navy blokes, there was a navy base there of course, and also being what it was Plymouth Sound, there was a breakwater out the front with an entrance and they had a boom across that entrance and of course it had to be guarded and there was a contingent of navy blokes down there

and they were called boom defence and they used to have to look after that. Of course, we used to always get in trouble with these blokes and when you got half full you started talking about the shallow water, matelots and they used to take umbrage at that and that was the time you got your back against the wall and started watching what you were doing. It was good fun – they’d sling a few punches and then in the end you’d walk out

arm in arm with each other so it didn’t matter much, no one got hurt.

Oh, I’ve no idea but to us we always used to jibe them and say “Why don’t you get out in the blue water you shallow water matelots [sailors]?” and that used to upset them.

It was good, not a problem, not a problem, we always used to work

well. That’s part of what I told you before, the mateship in service life – if one bloke in the crew had money and the rest of them were all broke everyone had money and that’s the way it was. You had your ups and downs, you had a few larrikins, we had a couple of larrikins in our crew but by and large

they used to work in together and they were all there for you, they had to be you couldn’t survive otherwise.

No it was just one big thing, whatever had to be done. They used to look after he maintenance, the whole lot. You had the engine crew and you had the airframe crew that looked after it

and they all did their job. When they required maintenance they used to pull them out of the water up onto the slipway and into the hangar and work on them that way. Big winches they used to winch them out of the water with, just like beaching a ski boat these days, same principle, you pull them up out of the water.

No, the only time we struck fellows was they used to run the launches. They used to take us out and pick us up again and also they’d run the refuelling boats too and they’d take the fuel out in the petrol launch and pump her in and come back again. There was always, while the boat was moored out there, there was always supposed to be

someone on board, what they called the duty hand. He was supposed to look after the aircraft while it was moored and at rest. You took it in turns, a member of the crew to do it, you went out on board and slept on the aircraft. But that was all right but everyone used to hate it because you were cut off from all communications but still it had to be

done.

Your quarters were better. You looked after yourself when you were a non-commissioned officer, sergeant, flight sergeant or warrant officer

but once you went into the officers’ mess you had a batman. In our case it was a batwoman and they used to , you know, wake you up of a morning with a cup of tea and all that sort of business and do all the chores around your room because you had your own separate room. Oh no, it was a different war altogether as an officer.

After I’d finished flying and then I got posted because when I got married I was still a flight sergeant and Dorothy was in the English air force, the RAF, and once you get married and you’re an officer and she’s not you can’t be on the same station so away I went.

It worked out all right – I went up to Scotland for a while and eventually came back and it was getting towards the end of the war then.

Yes, in that book there it tells you – I’d completed one operational tour or something and the few courses I’d done.

Well, once the duty roster went up on the board you knew when you were rostered to fly and what time your take off would be and that would be it, you’d leave it at that, you’d just get to bed at the normal time and someone would come around and wake you a good period of time, whatever it was half an hour or an hour before you were due to take off and usually with the

cry of “Come on you so and so’s get out and fight”, you know. You’d stagger out and get dressed, have a meal and by that time you’d also, the fellows, the other part of the crew, would be over at the mess and pick up the rations or what you took with you. And the other part of the crew would

have gone up to operations to be completely briefed on where you were going and what you were going to do or what you were supposed to do. And then eventually you’d all make your way down to a lunch which would take you over to the aircraft. Then there was a check over the aircraft of course to make sure everything was right. You’d start your motors and run them up and see that they were serviceable and sometimes they weren’t and sometimes they were.

They used to have twin magnetos on each motor and you’d run them up, run the engine up and then switch one off and if there was a drop in revs, I think it was about one hundred revs, it was still classified as satisfactory but if it got over that you’d declare the aircraft unserviceable and that would be that, you wouldn’t go. That happened a

few times but by and large we used to get off. We used to always have a flight officer and he didn’t worry too much. You’d tell him there was such and such a rev. drop on this motor and his stock answer was “You take off, I’ll take the risk”. Half the time you didn’t even bother telling them because there was a permissible limit and if you went over it

nine times out of ten it would rev. itself out of it once you got going but fairly makeshift in those days – as long as the thing in the front used to twirl about that was all you were worried about.

Well, the main thing was the usual staple rations, everyone was

supplied with a great lump of steak, they fed you with that and we always carried an issue of vegetables. There was a proper galley on those aircraft and that chap, Lithgow bloke Alf Manyon, he was more than often the cook and he was quite a character. His favourite trick was when the

captain’s plate was ready he’d have to pass it up the stairs and in on the top but before it got up there he used to implant his thumb in a bit of oil somewhere and put a big greasy thumbprint on the side of the plate before he handed it up to old Keith and it used to upset him. Only a joke of course but that was Moose, that was how he went on and you’d be disappointed if he didn’t do something like that, you know.

We used to get fruit, plenty of oranges, the oranges were good for a while but they cut them out because they finished up, they used to get them from Spain, and the damned Spaniards they used to start sending a few crates of oranges over and then they left a few bombs in them and they opened the oranges up and the bomb would go off so they cut out getting the oranges from Spain - a bit like some of these characters that are running around today by the sound of it. They kept us in plenty of

fruit but we never saw any bananas or anything like that, bananas or pineapple. Oranges was the main thing, there was plenty of them for us anyway. Air crew always ate better than ground staff because they reckoned you needed it.

Always six packets of cigarettes –

just the usual things, there wasn’t much variety amongst it, you know, bread and there was always a supply of tea and stuff on the aircraft but it was no Hilton or anything like that but there was plenty there, everyone always got plenty to eat. That’s one thing, while we were on the squadron we never went short of food. And if you had some money you could always go over to town and get something

anyway. You could always go and buy a steak over in town if you knew where to go to and had enough money. Everything was available on the black market if you were around and if you had the money to pay for it.

Well people were always looking for a bit of good food to have that was the

thing and I used to take Dorothy over there as often as I could because the other part of the crews, you know, their rations were pretty mundane, a lot of potatoes and vegetables and that sort of stuff.

There was a vast difference between air crew meals and ground staff meals I suppose they reckoned we needed the extra sustenance – I don’t know, that was their idea.

Well you did that when you got dressed of a morning, you just put it on. Long woollen socks,

flying boots, invariably you wore a bit thick woollen cardigan, not a cardigan a pullover. Some used to wear flying jackets, leather flying jackets, we had them but I was never real keen on them because they were too bulky and if you could keep warm with out them, you know, long johns they were the order of the day.

You wore just whatever – the flying boots were good, they were fleecy-lined flying boots and they’d come up to your knees and your leather flying helmet with a built-in microphone and earpieces but that was something that you did. Then, on top of all, that you wore a Mae West [life jacket] and you had to have that on at all times.

And built into that was extra flotation things and a survival kit, you know little condensed stuff, pills and stuff to keep you going if you finished up in the water because we used to carry dinghies and that sort of thing that inflated if you

went in the drink. That was all really, the Mae West used to keep you fairly warm on top of that but if you had a flying jacket on as well things got too bulky and you couldn’t move around.

I couldn’t give you an estimate of the quantity but

we had a tank, you know, a tank that we used for that. Water wasn’t a problem we always had enough water because they had, you know, primuses to make tea and all that sort of stuff. I don’t think there was any coffee, no one worried about coffee in those days.

I suppose there were for some blokes but I never, ever had any. I suppose there would have been where you put your underpants on back to front or something like that – I never went in for that business. I’m sure there were some people that did, they always had to have a certain item of clothing. Same as you get blokes today that play football they wear their things a certain way

and I suppose you could call it superstition.

Always you just checked the state of the batteries, all the electrical stuff, made sure everything worked because there’s a heap of little motors that you have to be responsible for and you’d just make sure everything worked.

There’s flap motors and motors to wind this out and wind that up and, you know, you used to have to make sure they were all there. Everyone had a checklist.

Well there was a doorway towards the front of the aircraft

which opened at almost water level, there was a bit of a step there but not much, not very big but enough to bend and crouch and walk through. And once you went in and you were on the floor of the aircraft and you just walked back there and went upstairs by means of stairs but that was the only hatch there was.

It was a good idea, we had one aircraft there, the experimental aircraft it was too, and the bloke – it was moored out, it was the one they changed the motors over and put big motors on it - and some fellow was supposed to be out on duty hand and he didn’t go because they used to duck it a bit if they could and a storm came up and the hatch was open, at night, and every time the waves caught it it went up and down up and down. And as it went

down it tipped about twenty gallons of water through the open hatch. Of course when they went out to get the aircraft in the morning it was there all right but the only trouble was it was sitting in about fifty feet of water and just hanging on to the buoy by the rope. The Group Captain that fitted the motors and that, he wasn’t very amused about that. I don’t know what happened to the bloke that should have been on there but he was probably never heard of again.

Yes, yes, you had hatches at the galley, at midships, they would open you could get out that way. Also the windows used to open up where the pilots were and you could get out there too. The astrodome, that was another one – oh yes, you could get out like that in an

emergency if you wanted to. Even with the turrets, even the tail turret it would wind back but I don’t know whether there’d be enough room to get out of it but you would have thought some space to do something with. But if you reached that stage I don’t think you’d be wanting to get out too quick you’d more likely be trying find a way to stop in there.

My longest trip, I don’t think we were out, it’s in the book there, fifteen hours fifty I think it was, that was the longest trip one night – we got back. The reason for that too was when we got back we couldn’t get down the weather had closed in and we couldn’t land so they sent us to a diversion base up in Ireland which used up a lot more and we got there it was closed in too so we couldn’t get down there so we had to come back again and we stooged along the English coast there at the bottom and we eventually got in at

Portsmouth, which was around a bit from Plymouth. We got down there, luckily, but I think we were about on our last eggcup of petrol because they had to refuel the aircraft before we could leave it because it was so short and there wasn’t enough weight to keep it on the buoy.

ten or twelve hours, it just depends where you went. A lot of our patrols were out to latitude of ten west which is a fair way over the Atlantic, nearly half way to America. Some of the

patrols there, you’d get out towards what they call PLE which is the prudent limit of endurance which means if you go any further than that you haven’t got any fuel to get back and some of those if you struck trouble you’d have been better of to go, I don’t know if it would have been America, but north of America there somewhere, Canada juts out a fair bit –

but you wouldn’t want to be out that far with that much fuel left you’d be looking for somewhere to lay down.

Mainly submarine patrol.

Well you flew to – you were given a designated area that you had to patrol and you just made your way to that area and when you reached that, that was your target and you set off from there. You flew your different courses, they’d tell you what courses you had to fly to patrol a certain area and you’d do that and just keep going around and around and around. But most patrols were box

patrols.

Oh a lot of that is listening watch, you logged everything that came in. There was a constant broadcast from headquarters, coastal command headquarters, which was based at Plymouth, that’s where

Dorothy used to work, and they would be continually sending out messages, not always aimed at us but general stuff and if they wanted you well of course you had your own call sign and you’d pick that up. But everything that came in the operator on duty had to log it all and you’d come back, sometimes you’d come back with ten or twelve pages of what you’d logged and a lot of it had no relevance as far as you were concerned.

But there were times when it did, they were after you or they wanted to tell you something or tell you to go somewhere or to do something. That all had to be logged and then your log had to be handed in when you got back up and then they checked it against what had gone out. So they knew whether you were having a bit of a sleep or doing your job.

Well, you had your times

off, you know, you’d work for a couple of hours and then someone else would have a go. That’s the same with all of them, the pilots and the navigator and there was plenty of time to have a bit of a spell, that wasn’t a problem. And when you weren’t actually doing it you’d probably go and do a look-out shift because you were continually searching for that sort of

trouble.

Submarines, mainly, either that or if you were briefed to have a look for a certain ship or something like that. A lot of our blokes, those two German ships that came out of Norway there and went down through the English Channel, our blokes tracked them, I just forget their names now.

They tracked them for days and they finally got them. It wasn’t safe to get too close to them though, not to those big fellows, they’d knock you down with their artillery.

It just depended, we were never very high, probably the average height that we got to on actual work would probably be

one thousand or one thousand five hundred feet, sometimes lower than that. The only time you got up high was if you had to check your aircraft and do what they call a compass swing. That’s after your aircraft had been in for maintenance the compass had to be swung again because all the magnetic fields in the aircraft would be altered due to the work that people had done on them. So you had to go

up and do another swing to correct everything against the new readings for the magnetic fields in your aircraft. In aircraft navigation you’ve always got due north and magnetic north and you had to work by those. So you had two norths and you had to adjust your compass. There might be ten degrees

deviation between true and magnetic – all good fun. But we used to get up to about twelve thousand feet high and that’s about as far as they’d go the old Sunderlands. And it would freeze you when you got up there because there was no heating in them and no oxygen so you couldn’t go any higher even if you could have got up.

Oh yes.

You just coped, you weren’t up there very

long. You’d just fly round and round and round until you reached the height and did the correction that you needed and then ducked back down again to get warm. There was no heating at all in the damn things, it was just a cheap metal fuselage and that was it.

They were cold, always cold. Bear in mind you’re in the

northern hemisphere and it’s a bit nippy out there at the best of times.

Well you had to try and move around as much as you could to keep yourself mobile. We dressed accordingly, it was the same as everything else, you dressed to suit and I don’t think cold was ever a problem with us

except that you were conscious of it and as I say you dressed accordingly. There was plenty of protective clothing but you couldn’t reach down and turn the heater on.

That was the main one - actually they had those sort of things going

against them but on the other hand their manoeuvrability was a feature of them. They looked big and unwieldy but they were a magnificent thing to fly, very responsive. And if you got into trouble with fighter aircraft you had a better chance of getting them away from them in a Sunderland

than you did in say a Liberator, an American Liberator [heavy bomber], they also used them on coastal command. They were an aircraft, to make a full three hundred and sixty turn on those things, it would take you four miles to turn a Liberator right round in a full circle whereas in a Sunderland you could do it in a quarter of a

mile. You could virtually just stick the wing down and to look at it you would think that you were pivoting on the wing tip point, and that’s how we got away from a lot of problems with fighter aircraft, you just turned inside them all the time and they couldn’t get at you. But the Libs couldn’t and they had a hell of a lot of losses, a hell of a lot of losses with American Liberators due to that fact, they weren’t manoeuvrable enough. Great aircraft, straight and level and a bomber and all that sort of

thing but as far as manoeuvrability that left a lot to be desired.

It didn’t happen all that often but when it did the navigator took charge straight away.

He called the shots from thereon – he stood up in the astrodome because from there, in that position, he could see everything that was going on and he would just give the pilot instructions, “turn this, turn that, dive this, dive that, nose down” or whatever. He used to call the shots from there on. And the rest of people that were on there, the gunners, and various other people that were doing what they were supposed to be

doing just went about their everyday procedures. The radio operator, whoever he might be, he used to have to send out an “OA” and advise them of your position with the co-ordinates supplied by the navigator. Then your main object from there was to either find some broken cloud to get away or keep out of their

way because they used to get angry.

Well, there’s not much to tell there. When it happened –

I happened to be in a mid-upper turret on my rest period doing observation

work and I had two browning machine guns in front of me at the time so I felt a bit protected, you know. In other words I could do something about it but that was the first time. Look, it’s a matter of self preservation, either you have a go or you don’t and if you don’t have a go there’s a good chance that you

won’t be having a go so what do you do. We were hopelessly outnumbered that particular day, there were sixteen of the cows, but we were very lucky that – well, we let them know that we were there and we got into broken cloud.

Well, their main object with those things is if they come at you they fly alongside you for a while estimating, I think I told you before, they fly alongside you estimating your course and speed and what the wind would be to allow – see in firing,

you’re actually aiming your aircraft when you’re firing at somebody. You’re not just aiming a gun, you’re aiming the aircraft because there’s so many things you’ve got to allow for. For a start, you’re travelling at some one hundred odd miles per hour and the winds blowing in another direction and all that sort of thing, there’s so many factors – you might want to hit that thing over there but to do that you’ve got to probably fire over here.

That particularly day I was up there and I could see these fellows, I don’t know how far they were away on our port beam, and just playing along. I knew what they were doing they were just estimating our course. So we fired a few bursts to let them know that we’d seen them and there was no actual attack as

such, they didn’t get a chance to get in on us but we kept them out and by hat time we got into broken cloud and stayed there because we could stay out longer than they could. But they were very good aircraft those German Junkers 88s. They were,

well, they were very similar to a Beaufighter, they even looked like a Beaufighter and they used them in the same duties. They used to be very fast and very heavily armed. They used them for a lot of things, fighter bombers. The old Germans had some good aircraft there’s no doubt about that.

I don’t know whether I could answer that.

Most planes they sound the same most petrol driven engines and with (UNCLEAR) they’re different to jets altogether. Of course jets started to come in at the latter stages of the war when the flying bombs came in and the V2s [rockets]. But the ordinary petrol driven engines they sounded pretty much the same just a deep-throated roar but you don’t hear it when you’re up

there. Our four motors, the exhaust pipes used to come up the top and curve back that way and you’d hardly hear them once you were up there but they kick up a racket when you’re down and you’re close but a lot of it’s taken away straight away if you’re flying at one hundred odd miles an hour. And that’s all we used to do we used to only fly at about one hundred and twenty or one hundred and thirty miles an hour

so we weren’t very quick. That was another advantage for us, we were a bit slower.

I don’t know that there’s any special – you know,

they’d notify you, whoever sight them he would notify the captain straight away. You know, aircraft on the whatever they were, give a position and then the navigator would get up in the astrodome and he’d have a look around and then take it from there. The main thing was to keep out of their way because we weren’t there as a fighting aircraft as such, you know,

you didn’t want to mix it with those fellows because if you did nine times out of ten you’d come off second best but still it was all in a day’s work.

Oh, it didn’t change at all I just started firing the gun to let them know that

we were around, that was all. I suppose it settled you down, you knew that this was likely to happen at any time. I think it’s not only just me, I’ve often heard fellows, those First World War blokes in the trenches and that sort of thing, some of them have said the same thing, you know, they didn’t know how the hell they’d be when they got up over those trenches and started charging at somebody.

I tell you what, what we did was a walk in the park compared to those blokes. Dorothy’s father, he was on the Somme and it must have been sheer murder that First World War. Hop up out of a hole in the ground and charge at a firing machine gun that took some guts.

Oh yes, she pumps there’s no doubt about that.

Well, it makes you highly alert, there’s no doubt about that, I suppose that’s what the adrenalin does. You’re thinking to yourself “How do I get out of this?”

I don’t set myself up as any sort of a hero or anything like that it was just a job to be done and I was no different to anyone else. There’s plenty of blokes that did a damn sight more than I ever did but the fact remains you do what had to be done at the time and you’re back here and that’s all there was about it.

Oh, no, no but that’s a

fact and at that age nothing seems to worry you too much anyway.

Yes, yes coastal attack after D-Day we got a lot of ground fire from the French coast and things like that and it was quite funny to watch that flak coming up at you.

It looks like fairy lights in the sky until it gets close but we were never hit. You think you’re going to be, every bit that comes up you think it’s got your name on it but it never goes anywhere near you, it’s all burning and lights. Things settled down completely after D-Day and that was a sight to behold. There was -

the Channel was full of small boats all with balloons above them and it was a magnificent piece of organisation that.

Where’s that, did you see something in that book?

Yes, but it wasn’t our crew.

Sometimes it was self-inflicted, we ran into a barrage balloon once on take-off, that was a bit hairy. You’d get a steel cable tangled up with your wing and you’d rip a motor out and that sort of

thing and that was a bit hairy [frightening].

Well a barrage balloon was like a small airship and they used to put them up on a cable and they could regulate the height that they wanted to set them up at to whatever the conditions

were at the time. They either put them in the cloud or above the cloud or below or whatever. And Plymouth Sound, due to the navy base there, it was ringed with them they had them all over the place and when we took off we had to have a clear path. We always knew which balloons were flying or supposedly we did know and we always knew when we were coming back where to go to miss them.

But this particular day we took off and as we found out later this particular balloon it was unserviceable and it hadn’t been pulled down, it was secured. I don’t know whether you know the idea of a barrage balloon but it’s a great long length of cable that is stretched between

whatever the height of the balloon is and a winch down on the ground and it’s secured to that and what you’ve got, you’ve got a great balloon up in the air and a length of thick steel cable hanging down, just like that, back to the winch. Of course you can imagine the destruction it causes if an aircraft happens to run into that with its wing. It’s not so much the fact that they run into that because the minute they do that

it hits the wing but then the cable goes over, one goes over that way and one goes underneath, so then you’ve got a cable and there’s your wing there, but you’ve got a cable that comes down like that. Well, at the top of the cable, on the balloon, there’s a parachute and on the bottom of the cable there’s what they call a paracheen which is an inverted parachute.

And as soon as something strikes it, the cable, it sends an impulse up and it releases an explosive charge up at the balloon and at the winch and that liberates the cable from the winch. So therefore you’ve got this aircraft flying along and over its wing you’ve got a cable coming down and you’ve got that situation like that. Well, the object of the parachute is the wind on that, laying on it,

it catches the parachute, the parachute’s the normal one that’s billowing down, the wind catches that and it slowly drags the cable up the wing, right, and you’ve got the paracheen at the bottom which is inverted, it just keeps it steady, and there you’ve got the aircraft flying along and you’ve got this cable snaked around the wing but it’s moving upwards because the parachute is pulling it up and on the bottom of it, on the paracheen side of it, is a

bomb. And when the bomb reaches the height of the plane and touches the mainframe up she goes. That’s how they work. Well this particular day, because there was something wrong with the thing, it had been secured and all the explosive things were switched off and there were no bombs or anything, it was waiting to be pulled down for repair and they hadn’t just

pulled it down. So we hit it, it wrapped it self around the main plane, the wing, it ripped one motor out and it fell away somewhere else and damaged another side of it. We were only up a couple of hundred feet I suppose but we were lucky enough to do a tight turn and landed again straight away. The only damage that we received was what happened to the aircraft, no one got hurt. The plane was all right, just stick another motor in it and repair the wing

and we were right but it just shows how lucky you can be.

Mate, it was all so quick, it was all over in minutes, you know. As soon as it ripped the motor out the thing slid off the wing anyway because it slid off with the motor, the steel cable, and there we were flying on three engines and we just managed to

do a tight turn and flop it back down again – a bit hairy.

It’s in the book, I just forget, I don’t know whether it was Sampson or Bevis but they did a good job we were still in one piece. But it just goes to show how these things can happen all because someone’s forgotten to tell the

other department that that balloon was still up.

Oh, I wouldn’t know what went on from thereon. It was just reported I would say whoever was responsible for not telling us would have got a rocket but still the damage was done then what could you do. I suppose they could take him out and shoot him but I don’t think that was likely to happen though.

Yes, the navigator, Russ Linton, he was a [Sydney] north shore bloke, he lived at Lindfield I think, Russ. Just an ordinary bloke, I think he was a draftsman or something in civil life

but a very meticulous sort of a fellow. When he set things out that pencil had to be there and that rubber had to be there, you know the type. And in the bathroom the toothpaste and the brush had to be there and there and Russ was one of those fellows. He came to stay with us in Lithgow after the war and he was just the same them, he used to drive Dorothy mad, but he was a hell of a good navigator and that was all that mattered.

The most unlikely bloke you’d ever find but he was a good bloke. We were lucky we had a good crew and they all did their job/

Manyon, Moose, Moose, he was. There was no doubt about that he was a character old Moose.

And we had another fellow, he wasn’t on our crew but he was in the same room as us, Bob Marcham. There were various blokes, some that come to mind, Marcham, he was another tail gunner and he was an untidy, filthy cow. When we used to go to

Spain we used to fly to the northern most point of Spain, there’s a place there called Cape Finisterre and that was one of our land falls and anyway this Marcham, he gave him the nickname of Finisterre Bob, that was his nickname from there on he was always called Finisterre Bob, I’ll never forget that. And there was another bloke called Gil Casey and he came from Victoria, he

shot an aircraft down in a fight one day and he got a DFM [Distinguished Flying Medal] for that but he was quite a character he was a bloke, his name was Casey, but he never referred to himself as Casey, he was always Gilbert Casee. He only answered to Casee but as rough as guts he was but he was always Casee, I’ll never forget him.

They were all devil may care blokes but as I said before at that age what the hell. How old are you?

You’re not much older.

We never had an active role in the actual invasion but

we did cover the landing in the Channel actually but we weren’t actually engaged in the operation. You could see it all, the numbers of ships and little ships, every little ship that they could get their hands on were in Plymouth Harbour the night before. Well, they were there a week before, it was supposed to go a week before what it actually

did but the weather beat them on that and they had to put it back. And we got up one morning and there was just nothing there they’d all gone. You wouldn’t believe it there were ships and balloons and the operation must have been tremendous. That was a rough old landing that one, too, but luckily there wasn’t much aerial activity on that. They thought the

landing was going to be further up north.

You knew something was going to happen.

There were no rumours. [British Prime Minister] Churchill came down and he addressed us in the gymnasium a couple of nights before it happened. Poor old Winston, he’d like a drink or two old Winnie and

he got up to address us and he was as full as a boot [drunk], as usual, and I’ll never forget him he said “All you people assembled here before me, you know what’s going to happen” and he said words to the effect “You’re all here but after this happens a lot of you won’t be”. You know, he was a real cheerful sort of bloke and I’ll never forget that part of it.

So you knew things were going to be imminent, why he even came there I don’t know but he always used to like to limelight old Winston but still he was the right man in the right place at the right time and it worked but they booted him out as soon as it was over though. I was in England after that, and the election straight after the war and

I think everyone was that sick of war that they just wanted a change at that stage.

We didn’t have any active part of that. We did do work up the French ports,

we finished up, we went into Bordeaux one day and had a look. It was mainly observation and that sort of thing because by that time on the coast the old Germans they were out of business really. We did a lot of work over the Channel Islands too because they were occupied by Germany during the war

but by the time it got to that they were just about out of business. They were stretched right out, Bomber Command had virtually put them out of business. Between the RAF and the Yanks they had nothing left, thank God.

Well, they went the other way to

start with when he first started to use the V1s, the flying bombs. I was in London the night that first started, I was up there on leave with another one of the crew, that fellow that’s standing with me at Trafalgar Square. We were up there and we could hear these things and we were in the Strand Palace in London and we could

hear these things “put, put, put, put” you know it sounded like an old two-stroke motor bike. Then there’d be silence and up they’d go “bang” and no one knew what they were at that stage, they had no idea, and that went on all night. Then of course in the morning they realised what it was all about and they played hell with those things for a while.

But they eventually mastered them, too, they attacked them at their source and also they used to play with them in the end. They’d send the fighters up over the Channel and tip their wing under one another and send them back home again before they got there. They’d just throw their gyro out of calculations and turn them right around and go home, that solved a lot of problems. But those V2s, they were nasty things, you never knew

anything about them, not until the explosion happened. They got up so high and so quick and until they landed you never knew where they were going to come from or what they’d do but did an immense amount of damage in London. We’ve seen them, just a whole street of houses just gone. Dorothy had a friend, a little cockney girl who lived in Bermondsey in the East End in London,

she was on the same station. And she went on leave one weekend to go and see her mother and father and family back in Bermondsey and she got up there and there was just nothing left the whole street was gone. Not a sign of any one of her family, the whole lot gone and that was just commonplace. No, there were some dreadful things came out of that. Of course, mind you, it was just as bad on the other side of it too in Germany in Dresden and Berlin and those

places it would have been just as bad there, they got paid back in spades.

Well, naturally, a lot of people got in the shelters in the underground as much as you could but after things hit well, offcourse, the emergency services people took over, fire

brigades and that sort of thing. It was chaos. The best thing to do if you were in London when one of those were on was to get out of London. We left the next morning, after those flying bombs started we went back to Plymouth because you didn’t know where they were going to land, they’d just cut out and then there’d be silence for a few moments and

then up they’d go. He might have been a bit unlucky, if he’d have got his jets going a bit earlier on he might have caused a lot more havoc than they did.

Well, a similar sort of thing. It was just a matter of mass survival in those days. You couldn’t do a damn thing about them, you’d hear the damned things whistling

down but apart from try and find some shelter what can you do about it? And the old Brits they were very stoic and they took it all in their stride, there’s no doubt about that. You wouldn’t believe some of the things that they put up with. Much as to say “Oh well, you’ve survived this one, what’s your next

trick” sort of thing. No, if you didn’t see them you wouldn’t know, their fortitude was something to behold and I’ve got an immense amount of respect for those people. And those Cockneys and the East Enders, the East End of the Docks was where the heaviest of it was and how they put up with it I don’t

know but you just had to, there was nowhere to go. They evacuated a lot of people, particularly children, they sent them to the country.

What the evacuation or the bombings?

Well, the bombings must have had an immense amount of

effect on your average citizen but then again what could he do. All they did was sift through the rubble and try and save what they could and start all over again there was no other option, there was nowhere to go. I think they sent the young people away to the country, I think that was a big wrench but I think they realised that the kids had to go somewhere they couldn’t leave them there if they were going to

save them. They went and they always had a smart saying for old Hitler, you know, I’d say that they were very, very pleased to see the end of it. They must have been because it devastated the country there’s no doubt about that.

Well, the first thing would be to make sure the aircraft was secure at the buoy, that was the job of everyone, and then you’d just load everything into the launch and go ashore. The bulk of the crew would head straight back to the barracks and the pilots, navigators and radio operators would head to the

debriefing section in the operations room where you’d spend a bit of time getting debriefed as they call it. The flight engineer, he’d have to put his reports in on the motors and that sort of thing but the rest of the crew would see that everything was OK as far as the aircraft was concerned and if it was early enough probably head for a beer and if it wasn’t they’d go straight to bed because it was too late. But that was about

it because by the time you got off an aircraft, they were all the same, we used to wear those chamois leather helmets with the ear pieces in and, particularly from the radio point of view, your ears were full of morse code and you used to peel the helmet off you and all you could hear for a while was the stuff coming out through the earphones and you were glad to get out of it and

settle down a bit. No, there was nothing spectacular in that at all really just normal course and once they took all the details down away you’d go too and prepare for the next one.

You virtually had your own

aircraft, yes. When we first went there we had “R”, that was the one, there’s a bit of it in the War Memorial now, it’s there, it’s the one that Joe Leach writes about in that book. It’s got a lot of history that aircraft it was flown by Graham Pockley who created quite a name for himself and the crew in the early days. I never, ever flew with him but Joe did.

But I flew in that aircraft for some time and it was quite an honour to be a crewman on “R” because it was one of the aircraft or the aircraft in the squadron that had a lot of history attached to it. But then it was a Mark 2 boat and like everything else eventually

they wore out, they had to retire it. There’s a lot of information on the net about this, you can follow the life of the aircraft right through from its date of manufacture to the end, whatever they did with it and it finished up being scrapped. They brought some of them home here as a matter of fact

and they set them up on the Rose Bay/Lord Howe Island run and our ex CO, a fellow called Ron Gillies, he was only a young bloke, he finished up the chief pilot on that run and they ran it for quite a while until such times as they got a strip on Lord Howe and they cut out the boats and got a land based plane.

So we had “R” for quite a while and then you’ll see in that log book there that we got a new aircraft. We went up to – the factory for these things was up in the North of Scotland and we used to pick the aircraft up at Stranraer in the North West of Scotland and we

finished up with “X” and I flew “X” until such time as – it was a Mark 3 aircraft and a lovely plane and we finished off our tour in that. Then I got out of it and you did fly in an odd other aircraft but basically, no, you kept the same aircraft right through except if one was replaced or damaged or shot down or

whatever and it had to be replaced. But each crew had its own aircraft and you were responsible for the upkeep of that aircraft, cleanliness and that sort of thing.

Just the RAF roundel actually, there was no specific markings. It had whatever your number was and the name, I’ve probably got some

aircraft there some photos of what was on them but there was nothing really significant about it because it was – I think they’d – it was like taking the names of the stations on the platforms on the railways, they didn’t want to advertise it too much where things came from but most RAF planes were pretty similar. Ours didn’t have anything significant, it didn’t have any flying kangaroos on it or anything like that.

Yes, that was our aircraft and woe betide anyone else who went on it. If the worse came to the worst and another crew had to take it, you know, you were pretty upset about that but it didn’t happen very often. You had your own aircraft and a lot of your own personal

stuff used to be stored on board and you knew exactly what each piece of equipment did and you had everything set to your own specifications. No, there was no worries that way and it all worked out pretty well and we eventually got a new one.

That was pretty simple actually. She came into the air force, she was in the RAF and used to be at work, she was a public

servant, with the PMG [Postmaster General’s Department] what was the equivalent of the PMG over there, the Post Masters’ Department. She eventually finished up in the air force because as far as Britain was concerned everyone was conscripted there, that was all there was about it, once you go, you go, and that was it. It was a different set up there, being a government employee,

she didn’t lose any money going in, her money was all made up by the public service and she didn’t lose anything financially. As a matter of fact she had a lot more money than I did she was getting paid better than me. At any rate she finished up in the air Force, she was a radio operator, and she eventually got posted to Mountbatten. She didn’t know me then of course

we were out flying one night and coming back on operations and I called up and got permission to land and got this voice back over the air and I thought “Well, when I go up to Ops I’ll find out who that was”. And that’s how it all started.

It wasn’t what she said it was how she said it. She spoke perfect English.

And about eighteen months later we were married and

that lasted fiftynine years. I’m sorry.

Yes, I was still flying then.

We got married in August 1944.

In Hove which is a little suburb of Brighton and that was in 1944 and of course we lived off the camp then after we got married, we were allowed to do that.

But then after I was commissioned they said to me they don’t allow the officers to socialise with the other ranks.

Well, I think she showed a lot of guts. She was

twenty-five then and to just up and come away from your family and get on a ship and you were married to a bloke that you hardly knew and didn’t know, well, she knew me for eighteen months or so but to get on a ship and comes to God knows where she was going in

Australia, twelve thousand miles away. And by that time of course our first child was on the way so she was on the boat with a host of other officers’ wives all in a similar condition. That way, it ensured a hasty trip back from England, prior to that you might have waited years to get a

boat to come back. First of all I had to go, they sent me and I left, and it was only a few weeks afterwards and she was on her way out. She came out through South Africa, the Canary Islands and South Africa on a banana boat they reckon it was, the SS Umtali. She arrived

here in November 1945 so she wasn’t long after me at all and she landed in Lithgow and God knows what she thought of that place in those days. We made the comment at the time she arrived here, at that time there were seven million people in London and there were seven million people in Australia, that’s the difference.

There were more people in London than there were in Australia at that particular time. She got off the boat and we walked up Pitt Street and there used to be a big delicatessen in those days called Wolfe’s, Wolfe’s Delicatessen was the top – it used to be like David Jones Food Hall now.

And she looked in the window and saw all the food and couldn’t believe her eyes and burst into tears because you hadn’t seen that in England for God knows how many years. So then it was off to Lithgow and we stayed with my sister for a couple of nights in Lithgow and

another sister in Sydney for a couple of nights and eventually finished up buying a little house in Lithgow courtesy of the War Service Homes people and there wasn’t much money around in those days, I think my deferred pay only amounted to a hundred and seventy-five pounds or something, you know, it wasn’t much.

No, I was still flying when I met her.

No, I was still flying ops when I met Dorothy and after that I think I was, we were married in August, it’s in the log book there when I finished flying. But when I went up to Scotland I didn’t do much instructing up there because it was pretty haphazard and I got myself on a couple of courses in Wales

and I did those and a bit of other instructing up there and by that time the war in Europe had finished.

Oh yes, I was in Scotland at the time and we eventually got sent back to Brighton

and we handed sort of everything in and were sent back to Brighton to wait for shipment home again. Dorothy was out of the air force by then and because of the fact that the baby, Diane was on the way, that hastened her discharged

and I was living with her family in Hove and they told us to go and get a job to wait for when there was a ship back to Australia. So I got a job as a radio mechanic in a radio shop in Brighton and I was working there, they were paying me there and also I was getting the air force money so I didn’t care how long it was before we got home because it was pretty good.

I was back to civilian life over there for quite a while and then eventually we got the call and they said “come on, you’re off” and we arrived back here in November 1945.

Well, her brother was in the air force, I didn’t see much of him if anything really, Jim, I’ve seen a lot of him

since. Basically it was her father that I had most contact with and him and I got on pretty good we had no problems that way. I think they were sorry to see her leave the country and that sort of thing but I think it was a pretty big adventure for her too there’s no doubt about that. It must have been quite a shock but

still she weathered the storm and produced a family of three children and five grandkids and, as they say in the scripture, she done good.

Well, it was quite interesting, it didn’t mean much to me as far as preparation was concerned because I didn’t have much to do with it. But I know all her friends they banded around and saw that she got enough clothing coupons to buy the material to do this and that and other things and it was quite an occasion.

Well, he was a friend of mine from the squadron and it depended on who was available, who could get leave and who would do it, that was the thing. It was a question of taking those things into consideration but I knew this fellow fairly well, he wasn’t a particularl friend of mine but he agreed to stand up

and it worked out to be a good weekend away. I had ten days off or something, she was still in the air force then of course and we honeymooned in Brighton and then back to the squadron a week later. But that was a long time ago and then it was a case of back to civilian life in

Lithgow. Then, not long after that Diane arrived, my eldest girl, and then a couple of years after that Barbara arrived and then eleven years after that young John arrived, there was quite a gap between him and Barbara. He lives round here in Weetangera, he’s an accountant, he’s got three grandkids there and Barb’s got one and Diane’s got

one. They’re all down here the whole lot of them except Diane and she’s still in Lithgow but that’s about the story.

Well, I don’t know that there were any hard and fast rules we just fell for each other and decided that tat was the natural thing to do. She never had any ties and I never had any ties so we moved on from there. It was sort of diving in at the deep end because I didn’t know what I was going to

do when I came back here and the finance side of it, there wasn’t much of that, but still it was a matter of making do with what you had and we survived. Occasionally you ran into a bit of rough water but still everything turned out all right in the end and that was the main thing.

Oh, it was always on your mind of course it was, yes, but again as I said before at that age, what was I, twenty-two then, you don’t worry too much about those things. I bet you didn’t worry about too much at

that age. See a fellow, grab him and that’s it. No, we hit it off pretty well and her first question to me was “Are you a sheep farmer?” in her perfect English and I said “No, I’m not, I wish I was”.

We lived a good life and plus the fact too that she’s been back a few times and her brother still lives in England and she’s still got some relatives over there. Barbara’s been over there quite a few times and Barbara had a year over there in England and Europe and John’s been over, John worked over there for twelve months not so long back and she and I were over there three times and back to the old

squadron so communication wasn’t sort of lost completely. Plus the fact these days you’re only a phone call away, you pick up the phone and you’re talking to them in a couple of minutes.

Probably sat on the

pebbles at Brighton. We didn’t do much, there wasn’t much to do in those days, you know, there was not much entertainment. We had quite a few trips to London and, you know, saw a lot of shows and that sort of thing. I remember we went up and saw when it was first released “For Whom the Bell Tolls”. And there was some fellow out the front selling peaches – they were about that big and green almost and we bought two. Two and six each and we sat there and ate the flesh and sucked the

stones right through the picture. There weren’t many peaches over there but it’s funny how things stick in your mind. London was a very good place for entertainment and shows and that sort of thing in those days. But as I say we’ve had a few good trips back there not so long back and

I think she was always glad to get back here with the kids. But we’ve travelled a lot in recent years, we’ve been all over the Pacific and the Far East and Hong Kong and Macau and China and those places and we’ve been through Tahiti and Noumea and

Fiji, all those places. No, we’ve done pretty well, well travelled, well seasoned.

I think it came as quite a culture shock at times.

Well, I think she found us all fairly rough and ready at times, you know, average Jo Blow and she was a gentle lady but the

children were, you know, she lived for her kids.

Not all that long, only two or three months that was all but I had all my civilian clothes sent over – I’d had them sent over in that period and I just used to wear ordinary clothes then and go to work. The old fellow I worked for I used to go in and fix these radios that had broken down for

him and he was quite good to me he paid me reasonable money, whatever the going rate was that was what he paid me. It was quite good, I enjoyed it and the money was nice and handy at the time because I was still getting paid from the air force. I wasn’t the only one that did that, lots of fellows did that while they were waiting because it was no trouble to get a

job.

I almost stayed in. During the latter end of the European business they sent notification around to all the personnel in squadrons over there

inviting you to apply for permanent commissions in the permanent air force. We talked it over and I applied actually and my name went through and I was called up for an interview before the Air Board up in Edinburgh, I had to go up to Edinburgh to have it and I had all the interviews. I found out later that I had been recommended, I had a niece in records in Melbourne and she told me I’d been recommended and I got back

home and I was on disembarkation leave and they sent for me and I had to go down for an another interview relative to this permanent commission and it was like enlisting again. They started the whole process all over again of what I went through when I enlisted in the first place, you know, and I said “I think you

should know now whether I’m suitable for this type of permanency”. I said “I’ve done one tour of operations and I’ve already got a commission and I’ve been in the air force nearly five years, you should know now without all this garbage. And they said “It’s only routine, we’ve got to go through it”. And they said “Of course you realise that if this is confirmed this permanency you will be

posted to Japan straight away”. And I said “No, I didn’t know that” (in the occupation forces you see) and by this time the eldest girl had been born, Diane, and we were living in Lithgow and we talked it over and I decided that I wouldn’t go ahead with it because of that. Because

Dorothy and Diane they’d have had to go to but we felt that it wasn’t the right thing to do and so I said “No, I won’t go ahead with it”. But I almost stayed in. Sometimes I think I should have but then on the other hand hindsight is a wonderful thing, you don’t know, but I didn’t so you’d never know.

But I didn’t fancy being in an occupational force with a new bride and a young baby and I didn’t know what it was going to be like up there. Plus the fact that I’d probably had enough flying for the time being. Anyway, I didn’t do it so then I just took a discharge and got out and went back to the old trade. I went back to the

radio trade and stuck with that for the time being and finished up in an electrical shop where I stayed until 1953. Then we bought a mixed business in Mascot and it’s just been one thing after the other over a period of years, a few odds and ends and different things, we’ve had our own business a couple of times

but it’s been all right, it’s worked out OK.

I don’t know that I missed anything all that much. Once you accept service life you become virtually regimented to it

and it’s just another job. I never regretted it and I reckon it was the best five years I’ve ever had in my life, no doubt about that. As I said to you earlier in the interview people who have never ever experienced service life they just can’t comprehend what it’s all about – you’re in a different world, it’s

probably the camaraderie, I don’t know, I think it’s that. You’ve often heard about the, you know “One for all and all for one” and that sort of thing, it’s pretty right. Of course you get the odd character that doesn’t abide by those rules but by and large they’re very good people. Anyone who’s experienced that, I think they come out of those sort of

things a much better person, I hope so, I’d like to think so.

Well, it was just another career, just an extension of the career that I was already in. You see, prior to that where I was in a

fairly stable position with my knowledge of, well it was hardly electronics in those days, but the radio industry, with the knowledge of that I was in an industry that was certainly going to go places there was no doubt about that so I wasn’t particularly concerned about that. But apart form anything else and all the

good sides of it once you get established in the services it’s a fairly sheltered life, you know you’re protected – they feed you, they clothe you, they transport you, they look after you and you haven’t got many worries. That certainly appealed to me and if this Japanese thing hadn’t been part of the deal I think probably I’d have stayed in

but then who knows “comme ci comme ca”.

Yes, I was very proud to get a commission, I’ll tell you that, extremely proud.

It was a sense of achievement and it didn’t happen to everybody and you know it said to yourself “Well, the boy from the bush he made it”. And then when I got

married, that was the smartest thing I ever did, yes, that’s true.

People win the lotto – I won it back in August 1944. I’m sorry.

Well, it’s a squadron that will live forever. It’s there and it’s permanent and it’s still going. It’s active – they fly different aircraft now but they still do the same work and

due to their circumstances of formation, that they were overseas at the time that war broke out, their squadron motto was “First to Strike” and that’s on all their emblems and I think it’s fairly significant. They

were, they were in it when the first shot was fired they were in it and I’m very proud to have been associated with them.

I just don’t know, I can see what you’ve sort of been after all the time but recording all this down like this saves me writing a book which they’ve been at me for quite some time to write these recollections down.

I’m very pleased that you’ve given us the opportunity to do this. Who knows, in years to come some relatives of somebody might say “Oh, I knew that old bugger”.

It’s been my pleasure. I hope your publication of all this goes as well as what you’ve set out – I’ve seen what it’s supposed to be and I think it’s a very good thing, there’s no doubt about that.