Fighter Boys: Saving Britain 1940. Patrick Bishop
rest went on drink and cars, which the junior officers clubbed together to buy to visit country pubs and make the occasional trip to London, less than an hour away. The frequency of nights out depended on two considerations: the price of drink and the price of petrol. To initiate a pub crawl, Kingcome and three or four friends would each put half a crown (121/2p) into the kitty. They would then board one of the jalopies (cost £10 to £25) held in loose collective ownership by the squadron. Petrol cost a shilling (5p) a gallon for the best grade, or tenpence (a little over 4p) for standard grade. After having downed several drinks costing eightpence (4p) for a pint of beer or a measure of whisky, they would still have some change over to share out at the end of the evening. Ten shillings (50p) would cover a trip to town, including train fare if no car was available, and the bill at Shepherd’s, a pub in Shepherd’s Market in Mayfair. It was run by a Swiss called Oscar and became one of Fighter Command’s main drinking headquarters in London. For a pound the evening could be rounded off in a nightclub.
Biggin Hill, which like Hornchurch originated as a First World War station, was rebuilt in September 1932 to a similar design. It became home to two fighter units, 23 Squadron and 32 Squadron. Pete Brothers arrived in 1936 to a ‘nice little airfield, a lovely officers’ mess’. The station had a reputation for joie de vivre, and its members enjoyed, when they were not flying, a life of sport, of visits to London and being entertained at surrounding country houses. Because of the airfield’s location, 600 feet above sea-level, unexpected visitors aboard civil airliners often dropped in when Croydon was closed by fog. One day in 1936 an Imperial Airways airliner landed carrying the American Olympic team, including Jesse Owens, fresh from his triumph at the Berlin Games. On another occasion a party of French models arrived after being diverted there on their way to a London fashion show. Churchill, whose home at Chartwell was only a few miles away, arrived unexpectedly one evening early in 1939. ‘We were having a drink in the anteroom when the door opened and in walked Winston,’ Brothers, who by then was a twenty-one-year-old flight commander with 32 Squadron, recalled. ‘We all got up and said, “Good evening, sir, can we get you a drink?” The waiter brought him a dry sherry and he asked if we could turn the radio on so he could hear the news. We listened, then he said, “Are you enjoying your Hawker Spitfires?” We didn’t like to say, “You’ve got it wrong, they’re Hurricanes.”’29
Behind the military briskness there lurked an atmosphere of fun. Jokes were not always in the best taste. In 1936, at the height of the war in Abyssinia, Biggin Hill, like every other station, put on a display for the annual Empire Air Day. To demonstrate bombing techniques a Hawker Tomtit dropped flour bombs on an old car carrying two ‘native’ figures. One, disguised in a black beard, dressed in a white sheet and wearing a pith helmet, was unmistakably supposed to represent Haile Selassie, the Emperor of Abyssinia who had lost his throne after the Italian invasion. The crowd loved it but the Air Ministry was not amused. There was jovial rivalry between the Biggin units. A new squadron, No. 79, was formed around a core of pilots transferred from No. 32 while Peter Brothers was there. ‘There were games. We decided we’d have a contest to see who could do the shortest landing. We had to pack it up when some chap hit the hedge and turned his aircraft over and smashed it up.’
Tangmere, at the foot of the South Downs, was a particularly pleasant post. A dreamy, prelapsarian atmosphere seems to have permeated the place in the last years of peace. Billy Drake, arriving there aged nineteen in the summer of 1937 as a newly commissioned pilot officer, found life was sweet. The summer routine involved rising at six and flying until lunchtime in Hawker Furies. Afternoons were spent swimming or sailing at Bosham and West Itchenor. Then there would be a game of squash or tennis before dinner and bed. Social life centred on the mess, furnished like the lounge of a luxury liner, where Hoskins and Macey, the white-coated stewards, shuttled back and forth with silent efficiency. There were good pubs nearby; like the Old Ship at Bosham, where on a summer evening you could sit with fellow pilots or a girlfriend and watch the sun going down over the estuary. Conversation concerned aeroplanes, cars, sport and parties, rarely politics. What was happening in Abyssinia, Germany or Italy was hardly mentioned. If the drums of war were beating, the pilots affected not to hear them. Drake had barely considered the implications of his decision to apply for a short-service commission. ‘I simply wanted to go flying,’ he said. ‘The fact that it might involve going to war never occurred to me until 1938 or 1939.’30
Life was not so congenial at every fighter base. Conditions around the country were variable. The fast rate of the expansion meant accommodation often lagged behind needs. Desmond Sheen, a nineteen-year-old Australian who joined the RAF on a short-service commission from the Royal Australian Air Force, arrived at 72 Squadron at Church Fenton in Yorkshire in June 1937 to be told he was living in a tent at the end of the airfield while the mess was being built. ‘We stayed there until November when the fog and the mists drove us out and we moved into hangars until the building was completed.’31 When Arthur Banham reported for duty to 19 Squadron at Duxford in Cambridgeshire after finishing his training in August 1936, he was put with nine other junior officers in a hut which acted as a dormitory. ‘The whole place was a mess, with trenches all over the place where they were laying foundations for the new buildings. The officers married quarters weren’t built and most officers lived out of the aerodrome altogether.’32
Arriving at their first posts, the newly qualified pilots learned quickly that henceforth everything would centre on the squadron. It became the focus of their professional and their social lives. Nothing could be more exciting than flying and no one could be more fun to be with than one’s fellow fighter pilots. ‘It was a wonderful time for most of us,’ remembered John Nicholas, who joined 65 Squadron in December 1937. ‘It was very pleasant to be with a number of young men of one’s own age, most of whom believed in the same things.’33 Some of the pre-expansion pilots had worried that the influx would dilute the clubby character of the old organization and dissolve its tenderly guarded esprit de corps. Peter Townsend, a sensitive, reflective career officer who had passed out of Cranwell as the Prize Cadet, returned to Britain to join 43 Squadron in June 1937 after a posting to the Far Bast, to find that ‘gone were the halcyon days of “the best flying club in the world” Tangmere was now peopled by strange faces, different people with a different style. I resented the new generation of pilots who had answered the RAF’s urgent appeal and found heaven-sent relief from boring civilian jobs.’34 Townsend accepted, almost immediately, that these feelings were unworthy. In a subsequent mea culpa he admitted that ‘my prejudices against them were ignoble, for they were soon to become the most generous-hearted friends, then, a little later, die, most of them, for England’. The reasoning was, anyway, wrong. At any time in the years before the run-up to the expansion programme, a majority of officers in the admittedly much smaller RAF were serving on short-service commissions.
The newcomers took to the existing traditions quickly, offering no serious challenge to the way things were done. Many were familiar with the routines of sport, joviality and boisterous high spirits from school days. Most of the short-service commission pilots entering in the expansion years had a public-school background of one sort or another. Roland Beamont was at Eastbourne College, Geoffrey Page at Dean Close, Cheltenham, Paddy Barthropp went to Ampleforth and Arthur Banham to the Perse School, Cambridge. Bob Tuck attended a small fee-paying day school, St Dunstan’s at Catford, and Pete Brothers a similar establishment, North Manchester School. Billy Drake, James Saunders and John Nicholas were educated abroad. Pat Hancock went to a day school in Croydon before moving to the technical college. Dennis David had been to a boarding school in Deal before changing to Surbiton County School. Of the Cranwellians, Tim Vigors had been at Eton and Brian Kingcome at Bedford.
Most of the entrants, even if they had not been to a proper public school, knew something of the ethos, if only from the pages of the Magnet and the Gem. Bob Doe, a secondary-school boy, felt out of place. Of his fellow short-service entrants he was ‘probably the poorest of the lot. I hadn’t done all the things other people