Air Force Blue: The RAF in World War Two – Spearhead of Victory. Patrick Bishop
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examination, the same one sat by candidates for Dartmouth and Sandhurst, followed by interview. The college preferred candidates who came towards the top of the list (Sandhurst was prepared to consider anyone in the first hundred).19 Before the college opened an Air Ministry Committee under Lord Hugh Cecil was set up to consider what sort of boy they were looking for. It concluded that RAF officers required a higher technical ability than was needed in the Army. As to character, they were seeking those with ‘the quality of a gentleman’.20 By this they did not mean ‘a particular degree of wealth or a particular social position but a certain character’. This sounded egalitarian, a statement that the RAF was a modern service in tune with the democratic mood of the age. The problem was, as the Cecil report admitted, how to find candidates with the required education and qualities ‘without excluding from the service men of small and humble means’.
Cranwell cost money – a hundred pounds a term, which was the same as the fees to a good public school. Parents also had to find another hundred pounds for uniform and books. This was far beyond the means of most British households. Six full scholarships worth £105 were awarded each year. But even if a grammar school boy’s parents could scrape the funds together he was still at a disadvantage. Many public schools had separate, specialized curricula for boys trying for Sandhurst and Dartmouth and it was easy for them to extend the service to Cranwell aspirants.
In practice then, the selection process and entry requirements meant Cranwell was dominated by the sons of the affluent middle and upper classes and the products of the public school system. Of the 929 schoolboy entrants who passed through between 1920 and 1939, all but ninety-three went to fee-paying schools.21 The public schools represented at Cranwell ranged from Eton, which sent twenty cadets, to small, long-vanished colleges for the sons of the shabby genteel, which sent one or two. The biggest block came from the Victorian foundations which sprang up in the nineteenth century to raise the soldiers, sailors and administrators needed to run Britain and its empire. Wellington, built as a national monument to the Iron Duke, provided the most with fifty. Other schools with strong military traditions were well represented. Cheltenham sent twenty-eight, Tonbridge and Imperial Service College twenty-two, and Marlborough and Haileybury twenty. Of military-minded schools, only Harrow, with five entrants, was under-represented.
The Cranwell course was rigorous and for much of the period the conditions were spartan. The cadets were marooned in the back of beyond. Sleaford, the nearest town, offered few temptations; one reason Trenchard had chosen the site was its distance from the fleshpots of London. After the rigours of boarding school, most of the entrants found it easy to cope. Peter Townsend, son of a colonial civil servant, arrived at Cranwell in 1933 from Haileybury where life at the outset at least was ‘hard and sometimes cruel [and] there was no one to help us but ourselves … Survive your first two years at Haileybury and you could survive anything.’22 At Cranwell he ‘submitted, gladly for the most part, to the intensive and variegated process which was to mould me as a pilot, an officer and a gentleman’.
Brian Kingcome, another son of the empire, started in 1936 after leaving Bedford School, which had developed strong links with Cranwell. ‘The college schedule was very civilised,’ he remembered.23 ‘Each day, including Saturday, began with an early morning parade, and there was a church parade on Sunday. Parades were followed by classes, including an hour or so a day of flying instruction. Wednesday and Saturday afternoons were set aside for sport. We dined formally in mess each night from Monday to Friday. From Monday to Thursday we wore mess kit consisting of leg-hugging mess overalls strapped under half-Wellingtons, with black tie, blue waistcoat, stiff shirt and butterfly collar.’ Dining in mess at weekends was optional when the dress code was slightly more relaxed – a suit on Saturdays and tweed jacket and flannels on Sunday.
Smartness was something of a fetish for the authorities. Tim Vigors, from a family of Anglo-Irish landowners, set off in January 1939 for his first term at Cranwell with hair cropped considerably shorter than he had worn it at his old school, Eton. On the train he bumped into an acquaintance, also Cranwell-bound, who advised him it was still too long, so he stopped off at a barber shop for another trim. On his first morning he lined up on the parade ground in regulation suit and bowler hat for inspection by a large and fierce warrant officer, who, after prowling up and down the line, stopped menacingly in front of him. He then ‘bellowed at the top of his voice, for the whole of Cranwell to hear, “What do you think you are sir? A bloody woman! Go and have yer hair cut!” Vigors hurried off for his third visit to the barber in two days.24
The reverence for spit and polish, for parades and bull, was at odds with the reputation of the wartime RFC. On the ’dromes of the Western Front dress codes and discipline were relaxed and drilling and parading were not highly regarded. The emphasis on appearance was another instance of the determination of Trenchard and his followers to show that the RAF could match the other services in every department, down to the precision of their marching and the shine on their boots. The attitude rubbed off on some of the cadets, who, when the next war came, would frown on what they saw as the casual attitude of the greatly expanded service.
Soaked in the public school ethos, Cranwell offered a huge variety of sports and activities. There was rugby, football and cricket, of course, but also athletics, squash, tennis, badminton, fencing, hockey, swimming, boxing, basketball, rowing and water polo. The surrounding countryside offered shooting, fishing and above all riding to hounds. Lincolnshire was prime fox-hunting country and the Quorn and the Belvoir would sometimes meet at the college. Riding was voluntary but encouraged. The belief that a good horseman made a good pilot, dating from the first days of aviation, was still strong, ‘the thinking being that the sensitive hands which could coax the best from a horse would be those most suited to the delicate controls of a flying machine’.25 The same applied to yachtsmen, and a declared enthusiasm for sailing always went down well at interviews. The course included history, English, foreign languages, though as the college authorities admitted, in 1935 the officer responsible for organizing the academic programme faced a ‘difficult and sometimes ungrateful task’.26
The cadets were attracted principally by the thrill of flying. There was certainly plenty of theory on offer from the course lectures on engineering and aerodynamics. The practice, though, was something else. Townsend reckoned that in his two years at Cranwell he clocked up only 157 hours of flying time, the same as a Luftwaffe trainee amassed in nine months.27 One reason for not letting cadets get airborne too often was that flying, particularly for novices, was still a very dangerous business. They started off on the Avro Tutor, a small open-cockpit biplane with a 240hp engine which, according to Kingcome, was ‘completely vice-free’ and ‘stood up to the cruellest abuse with a happy smile’.28 Then in their second year they moved on to ‘service type’ aircraft. The Bristol Bulldog, which arrived in November 1933, was fine when flying straight and level, but, as Peter Townsend discovered, in a spin ‘she was a bitch’.29
Putting an aeroplane into a deliberate spin then getting out of it was a regular exercise. One day Townsend was aloft with his instructor Flying Officer A. F. McKenna, a ‘burly, smiling man with a rolling gait like a sailor’. They climbed to above 8,000 feet, which given the aircraft’s proclivities was set as the minimum height at which the manoeuvre should be attempted, then McKenna in the rear cockpit told his pupil through the Gosport speaking tube to ‘spin her to the left off a steep turn’. Townsend pushed the stick forward and the Bulldog spiralled briskly downwards. After three turns McKenna told him to ‘bring her out’. Townsend followed the prescribed counter-intuitive drill of shoving the stick forward again and applying opposite rudder but nothing happened. He wrote:
We were sinking rapidly and I was conscious of an eerie hush, of the clatter of the engine’s poppet valves and