Air Force Blue: The RAF in World War Two – Spearhead of Victory. Patrick Bishop
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the air, of the air rushing past my ears and through the bracing wires, making them whine, while the aircraft pitched and tossed in a sickening, circular movement, totally, hopelessly, out of control. ‘I’ve got her!’ yelled McKenna, now far from cheerful. Banging open the throttle lever, pumping the stick, kicking the rudder, he tried to rock the Bulldog back into flying position. In vain. ‘Get ready to jump,’ shouted McKenna and I moved my hand to the quick release of my … harness, praying to God that I should not have to pull it. With throttle, stick and rudder McKenna kept fighting the Bulldog. We were down to 2,000 feet when at last he brought her back to an even keel with just enough height left to dive and pick up flying speed. His voice, now very quiet, came through the speaking tube: ‘That was a near one. Now climb her up again and we’ll do another.’
Others were not so lucky. During Townsend’s time at Cranwell a mid-air collision killed two instructors and two cadets. Their dismembered bodies had to be collected from trees and fields for burial. The perils of flying training did not end there. Of the young men who passed through Cranwell between the wars, sixty-two were killed in flying accidents, many more than died in RAF operations in the same period.30
The Apprentice Schools were set up with the same devotion to excellence. Obviously, the RAF depended on a high level of mechanical expertise to function. Trenchard decided that the best way to create a dedicated workforce of career technicians was ‘to enlist the bulk of our skilled ranks as boys and train them ourselves’.31 The Apprentice Training Schemes started in April 1920. The Army and Navy tended to draw their recruits from the ranks of the young, poor and unskilled. The RAF, declared a 1934 article, was ‘different from any other Service. The aircraftmen are the elite of their class. All, by comparison with former days, are educated. A great many of them are well-educated … in no other Service is there closer association between all ranks.’32
Applicants had to have the School Certificate, an exam normally sat at the age of sixteen with papers in five subjects including English, mathematics, a foreign language and a science. Most British children left school at the first legal opportunity aged fourteen to find jobs and contribute to the family budget.
Candidates were nominated by local education authorities and sat a competitive exam which included papers in maths, experimental science and English. The intake was much bigger than Cranwell – upwards of three hundred a year. The great disparity in numbers reflected a basic fact about the nature of air forces. To function, the RAF needed a longer logistical and support tail than the Army or even the Navy and ground personnel greatly outnumbered fliers. By 1945, in an Air Force numbering more than a million, only 17.7 per cent flew aircraft. The function of the other 82.3 per cent was to project them into battle.33 Even so, the Apprentice Schools could not fill all technical manpower needs and qualified tradesmen had to be recruited directly from civilian life to make up the shortfall.34
Successful applicants for apprenticeships were expected to serve at least ten years with two on the reserve. Clothing, food and lodging was free and boys under eighteen got one shilling, then one and sixpence a day, the older ones three shillings. Those destined for the larger trades – the fitters who serviced the engines and the riggers who looked after the airframes – were trained at Halton, a former Rothschild mansion in Buckinghamshire which had been bought by the War Office at a knock-down price. Those specializing in wireless technology were housed in a school on the Cranwell complex.
Trenchard’s enthusiasm for the apprentice scheme was as great as his devotion to Cranwell. Those who passed through it would be known as ‘Trenchard’s Brats’. In some ways the Apprentice School mirrored the college. The boys lived a regimented life in which competition in everything was encouraged and smartness was enforced. Hubert Rawlinson, who arrived at Halton as a sixteen-year-old from Bolton in late August 1939, found himself plunged into an austere world where almost every minute was accounted for and rules governed virtually all human activity. After a bone-shaking ride from Wendover station in three-ton lorries with solid rubber tyres the new boys were set down at Bulback Barracks.
‘We came to a halt by a huge parade ground and climbed down from the vehicles,’ he wrote.35 ‘A roll call was made and we were then taken to three gigantic barrack blocks, each having six large rooms with rows of beds either side. Each bed had a wooden locker alongside, a wooden box which could be padlocked underneath the bed, and a steel locker fastened to the wall above. Underneath the wall locker were three clothes pegs fastened to a frame. The beds were made in two halves, the front sliding into the rear; no springs but thin metal slats … upon the beds stood three square biscuit mattresses, five brown blankets, two calico sheets and a head bolster. Twenty of us were placed in each room …’ After this sobering beginning they were taken across to the dining hall for their first taste of service cuisine: rissole and chips followed by suet pudding and custard.
After three weeks of square bashing and PT they were assessed to determine which trade they would be trained in for the next three years. The order in which they were interviewed was set by their place in the entry exam results. The strong message the boys received was that they had entered a meritocracy and that success would be determined by talent and hard work. Rawlinson was selected as a metal rigger, the trade responsible for maintaining and repairing airframes. The archaic sounding term was justified in an era when many of the aircraft the RAF flew were still partly constructed of wood, canvas and wire and the pear-drop smell of the acetone used to ‘dope’ the canvas stretched over biplane wings permeated workshops and hangars.
The boys marched everywhere, back and forth every morning and evening to the workshops, twice a week to half a day of academic lessons in the school building, always to the tune of a band made up of older apprentices equipped with bagpipes, trumpets, fifes and drums. On Sundays, church parade was compulsory.
At weekends, after Saturday morning fatigues, the boys were allowed off the camp to visit Aylesbury, Tring and Wendover. They were on public display, representatives of the Royal Air Force, and correctness in behaviour and dress was essential. For these outings they had to wear ‘best blues’: breeches, puttees, boots and tunics with ‘dog-neck’ collars, set off with a swagger stick tucked under the arm. Only those over eighteen were allowed to smoke and then not in barracks.
After three years and several progress tests apprentices sat their passing-out examinations; one week for academic subjects and a second for their trade. Failures were re-mustered as aircraft hands, the dogsbodies of the RAF. The rest were then sent off to start their careers on a starting pay of twenty-six shillings and sixpence a week – good money for an eighteen-year-old in the 1930s.
Halton created something that had never been seen in the British armed forces: a body of educated NCOs and skilled technicians, confident in their abilities and well aware of their vital function in the organization. It showed in their attitude. T. E. Lawrence, writing to Air Vice Marshal Oliver Swann, noted that RAF officers ‘were treated by the men off parade as rather humorous things to have to pay respect to’.36 They tended to regard officers as ordinary humans, rather than, as Army and Navy other ranks were expected to, as more exalted and evolved members of the species. This relationship between commissioned and non-commissioned wearers of Air Force Blue was to be a defining characteristic of the new service, one that harmonized with the spirit of the times and the mood of the skilled lower classes on whom it would have to rely.
The gap between the two was slowly closing. Unlike the other services the RAF offered real opportunities for social mobility. When drawing up his strategy for the training of pilots who would be mostly officers, and ground crew who would be NCOs and other ranks, Trenchard had left a window open. It was decided that the best three apprentices from each entry would be awarded cadetships at Cranwell at the end of their time at Halton. The scheme also included Wireless School apprentices. Together they would send 124 boys to the college in the years between the wars, more than 10 per cent of the total intake.37