Alan Bristow

by Alan Bristow

  ‘Me too,’ said Turk.

  But de Millington looked thoughtful. ‘It’s not that important,’ he said. ‘I don’t mind being trained as an air gunner, if that’s all that’s on offer. At least it means I won’t have to go back on the ammo run.’

  We agreed it was important not to go back on the ammo run, but being an air gunner seemed a poor alternative. Turk, Taylor and I agreed we’d find other jobs. We wished de Millington good luck and walked out into Russell Square, where we took our leave and agreed to stay in touch, which of course we didn’t do.

  De Millington did not survive the war.

  I started walking back to Waterloo to catch a train to Sutton, to which my mother and sister had moved – Dad was still in Malta. If I couldn’t be a pilot, what could I do? I dismissed the idea of rejoining the ship in Avonmouth. I’d had enough of being on the defensive, constantly being a target but never able to attack. Perhaps I could join the Royal Navy as crew on a motor torpedo boat! An MTB made a fine sight, cutting through the water at thirty-five knots, ducking under the guns of the enemy and unleashing a deadly weapon right into his vitals ... none of this waiting around to be dive-bombed. Such thoughts fell over each other in my mind, but as I was crossing Trafalgar Square, fate took a hand. On the south side of the square, on the corner of Cockspur Street, hung a sign which read: ‘Join the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm Pilot Y Scheme’.

  I stood looking up at the twenty foot long white canvas sign with its black lettering. Perhaps being a pilot in the Navy was every bit as good as being a pilot in the Air Force. I opened the door beneath the sign and walked into a small lobby. In front of me was a staircase with an arrow pointing up – ‘Interview Room’. Thirteen steps on that staircase led me to a wide landing occupied by an elderly Chief Petty Officer, who was sitting at a desk. On the desk was a telephone, an overflowing ashtray, a three-inch high pile of application forms and a pamphlet headed ‘Pilot Y Scheme’.

  ‘What can I do for you, son?’ the Chief Petty Officer asked in a broad Cockney accent.

  ‘I want to be a pilot in the Navy, sir.’

  ‘Well, fill in this form, then you’ll ’ave to see the doctor and pass an aptitude test.’

  The medical examination, by a surgeon Lieutenant Commander RNVR, was basic and thorough, ending with what I later came to know as a ‘short-arm inspection’. The aptitude test, supervised by the Chief Petty Officer, involved me sitting on a hard wooden kitchen chair with a pedestal in front of me on which there was an illuminated glass panel divided into four segments by a big black cross. Attached to the base of the pedestal was a control column.

  ‘Now I’m going to switch this thing on,’ said the Chief Petty Officer. ‘A red dot will appear, and you can move it around with the stick, like this.’ The dot appeared, and the Chief Petty Officer demonstrated that it did indeed respond to the movement of the stick.

  ‘Okay, now it’s your turn. You have to try to keep the dot in the middle.’

  I took a grip of the control column. The red dot was already positioned on the intersection of the cross. I waited for something to happen. Ten seconds went by.

  ‘I see you’ve done this before!’ exclaimed the Chief Petty Officer.

  I said nothing.

  Unlike the RAF encounter earlier in the day, I felt confident and assured as I walked into the interview room. A retired Royal Navy captain looked up from his paperwork.

  ‘Bristow? What is your father’s first name?’

  ‘Sidney, sir,’ I said.

  He beamed. ‘What a coincidence! Your father and I served together in Bermuda and Portsmouth. I’ve heard he’s landed the job looking after the dockyard in Malta.’

  It was too good to be true. After a few basic questions I was given a chit telling me to report to the Royal Navy shore establishment known as HMS St Vincent in Gosport in ten days time. There, I was to start my pilot training in the rank of Ordinary Seaman.

  I did not know, nor did I care, what the Y Scheme was as long as it meant I could be a pilot. In fact, it was a system by which young men could be accelerated through officer training. But my introduction to the Royal Navy came as a far greater shock than I had expected. As a cadet with British India I had worn officers’ uniform and enjoyed all the privileges that went with the rank. At HMS St Vincent I was just another matelot in bell-bottom trousers on Training Course No. 55. While most of the people there were only a year or two younger than me, in terms of experience we were worlds apart. Two hard years in the merchant navy had given me an education that money couldn’t buy. My fellow cadets were fresh out of school, and most of them seemed naïve and wide-eyed to me.

  HMS St Vincent was a row of stark red-brick blocks that had once housed prisoners of the Napoleonic wars and which hadn’t improved much since, in terms of creature comforts. As the lowest form of Navy life, our training included learning how to blanco your cap, polish your black buckle shoes and iron your zip-front uniform. We did a great deal of square-bashing on the massive parade ground and sat through elementary lectures in map-reading and dead reckoning navigation. One consolation was the sport; we played football and swam every day. We were allowed out only one precious afternoon a week, but because it was the first step towards becoming a naval pilot, I was happy to grin and bear it.

  The bane of our lives was Chief Petty Officer Wilmott, a martinet and a sadist who had never seen active service and who thoroughly enjoyed dishing out demeaning punishments for petty reasons. Wilmott had a bizarre and particular hatred for New Zealanders and did his utmost to give them humiliating extra duties. Matters came to a head after he made six of the Kiwis go down on their hands and knees and paint the white lines all over the parade ground on which we did our endless square-bashing. The Kiwis were livid. They’d come to England to help us fight the war, they said, and they were being treated like dirt for not leaving the galley as clean as Wilmott would have liked. They planned to redress matters.

  They set about finding out which pub Wilmott stopped at on his way home each night. There was nothing special about Wilmott’s bike as it lay against the pub wall, but by the time the New Zealanders had finished with it was unrecognisable as a means of transport. They battered and mangled it beyond recognition. Then they waited outside the pub until Wilmott emerged, happily tipsy, and did the same to him. Several bones were broken, and he was in hospital for a week. We waited with trepidation for his return, but from that point on he was more circumspect in his bullying, especially with New Zealanders.

  Some campaign medals had been struck, and I was entitled to several of them; the North Atlantic Star, the Burma Star, the Africa Star and the general active service ribbon. I debated in my mind whether to claim them. It might prove sticky if too many questions were asked about how I had come to leave the merchant navy. At worst, I could be hauled back to Avonmouth in irons and put aboard some dreadful ammunition scow bound for perdition. Eventually I decided to lodge my claim and the medals came. It was known to the other trainees on Course 55 that I’d been in the merchant navy and that the ribbons were legitimate, but Wilmott was twitching with rage.

  ‘I’m reporting yew for wearing medals you’re not entitled to,’ he barked, without allowing me to explain.

  I was hauled up before the Commanding Officer, lef’ right lef’ right lef’ turn ten-shun! Wilmott stood smugly at my shoulder. The CO was reading some papers. ‘Ordinary Seaman Bristow,’ he said slowly. ‘You have been wearing medals you haven’t earned.’

  He looked up at me. ‘I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how serious this is. These medals are due to men who have fought and suffered for their country, and I take an extremely dim view of trainees taking liberties with them.’

  ‘I wasn’t given time to explain, sir,’ I said. Then I told him precisely how I’d earned each one. Atlantic convoys, evacuation of Rangoon, the sinking of the Malda, the Hatarana torpedoed off the Azores. With every story, Wilmott grew an inch shorter. By the time we got to Bougie, he was a small puddle o
n the floor.

  ‘You may go, Chief,’ said the CO. Wilmott slunk out.

  ‘And your father was the Commodore in charge of the dockyard in Malta during the siege,’ said the CO.

  I affirmed that he was indeed.

  Before I had left his office the CO had made me leader of all courses in barracks, a dubious honour because it was henceforth my responsibility to get the men out of bed and on parade on time in the morning and to make sure they behaved themselves in the mess halls at mealtimes. It also made me responsible for marching trainees down the main road in Gosport to stand guard every night over six fuel storage tanks, in readiness to fight fire if they were hit. But thereafter, Chief Petty Officer Wilmott gave me a wide berth.

  After five weeks at St Vincent we packed our belongings and boarded a train at Gosport. Our destination was Gourock on the Firth of Clyde, where we were to take ship for Canada and basic flying training. Wartime transport being what it was, getting to Glasgow was no simple matter. We were turfed out at a temporary holding barracks in the foothills of the Cumbrian mountains at a place called Drigg. After the war Drigg was to become a dump for nuclear waste from Sellafield, and to my mind they couldn’t have picked a better spot for it. In mid-December 1943 there was snow everywhere, and it was so cold that I slept in my uniform and greatcoat. On the morning of the second day, Course 55 boarded the train for Gourock where we embarked on the Queen Mary, bound for Halifax, Nova Scotia.

  The Queen Mary was hopelessly overcrowded. Our course, eighty men strong, was given a section to itself in which the bunks were stacked four high. As course leader I was required to patrol our deck and report regularly to one of the ship’s officers on the state of the watertight bulkheads in our sector. Temporary watertight doors had been installed throughout the ship, and at a given signal the doors had to be closed and bolted to ensure that if the ship was damaged, she stood a better chance of staying afloat. The doors were manual, which meant every door had to have a trainee standing next to it, ready to respond to the signal and entomb his comrades. It was my responsibility to make sure they stayed awake, which was not easy – it was a tedious watch, and as often than not they’d fall asleep. The Queen Mary made twenty knots and no submarine could catch her, but it was a necessary precaution nonetheless.

  I got to know some of the Queen Mary’s officers, and because I’d been at sea they allowed me up to the bridge. My fellow trainees were jealous because there were Wrens up there, but I’m afraid they made no impression on me. I’m sure they were putting something into the tea to keep us in check – it tasted bloody awful, but there was plenty of it. The Wrens were the secretariat in a vast communications area behind the wheelhouse, full of wireless operators, charts and officers’ facilities.

  The crossing was fast, and on the fourth day we disembarked at Halifax and took a train to a transit camp in New Brunswick. Next day, another train took us to a village south west of Montreal called St Eugene. We boarded buses that ploughed through the snow to barracks at Number 13 Elementary Flying Training School, where the cold in the long huts made Drigg seem like a memory of summer.

  CHAPTER 6

  Taking to the Air

  St Eugene was a cheerless place. Snow blanketed everything, with great banks of it built up beside the roads along which we walked between buildings. Inside our barracks it seemed even colder than outdoors. As course leader, I was responsible for keeping up morale. The first thing to do, obviously, was to get some heat in the place.

  ‘We need firewood,’ I announced.

  One genius picked up a chair and bashed it on a table.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I asked.

  ‘For the fire,’ he said.

  ‘Not the bloody furniture,’ I said. ‘Outside. Go into the woods. Fetch sticks.’

  We had two tall stoves, one at each end of the barracks. They were hard to light, but once you got them going they were damned good. Slowly, the ice inside the windows started to melt. We were living on field rations, and I tried to enhance the sense of community by making sure everyone ate at the same time. My authority was accepted unquestioningly. When you’re seventeen, as most of the course were, a man of twenty is a senior citizen, especially when he has a distinguished tonsure like mine. They knew I’d been round the world and for that I was accorded respect.

  We were issued with brushes and shovels to keep the pathways clear, and out on the airfield the snowploughs worked constantly to keep the runways operational. Next morning we were introduced to the delights of the heated mess hall, then assembled in a warm hangar where we were addressed by a chap who called himself the Commanding Officer and wore the exalted stripes of a flight lieutenant. After a perfunctory welcome we were divided into groups of about a dozen, with the CO’s finger picking out ‘you, you and you’ on an arbitrary basis. I was in Flight ‘D’.

  I was introduced to my instructor, Pilot Officer Wanamaker. He was a Canadian who was shortly to go to England to fight. I soon came to realise how lucky I was to have him. He was a good instructor, clear and precise in his explanations, and a skilful pilot too. He in turn introduced me to the aeroplane on which I was to learn to fly.

  The Fairchild PT-19A Cornell was a low-wing monoplane with a 200 horsepower engine that could haul it along at 125 mph. It sat outside in the snow, and as I walked out to it carrying my seat parachute, it struck me how wonderfully elegant it looked. Wanamaker walked me around it.

  ‘Let’s check that all the snow is off the wings,’ he said. ‘Never try to take off with any snow or ice on the wings – you’ll probably crash.’

  Mentally I filed this information away.

  ‘Never, never try to hand-swing the propeller on this plane,’ he went on.

  Another card for the mental filing cabinet. Years later I tried to work out why. Would the prop swing back and take your arm off? I looked up the compression ratio on the Ranger L-440-3 engine. It wasn’t that high, not much more than six to one. But whatever my instructor said was gospel, and I have never hand-swung a Cornell.

  We climbed onto the wing and into the cockpit, and strapped in. The instructor sat unseen behind the ‘pupil’. The disembodied voice talked about the controls in front of me.

  ‘On the left is the throttle. Can you hear me all right?’ He was talking down a Gosport Tube, and I could hear him perfectly well. He showed me how to close the canopy over our heads. ‘Okay, these are the instruments – the altimeter, air speed indicator, turn and bank, clock. Under your seat is the fire extinguisher, can you see that?’ By craning my neck, I could indeed.

  Somehow Wanamaker started the engine, and after a burst of noise he pulled back the throttle, and we sat ticking over. ‘In this cold weather, if you’re the first flight, be sure you give the engine plenty of time to reach the proper temperature before you fly.’

  At the side of the panel there were two gauges, oil temperature and oil pressure. When the needles had reached their minimums, Wanamaker pushed in the throttle and we began to move. ‘Follow me through on the controls,’ he said. I put my hands on stick and throttle and my feet on the rudder pedals, and felt him moving them. Suddenly we were charging over the compacted snow; we bounced once, bounced twice, and the earth fell away. In an instant I was transported back to an earlier time, a thousand years ago before the war, when Randall’s Puss Moth conveyed us through the sky to Ryde beach for summer picnics. The snowscape of Canada stretched before us, the blue sky filled the canopy and we had it all to ourselves. Wanamaker’s voice came down the tube.

  ‘Can you see the horizon? With the stick, keep the nose in that position, relative to the horizon. You have control.’ As with the red dot, the horizon stayed just where it was put.

  ‘Good,’ said Wanamaker. ‘I think you’ll do all right.’

  It all felt natural. The Cornell was a sound training aircraft, honest and straightforward without gimmicks or vices, and easy to fly. In a few hours we’d progressed to more advanced work, steep turns, stalling and spinning,
and landing – maintaining 70 mph on the approach, putting down the flaps, flaring the plane and touching down gently on the snow. I had just under six hours in my logbook when Wanamaker said: ‘I’ll send you solo tomorrow.’

  That night it snowed heavily, and the following day Wanamaker was transferred elsewhere. My new instructor was a Warrant Officer who wanted to see for himself whether I could fly, so we did almost two hours more dual training before I finally got to go solo. I felt no trepidation; I was aloft as before, but without the dead weight of the instructor in the back. I was confident, and confidence is everything in flying, in business, in life.

  I quickly grew to love aerobatics, stalling and spinning, throwing myself around the sky like a seal in a swimming pool, but I became conscious of the fact that not everyone was getting the hang of it. We’d had a group photograph taken on our first day, men standing three deep on benches with big aviator smiles, and the picture was hung in the mess hall corridor. One day a halo appeared over the head of one of the trainees, applied in white ink. Then another, and another. They had washed out, ‘been scrubbed’ in the dreaded phrase. By the end of our basic training, about one in four had won a halo. One of my friends, Alan Brown, got scrubbed because he couldn’t get the hang of spin recovery, but they allowed him to finish the course because he was transferring to be an observer. He’d been a sergeant of police in peacetime, and he went on to have a distinguished career on torpedo bombers. He was disappointed, but he took it in his stride. Some men were tearful as they packed their kit for passage back to England.

  You could also get scrubbed for indiscipline – breaking out of camp, ‘going ashore’ without leave. I didn’t find the confinement tedious. The only way to keep up with the workload was to study in the evening. One night a week the camp was invaded by local girls, most of them wanting to get married and live in Europe. One had to be on one’s guard.

  Every week we had written assessments, and I was never less than ‘above average’. Same went for the theoretical work. I scored particularly highly on ship and aircraft recognition. They would flash on a screen silhouettes of aircraft, friend and foe, from various odd angles, and you had to say what they were. The flashes came faster and faster until nobody could keep up, but I lasted longer than most. Some chaps couldn’t tell a Mitsubishi Zero from a donkey. With ships, I was in my element. I could usually tell from a glimpse of the bow whether a ship was Japanese, American, British or Italian. We had gunnery practice in a big plastic bubble with targets projected on a screen, and it was all a glorious game.