Alan Bristow

by Alan Bristow

  As the course neared its end a wicked thought came to me – this will keep me out of the war with Japan. If I was destined to fly against submarines from a helicopter carrier on North Atlantic convoys there would be no chance of being transferred to the Pacific, where the most savage, fanatical fighting was going on for every scrap of land the Japanese conceded. At that time, late in 1944, it was expected that the Japanese home islands would have to be invaded, and estimates of the loss of life were astronomical – figures of ten and twenty million were bandied about. Of course, we weren’t to know that the atom bomb would end the whole thing in a week, but I wasn’t in a tearing hurry to be part of the Pacific action. I’d seen all the Japs I wanted to see, grinning over the rails of the Shirakumo off Calcutta.

  In the event, the Atlantic convoy protection plan came to nothing. As far as I’m aware they only converted one ship for anti-submarine helicopter operations, and I wasn’t appointed to it. The war in Europe was being won, the U-boat threat in the North Atlantic had largely been suppressed, and I found my constant requests to be transferred to an operational fighter squadron were meeting less and less resistance.

  The helicopters we were training on had been bought by the British government and were to be shipped across the Atlantic after we’d been taught to fly them. The government had become quite excited about helicopters and had ordered 240 R-4s, but the end of the war caught up with Sikorsky and in the event, only twenty-four were delivered to the Fleet Air Arm.

  At long last we were given a date for our departure for England and started making our dispositions to leave New York. We gave notice to the lady who owned our apartment, and for two weeks we tried desperately to sell the Chevrolet, without success. On the day before we were due to report to Royal Navy headquarters at the Brabazon Plaza Hotel to await transport across the Atlantic aboard the Queen Mary, the original owner got word of our plight and bought back the Chevrolet at a discount of twenty per cent.

  My first appointment on returning to England in September 1944 was to No. 9 (P) AFU based at HMS Kestrel, Worthy Down, near Winchester, where two Sikorsky R-4 helicopters were used as communication hacks for the captain and staff. It was obvious that the Admiralty hadn’t worked out a plan for the serious deployment of helicopters, but by January 1945 they were being put to good use on radar calibration exercises, providing stationary targets on which guns could be ranged. The YR4s proved to be very effective for this type of precision flying and it was decided to extend the work to include calibration of the radar-controlled big guns on HMS Anson and King George V, which were operating out of Scapa Flow. This change in Admiralty policy brought about my next appointment, in April 1945, to 771 Squadron based at HMS Tern at a place called Twatt in the Orkney Islands. 771 was unlike most Fleet Air Arm squadrons in that it operated a mixture of Boston light bombers, Seafires, Swordfish and Martinets, together with two Sikorsky R-4 helicopters. The latter were the responsibility of the Canadian Lieutenant Commander Len Page RCNVR, my fellow student at Floyd Bennett. Len’s father had been a professor at McGill University in Montreal, and he was a good pilot and a solid chap all round.

  With 771 Squadron I finally got my hands on fast fighters and gained some experience of ‘addles’, the mock carrier landings practised on land, before graduating to full carrier landings on escort carriers in Scapa Flow. The mix of flying was astonishing. It wasn’t unusual to find oneself flying the YR4 from farm to farm collecting cream, butter, chickens and eggs for the officers’ mess in the morning, and in the afternoon flying a Seafire on a photo-reconnaissance patrol over Norway. Whatever the Admiralty thought about the superior skills of helicopter pilots, the chaps on operational squadrons looked down on us as the lowest of the low. How the hell had I got dragged down to the status of helicopter pilot? I would fly the Seafire or the Martinet as often as I could, and I made a point of being as slick as any of them at deck landings. I loved the Seafire and was particularly good at carrier landings off a curved approach, ignoring the batman and catching the second or third wire every time. That silenced some of the helicopter critics. The Martinet was a different matter – a nasty, spiteful little bastard of an aircraft that would flick out of a steep turn without warning. It happened to me when I was practising at altitude, and it killed one of our pilots when it suddenly flick-rolled into the ground off the circuit.

  HMS Tern occupied a windswept plain on a treeless island swept by harsh Atlantic winds whatever the season. The control tower was a blockhouse stuck on top of a collection of bomb shelters, forming an uninviting centrepiece around which were clustered motley groups of Nissen huts. It was extremely busy, with an air of purpose about the place; apart from flying crew there were countless support staff, including busy engine and electrical fitters, many of them women.

  I got myself into trouble when I went out to fly one of the Seafires only to find a body dressed in overalls lying on the port wing, head down in the cockpit. I soon realised it was one of the Wren technicians dealing with a fault on the VHF set. As I drew nearer, I could see her bottom sticking proudly up in the air and I couldn’t resist ‘goosing’ her handsomely. She swung round in a second and walloped me on the side of the head. All I could say was, ‘I’m frightfully sorry, I thought you were a fella.’ She was absolutely furious and reported me to the Commanding Officer, C.S. Burke, a pilot who had distinguished himself flying a Swordfish in the attack on the Italian fleet at Taranto. Fortunately he didn’t take the incident too seriously beyond making me apologise to the young lady, whose name I discovered was Iris. What I didn’t know was that Iris was dating Len Page. Len also treated the incident light-heartedly and the three of us became good friends, and remained so for life. Years later, on a visit to Canada, my wife and I stayed with Len and Iris, and Iris declined to bend over to pick up my teacup on the grounds that I was unsafe for any woman to be around under such circumstances. Len died at the age of ninety-two, and we’re still in touch with Iris.

  One day in 1945 Len came in with his twelve-bore and announced we were going shooting. I was very much up for it – I had learned to shoot when I was ten years old on the farm at Alness, standing up to my neck in the barley popping off pigeons with a double-barrelled twenty-bore. But this was like no shooting that had ever been done before. Len propped the shotgun in an R-4. ‘Get in,’ he instructed.

  Once airborne we sought out one of the endless skeins of geese that criss-crossed the Orkney sky, slowed down to about forty knots and pulled alongside.

  ‘Okay,’ said Len. ‘Fire at will.’

  It rained geese over Orkney that day. Goose was on the menu in every mess in northern Scotland, and probably further afield. Shooting was to become a passion with me, although rarely from a helicopter. One morning when I was out on the milk run buying dairy produce for the squadron I noticed a shotgun propped in the corner of a farmhouse kitchen. It belonged to the farmer, then at sea, and his wife was happy to sell it to me for £10. With that old gun I quartered Orkney putting meat on the table.

  The R-4 was noisy – we wore regulation leather helmets, and one could talk to a co-pilot or passenger on the Gosport Tube – and it vibrated a good deal, but it handled very well. It had a quite reliable Warner Super Scarab engine, although we did have some fires and failures with it. I believe I could jump into one and fly it away right now. It was good in turbulence, responding to rising air quite gently – it was slow, and it wasn’t really attacking the air very much. The power margin was adequate, no more. Helicopters use a lot of their power just to stay in the air, so the amount left over for manoeuvring is critical. It was very easy to overpitch – that is, to demand more power than the engine was capable of providing. If you overpitched, the rotor revs would start to run down, and they could decay to the point where you couldn’t stay airborne. It wasn’t like stalling an aeroplane, where you could recover as long as you had enough height. There was no possibility of recovery if you let the helicopter’s rotor slow down beyond a certain point, and a fatal crash was
inevitable. The collective lever, which controlled the pitch of the blades, would creep up and down of its own accord. It had a friction device to stop it, but it wasn’t very effective. When my hands were busy I would keep my left knee over it to hold it in place. It wasn’t a good idea to let go of the throttle either, because the rotor would drop off by ten or twelve revs, and that could make a big difference.

  If the engine stopped for any reason you had to get the collective down pretty smartly, to put the main rotor blades in flat pitch so the airflow would drive them around as you descended. It came down quite rapidly but under perfect control, and it was easier to land engine-off than some more modern helicopter types. It had three rotor blades made of balsa wood covered in canvas, with a steel rod along the leading edge. Heavy rain or hailstones could damage the blades, and the efficiency of the rotor depended on how well polished the ground crew kept the leading edges.

  In-flight vibration depended very much on how well you could ‘track’ the blades, making sure all three were flying along the same plane. We had a tracking flag that a ground engineer would hold under the rotor when it was turning. It had a dab of paint on the end, and whichever blade was tracking lowest would get a paint smudge on it. We would stop the rotor and trim that blade a little higher. There were three colours, blue, yellow and red, and if you could track each blade within a pattern of half an inch, you’d have a fairly smooth ride. I grew to enjoy flying the R-4 very much.

  On 4 April 1945 I became the first pilot to land a helicopter on a battleship when I flew out to HMS Anson in Scapa Flow. I set her down on top of ‘A’ gun turret – the guns of ‘B’ turret which normally traversed over ‘A’ turret had been moved as far out of the way as possible, but there was less than three feet of clearance between the rotor blade tips and the cladding of ‘A’ turret. I performed the same feat several times over the next few days, partly to prove that it could be repeated, and partly to accommodate a succession of officers who wanted to share the experience.

  More than once Len and I made the long flight from Orkney to Worthy Down, a distance of some 700 miles. Worthy Down was a maintenance school where repaired aircraft were test-flown, and getting there in an R-4 was a good day’s work. We rattled, shook and plodded along at 65 mph, hour after hour, but we were young and we took it in our stride. Range was not good – perhaps 150 miles to a dry tank. We would stop at Evanton, the naval air station on my family’s old farm, and we’d refuel again at Glasgow, plod around the coast to Carlisle, then fly south stopping at some of the countless air stations that saturated the country at that stage of the war – they virtually overlapped in some places. Halfpenny Green was a regular stop, Oxford an occasional one. Despite the fact that we had no VHF radio, Len and I never lost each other in the air. Oddly enough we didn’t seem to attract any attention. Helicopters were rare in Britain’s skies at that time and most people had never seen one, but we never landed where there were civilians, and Navy pilots simply turned up their noses at us and looked the other way.

  At Worthy Down we were put up in the cabins attached to the wardroom for the use of waifs and strays, and on our first trip I thought I’d take advantage of the situation to obtain a new set of flying clothes. I walked up the steps of the Clothing Store and addressed the Chief Petty Officer WRNS in charge.

  ‘Look here, I’m Sub-Lieutenant Bristow. Here’s my clothing logbook – I was told to come down here in a hurry and there was no room for my kit in the helicopter, so I need some new gear.’

  She looked at my book. ‘Sir, it appears you have two sets of everything.’

  ‘No, I’m afraid I have only one, and it’s in Orkney.’

  I managed to fib and cajole my way to a new Sidcot jacket, flying boots, gloves with silk inserts, silk socks and a watch. As I was walking contentedly out, the Wren said: ‘Sir, I think you’re the only man I know who has three sets of flying clothing.’

  ‘We should go into business together, shouldn’t we,’ I said.

  I saw her again a few days later at a concert party in a hangar when she was in the high-kicking front row of the chorus, and I couldn’t help noticing what a lovely pair of legs she had. It was a memorable evening; somebody had made a cake, a rare treat in the days of rationing, and after the show I contrived to talk to the Wren. Her name was Jean Beavis, she came from London, and yes, she would come to the flicks one night in Winchester.

  So we went to the pictures, and we got quite close. She was a kind and gentle soul who had been spared much of the horror and hardship of war, and I think the rare domesticity and normality that she represented appealed to me; I had experienced nothing like it in five years. We spent a lot of time together, including one unforgettable night in London when a V-2 landed two streets away from our hotel. Her father was a tall, erect man who had been in the Army and worked in one of the gentlemen’s clubs in St James’s. I had to fly back to Orkney, and while I was there I received the news that Jean’s mother and father had been killed by a V-2 at their home in Woodford, Essex. I went back to Worthy Down as soon as I could, and during a drive through the beautiful Dorset countryside, I rather perfunctorily proposed marriage to Jean. My proposal accepted, I flew back to Orkney. We were married in Woodford on Bastille Day, 14 July 1945, and I almost didn’t turn up. I had begged for the loan of a Seafire to get to London for my wedding, but there was a buzz in the squadron about being posted to the Far East following the end of the war in Europe, and we were using the Seafires round the clock to work up. Instead, I was offered a lift in a Boston bomber heading for Middle Wallop, where I landed on the roughest grass runway I can remember. I made it to the church on time, as did my best man, Dolly Grey, a fellow helicopter pilot who had recently survived ditching his R-4 in Scapa Flow with the engine on fire. Jean looked stunning, her sister Vera gave her away and the wedding day was a ray of light in the family’s otherwise tragic year. We were together for twenty-seven years, but we started married life without a proper honeymoon because I had to rejoin the squadron with the intention of making war on Japan.

  The news that the squadron was to take ship for the Far East was welcome because it meant I would be able to put helicopters behind me and fly Seafires full time, like a proper pilot. We were called down to Ayr, outside Glasgow, and as usual everything was suddenly to be done in a tearing hurry. There we were addressed by a test pilot called Winkle Brown, already renowned as an aviator in military circles, soon to become more widely known as the man who had flown more types of aircraft than any other. Years later I hired him to run the British Helicopter Advisory Board and he did a very good job.

  We had Griffon-engined Mk XVII Seafires with reinforced undercarriages and longer-range tanks, and we flew them onto the fleet auxiliary Queen, which was lying in the Clyde amid great excitement and bustle. We gathered in the wardroom, and over a drink we were introduced to some of the officers aboard the Queen. There was a Commander RNVR with red stripes on his sleeves and we began quizzing him about the ship – what the Captain was like, how long it would take to get to Japan, and other questions of the moment. It was his third trip to the Far East, it turned out, and he was a medical man who specialised in tropical diseases.

  Several times he looked at me quizzically. Finally he said: ‘What’s your name, Lieutenant?’

  ‘Bristow, sir,’ I said.

  ‘When you’ve finished your drink, Lieutenant Bristow, go down to the sick bay and wait for me. Nothing to worry about – I like to do spot checks on people occasionally.’

  After he’d wandered off my friends were merciless. ‘Bristow’s got the clap,’ said one. ‘The doc’s spotted it a mile off.’

  I grumbled off to the sick bay, where I found a Chief Petty Officer having lunch. ‘I’ve just come on board,’ I explained, ‘and the doc’s told me to come here for a spot check.’

  ‘Oh, yes, he does that sometimes.’

  I waited and I waited. One o’clock came, two o’clock, and I was feeling thoroughly bolshy. The Chief Petty Offi
cer got me some lunch – one of his own sandwiches, I think – and I was about to give up when the medic finally arrived, full of soothing apologies at having been delayed. He looked me over for a minute, took my pulse and stuck something in my mouth.

  ‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘Just a minute.’

  He stepped over to a phone on the wall, punched a button and addressed some unseen authority figure. ‘I’ve got one of the new fliers here sir, and I’m afraid I’ve got to put him ashore. He’s got hepatitis, and it spreads like wildfire.’

  I was stunned. ‘No I haven’t,’ I said. ‘I’m fit as a fiddle!’

  The doctor would have none of it. The master-at-arms was called to escort me to my cabin and I was given a few minutes to gather my barely unpacked gear. Confused and angry, I was put ashore at Gourock in a pinnace and ordered to wait in the Duty Officer’s office. After an age, an ambulance rolled up – an RAF ambulance, of all things. A young female squadron leader stepped out.

  ‘Are you Lieutenant Bristow?’ she asked.

  ‘No, I’m Sub-Lieutenant Bristow,’ replied the unco-operative patient.

  ‘I’m sorry, but we’re taking you to Errol.’

  ‘Where the hell is Errol?’

  In fact, it’s now called Dundee Airport, and as we drove all the way across Scotland she explained that it was the only place that had satisfactory isolation facilities for cases of hepatitis.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve got hepatitis,’ I said.

  ‘I can’t see anything wrong with you,’ she agreed.

  It was a miserable journey. We arrived late in the evening, and my mood was lifted by the beauty and tranquility of the hospital. I was taken to a lovely suite of rooms overlooking Errol airfield and the Tay estuary, with a private bedroom and bathroom, and settled down for the night secure in the knowledge that the mistake would soon be rectified.