by Tony Benn
A Warden’s Report Form from October that year, in my writing, describes: ‘House collapsed and FIRE spreading, THREE German aircraft seen, SIX of ours in pursuit. RAF Motorboats in attendance. Warden SMITH slightly wounded’, which must have been a practice report, as there were no raids as far as I remember.
I later received from the Assistant Medical Officer of Argyll County Council a letter thanking me for ‘attending so enthusiastically at the First Aid Post’. I wore an armband and I still have my St John Ambulance first-aid manual from that time, full of terribly dangerous advice, including that if someone has a shock, give them a hot drink! I was clearly a precocious fifteen-year-old participant of the civilian preparations for war.
We were in effect refugees and it was very boring, much of the time. One day I clambered out of the window and climbed on to the huge, six-foot-tall letters that spelt out ‘Columba Hotel’; I was seen moving from letter to letter and was hauled in. Another day I tried to make gunpowder by getting saltpetre from the chemist, but having completed the mixture, a match failed to ignite it, so I put it on a fire to see if it would burn. It put the fire out.
My brother David, then aged eleven, got so depressed and angry at being sent to safety out of London that he told me he wanted to commit suicide. So I dug out some strong throat lozenges, which burned when you sucked them, and gave him two of them to eat. He then told me that he had changed his mind, and could I help? So I said I had an antidote and gave him four more of the same lozenges. He survived. But I got into a lot of trouble when this was reported. My brother says that when I was bored I could create discord and annoy people and would ‘argue the hind leg off a donkey’ about anything.
Returning south, I found that the school had been evacuated again, to Buckenhill near Bromyard in Herefordshire, where we took over a series of old buildings, including a Victorian castle called Saltmarsh where all sports were replaced by gardening. We had military exercises and were kitted out in battle-dress, tin hats and gas masks. It was at the age of about sixteen that I first learned how to fire a rifle, do bayonet drill, toss grenades and take part in live-ammunition exercises. They were much more risky than was ever admitted.
The old grenades that we used had a pin in them and, when you removed the pin, the grenade was safe while you held it because it had a little handle that you gripped. When the handle was released, the grenade went off after five seconds. We were told that under certain circumstances, if you threw a grenade at an enemy soldier, he might catch it and throw it back within five seconds and blow you up instead. The way of dealing with that was to allow the handle to be released, count three and then throw the grenade, so that it exploded just as it dropped into enemy lines. There was one boy who accidentally dropped the grenade just before he threw it, but happily he got behind the sandbag, thus saving himself from death. Where live ammunition is used, the timing has to be very precise and our cadets, working by the clock, had to move out of the positions they occupied before the real bullets were fired at them.
On one occasion the local butcher, who was in the Home Guard and was responsible for a Lewis machine gun, arrived late with his crew and opened fire before the legs of the Lewis gun had been anchored into the ground, so that when he started firing, the bullets went all over the place and we had to run to escape them.
Another time, a ‘sticky bomb’, which was an anti-tank grenade covered with glue, which you had to take up and attach to the side of an enemy tank, failed to go off. One of the teachers, Mr Murray Rust, had to be sent in to explode this sticky bomb, which as far as I remember he did by firing at it with a pistol.
We were also present at one of the earliest demonstrations of the Blacker Bombard – a thick piece of piping mounted on a stand, at the bottom of which there was a sharp pin. Elementary mortars were dropped into the tube and, as they fell, they struck the pin, which exploded them and fired them off in the general direction of the enemy. There was no serious aiming mechanism and the main thing was to get your head out of the way after you had dropped the bombard into the firing tube. We also used Sten guns, which were all-metal sub-machine guns that got very hot when you fired them. What you had to do was dip them in a bucket of cold water until they cooled off and could be used again.
In Oxted, while still living at Blunt House in school holidays, I had joined the Home Guard and we had a guard room in the village where we gathered every night, preparing for our patrols in case German parachutists arrived. By then some of our rifles had been taken away as they were needed in the Soviet Union, and we were equipped with bayonets stuck in a piece of metal tubing, known as pikes.
At nights I would patrol with my pike and was warned that German parachutists might arrive disguised as nuns – in retrospect, I am glad I never saw a nun, because at sixteen, with a pike and clear instructions to kill on sight, I fear I could have done a lot of damage. In the guard room we did our drill with rifles and were taught how to load them, press our fingers down to keep the top bullet out of the barrel, pushing the bolt over to hold it down, and then press the trigger, leaving the rifle ready to use by pulling the bolt back and pushing it forward. One of the old boys, who had been a general (possibly in the Boer War) and had rejoined the Home Guard, had just been appointed a corporal and was very proud of his stripes. When loading his rifle he followed the instructions, but accidentally pulled the bolt back twice, so the gun was loaded; he fired a bullet through the wall, which passed through the lavatory of the house next door, which a woman was using at the time.
Indignantly she banged at the guard-room door and shouted, ‘You are not to be trusted with guns.’ Quivering, we kept the door locked until the inspecting officer for the area called later that night. When we reported the incident to him, he said it was the third he had heard about that evening.
It seemed fun at the time. But a complete generation of young men was being taught how to kill, and believed that it was necessary to do so, to keep the enemy out of Britain. In retrospect, I think that was quite an influence in shaping people’s attitudes to violence and death. It certainly contributed to my own continuing detestation of war.
My father and my brother Michael had both joined the RAF in 1940; I enlisted two years later when I was seventeen, but was not called up until the summer of 1943. By then I had been at Oxford for a year studying – in a desultory way – for a philosophy, politics and economics degree, but expecting at any moment to go off to war.
8
From Oxford to the RAF
WHEN I LEFT Westminster School to go to New College, Oxford, it was a leap to freedom, with the opportunity to plan my own time away from the disciplines of school. It was of course short-lived, but I enjoyed it enormously. I cannot recall the reason why I went to that college, or how much my parents paid in fees. The academic side of university never interfered with my political and social life.
It was at New College that I met David Butler, who became a close friend, and we went together to tutorials with Philip Andrews, who taught us economics and smoked a pipe (as did his wife). He probably influenced me to take up a pipe myself, and it has been a great source of comfort to me ever since.
In 1943 the university was totally different to the pre-war Oxford and to the Oxford of today, because we were all waiting to go into the services. I myself spent a lot of time with the Air Squadron, where we did some basic training prior to joining up.
But even in the normal life of the university at the Oxford Union, in which I was very active, the war dominated the debates because we were all thinking about what sort of a world we wanted when it was over, and discussing issues that were to arise in the election of 1945.
Indeed, I made my ‘maiden speech’ in the Oxford Union on the Beveridge Report. The Oxford Magazine account of the debate stated that I ‘showed the wider implications of the motion, which made even the Beveridge Report itself seem irrelevant’. Later, another motion proposed that ‘planning social security would involve the loss of liberty’. It was d
efeated by 128 to 89 votes. Frank Pakenham (Lord Longford) and Geoffrey Rippon also participated in the debate.
On 4 March 1943, Richard Acland spoke on the motion ‘that in the opinion of this house reconstruction in Europe and in Britain is impossible unless all the major productive resources entirely cease to be owned by private individuals’. It was carried by the casting vote of the President.
In my speech I said that it involved the fundamental issue of capitalism versus socialism. Tony Crosland, who was back on leave from the army, ‘ably endeavoured to refute the argument that work is less well done by the state’s employ than the capitalist’s, though admitting he found himself in uneasy partnership with Dick Acland’.
Later in May there was a debate on the motion ‘that the state should design and build the Englishman’s castle’ – an argument for a huge public housing programme, which I moved with some passion. The Oxford Magazine commented that ‘The mover was confident and handled his arguments well but he must avoid treating the house as a class or a Salvation Army meeting’! My motion was defeated by 58 to 46 votes.
I also threw myself with great enthusiasm into the Oxford University Labour Party Association and was elected to the executive committee at a time when A. D. Lindsay of Balliol was the President and Patrick Gordon Walker was Senior Treasurer. At our meetings we discussed local government, the Labour Party, the trade-union movement, education and the role of women in politics.
Most of my friends would gather in the evening to discuss the post-war world. We were frequently interrupted by practice air-raid exercises, and on one occasion one of the dons came to my room and announced that a bomb had landed nearby; he had to tie a label round my leg, stating ‘Severe burns’. A bucket full of paper had been lit to make the exercise realistic, but had gone out before the fire brigade arrived to extinguish it. I told him that I had a lot of work to do, so he agreed to change the label to say ‘Slight burns’, to avoid my being carried off to casualty!
All that came to an end in the summer of 1943 when I joined the RAF as an Aircraftsman Second Class (AC2), and was kitted up, put in a block of flats in St John’s Wood and found myself at the London Zoo, where our meals were served. We were eventually posted to the Initial Training Wing at Stratford-upon-Avon, where we were put up in a series of requisitioned hotels as air cadets.
It was all very easy-going and I remember on one occasion there was terrible trouble because some of the cadets, having had a drop too much to drink, went out with paintbrushes and, wherever the word ‘Shakespeare’ appeared, painted ‘Bacon’ – who was believed by some scholars (including the late Enoch Powell) to have been the true author. The anger of the residents of Stratford-upon-Avon when they saw their beautiful theatre daubed ‘Bacon Memorial Theatre’ knew no bounds, and the offenders were severely disciplined by officers who, even if they were quietly laughing, had to hide their amusement in order to retain their reputation with the locals.
From there I was stationed at RAF Elmdon, which was the municipal airport of Birmingham. This was where I began my flying training on Tiger Moths, whose design came straight out of the Biggles period of the First World War. It was a wooden biplane with two open cockpits and we sat on our parachutes. We wore goggles and a leather jacket and helmet and communicated between the two cockpits by means of a rubber speaking-tube, through which you were just audible above the noise of the engine.
Living in Nissen huts, we would get up about five o’clock, have breakfast (which consisted of a bun and a cup of steaming cocoa, so thick that you could stand a spoon up in it) and go into the hangar, where a couple of us would drag a Tiger Moth out onto the tarmac. As we clambered into our cockpits and did our basic drill, someone would put wooden chocks under the wheels, catch hold of the propeller with one hand, and we would shout ‘Contact’ as we switched on the engine; the man would then swing the propeller until it started like a powered lawnmower. We would shout ‘Chocks away’, open the throttle and taxi out for take-off, to do our ‘circuits and bumps’ – which was the way we described the initial training, made up of a succession of take-offs, circuits of the airfield and bumpy landings. None of us flew solo at Elmdon, but we were tested for our suitability and then posted to Heaton Park in Manchester, waiting to go abroad for our proper training.
I could hardly believe my luck that I was being paid two shillings a day to have such a happy time. Among our amusements was flying low over a nearby nudist camp, where we saw the naturists running for cover as we zoomed over them, waving at anyone who seemed to be friendly. A few years ago I had a letter from a man who remembered living as a boy near Elmdon and how thrilled he was to see these planes flying over.
It was very dangerous learning to fly in Britain, where we would have been a sitting target for enemy fighters. They would have shot us down in our hundreds, so we did our real training abroad.
I got to Heaton Park in Manchester in the autumn of 1943. It had been a huge public open space and a lake, but now it was covered with Nissen huts where we nearly froze to death; we had one little coke-fired boiler in the middle, which we were not allowed to light until evening and which had gone out by morning. We walked to do our ablutions in another ice-cold building and ate our meals in a large hall. There was nothing whatsoever for us to do, as we were waiting for a troop ship to take us to do our training in South Africa, Canada or America.
We were mainly sent on long and exhausting route marches to keep us busy. At one stage my job was to be posted to the edge of Heaton Park, to stop RAF men from jumping over the wall and going into Manchester for a night off. It was quite a cushy job because there was such confusion that it was easy to jump over the wall myself and have an evening out in Manchester with my mates. One very foggy night I had just done this when, out of the fog, I could see a route march approaching, headed by a very big sergeant. I only just managed to slip into the fog myself before I was spotted.
In January 1944 we were issued with tropical gear and sent on a train to Glasgow, to be embarked on the Cameronia, which set sail on 11 January and went through the Straits of Gibraltar and the Mediterranean to Egypt, then via the Suez Canal down to Durban. Going through the Suez Canal into the Red Sea, we saw the Italian fleet, which had surrendered, moored in the Bitter Lakes.
The conditions on the ship were not too grand, since we were sitting along tables facing each other for long stretches; at night we slung hammocks above them or found somewhere to sleep on deck on the long voyage to Durban. The U-boats were active as we came down past Spain and we heard depth-charges being dropped, which were like hammer blows on the sides of the ship. As we were below the water line, it was slightly nerve-racking, but we got across the Mediterranean safely and through the Suez Canal.
Once, the troopship got stuck in the mud on the Canal and the captain had the brilliant idea of using the Tannoy to tell us all to go to the other side of the ship; he shouted, ‘One, two, three, jump!’, which we did, and the ship freed itself and we carried on.
Life on board was incredibly boring, but we made up for it by talking all the time, and on one occasion we decided to have a meeting about war aims. I was deputed to go and ask the Officer Commanding Troops, so I went to his cabin, saluted sharply and sought his approval.
‘There would be no politics in it, would there?’ asked the colonel, so I saluted again and said, ‘No, sir.’ And we then had the most lively debate about the post-war world and how it should be organised. Of course the body of men came from a much wider social background than I was used to, so my real political education began in the RAF and developed more fully when, after the war, my formal education ended.
We took on board some Italian prisoners en route to a prisoner-of-war camp and these wretched men were confined in the depths of the ship. One of them died on board and we had a funeral at sea, with proper military honours: his body was thrown overboard in a canvas sack with a weight attached to it, though we all knew that it would probably be eaten by sharks long before it got to t
he bottom of the sea. I found that a very painful experience as I thought of his family. I assumed that he, like many Italians, had suffered under Mussolini and had been conscripted into the forces.
We landed at Durban and it was like going back to the pre-war world; I remember seeing a banana for the first time since 1939. We were put in a transit camp waiting for a long train journey north to Rhodesia, where I was to complete my training. I had twenty-four hours free to visit my aunt, who lived in Pietermaritzburg. Then it was back to the camp and on to the train, north to Bulawayo in Southern Rhodesia.
It was a fabulous journey, and the end of each carriage had an open platform on which you could sit and watch the sun go down; as we climbed the mountains, the train went so slowly that you could jump off and walk, then jump on again before it gathered speed. After three days we got to Bulawayo and were sent to Hillside Camp, another transit camp, where we were to stay until we went on to our flying school.
Wearing shorts and a bush jacket with a topi, we looked like early colonial settlers; indeed, that was the atmosphere in Rhodesia at that time. We went into Bulawayo for the evening, and I have recounted elsewhere my failed attempt to strike up a friendship with Gloria, who worked in a hairdresser’s shop and spent the evening serving meals to us in the Services Club. I blushed so scarlet when I spoke to her that she asked me if I would like a cold drink; deeply embarrassed, I fled.
We also met Ginyilitshe, an old Matabele warrior who had fought with Lobengula against Cecil Rhodes, and who came and described the battle. I was kindly welcomed into the home of the Aulds, whose daughter Mary Fletcher was a nurse. She took me to the local hospital for Africans, where the conditions were appalling. I have kept in touch with Mary, who came to see me recently. I also phoned Gloria, just before she died two years ago.
