Wings

by Patrick Bishop

  Credit for the survival of the Royal Air Force in these treacherous years is usually awarded to Boom Trenchard. In RAF circles, wrote Dean, ‘the story is often told in pantomime terms with the Royal Air Force as the beleaguered maiden, the army and navy as the dragon and its mate, and Trenchard as St George.’ Again, though oversimplified, this tale is true in its essentials.2

  In January 1919 Trenchard, fresh from putting down a mutiny of disaffected soldiers, was asked by Churchill to take over again as Chief of the Air Staff, the job he had held briefly before falling out with Rothermere. Before he did so Trenchard was asked to produce a paper on how the air force should be reorganized in the light of the mood of austerity. He came up with a plan that made the most of the limited resources available and Churchill confirmed his appointment.

  Despite his previously expressed convictions that air forces should serve the objectives of parent services, Trenchard now became the most ardent defender of an autonomous RAF. Some saw this as evidence of his malleability, bordering on hypocrisy. Those who knew him well, like John Slessor who served under him on the Western Front and ended up Marshal of the Royal Air Force, discerned something else. ‘Whatever Trenchard’s faults may have been,’ he wrote, ‘I class him with Churchill and Smuts as one of the three greatest men I have been privileged to know.’

  Slessor defined Trenchard’s qualities as ‘self-confidence without a trace of arrogance; a contemptuous yet not intolerant disregard for anything mean or petty; the capacity to shuffle aside the non-essentials and put an unerring finger on the real core of a problem or the true quality of a man, a sort of instinct for the really important point; a selfless devotion to the cause of what he believed to be true and right. Trenchard [had] all those qualities, and above all a shining sincerity.’3

  Trenchard was philosophical about the difficult task he had set himself. In a memorandum setting out the post-war organization of the RAF he compared the force to ‘the prophet Jonah’s gourd. The necessities of war created it in a night, but the economies of peace have to a large extent caused it to wither in a day, and now we are faced with the necessity of replacing it with a plant of deeper root.’4 Always mindful of the scarcity of resources, he set about providing the vital essentials of a skeleton force, while giving way on every possible detail where he felt expense could be spared. What was needed were institutions that would provide the foundations of the new force and establish it as an independent reality, and to arrange the limited manpower at his disposal in the most efficient and flexible way.

  In the paper he had written for Churchill, Trenchard had set out two choices. One was ‘to use the air simply as a means of conveyance, captained by chauffeurs, weighted by the navy and army personnel, drop bombs at places specified by them . . . or observe for their artillery.’ The other was ‘to really make an air service which will encourage and develop airmanship, or better still the air spirit, like the naval spirit, and to make it a force that will profoundly alter the strategy of the future.’5 Throughout the war the vehement partisan of the first approach, Trenchard was now the equally forceful champion of the second. Lloyd George accepted Trenchard’s case and the document was expanded into a White Paper. Its adoption guaranteed the survival of the RAF, although its service rivals made periodic raids to try and reclaim lost territory.

  The fact was that the argument for an autonomous air force was by no means unanswerable. Britain’s allies in the Great War did not rush to establish third services and the United States and France continued to tie aircraft to the requirements of their armies and navies. In the years before the next war broke out, the RAF’s struggle to establish its identity took precedence over the needs of the other services. As it was, the fact that most of the work done between 1914 and 1918 was in conjunction with the army meant that, after the RAF’s conception, it was military genes that predominated. The result was that naval aviation was badly neglected. This error was only corrected when the Fleet Air Arm (FAA) was belatedly handed to the Admiralty in May 1939, leaving it pitifully unprepared for the new realities of war at sea.

  In the early 1920s, when the thought of another major war was too unbearable to contemplate, the natural reaction was to flinch from consideration of long-term strategic possibilities. Trenchard busied himself with stretching the limited bricks and mortar in his barrow to build something that would last.

  He was concerned initially with humans rather than machines, concentrating on training officers and men to provide a wealth of expertise, that could be drawn on to instruct others and to be brought into play when a crisis arose. Flying was a young man’s game – a fact which posed an immediate problem. It meant that at any time there would be a large number of junior officers and comparatively few senior ranks. Trenchard invented a new system. Only half the officers at any time would hold permanent commissions. Of the rest, 40 per cent would be short service officers, serving for four or six years with another four in the reserve. The other 10 per cent would be seconded from the army and navy. The permanent officers would come from an RAF cadet college, the air-force equivalent of Dartmouth or Sandhurst, and also from universities and the ranks. Once commissioned, they would be posted to a squadron. After five years they were required to adopt a specialist area like engineering, navigation or wireless.

  Flying was also highly technical. The new air force would need a steady supply of skilled riggers and fitters. Like the pilots, the mechanics who had kept the aeroplanes in the air had returned to civilian life. Trenchard’s solution was to bring in ‘boys and train them ourselves’. They would start off with a three-year apprenticeship, before entering the ranks. To carry out the research and development necessary to keep abreast of rapidly changing technologies there would be specialist centres for aeronautics, armaments, wireless and photography.

  The army and navy had offered the use of their facilities to train up volunteers. Trenchard spurned them. The RAF would have its own colleges in which to inculcate the ‘air spirit’: Cranwell in Lincolnshire for the officer cadets; Halton in Buckinghamshire for the apprentices. Cranwell had been an RNAS station during the war and it was plonked on flat, wind-scoured lands in the middle of nowhere. This, in Trenchard’s eyes, was one of its main attractions. He told his biographer that he hoped that ‘marooned in the wilderness, cut off from pastimes they could not organize for themselves, they would find life cheaper, healthier and more wholesome’. This, he hoped, would give them ‘less cause to envy their contemporaries at Sandhurst or Dartmouth and acquire any kind of inferiority complex’.6

  Halton, on the other hand, was chosen for its proximity to London. ‘Trenchard brats’ – as the apprentices became known – were thought to be more prone to homesickness and boredom. Halton Hall and the surrounding estate, bought from Lionel de Rothschild for £112,000, was within easy reach of dance halls and cinemas and the railway stations of the metropolis for parental visits.

  In February 1920 RAF Cranwell was transformed into the Royal Air Force College. It was a grand name for a dismal, utilitarian cantonment. One of the first intake of fifty-two cadets described a ‘scene of grey corrugated iron and large open spaces whose immensity seemed limitless in the sea of damp fog which surrounded the camp’.7 They lived in single-storey huts, scattered on either side of the Sleaford Road, connected by covered walkways to keep out the rain and snow borne in on the east wind. It was not until 1929 that a proper edifice was in place. The design was inspired by Sir Christopher Wren’s Royal Hospital in Chelsea, and the brick and stone and classical proportions helped create an instant sense of tradition.

  The likes of Hawker, Ball, Mannock and McCudden had provided a cohort of paladins around whom a glorious narrative could be constructed. Churchill set the tone in the first issue of the college magazine.

  ‘Nothing that has ever happened in the world before has offered to man such an opportunity for individual personal prowess as the air fighting of the Great War,’ he wrote. ‘Fiction has never portrayed such extraordinary comba
ts, such hairbreadth escapes, such an absolute superiority to risk, such dazzling personal triumphs. It is to rival, and no doubt to excel these feats of your forerunners in the Service that you are training and I . . . look forward with confidence to the day when you will make the name of the Royal Air Force feared and respected throughout the world.’8

  The likes of Mannock and McCudden, though, would have been out of place socially at Cranwell. The overwhelming ethos and atmosphere was muscular and public school, and fun was boisterous and painful. First-termers were forced to sing a song for the other cadets and failure to perform well earned a punishment called ‘creeping to Jesus’. The victim was stripped almost naked, blindfolded and forced to sniff his way along a pepper trail that ended at an open window, where he was tipped outside and drenched in cold water.9

  Trenchard set the tone in a typically interfering letter to the first Commandant, Air Commodore Charles Longcroft. ‘Who have you got up there who can train the boys in Rugby Football?’ he wanted to know. ‘After all, this is the best game for making an officer and a gentleman out of any material. If we want to do well in the Air Force, I believe that rugby is the best game to help us.’10

  Longcroft himself was ex-Charterhouse, an early aviator who had transferred from the Welch Regiment and commanded No 4 Squadron on the Western Front. He rode to hounds and followed beagles. Cranwell had its own pack and its first master was Charles Portal, another RFC veteran, who commanded the flying training wing and would be Chief of the Air Staff for most of the Second World War.

  But as Trenchard’s missive suggests, Cranwell existed not just to acquire gentlemen but to manufacture them. From the outset it had been understood that a modern force could not rely exclusively on the traditional recruiting grounds of the military class. In 1919 a committee was set up under Lord Hugh Cecil – a Tory MP from the Salisbury dynasty who had served as a ground officer with the RFC – to try and define the educational and human qualities needed for the officer corps. It was accepted that, in theory at least, it should be open to all talents. Cecil decided that all officers must be able to fly, though this qualification was not so rigid as to exclude good technicians who were poor aviators. The RAF wanted boys who exhibited ‘the quality of a gentleman’. It was careful, though, to emphasize that by this it meant ‘not a particular degree of wealth or a particular social position but a certain character’.11

  Ordinary boys from ordinary families were nonetheless unlikely to find the gates of Cranwell flung open to them. Air Ministry officials set out to recruit people like themselves, writing to the headmasters of their old schools, selling the college’s virtues, playing down the perils of air-force life and seeking candidates. Eton had a dedicated liaison officer.

  Unlike the public schools, few state schools had the resources to provide coaching for the entrance exam. Fees were steep. Parents were expected to pay up to £75 a year, plus £35 before entry and £30 at the start of the second year towards uniform and books. This was at a time when a bank manager earned £500 a year.

  So, despite the pious utterances of the Cecil committee, the young men who passed through Cranwell in the interwar years were drawn largely from the middle and upper middle classes. The stuffier army and navy may have regarded them as arriviste, but to the less sophisticated air-force officers seemed rather polished and aloof. Their style was caught by the beady eye of Richmal Crompton, creator of the Just William series of boys’ books and a reliable social observer. In one story William’s sister Ethel is taken to a dance by a stuck-up airman from the local base, somewhere in the Home Counties.

  ‘It’s a rotten floor, of course,’ drawled Wing Commander Glover, adjusting his monocle.

  ‘Absolutely rotten,’ agreed Ethel languidly, as she leant back in her chair and sipped her tea elegantly.

  ‘But interesting to watch the natives.’

  ‘Frightfully interesting,’ said Ethel, trying to look as little like a native as possible.

  ‘Some pretty frightful dancing, isn’t there?’

  ‘Frightful,’ said Ethel with an air of aloof disgust.

  ‘An awful crowd, too.’

  ‘Awful,’ agreed Ethel with a world-weary smile.

  ‘Well,’ said the Wing Commander, ‘shall we tread another measure or are you tired?’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Ethel, trying to strike the happy mean between readiness to tread another measure and lofty amusement of the whole affair.12

  The Wingco’s snooty demeanour does not sit easily with the notion of the flier as being intimately connected with the society he was defending, which would be promoted during the Battle of Britain.

  There was a backdoor route to Cranwell. It led from Halton, where every year the three best apprentices were offered a cadetship to the college with the expectation, frequently fulfilled, that this would lead them to the highest reaches of the service. The first appeal for apprentices had received an overwhelming response. Five thousand boys applied for the first intake of 300 places. They were mostly drawn from the lower-middle and upper-working classes, who saw the RAF as a way into the intoxicating world of aviation. The entrance exam tested them on mathematics, science and English. The candidates were expected to be at school certificate standard, a tough exam taken at sixteen, which was the threshold to higher education (it was a requirement for Cranwell), so most of the boys had parents who were prepared to keep them on after the normal school leaving age of fourteen. The sacrifices this must have entailed in some cases are evident in a 1924 magazine photograph of proto-apprentices as they set off from a London railway station to their new life. They are all cheering. Many wear shabby suits and flat caps. The caption noted that ‘the variety of class of boys was very striking, many of them having quite an imposing kit, whilst not the least pleased with the whole proceedings were those whose belongings were kept within bounds in brown paper parcels’.13

  The apprentices were divided into trades. They were to become fitters, working on engines, and riggers, responsible for the airframes. The third, smaller, category of wireless technicians was trained at a sub-unit of Cranwell. Many – maybe most – of these eager lads harboured an ambition to fly aeroplanes, rather than merely to service them. In 1921 a new class of airman pilot was announced that offered flying training to outstanding candidates from the ranks. They served for five years before returning to their own trades, but retained the sergeant’s stripes they gained for being in the air. This policy meant that by the time the next war started about a quarter of the pilots in RAF squadrons were NCOs – a tough, skilful, hard-to-impress elite within an elite. Trenchard was as proud of Halton as he was of Cranwell. He understood that he was engineering a new class of educated other ranks – something that had never happened in British military history.

  Cranwell and Halton did not produce enough men to staff the new service – skeletal though it was. To create the manpower needed Trenchard brought in a system of short-service commissions. In 1924 the Air Ministry advertised for 400 officers for flying duties. They had to be British born and of pure European descent.14 Once in, their contracts ran for six years with a further four on the reserve. The system was a godsend for many ex-wartime pilots who had caught the flying bug but were unable to find work in the restricted world of commercial aviation.

  In his search for a cheap supply of trained fliers available in case of emergency Trenchard had come up with the idea of an aerial equivalent to the territorial units that supplemented the army. In 1925 the Auxiliary Air Force (AAF) was formed. The first four squadrons were No. 600 (City of London), No. 601 (County of London), No. 602 (City of Glasgow) and No. 603 (City of Edinburgh). The pilots were amateurs who flew in their spare time. The machines and the mechanics who maintained them were supplied by the RAF. As with the territorial yeomanry regiments, the idea was that these forces would have a strong local character. Trenchard also wanted them to have social cachet. They would succeed, he said, ‘if it was looked upon as as much of an honour to belong to one as it is to b
elong to a good club or a good university.’15

  The AAF provided an institutional framework in which the attraction that ‘sportsmen’ had felt towards aeroplanes since the pioneering years could be formalized. Some of the units gloried in their snobbery. No. 601, the ‘Millionaires’ Squadron’, was formed by Lord Edward Grosvenor who, after Eton and a stint in the Foreign Legion, had served as an RNAS pilot in the war. He recruited from his own circle. According to the squadron historian, he ‘chose his officers from among gentlemen of sufficient presence not to be overawed by him, and sufficient means not to be excluded from his favourite pastimes – eating, drinking and White’s [the exclusive St James’s Club]’.16

  The squadron had its headquarters at a townhouse at 54 Kensington Park Road in Notting Hill. Their gatherings echoed to the sound of broken glass. One after-dinner game involved trying to circumnavigate the room without touching the floor, another ended with unsuspecting visitors having tankards of beer poured down their trousers. It was all good, high-spirited fun, but the auxiliary squadrons took their flying seriously and the japes were mixed with a conscientious approach to training that would serve the RAF well later. Initially they were equipped with bombers, but from 1934 gradually switched to fighters. During the Battle of Britain the AAF provided nearly a quarter of Fighter Command’s strength.