Andrew Wareham

by When Empires Collide (Innocents At War Series 1)

  Tommy was inclined to be dismissive; Monkey and her mother were both in love with the location and the gardens. Squire drew Tommy to one side.

  “It would not be impossible to make some sort of gift, Tommy, to our daughter in advance of her wedding, that is. In short, Tommy, was I to oversee the building work, then the purchase would be eminently practical from your point of view. The ladies seem very much taken with the property, you know.”

  “Not inexpensive, sir,” Tommy demurred.

  “True, Tommy, but I am not a poor man, you know. Your father put me onto more than one good thing in the mining world over the years, and I made quite a bit as a result. He put most of his profits into his aeroplanes – which did not come in cheap, you know – while I tucked mine away into safe shares on the Exchange. I do not wish to boast, Tommy, vulgar to talk of money, in any case, but I am one of the warmer men in our neck of the woods! Been suggested to me a couple of times that I could drop twenty or thirty thousand into the right hands in Westminster and end up a baronet in short order. I could do it, but I’m damned if I can see why I should. But a few hundred on my daughter’s house? No difficulty there, Tommy, and glad to be useful!”

  “Then I can only thank you, again, sir. How do I go about talking price, sir? I am not at all sure about that.”

  “Listen and learn, my boy. The lawyer chappie will ask far too much in the first instance and you will look at me and regretfully shake your head; can’t be done. I will agree that it is outside the realms of possibility and we shall thank him for allowing us to look over the old place and then let him make the next move. If he has the expectation of interest in the house, thinks he may sell elsewhere, then he will not drop on his price – but I know the old lady died six months ago, Tommy; the place is still unsold so I much suspect we may be the only buyers in the offing. We shall see.”

  The Squire showed himself a sharp man of business, belying his benign, agricultural appearance, and a starting price of seven hundred guineas fell to a sale at four hundred and twenty pounds, the shillings knocked off as a last concession. Tommy dug out a purse and placed forty-two sovereigns in the lawyer’s hand as a deposit and agreement was made to seek an early closure of the deal.

  Tommy drove through the village, looking for a builder’s sign, at Squire’s instruction.

  “Always endeavour to place business in local hands, my boy! It will cost you a little more, very often, but it will gain much in terms of good will. Had we bought in a larger town, we could have had a choice of builders and an architect; here, we must make do with a probably old-fashioned local chap who will have his own ideas. He will, however, do a good job, because he will not dare do us down, for being very big in a small and not very rich locality.”

  When Empires Collide

  Chapter Seven

  The first of June brought the squadron to Netheravon, on Salisbury Plain and close to Upavon; the airfield had been extended by a tented encampment, containing living quarters and workshops for the mechanics and riggers which lacked almost all of the machinery and facilities the technical men needed. It was only for a month, they were reassured.

  The camp contained the whole of the Military Wing of the RFC, reduced by two unfortunates who had crashed on the long cross-country flight from Scotland. Two Squadron had taken more than a fortnight to reach Salisbury Plain from its base at Montrose, due primarily to one of its heavy lorries, a steamer, which had a maximum speed of less than ten miles an hour. Charlie went to some lengths explaining the hardships they had faced on their journey south, landing in fields and putting up in tents only if the lorries had caught up with them. Commonly they had found rooms – shared rooms – in local pubs but on one memorable occasion had slept rolled up in blankets under a hedgerow.

  More than one hundred and fifty ground vehicles had reached the camp and there were sixty aeroplanes parked in neat lines by the tents. It all looked rather impressive, until the machines were examined and identified.

  There were BE2s and RE5s, which were very modern machines; four Sopwith Tabloids had been delivered, the single-seat version, tiny and lonely looking in one corner. There were a few Avros. The modern biplanes made up a bare half of the fleet, however; the rest were ancient – three, four or even five years old. There were Bleriot monoplanes with the original fifty horsepower engine, capable of sixty miles an hour with a following breeze; there was a group of Farman Longhorns sat next to the slightly less crazy-looking Shorthorn and even a single Valkyrie, renowned for its instability but nevertheless occasionally used as a trainer. In the middle were the eighty horsepower Bleriots, both single and two-seater, faster but still frail machines, yet due to be taken across the Channel if there was a war.

  There were more pilots than machines, but the exact number of each was debatable, due to the depredations of crashes of minor, or major, impact. The Corps itself believed there were now seventy-four pilots on the active list, but six at least of these were sporting broken limbs and a few, exemplified by Major Trenchard, were such appallingly bad fliers that their commanding officers would not let them into the air. Of the aeroplanes, not all would fly again having scraped their way into Netheravon; there was a shortage of aero engines, no British manufacturer having succeeded in making one that worked reliably. Many of the machines present used Daimler and Mercedes engines made in Germany; the others had imports from Italy, France and Spain, many of which were patent infringements of the German engines. It was felt that the supply of German-made engines would soon dry up.

  Rolls-Royce was busy and was sure that it would soon have the capacity to supply several hundreds of engines; the concept of producing at least ten thousands a year had resulted in incredulous laughter.

  For airframes – the wings and fuselages and tailplanes – the need was for light, strong materials such as aluminium and tubular steel, already demanded in huge quantities by the navy and the motor vehicle industry. Wooden frames were all very well, but there was a shortage of timber in Britain, due to the bulk of the forests having been cut down for charcoal two centuries previously.

  Colonel Sykes, in command of the Military Wing, was hopeful that all would work out well. He had already created a register of all civilian aeroplanes in Britain with the intention of conscripting every one that could be used for reconnaissance or in training; the Central Flying School was to pass all of its more robust machines to the Military Wing; amazingly, the Treasury had promised money with which to purchase machines from the French manufacturers if an Expeditionary Force was sent across the Channel. It was expected as well that all civilian pilots of a military age would flock to the Colours and provide a reserve of useful pilots who could, at minimum, be used as instructors in the new training schools that were to proliferate.

  A few cynics pointed out that Germany had at least two hundred disciplined military fliers, and that all of the civilian pilots in that country would have performed their military service and would therefore be of immediate use in their air force. It was obvious, however, that they would be handicapped by the well-known Prussian inflexibility; it was an article of faith that all German soldiers had to be shouted at unceasingly – they could only perform to orders, while the British, individualists to a man, would show themselves as buccaneers of the air.

  “Excuse me, Major Becke,” Tommy whispered, “but have you ever heard such bullshit?”

  “Frequently, Tommy, but then, I often attend meetings with our commanders. Now, shut up!”

  Some of the best military brains in Britain gave lectures, mostly to state that war was inevitable and would occur after harvest unless some accident occurred to bring it sooner. The most honest also stated that the war would probably be very short, unless it was rather long. General opinion was that if the powers of the Entente – Britain, France and Russia - could coordinate their activities, then the war should be short, because they would mobilise eleven million men to the eight millions of the Central Powers. On the other hand, Germany especially had an eff
icient railway system that could transport whole armies very quickly from one side of the country to another. Unsaid, but implied, was that Russia was so backward that it was highly unlikely that she could run her railways at all under the strain of war and that most of her several millions of men would sit far from the scene of any action, quite probably without rifles, which would be in store elsewhere.

  The pilots naturally found their way to the pubs in the local villages in the evenings, there to discuss all that they had heard during the day. They came to a unanimous conclusion.

  “It’s a cock-up! None of the politicians know what they’re doing, and the Emperors don’t care because they’re following God’s orders. There will be a war, and we shall fly high and fast and every day – and who can ask for more than that? Roll on the bugles and drums of war, gentlemen! Landlord! Whiskey!”

  Tommy found that flying was good for curing a hangover.

  They practised navigation and they chased toy balloons, inflated and released downwind, and they competed at landing in the shortest possible distance, measured by tape from a marked line. The greater the pilot’s experience, the better he was likely to be at his landings, so Tommy shone in his superiors’ eyes; he could judge his machine’s stalling speed almost to the nearest mile an hour and could trickle in and come to a halt yards before his competitors. When asked how he did it he ascribed his skill honestly to long practice.

  “You should never let a pilot join a squadron with fewer than two hundred hours of experience, sir,” he answered Colonel Sykes, which was not a popular response, the colonel knowing that fewer than ten of his pilots met that criterion.

  “You top the one thousand, do you not, Mr Stark?”

  “Just over eleven hundred now, sir.”

  “How do we achieve your two hundred hours, Mr Stark?”

  “Schoolboys, sir. Air cadet corps, sir, in every town, offering free lessons to every boy of sixteen and seventeen. You will lose a few to crashes, of course, but you would get thousands a year to choose from.”

  “Our pilots should all be officers, Mr Stark. We cannot expect any common oik off the streets to meet our standards!”

  “The Germans and French can make ordinary folk into pilots, sir. Are we not as good as them?”

  Colonel Sykes terminated the interview; Major Becke escorted Tommy back to the mess.

  “Well done, Tommy! That is not the best of enemies to make, but you did so most efficiently.”

  “The man is no more than a public-school tit, sir! Our pilots must be bloody officers! What sort of nonsense is that? You have seen how good our sergeants are, sir – can we not teach them to fly because they do not speak properly?”

  “We can and will teach them, Tommy, and we will commission them on the sly without the brasshats catching on. No choice in the way we must do it, I fear.”

  “Battlefield commissions, sir?”

  “Just that, Tommy. Do it, bypass the system and later make it clear that the squadron will be unable to fly without them – but do not expect to be loved for it. Most of our seniors will regard maintaining the class system as more important than winning the war.”

  “As you say, sir. By the way, what were buccaneers?”

  “Romanticised pirates, Tommy. Sea-going cowboys, in effect – all very jolly at a distance of two hundred years and wearing rose-tinted spectacles!”

  “My father always said that all of the cowboys he ever met were illiterate farm-hands who smelled of cow shit. But he was a mining man, of course.”

  “Dear me, Tommy, you do know how to make yourself unloved! Cowboys are officially very romantic figures – everyone knows that and you must not let silly things like facts get in the way of popular prejudices. Changing the subject – sports afternoon tomorrow; I do not see your name down for any of the teams?”

  “Nor will you, sir. Sports are for the mentally under-nourished, sir. I will be unable to turn out, sir, for most unfortunately ricking my ankle an hour before the afternoon starts, so I have not put my name down in order not to disappoint my fellow team members.”

  “Not good enough, Tommy! I have now officially rebuked you for a lack of zeal and inadequate officer-like qualities. It is a well-known fact that team games such as rugger teach a young man how to be a bullying thug who breaks the rules and loses any sense of shame; these are obviously qualities needed by an officer. I need a man to go to our workshops at Farnborough to pick up some copper fuel pipe, which has run short in the workshops. God help us when we go overseas if that is the standard of planning for action! Be so good as to drive down tomorrow morning with Mr Knight in one of the Crossleys, Tommy. You may wish to return in the Lanchester, later in the evening – that choice is yours, of course. Just keep out of sight while the remainder of us are enthusiastically being sporting.”

  Tommy had flown to Netheravon, was glad of the opportunity to pick up his car; it would give him an afternoon and evening with Monkey, and he was in favour of that as well.

  They left before breakfast, the standard of catering at the concentration camp such that they preferred to take a chance at a bacon sandwich at a wagoner’s stop.

  “Watch out for any place with a steam Foden stopped in front, sir. The elite of the roads, the Foden lorry, and they will pick the best places to eat, their drivers being able to afford a little bit extra.”

  “Worth knowing, Mr Knight. They were saying that the Army will probably commandeer heavy lorries from civilian firms as soon as the war starts. Will they take the drivers as well?”

  “Only if they volunteer, sir. No conscription without an Act of Parliament, sir, but the impressment of civilian goods is allowable in time of national emergency. Most of the drivers will sign on, sir. Their firms will want them to look after the lorries and will probably keep their jobs open for them. No real precedent for this war, sir. No European War since Waterloo, not as far as England is concerned, so we don’t know what can be done.”

  “Do you need me at the airfield, Mr Knight?”

  “No, sir. I will pick up everything we require from stores, sir. Probably easier in some ways if you are not present, sir.”

  Tommy had been in long enough to know that meant that the Quartermaster and Mr Knight would have some deals worked out between them which they would much prefer an officer to know nothing of.

  “Very good, Mr Knight. Can you take a detour to drop me off at the Big House in Long Benchley? My car is there, as is my young lady.”

  Monkey ran to the door, as the butler opened to Tommy.

  “I thought you were at Netheravon, Tommy!”

  “I am! However, a tender had to come into the airfield today and it was as well to have an officer accompany it. So here I am. Is your father to hand?”

  Monkey led him to the estate office.

  “Good morning, sir. I find I need to pick up a little of my baggage – the box we left in the safe here and the gun bag, sir.”

  The Colt Automatics, the Webley and the heavy rifle and the boxes of ammunition were packed into the gun bag which was put onto the back seat of the Lanchester.

  “You need them now, Tommy?”

  “Before the end of August, sir. We will be at war as soon as the harvest is home, sir, unless some mishap brings conflict sooner. So we have been told – in confidence, of course.”

  Inside information – the breath of life to the man of financial affairs.

  “Then I shall take a risk, Tommy, a speculation. When war becomes a reality we may expect a fall in Consols and a rise in the value of munitions makers.”

  “Consols, sir?”

  “Government stocks, Tommy. Bonds they are often called.”

  “Yes, sir. I believe Mr Knatchbull said that he was to invest the trust fund left me by father in bonds.”

  “Then I shall speak to him tomorrow, Tommy. What I intend to do is to sell all of my holdings in Consols, and in some other fixed-interest securities of a similar nature, and use the proceeds to buy shares in Vickers and some
of the other arms manufacturers. Consols are quite high at the moment, rates of interest being low; war will drive interest rates up and the price of Consols down. It is obvious, I think, that the shares in the gun makers must go up.”

  “Is that profiteering, sir?”

  Squire laughed and said that he much hoped so. He did not tell Tommy that he intended as well to purchase wheat in advance of the harvest – food prices also rose in wartime and a thousand or two of tons of grain would come in handy. He knew an importer in Southampton and might well make an arrangement with him to bring in shiploads of canned beef from South America while he was at it. If there was to be a war, then he was not going to make a loss from it; nor would Tommy, for Squire would arrange for Mr Knatchbull to hang on his coattails and invest his own money, and Tommy’s, wisely.

  “Your house purchase is completed, Tommy, and I have paid across the money you left with me, and dealt with the lawyer’s fees. We need to sit down with the floor plan the vendor’s solicitor provided and pencil in what must be changed and then I shall drive – well, be driven, by my chauffeur – to Wilton to talk with the builder.”

  Squire preened as they reacted to the news that he had purchased a motor for the family.

  “A Panhard, Tommy, being a large vehicle and in stock at the dealer’s. I had wanted a Rolls-Royce, but there is a waiting list of nearly twelve months for deliveries – far too long! The Panhard is to be driven down from London on Friday. I am to buy George a small Austin as well – a low-powered and slow vehicle for his first venture onto the highways!”

  Tommy thought that might be very wise.

  He sat with Monkey over the plans of the house, debating the best means of modernising it.

  An hour and they had agreed to sacrifice a bedroom, splitting it into two bathrooms upstairs; the generator would be housed in its own newly built brick shed – for they must have electricity - and the carriage house could easily be turned into a double garage. The problems arose with the location of the water closets, and the plumbing and drains to them, and the siting of a cesspit at a discreet distance, downhill yet not close to the river, for obvious reasons.