Boy Entrant; The Recollections of a Royal Air Force Brat

by Brian Carlin

  The food in the Halton Apprentice Mess turned out to be remarkably similar to the fare we were accustomed to back in our own St. Athan mess, but we were hungry and wolfed it down. Then, when everyone had finished, we climbed back aboard the coach and set off once again, this time south-eastwards towards London. At first, the going was swift as we travelled through open countryside, small towns and villages, but gradually the landscape became increasingly built-up, with much more traffic in evidence, as we neared the big city. Eventually, our rate of forward movement slowed to a snail’s pace as the coach stopped and started through a series of multiple traffic lights.

  By mid-afternoon we were feeling restless and hungry, so Pilot Officer Read asked the coach driver to stop at the next café that he saw, to give us a break and get something to eat. Shortly afterwards we pulled up outside a modest eating establishment, into which we gratefully flocked after scrambling eagerly out of the coach. It must have seemed quite a sight as we all trooped inside, dressed in our heavily-decorated uniforms. Pilot Officer Read insisted that we needed to be properly dressed, with tunics buttoned up and SD hats worn properly, so that our appearance would not be unbecoming to the good name and order of the RAF. The two sweet middle-aged ladies who ran the café were clearly puzzled by this sudden invasion and even more puzzled as to our origin. One of them eavesdropped on a conversation that I was having with one of the other band members, thinking that I didn’t notice. She then approached the second lady, saying in a quiet but clearly audible voice, “I don’t know who they are Doris, but they speak with a beautiful brogue. They must be from Scotland.”

  We both laughed at this and later told the others that we’d been mistaken for the Scottish Air Force.

  The ladies may not have known who we were, but they knew how to take care of our grumbling stomachs. Large platters of sausage, egg and chips washed down with mugs of decent tea soon took the edge off our hunger and thirst. Then we were on our way again, reaching Earls Court around 1700 hours—ten hours after we’d set off that morning from St. Athan. I had been looking forward to seeing the famous sights of London, but was disappointed at seeing nothing more than the type of ordinary buildings and streets that are common to any city. There was no Big Ben to marvel at, no Buckingham Palace or Tower of London and although we were so close to the centre of London that it seemed almost impossible to miss these famous landmarks, we didn’t see a single one of them.

  Earls Court was a much larger place than I had imagined it to be. There were people in military uniforms of every description all around us and military equipment from tanks to aeroplanes to horses. The coach dropped us off near the exhibition area and we were then given leave to explore the various service exhibitions for about an hour, before reporting to the arena assembly area—the equivalent of backstage. Then, at around 1830 hours, we all converged on the specified meeting point to prepare for our entrance and grand performance at 1900 hours.

  The atmosphere in the assembly area was hectic and the air filled with distinctly equine aromas. I found myself dodging cavalry horses and field artillery pieces as soldiers dressed in ornate uniforms hurried around attending to their mounts, brushing and combing the flanks of the gleaming, sinewy animals. Others brought buckets of water to the stalls where the dark feisty horses were prancing around at their tethers like highly strung prima donnas, as they waited for their turn in the limelight. A thick carpet of dark brown sawdust covered the entire floor; probably to make the footing better for the pampered horses, or perhaps to make it easier to clean up after them.

  Pilot Officer Read and Corporal Naylor were waiting for us and had apparently used the time to survey the arena where we would be performing. They had some news for us.

  “Gather round lads and pay attention,” said the diminutive Pilot Officer.

  A few people continued talking, seemingly unaware that everyone else had fallen silent in anticipation of what the officer had to say. Those around them quickly shushed them to be quiet.

  After pausing long enough to make sure he had our undivided attention, he began, “We will be going on first as the “opening act”, so as soon as we’ve finished here I want you to get formed up at the arena entrance and be ready to start.” He paused for a moment, read something from a small piece of paper that he held in his right hand, seemed to gather his thoughts and then continued, “Corporal Naylor and I have made a survey of the arena area. We were distressed to find that some equipment has been set up in the arena for one of the later events and so the area available for our figure-marching is only about half of that in which we practised.”

  This was something of a bombshell. We had practised marching in a certain size area that we expected to be near enough identical to the real thing. Would we be able to carry it off in an area size that we weren’t used to? And even if we could do it without some disaster befalling us, the half-size area seemed to indicate that we would finish in only half the time allotted for our routine.

  Pilot Officer Read continued, “Corporal Naylor has suggested that when you reach the end of the routine, continue on and start all over again without stopping. Do you think you can do that?”

  “Yes sir,” several people answered.

  “Okay then, that’s what we’ll do!” He announced triumphantly, apparently with the utmost confidence in our ability to get faultlessly through the amended routine, even though it was a major departure from what we had diligently practised week after week. “Now lads, I want you to put on your best show ever and make St. Athan proud of you,” he continued. “Good luck! Now go and form up for your entrance.”

  With that he walked towards the entrance to the arena, where the massive doors that temporarily hid us from the arena area dwarfed his slightly built figure. We followed behind him and then formed up in our eight ranks, facing the closed doors, with our trumpets on our hips in the “at-ease” position. At some unseen signal, the massive doors began to slowly glide open and while they were still moving, Drum Major Featherstone gave the order for us to quick march. As always, we stepped off with the left foot as our drummers beat out their two threes and a seven and by the time we actually entered the arena we already had our trumpets to our lips and had started to play.

  The repertoire had been well established during our many practice sessions and we had memorized the names and order of tunes to be played. These included, but weren’t limited to, Swinging the Prop; Come and Join Us; The Marseillaise; On Ilkley Moor B’at ’At; Swinging the Cat; Roll me Over in the Clover; and The St. Louis Blues March.

  The sawdust that covered the backstage floor area also covered the entire floor of the arena and while it may have been good for the horses, it made the act of marching very difficult for Boy Entrants. Instead of the hard even surface that we were accustomed to, there were humps and hollows, hard spots and soft spots. At first I thought I would stumble and fall in an embarrassing heap on the arena floor, as I’m sure my fellow bandsmen also thought, but I got used to it and made adjustments to my stride that compensated for the difficult surface. What I found more irritating than marching on the sawdust was the sparsely-occupied spectator seating. Perhaps disappointed is a more appropriate word to describe my feelings, because most of the seats were empty, although people were slowly trickling in to fill them. It seemed that after all the build up we had been subjected to, not to mention the hours of practice that we’d put in, we weren’t playing to anything remotely resembling a packed house. But then I thought of it in another way—we were there! We had made it to London and were appearing at the Royal Tournament, even if we were just the warm-up act, playing and figure marching while the audience members were finding their seats, as they probably anticipated the more interesting main events that would come later in the programme.

  We went into the figure marching routine, resplendent in our braid and regalia, as our leaders and markers made adjustments for the smaller area in which we were forced to operate. It all worked out well. Our Boy Entrant wheel badge figu
re was smaller in diameter than the one we’d practised, so we had to slow up the pace and almost mark time as our wheel rotated. Then, when we came to the end of the routine, at the point where we would normally have marched out of the performing area after reforming back into our eight ranks, we just went straight back into it again. It wasn’t necessary to repeat the musical repertoire because the trumpet majors and Corporal Naylor had allotted enough tunes to last for the entire duration of the display. In the end, we proudly completed our mission of bringing Boy Entrant trumpet band music to the masses and if by chance any of them might have been watching, they probably wouldn’t even have noticed that they had just witnessed two performances for the price of one.

  It was customary, at the end of each performance, for the display members to form up facing the royal box and then their officer would take his place out in front of them and give a salute to the royal personage in attendance. At the end of our performance, Pilot Officer Read, who had been waiting somewhere in the background, marched out in front of the band and, standing stiffly to attention, threw a text book style salute in the direction of the royal box. Alas, Her Majesty the Queen wasn’t there to take it. In fact, no royal personage was present, not even a minor one. A senior officer filled in for her instead. That was a little disappointing too, because we’d been told that we would be performing before the Queen.

  After leaving the arena, our little officer gallantly congratulated us on a fine performance and commended us for the skilful manner in which we’d changed the routine to accommodate the reduced performance area.

  “And now, lads, you can stay and watch the rest of the tournament.”

  With that, we were ushered to a block of seating that had been especially reserved for us and watched an enjoyable show, the likes of which I’d never seen before.

  It was fantastic! Each of the United Kingdom services was amply represented in all of the performances, but added to that were service groups from the Commonwealth, some of them keenly military and others colourfully exotic.

  The show began with the Royal Navy Field Gun Competition. A large group of naval ratings, dressed in their traditional short-sleeved, collarless white gun-shirts and bell bottoms gathered into white gaiters above their boots, ran into the arena and started setting up the very same equipment that had hampered our performance only minutes before. This was accompanied by a fast paced rendition of “You Can’t Get a Man With a Gun” over the arena sound system.

  The Field Gun Competition involved teams from various ships and naval bases, each team consisting of eighteen naval ratings. The object was to manhandle a field gun and its gun carriage a number of times from one end of the arena to the other. The problem was that they had to get it over two 5-foot high walls and across a wide intervening 28-feet long “chasm”. The complete gun assembly was too heavy to get over the walls in one piece, so part of the race involved disassembling it and then moving it over the walls in its component pieces. Both teams had obviously practised the drill many times and when a loud explosion signalled the start of the race they soon set to at removing the gun barrel and wheels from the gun mount, at the same time detaching the mount from the limber—the forward wheeled part of the carriage that supports the ammunition box. Then various groups of ratings skilfully manhandled their limber over the first wall by running the shaft, by which it was pulled along, over the top of the wall until the wheels of the limber came hard up against the obstruction. In doing this, the towing end of shaft arced upwards until it could go no further. Almost immediately, two of the men climbed atop the wall and launched their body weight against the tee-bar that formed the end of the shaft, pivoting the heavy parts of the limber upwards until the wheels could be pushed over the wall. Some of the other team members rigged up a tightly suspended rope line between the two walls and then one man hung onto a small trolley contraption riding atop the line on two grooved wheels that whizzed him from one wall to the other. But he wasn’t just joy riding; he carried both of the heavy gun mount wheels with him, one suspended from each shoulder. A tag line on the trolley enabled it to be pulled back to the starting position, where four other team members suspended the gun mount from it, using a rope sling. Then all four men balanced precariously on the gun mount, whilst hanging onto the trolley handles, as they rode it to the second wall.

  Meanwhile the limber group had pulled their carriage across the intervening ground, before removing its wheels and manhandling the parts through a narrow gap in the second wall. This was closely followed by the gun mount, which was then reunited with the wheels that had already been taken through the gap. As the pieces arrived at the other side of the second wall, the teams worked furiously at reassembling their gun in a firing position, with the limber at some prescribed distance away. And then, when the assembly was complete, one member raced to the limber, opened the ammunition box and retrieved a round that he cradled in both arms as he bolted back to the gun position. The gun team muzzle loaded the blank round and when all was ready, one of the gunners yanked on a lanyard, firing off the round with a deafeningly loud explosion that temporarily filled the arena with a large expanding cloud of blue smoke. But no sooner had the round been fired, than the runner raced back to the limber for another round so that the procedure could be repeated. In all, each team fired off three rounds. Then, a brief rest only to be interrupted by a bugle call and they were off again, repeating the same drill, but this time in the opposite direction. Three more rounds were fired off at the end of that run and then another rest period. Soon, the bugle sounded again and one more run was made, but instead of firing off some more rounds, the teams raced the gun and limber combination down the sides of the arena instead and across the finish line to complete the competition.

  The audience was going wild, cheering the teams on. Apparently, different naval stations competed at each performance and on this particular night it was Chatham against the Fleet Air Arm. I couldn’t make my mind up which team to cheer for—my father’s home port had been Chatham when he’d served in the Royal Navy during the war, so I felt I should support them. But I was torn by loyalty to my aviation brothers of the Fleet Air Arm. In the end, the familial association won and I supported Chatham, who went on to win by a very close margin.

  Both teams were visibly exhausted by their heroic efforts and breathed heavily whilst a senior naval officer faced the royal box and saluted the royal person. It wasn’t Her Majesty the Queen, but another member of the Royal Family; the Princess Royal, I think. After this brief rest the teams departed the arena pulling their gun carriages with them, as the arena sound system played “All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor”, much to the amusement of the wildly applauding audience.

  The next event was also staged by the Royal Navy. It involved a number of manned scenes, acted out under the bright cones of spotlights that illuminated them one at a time and in isolation from the otherwise darkened arena. The scenes started with one that depicted the manned gun deck of Nelson’s ship and ended with the portrayal of a guided missile being fired from a ship.

  It took the arena crew several minutes to remove all the scenery and props after the lights came up, which gave the audience time to stretch their legs before the Royal Marines’ massed bands entered in a breathtaking spectacle of precision marching and stirring music.

  Five combined Marine bands paraded through the arena as one, seeming to fill it entirely. There must have been around 250 individual players, each of whom was dressed in the customary dark blue dress uniform surmounted by a white tropical helmet. We were treated to an amazingly varied repertoire of music, most of which was military, although some pieces like “Ave Maria” clearly were not.

  After the Royal Marines had made their exit through the great doors, the arena turned quiet for a short time, but before long the doors slid silently open again to permit a large troop of mounted Royal Household Cavalry to enter the arena. Each trooper carried a lance in the vertical position, with a pennant fluttering at the top near the
sharp end. As if the pageantry of the cavalry in their plumed helmets and shiny breastplates wasn’t enough, they were led into the arena by the colourfully dressed Royal Horse Guards Kettledrummer astride a huge horse that, we were informed by the announcer, was named “Hannibal”. Two large, heavy-looking, ornately decorated, silver bowl-shaped drums slung across the horse’s shoulders were being beaten with the type of padded drumsticks used for bass drums. Four trumpeters, garbed in the same colourful uniform as the kettledrummer, rode in a row immediately behind him. The drummer beat out the rhythm for the troop as he led them all the way to the centre of the arena, where they eventually came to a halt. Such a spectacle was rarely seen, except during the Queen’s Birthday Trooping of the Colour ceremony, or other rare State occasions. By this time, a solemn hush had fallen over the audience and so all was quiet when the four trumpeters raised long, straight, silver herald-trumpets, that each dangled a banner bearing the Royal coat of arms, to their lips. They paused in this position for a moment and then played a fanfare that resounded throughout the great cavernous hall. That done, they departed the arena, led by the kettledrummer and we were left alone with two troops of the Household Cavalry—the “Blues,” wearing royal blue tunics and red plumes on their helmets and “Royals,” who wore red jackets that were offset by the white plumes atop their helmets.

  What followed was a musical ride by the 32 mounted riders that lasted for several minutes. Harnesses jingled and hooves pounded on the sawdust-covered arena floor as they trotted and cantered through a series of intricate manoeuvres, during which the horses narrowly missed colliding with each other by miraculous split second timing, as their columns interwove and criss-crossed in the centre of the arena. Gleaming helmets and breastplates glinted under the bright overhead lights, as the cavalry troopers turned and wheeled in time with the music. The long horsehair plumes that streamed from the pinnacles of their helmets danced and bobbed in rhythm with the horses’ body movements.