The Secret Life of Fighter Command

by Sinclair McKay

  Building work began on the temporary ground-floor Filter Room and the Operations Room. At this time, one wholly unexpected source of conflict broke out: it was with the Priory’s next-door neighbour. Almost as soon as work began to prepare the estate for war, a widow called Mrs Anson, living at the adjacent Bentley Manor, on Stanmore Common, started a letter-writing campaign highlighting a range of grievances. It started with what she regarded as intellectual theft. Remarkably, despite the secrecy, she had caught local chatter about operations being sited underground. This provoked her first furious fusillade of letters to the Air Ministry. The charge was plagiarism; the widow claimed that as far back as 1936, she had offered the RAF ‘use of her crypt’ in order to make their work bombproof. Outraged that the idea was being put to use next door, she demanded financial compensation to acknowledge that the idea was hers.

  Just as war was declared, Mrs Anson stepped up her own conflict, starting the battle of the driveway. She had originally offered it for sale to the Air Ministry; perhaps the Air Ministry had other matters on its mind, for no immediate response was forthcoming. At some point in the weeks before September 1939, some anti-aircraft brigade workmen had – perhaps rather peremptorily – parked their trucks on her land and built a concrete hut, with the workmen being billeted on the land for the duration; the purpose of this hut was to house a huge number of cables – obviously vital for telecommunications to and from the Priory. The widow was a patriot who had no objection to the principle; rather she took issue with the method. It says a lot about the nature of officialdom at the time that Mrs Anson’s increasingly shrill accusations – which were eventually to elicit responses from 10 Downing Street and Buckingham Palace – were dealt with so formally and patiently (if, as we now see in the correspondence, with flashes of comic exasperation) at a time of national crisis.

  The widow made a financial claim for the then colossal sum of £10,300, in order to compensate her for the loss of land that she had planned to sell for ‘offices, a hotel or a country club’. A memo circulated within the Air Ministry proposed a course of action. ‘[It] is probably pure conjecture on her part and although she refers us to her solicitors, there seems very little chance that her claim could be substantiated,’ wrote the official, M. Murray, to Bentley Priory in October 1939. ‘We take it that there are no grounds on which you would be prepared to abandon this site at this stage and it would therefore seem adequate to play the ball back into [her] court by simply telling her that her property has been requisitioned and that compensation will be paid under the Compensation (Defence) Act of 1939.’4 It was imagined that Mrs Anson would acquiesce graciously. However, the very idea of requisition only added a splash of paraffin to her flames of fury and her correspondence began to travel to some extraordinary corners.

  In one letter to the Air Ministry Chief, Sir Archibald Sinclair, she turned her fire on the Secretary of State for Air. ‘On Bentley Manor, I have a huge mortgage,’ she wrote. ‘Sir Kingsley Wood knew this but as I am a widow, he STOLE my land … and built a cable house for 250 cables. And broke the contract for sale. He knows about this contract.’ But very much worse was the effect upon her nerves. She wanted it to be known that at one point during the construction of the cable hut, several workmen popped in and out of her house. She would never have let them in if she had known what the result would be. They left her cushions reeking of ‘tobacco juice and onions’. The result, she said, was that the cushions had to be burnt.5

  She turned up the heat in other ways. One letter was delivered directly to Buckingham Palace (and received a polite reply from the King’s Equerry); the Air Ministry catalogued several personal letters to Sir Kingsley Wood, as well as letters to MPs Rhys Davies and Sir Reginald Blair. The Labour MP Clement Attlee (shortly to become Deputy Prime Minister) was also drawn into the affair. After corresponding with her, Attlee wrote to Sir Kingsley Wood and the Air Ministry in the spirit of investigating Mrs Anson’s incandescent woes.

  As the war progressed, Mrs Anson’s rage intensified. Further hostilities broke out when Fighter Command realised that they would have to negotiate with her in order to requisition her home for WAAF accommodation. The story demonstrates how seriously war bureaucrats took their requisitioning, even when dealing with those on the dotty spectrum. It illustrates too how deadly serious they were about money; for there was no suggestion that they would negotiate with Mrs Anson, even for the sake of a quiet life.

  Such colourful sideshows failed to dilute Dowding’s focus. In conditions of great secrecy, in the days before war was declared, those in the Filter Room now began rehearsing how best to collate the information coming from the various links in the Chain Home Command. The key phrase was Plan Position Filtering; and they were also observing very closely how individuals were using radar, and how effective they were proving to be at it.

  Just a few miles west, a similar subterranean operations room was built at the base of 11 Group at RAF Uxbridge in 1938. Each group was responsible for a different sector of the country – for instance, 10 Group focused on the southwest, 12 Group the Midlands and Wales, while 11 Group oversaw RAF stations throughout the southeast, with Fighter Command at the centre of the web of communications and commands. Though functional, 11 Group HQ was yet supremely elegant, with suggestions of art deco in the railing details, and the glow of bronze and polished wood vying with the colour-coded clocks and the illuminated panels. In the period before and just after the outbreak of the war, this would be the domain of Keith Park.

  Jim Griffiths worked at Bentley Priory in those pre-war days, when he held the rank of leading aircraftman. He recollected that in the months before the conflict, the establishment had a notably friendly atmosphere: ‘The only time we ever saw any of our officers in uniform was when they were going on a staff visit, Armistice Day, King’s Birthday or other such occasions; normally they came to work in lounge suits. Looking back, I can only say that at Bentley Priory, we were an extremely happy set of people.’6

  Air Marshal Dowding requisitioned a west-facing ground floor room as his office; except for desk, chair and telephone, it was notably sparse. From here the command radiated outwards – was delegated – to group headquarters and bases across the country, from the suburban fringes of London to the bleak coastlines of Scotland. The delegation of control was crucial.

  Largely due to financial considerations, plus manufacturing difficulties with the aeroplanes, the fighter force was not up to the capacity that Dowding himself had been pressing for. Nonetheless, the pilots were established with several new boons that their immediate predecessors had not enjoyed: proper functioning radios; enclosed cockpits; and proper, surfaced, hard runways, as opposed to smooth (and often slippery) strips of close-cut grass. Some RAF stations had the prized social uplift of easy access to London. Hornchurch was an easy drive in from the east; North Weald a fast railway journey into Liverpool Street. Quite frequently, pilots would take the opportunity to entertain young lady friends in the West End and ensure that they returned to their stations before they could be missed.

  Back at Bentley Priory, Dowding did not sleep in the big house; instead, he took a nearby property, a villa called Montrose, living a life of almost Victorian simplicity there with his sister Hilda. Widowed since 1920, Dowding in some ways behaved as though he was very much older than his years.

  War was not the only reason that Dowding needed both preternatural determination and thick skin; for in the corridors of Whitehall, Air Ministry manoeuvrings and rancorous office politics were threatening to undermine every aspect of his work. Even the security of his position was called repeatedly into question, and sometimes in the most wounding ways. Possibly because of his demeanour, and the nickname ‘Stuffy’, his nominal superiors might have imagined that Dowding was too insensitive to be hurt. But this wasn’t the case.

  Yet, whether his superiors agreed or not, the system he had started to build in 1936 would prove beyond vital. It wasn’t just the ingenious ‘black magic’ of r
adar, as some older air force figures had it; Dowding was also organising for the comprehensive defence of the capital. He was in charge of the anti-aircraft guns; the sun-bright searchlights that before long would be crisscrossing the sky in great triangles of light. There were the faintly comical barrage balloons – vast, bulbous, silver and glittering – that in time would resemble floating metallic elephants under moonlit skies. There was the all-important human element too: the Royal Observer Corps, dedicated men armed with little more than binoculars, watching the skies as closely as any subsequent UFO enthusiast.

  Indeed, in the wider story of Fighter Command, the Observer Corps never seems to get much recognition. Formed during the First World War, it was originally comprised largely of police constables in London. They were under instruction to keep watch for Zeppelins, and when they spotted any, to phone through the positions of the craft. The idea was so effective that it was then put into operation around the country, and particularly in coastal areas. At first, it was purely a police matter. By 1917, for the sake of tidiness, the Royal Flying Corps took over responsibility, under Major General Ashmore, though policemen were still used; the observation posts dotted around the coast were now linked more closely with anti-aircraft gun emplacements and searchlight stations. Naturally, after the war, the Corps dwindled away to practically nothing; but the idea of it remained firmly with the new RAF hierarchy. And so, by the mid-1920s, as part of a review of the defence of the realm, a fresh Observer Corps was formed.

  It was made up this time of specially enlisted special constables; in other words, eager civilian volunteers. They had to be trained not merely to detect incoming craft, but also to distinguish between friendly and enemy planes. Out in the vast flat silence of the Kent marshes, new recruits were tested; the trials were a success, and Observer Corps stations were established in Kent and Surrey. The motto of the organisation: ‘Forewarned is forearmed’.

  Soon there were observation stations across the south coast, and in the Home Counties too – though not nearly enough to have been of real use if some military catastrophe had overtaken the nation in those years. By the mid-1930s, the RAF understood the need for expansion of the Corps – and by 1936, it moved with Dowding into Bentley Priory.

  Within the Corps, there was a fresh emphasis on providing cover not just for London and the Home Counties, but also for the great industrial cities of the Midlands and the north; German bombers would clearly be determined to try and paralyse the country’s wartime production lines. There were also moves to integrate the Corps more closely with the Dowding system.

  The observation posts themselves were structures of the purest simplicity. Whether out on moorland or placed on top of London office blocks, they were basic wooden huts, sometimes a little elevated from the ground. There was not a chance that they would also function as shelters from bombing raids; they could barely shelter the volunteers from the weather. Nonetheless, they would be manned by the recruits, who had been issued with binoculars and would bring their tea flasks. Lacking portability, straightforward telephones were clearly impractical for such outdoor work, so the observers had to use specially designed ‘magneto’ phones in order to ring through to HQ. These were cranked by handle in order to generate sufficient voltage to ring bells on the same line and alert the operators. These telephones could be worn on the chest, by means of a harness, and came with headphones.

  Posts were also equipped with a wondrously complex-looking device – part astrolabe, part giant compass set – known officially as a ‘Post Plotting Instrument’ but popularly as a ‘Micklethwait’ after the man who designed it. This involved a sighting bar, a fixed pointer and a fixed map, and enabled the user to roughly work out the height of a sighted aeroplane and then, by means of its horizontal bearing and vertical angle, to get an idea of the aeroplane’s position. Such data, when phoned through on the magneto, would be collated and added to data coming in from the radio direction finding; and so it was that with different sources and angles, finer, faster, more accurate calculations concerning the enemy’s position could be made.

  Neville Chamberlain’s flight to Munich in 1938 – and the general, nationwide sense that this would be the trigger for the war – led to the Observer Corps staging a dress rehearsal at the same time. Using various flights and different possible scenarios, the volunteers were put through the paces of what a German ‘gas attack’ might look like, and it was possible to gauge from this the strengths and weaknesses of the organisation. At around that time, thirty-eight million gas masks had been distributed to the population, while everyone had seen the cinema newsreel footage of the Spanish Civil War and the nightmarish destruction of Guernica on behalf of Franco’s fascists by German and Italian bombers. Franco’s forces had initially sought to deny that they were responsible for the razing of the town, claiming that their enemies had set buildings ablaze while retreating; but incendiaries stamped with German manufacturing marks were found. It was a dress rehearsal for Blitzkrieg. Millions of British cinemagoers, watching the images of destruction, were told by the voice-over: ‘this was a city, and these were homes, like yours’.

  There was also the Japanese bombing of Shanghai; W.E. Johns, creator of fictional flying ace Biggles and editor of Popular Flying magazine, wrote searingly of the slaughter:

  What have these poor devils of Chinese done, whose mangled remains I saw being forked into carts like so much manure? It is a pity the Japanese bomber pilots cannot be shown what they did but that I fancy, is the last thing the Japanese government would permit. Nor, would our own government allow our bomber pilots to see it.7

  The gas masks alone evoked a thrill of atavistic horror. Everyone believed that the fate of Guernica would be visited upon Britain. Which is why the Observer Corps stood out; keeping watch in ramshackle structures through the night put them as firmly on the new front line as any soldier. Yet even after the declaration of war, the Observers were still essentially citizen volunteers.

  They were paid; but they had to do a great deal of hard work in return for it. Class A observers agreed, in writing, to undertake forty-eight hours of observation work a week, for the hourly sum of 1s 3d (paying out a maximum of £3 a week). Class A observers were – at least at the beginning of the war – expected to be over the age of thirty-five. ‘They must have good hearing and eyesight (glasses are no bar to members of the centre crew),’ reported The Times. Class B observers were volunteers who agreed to twenty-four hours’ observation a week. Head observers – the men who worked at centres such as that in Maidstone – received a bonus £1.

  The job was exacting; and those carrying it out were justifiably proud of their ability to swiftly distinguish between different sorts of planes at any hour of night, let alone day. Like many volunteers, though, they sometimes found their pride being a little squashed by the authorities, who perhaps made the mistake of seeing them simply as enthusiastic civilians. Indeed, the exact status of these vital men was much later to become a source of friction, especially for those who had, some years previously, served in the Air Force. Air Chief Marshal Sholto Douglas wrote to the Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Archibald Sinclair, in November 1940, as London was nightly battered and the Corps kept faithful watch on the incoming raids:

  I wonder if the Air Council realise what a blow it is to the higher ranks of the Observer Corps to be told that they are not allowed to wear their Wings on Observer Corps uniform? There is definitely an atmosphere of gloom, if not mutiny on the question. The Observer Corps uniform, for good or ill, bears a close resemblance to that of the RAF. The senior officers of the Observer Corps are, almost without exception, retired Air Force Officers with a distinguished flying record. Most of these learned to fly prior to 1941, and in fact are pioneers of the flying Services … It seems perhaps absurd that so small a question should have such an effect … but I can assure you that it does. It … goes deeper than logic.8

  Sir Archibald went a little further in his response. As well as the token gift of ‘100
pairs of binoculars’ to the Corps, he also announced, the following year, that the entire body had received a terrific honour: it was henceforth to be known as the ‘Royal Observer Corps’. ‘For some time,’ ran one newspaper report, ‘there has been a certain amount of dissatisfaction at what the members of the Corps regarded as official recognition. The new title will no doubt give much satisfaction to watchers, plotters and tellers alike.’9

  In 1942, there was to be a further innovation: women volunteers were allowed to join men in their little lookout posts. Vera Charlton was in the northeast of the country, near Durham, and she joined up as soon as she could. She recalled: ‘The look-out post was built of cement. It was a small square building about eight or nine feet high with wooden floors and corners, and wooden things to stand on to look out. There was also a dugout with a wooden stove to heat things on, a shelter with a tiny little window and a Browning rifle. You had to learn how to fire that and how to fix bayonets – my father taught me how to as he was good at it.