Never Fear

by Ian Strathcarron

The course was intensive in the air and on the ground. Every weekday night there was a lecture, mostly on aspects of flying machines and how to survive them: ‘First Night Flight’, ‘Operational D.R.’, ‘Aircrew Duties’, ‘Cockpit Gadgetry and its Limitations’, ‘Bomber Flying Control’, ‘Command Synthetic Training’, ‘Met Flights’, ‘Western Desert Operations’, ‘Pathfinders’, ‘Luftwaffe Training’, ‘Coastal Command Navigation’ (given by his old chief Group Captain Dickie Richardson), ‘Low Level Attack and R.P.’, ‘Fighters in the Western Desert’, ‘Principles of Aircraft Recognition’, ‘Intruder Operations’, ‘Photographic Interpretation’, ‘Functions of an M.U.’, ‘Army Air Support in the Mediterranean’, ‘Medical Aspects on Ditching’, ‘Lack of Confidence’, ‘Glider Operations for D-Day’. These aeronautical themes were interspersed with lectures on current affairs: ‘Russia’, ‘The BBC at War’, ‘America’, ‘Life in Occupied Belgium’, ‘Escape form Germany’, and so on. Another old friend, the First World War ace Lord Douglas Hamilton from the Royal Aero Club and Francis’s formative suicide squadron, was a frequent guest lecturer.

  Flight Lieutenant Chichester gave three lectures: ‘Plotting’, ‘The Value of Observer Navigation to Pilots’ and ‘Pilot Navigation Exercises in AP 1388a’; later – in December 1944, when the war was almost won – he could be more esoteric: ‘Astro Navigation in the Pacific’. Saturday evenings were set asides for debates. Francis took part too:

  15.5.44 Motion: That alcohol is a help not a hindrance.

  Proposed by F/L Chichester and S/L Airey, Opposed by S/L Hay and Major Hayden Thomas

  The motion was defeated.

  (Major Hayden Thomas, from the SAAF, was killed in night training at Castle Combe a month later. The Operations Record Book has frequent entries reminding us of the dangers of advanced flight training, recorded typically with the words: ‘Killed in Flying Accident, Multiple Injuries’.)

  Another motion, three months later’ was ‘That in the opinion of this house Flying is an Invention of the Devil’. It was carried 43 to 28.

  It was the Handling Squadron that had a more amusing war. Their duties included putting a long list of fighters, bombers and trainers through their paces and then writing Pilot Notes. Their jobs seem to have had the glamour of a test pilot’s without the obvious drawback. Francis remembered with enthusiasm there being thirty-seven different aircraft types at Hullavington.

  Flight training still happens at Hullavington but on a much more modest scale. It is now home to 621 Volunteer Gliding Squadron, which has the very worthy intention of training Air Cadets from the age of thirteen to fly for free. I am fortunate enough to be shown around by Squadron Adjutant Flight Lieutenant Nick Blake and Squadron Administrator Neville Cullingford. Although not officially part of the RAF, many of the cadets go on to join the RAF or Fleet Air Arm or commercial aviation. The ethos of the squadron is very much RAF, with the emphasis on discipline, teamwork and respect; I imagine it does the teenagers the world of good. Run on an entirely voluntary basis by the instructors and using long-serving Grob gliders that have seen as many as 25,000 launches, in its own way 621 Squadron is just as admirable an occupant of Hullavington as the Empire Central Flying School was sixty years ago.

  The enormous runways are still remarkably intact considering their age and heavy use all those years ago, nowadays they’re used by Top Gear for filming squirming super cars and various track day companies – in fact any commercial use above a car boot sale is welcome. The largest hangers are in commercial use too, by karting and storage companies.

  The base is now divided in two: 621 Volunteer Gliding Squadron uses the runways and principal hangar while the Lutyens-designed buildings and parade and sports grounds belong to 9 Regiment Royal Logistics Corps. Only a rather jumpable fence separates the two. Station Staff Officer Peter Murton and his collie, Sam, are kind enough to show me around Francis’s old wartime base.

  Francis’s HQ at RAF Hullavington

  At first sight Hullavington is exactly as Francis would have remembered it. Being large and solid, the Lutyens buildings reflect a time when the forces weren’t under constant budget attack by the Treasury. The mess building in particular is most impressive, with wood panelling and an eighty-place oak dining table and mahogany and leather chairs. The façade of the orchestra gallery is lined with the emblems of the services that Francis taught: in the centre the Empire Central Flying School and the Royal Canadian Air Force, and on either side the South African Air Force, Royal Australian Air Force, Royal New Zealand Air Force, Rhodesian Army Air Force, Indian Air Force and so on. One can almost smell the pipe smoke, hear the banter and see the flying suits. For a lover of aviation it must have been a paid paradise.

  Beyond the dining room is the library, where Peter considers that the lectures and debates would have been held. Upstairs are the officers’ rooms. No one knows in which one Francis spent his eighteen months there; but as they are all the same, I can say that there is more than enough room to swing a cat and still have a splash in the enormous basins.

  What has changed a lot, and for the better, is that the 400 soldiers now have sufficient space for their families, so the base is now home to 1,200 souls. Of course the horrible modern buildings that house the families jar uncomfortably alongside their Lutyens counterparts, but space is space. When on home leave Francis tried to persuade Sheila to come with him back to Wiltshire, but that would have meant sharing a house with other wives – not really Sheila’s thing; she preferred to take her chances with the doodlebugs in Essex.

  Not that Francis wasn’t amusing himself at work:

  At the end of each course we used to have a navigation race with twelve light two-seater Miles Magister training planes in it. This was fine training for the sort of navigation that is really valuable to a pilot. We made it a kind of treasure hunt. For instance, in one race they had to fly to Stowe, the public school, and count the number of tennis courts there, multiply the number by x, and then fly in that direction for 5 miles to find another clue. These races were immense sport, and very popular.

  Another of my jobs at Hullavington was to devise methods for teaching ‘nought feet’ navigation to pilots intruding into enemy territory when they would be unable to take their eyes off the ground ahead, and must bejinking all the time to avoid anti-aircraft fire. It amounted to map-reading without maps, in other words all the mapreading had to be done on the ground before taking off. It sounds an impossible requirement but, with the right methods and plenty of drill, pilots could find a haystack 50 miles off while dodging about all the way to it.

  Miles Magister RAF trainer and Francis’s weekend warrior

  By April 1943 there was a feeling in the air that the war was winnable and the impression arising from studying life at Hullavington is one of the last big push: the war was ours to lose, not theirs to win. Consequently the rules were relaxed about Francis being grounded because his uniform was without wings, the chiefs realising that he could do a better job of teaching navigation if he could reconnoitre training routes first and so devise more testing drills and write more telling exercises. An added bonus was finding any of his lost ducklings:

  If any of my students were lost on a navigational exercise I used to spend many hours in my light aeroplane searching where I estimated them to be.

  Two South African majors were lost on one exercise, and I hunted for days among the Welsh hills. Three months later, when we had given up all hope for them, word came through that they were prisoners of war. They had flown the reciprocal heading of their compass, south-east instead of north-west. When they crossed the English Channel they thought it was the Bristol Channel. They were grateful when an airfield put up a cone of searchlights for them, and it was not until they had finished their landing run on the airstrip and a German soldier poked a Tommy gun into the cockpit that they realised that they were not on an English airfield.

  As the war progressed he was even allowed to fly his Magister home at weekends:

&n
bsp; I used to land at Fairlop, a mile from our house at Chigwell Row. One morning, just before I took off, a cryptic message came through from Air Traffic Control London saying that I must take great care while flying and look out for anything strange. I usually flew low, because it was more interesting, and I was surprised to see all the children dash across a playground and take cover from my little monoplane as I flew over. When this happened a second time, I realised that they were taking cover from me, and when it happened a third time, I wondered what it was all about.

  Back home he soon discovered Pages had been damaged and the leaves blown off its trees by a doodlebug. The schoolchildren thought Francis’s plane was an unguided missile. Actually, his war didn’t finish with an explosion but rather petered out without comment from him or Sheila or any official record of him ever having left Hullavington. I note from the RAF list that he was discharged on 27 September 1945. But as we will see in the next chapter, he had his eyes on new horizons long before then anyway.

  NOTES:

  13. Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 587.

  I said, ‘There’s the shore; you can swim for it if you wish, but Gipsy Moth is racing on’.

  CHAPTER 7

  Gipsy Moth II

  Seven years after the war I was attacked by an overpowering urge for some practical navigation. So I decided to go sailing or gliding, and plumped for sailing, because it was more sociable; the family could weekend in a yacht, but hardly in a glider. My first sail (as crew) was to the Baltic. That cruise was not a success, but it did result in my becoming an ocean racer.

  I decided that sailing was going to be a misery for me if I was going to worry about the weather all the time, about getting caught out in a gale and being fearful of my gear in a blow. If I was going to sail, I must learn to do it properly. I thought that the Royal Ocean Racing Club sailors would be the ones to learn from, because they raced in all weathers.

  Thus in the summer of 1953, at the age of fifty-two, Francis first took to the waves; even he would have been astounded to have known that just thirteen years later he would be the most famous sailor in the world.

  He had spent those seven years since the war building up his map publishing business, working and living at home, 9 St James’s Place, an elegant four-storey William and Mary house tucked in behind the Ritz and Green Park: very much London SW1. He later recalled that in 1944 his thoughts had turned to what he would do when peace came:

  I wanted to get into the air travel business. When on leave I marked off an area in the West End of London where I thought the air travel business would be centred after the war. This was a rectangle, with Piccadilly in the centre. I hired a taxi and drove through every street in the area noting down all the houses for sale. In the end we bought one in St James’s Place.

  The ‘we’ who bought the house was actually Sheila, as Francis was still without funds. As she remembers:

  In August 1944 Francis came home on leave and said I ought to buy myself a house in London. This was at the height of the doodlebugs and London was pretty empty. He brought me to 9 St James’s Place, I walked into this house and fell in love with it at once.

  The Chichesters moved in: along with Francis and Sheila were George, by now 19 and about to join the Merchant Navy, Dimbleby the dog and Francis’s fellow navigators, the bumblebees, whose hive was soon up on the roof.

  It was a brave move – and typical of Sheila that she made it. Great property fortunes were won and lost during the war. The falling bombs were a form of Russian roulette. A walk around the St James’s area now shows how many post-war buildings there are; in 1944 it must have looked rubble-ruined. Among the bombed neighbours was the Royal Ocean Racing Club at 19 St James’s Place. Sheila gambled and she won – unlike my grandmother, who sold her house in Kensington for £500 in 1942; family folklore says that everyone thought the buyer was mad. But the house survived the bombing and the buyer proclaimed sane, even wise. It is now the Moroccan embassy.

  There is not much to report from outside sources about those seven post-war years: Francis had demobbed and his service records ceased and the press cuttings and friends’ memoirs of later years had yet to start. Instead we have to rely on his and Sheila’s respective autobiographies. Francis gives the seven years only a few paragraphs, mostly about Francis Chichester Ltd, his map and guide publishing business.

  Francis and his fellow navigators, bees, on the roof at St. James

  ‘A friend suggested that I should make jigsaw puzzles. There were 15,000 maps left over from my ‘Pinpoint the Bomber’ game. I bought a ton or so of cardboard, designed some cutters, and turned these maps into jigsaw maps.’ He made a series of jigsaw maps, ‘The Heart of London’, ‘The Heart of Paris’, ‘Shakespeare Country’ and ‘London Zoo’:

  I set off on a sales campaign and sold the first 5,000 to big stores and other shops. I came back elated thinking, ‘Hurrah! I’m in business’, and promptly made 10,000 more.

  On my next sales round the buyers told me that the puzzles had not sold as well as they had hoped. I decided that this was due to using an old map, so I designed a new one. Then one day a man walked into my office and said, ‘This picture map of London is the best I’ve seen; if you will take it off this lousy piece of cardboard I’ll order 5,000’. And so I became a map publisher by accident.

  He was ‘the designer, producer and salesman, I typed all the letters, did the bookkeeping, invoiced the goods, parcelled them up and delivered them’. He was pleased to have fallen into map making, which was

  the right business for me, for I have been involved with maps ever since I made my first chart for my Tasman flight. My adventures with faulty maps when flying, and my search for methods of teaching fighter pilots how to meet map-read at nought feet without using a map, left me with strong views on what should be put into a map and, equally important, what should be left out.

  However, the business was surviving rather than prospering, with Francis keeping one room for himself in which he slept, worked and lived, while renting out all the other rooms to provide an income for the family.

  Where was Sheila all these seven years? Luckily, in her autobiography she is far more revealing. A Craven family friend, the Earl of Cardigan, had offered them Fisherman’s Cottage, a water bailiff’s shack on the River Kennett by Savernake Forest near Marlborough. Francis took to it immediately for the mile of trout fishing and 750 acres of rough shooting. Sheila noted that

  the cottage had no drains, no water except by pump and of course no electricity. At first we used to drive down, Francis and I together and our dog Dimbleby, and camp there. During that first winter we would make marvellous blazing fires and were blissfully happy. We both loved it there. I couldn’t get over the peace, with no air raids. I stopped worrying about money. I became a fatalist.

  So blissfully happy were they that soon she felt ‘a heightened pleasure in everything. The trees looked more brilliant, the autumn tints and sky looked brighter, everything seemed marvellous’. She was, of course, pregnant.

  Giles was born on 29 July 1946. Typically, Sheila was far ahead of her time, opting for a natural childbirth at home under the auspices of Dr Pink, ‘a priest as well as the doctor, a vegetarian, very gentle, very wise, he used to come and talk to me and from then on I was extremely happy’. At Christmas that year the three Chichesters and Dimbleby drove down to the cottage; only one Chichester drove back: Francis. Sheila and Giles – joined latterly by the au-pair, Siglinda – were to spend the next six years living there more or less full-time – and more or less alone.

  Sheila, Giles, Francis and Dimbleby at Fisherman’s Cottage

  Giles’s christening

  Sheila remembers Francis’s visits wistfully:

  He used to come down to the cottage at weekends, arriving on Saturday night looking very tired indeed. He used to sleep all day Sunday, and on Monday he went out shooting all day. It was rather lonely for me, but he felt desperately cooped up living
in one room in London and needed this break of an out-of-door life.

  I did feel rather cut off from Francis. Especially since I had become such a keen vegetarian, to see all the shooting and killing of game going on around was trying, but I had to make the best of it. It was difficult for Francis too, for men like to feel they’re bringing home a nice present for their wife to roast. I don’t think I really recommend husbands and wives splitting up like that. It is lonely for both, and you don’t seem to see each other’s point of view.

  Towards the end of this semi-separation their autobiographies coincide. After his unsuccessful cruise of the Baltic in the summer of 1953 Francis decided to buy his own boat.

  I said nothing to Sheila about this, because I felt sure she would disapprove when we were so hard up, and I was determined to get a yacht. I went round looking at various likely yachts for sale, and finally bought a day sailor with a horrible name of Florence Edith.

  Francis paid £1,150 in September 1953 for the yacht and set about sailing her around her Essex moorings as much as he could at weekends. Sheila must have been feeling lonelier and lonelier in her river cottage in Wiltshire.

  Pretty soon the day came when ‘I had to break the news to Sheila. Expecting a terrific rocket for my extravagance, imagine my astonishment when she said, “Oh, I always wanted to sail. What an excellent idea!”’ No doubt seeing something of Francis again only added to the excellent idea.

  A few weekends later Sheila arrived to join Francis for her maiden voyage from Brightlingsea but no one there had seen or heard of the Florence Edith or Francis Chichester. At last an old fisherman told her, ‘Oh you mean that there yellow boat? She be lying on Buxey Sands 10 miles out. ’Tis lucky ’tis fine weather, otherwise she’d be sunk when t’sea rises. What’s more, there be thick fog coming up, and if she do get off the sands, it’ll be a long time before you see her here again. My advice to you is to go home. She won’t be in till morning. If then, with this dreadful fog.’