The salesman accepted the invitation keenly before Keith told him that John Mussell was a great guy who was suffering some level of deafness from flying jets. “You will find he shouts loudly. Do not be embarrassed by this, just shout back. John has plenty of money so it’s worth your while.”
Keith then asked John if he would be interested in coming over to his house where he and Pat had a Hi-fi fundi visiting for dinner. John leapt at the opportunity and accepted Keith’s warning that; “This guy is so into powerful speakers that he has become very deaf. Ignore the fact that he shouts and simply shout back.”
John got to Keith and Pat’s home first. When the salesman arrived, Keith shouted introductions whereupon his guests responded more loudly and were immediately immersed in a shouted technical conversation. Keith, battling to keep a straight face, asked them to sit down and excused himself on the pretext of having to give Pat a hand in the kitchen. From there Keith heard the shouted conversation mounting in volume, just as he had hoped.
After some time John turned his head away and muttered something to himself in a low voice. Immediately the salesman asked, “What was that”? in an equally low voice. Keith’s game was up; not that it spoilt a pleasant evening. But John left the Kemsley home determined to get his own back on Keith. He consulted Flight Lieutenant ‘Porky’ MacLaughlin on how best to do this.
In the meanwhile Keith continued with his practical jokes, many of which were aimed at his beloved wife. The story goes that he sent Pat to the hardware store where she was instructed to ask the salesman for ‘a long wait’. She got it all right, but had given the salesman hell for bad service before realising that her husband had set her up. On another occasion Pat was told to buy a pint of white-on-purple polka-dot paint. “Remember, white on purple—not purple on white." Again, Pat had been set up. When, however, Keith asked her to get a real item – a two-pound ball-and-claw steel-shafted hammer—Pat thought the description sounded too much like another of Keith’s pranks. Consequently he was not too pleased that his instruction had been ignored because he really needed the hammer for a job he intended to do that very day.
Then one Friday afternoon, at the very moment all Government departments closed down for the weekend, Keith and Pat received a hand-delivered registered envelope from the Registrar of Births, Marriages and Deaths. The enclosed document stated that, due to some error in paperwork at the time of their marriage they had never, in effect, been officially married. This meant that in the eyes of the law their children were illegitimate. An early visit to the offices of The Registrar of Births, Marriages and Deaths was strongly recommended to put matters to right.
Keith and Pat were beside themselves with concern for the entire weekend, just as John and Porky had hoped. Keith arranged a flight to Salisbury to be at the Registrar’s office the moment its doors opened on Monday morning. He presented the letter to the receptionist and waited while the appropriate file was being sought from registry. A puzzled attendant kept appearing and disappearing, saying the file reference group seemed correct but that the final digit corresponded to a file that could not be located. Eventually the penny dropped and Keith realised that the joke against him had been so well prepared that even the Registrar’s Office had been fooled.
John enjoyed this experience so much that he decided to pull a fast one on all officers at Thornhill. We received an official-looking questionnaire purporting to have come from Air Headquarters. It started with the usual Rank, Name, Number, Date of Birth, Date of Attestation etc. and required individual Flying Log Book records be broken down into components that required hours of work. The spaces to be filled were such that little space was given where the entry would be long and large spaces for entries requiring little space; typically Government! However, the questions went on and on and even asked for domestic details including such things as how many pets one kept, their names and food brands.
It only fooled those who were in the habit of filling in forms as they read each question. Those of us who read through the questionnaire first, smelled a rat and threw it into the waste bin. Unfortunately, two senior officers who had little time to spare put in a lot of work before realising a prankster had caught them out. There was hell to pay.
Before an official investigation could progress too far, John Mussell owned up to being the one who had prepared, printed and issued the questionnaires. For his troubles he received a severe reprimand and had to replace all the paper that had been wasted.
When my course reported to New Sarum for the pilot selection process in 1956, we all noticed that the cover flap on one toilet seat in the ablution block of the officers single quarters had been elaborately painted with a poem set inside a floral wreath. As I recall it, the poem started with the words “In loving memory of Mike Saunders who did’st on …”
Mike Saunders was well known for naughty deeds right from the start of his flying career. He was a junior pilot when he went into a toilet and waited there until the other three adjoining ones were occupied. At this point he lit a short fuse affixed to a commercial detonator. As soon as the fuse was burning, Mike dropped it into the toilet and flushed. He expected the water to transport the fuse and detonator into the external sewerage pipe where detonation would pressurise the system and blow the contents of the toilet bowls upward onto the bare butts of his unsuspecting mates.
Mike’s plan failed. The fuse and detonator were too heavy for the water to carry over the bowl’s water trap. The flush was complete before detonation occurred, shearing the toilet bowl at floor level. Mike’s error cost him all the repair expenses and his colleagues rubbed this in with the painted remembrance wreath and poem on the new wooden seat.
Some time during the ‘60s, Alex Roughead had become a menacing pyromaniac. He revelled in explosives and set many traps for his mates. One of his pranks involved substituting a small wad of magnesium cotton in place of the filament of a broken light bulb. Upon entering their own rooms his friends would receive quite a fright and become temporarily blinded when they switched on the main light. He had done this at New Sarum so many times that all of his friends had learned to look away and expect a bang when they switched on ceiling lights.
Alex decided he should change the position and set up a larger charge on a bedside light. Having heard nothing during the night nor received any abuse at the breakfast table next morning, he felt disappointed. So he went to inspect the bedside light he had doctored and found it as he had left it. Alex switched on the light, but nothing happened. He could not understand this. Next he went to the main electrical board in the passageway where he found a thermal breaker had dropped out. As he switched it on an almighty explosion occurred.
Alex returned to his friend’s smoke-filled room to discover that the bedside cabinet, light and most of the bed had been destroyed. Huge black burn marks covered two walls and the ceiling. Realising that his friend might have been killed or badly hurt if the thermal switch had not tripped out the previous night, Alex abandoned pyrotechnic trapping.
Unrelated to Air Force were stories of a commercial pilot serving with Central African Airways before that airline became Air Rhodesia. He had been trained by Air Force and delighted in teasing old ladies and brand-new airhostesses. Walking backwards from the flight deck, drawing out two lengths of string, he would come to an old lady and hand her both strings requesting that she fly the aircraft whilst he slipped off to the loo.
Targeting a new hostess on her first flight he gathered up all the salad on his lunch plate and placed it inside an airsick bag. With the connivance of the skipper, he rang the service bell for the hostess. When she arrived on the flight deck she found the second Dickey doubled up and noisily puking into the sick-bag. He turned and apologised for asking her to take the bag from him. As the hostess reached for the bag the captain grabbed it saying, “I love my salad warm" whereupon he hand-scooped salad into his mouth. The hostess, with hand over mouth, left the cabin retching.
On another occasion this naughty
pilot dug a hole in the paper plate on which his lunch had been served. He undid his fly and pulled the head of his twin through the hole and set salad neatly around it. When the new hostess responded to the cockpit service bell, he pointed to the centre of the salad pile and asked, “What’s the meaning of serving this with my salad”? The panicking hostess apologised, took the fork from the plate and stabbed the offending item, which promptly bled profusely as cries of agony emitted from its owner. Not surprisingly, this pilot became more circumspect in future pranks.
The impending arrival of Hunters meant we had urgent need for more pilots.
15 PTC
WITH THE INTRODUCTION OF CANBERRAS and the impending arrival of Hunters, the RRAF was running short of pilots. Following the 1960 break in pilot training, it was decided to make this up in 1961. No 15 PTC was brought forward to mid-1961 to follow close behind 14 PTC, which was then midway through BFS.
When 14 PTC moved on to Vampires, I was allocated three 15 PTC students. They were Officer Cadets David Hume, Doug Patterson and Bruce McKerron. Patterson did not do well. I put him up for a scrub check and he returned to Civvy Street. McKerron was a cocky young fellow who was too familiar for my liking, but once he knew where he stood he did well and I enjoyed teaching him.
Officer Cadets David Hume, Doug Patterson and Bruce McKerron.
Hume came from Umtali where I had known his parents and brother Peter before I joined the Air Force; but I had only noticed young David in passing.
From his very first gentle flight Dave Hume was airsick and sortie after sortie had to be cut short to get the honking cadet back on the ground. It was obvious to me that David had potential and should make a good pilot, so long as the airsickness problem could be overcome. Feeling sure his was not a physical problem, I set out to cure him.
Most of the students had flown about eight hours but Dave Hume had less than half of this time. As usual, he reached for his ‘honk packet’ twenty minutes into the flight. Once he had heaved up, I told him to tighten his seat belt and hold tight to see what he must eventually endure if he was to become a pilot. For about fifteen minutes I conducted non-stop aerobatics with lots of positive and negative ‘G’, plenty of fuel fumes and a couple of naughty flick rolls that even made me feel a bit queasy. When I stopped, Dave had half his face in the honk packet and his knees were up by his ears as he wretched noisily and repeatedly, but with nothing coming from his stomach. Back on the ground he staggered back to the crew-room bathed in sweat and so pale I became worried that I might have overdone things. When he eventually recovered I said to him, “Hume, you have experienced and survived much harsher flying than you will face at any stage of your flying training. What you have to go through to reach solo is very, very gentle, so stop worrying about your stomach and let’s get on with the job." Dave never had a moment’s trouble from then on and went solo with time to spare. He eventually gained the Sword of Honour as best student when he and his course members received their wings.
Some time after the last solo had been flown I was given Officer Cadet Harold Griffiths, due to ‘non-compatibility’ with his first instructor. He had joined the ground-training phase of his course late because, as a member of the Churchill School Pipe Band, Griffiths (Griff) had been given special dispensation by Air HQ to accompany the band on a tour of Scotland. His introduction to flying with the RRAF was unusual and might have put a lesser man right off flying as a career.
The Churchill School Pipe Band was well known to all Rhodesians for its excellence in Scottish piping dress and drills. So their invitation to participate at the Edinburgh Festival was wholly supported and the RRAF undertook to fly the band to Scotland and back.
OC 3 Squadron, Squadron Leader Harry Coleman, captained the aircraft with Flight Lieutenant Bill Smith as his co-pilot. They were in for a Tough trip because the work of professional saboteurs showed up again. Just prior to crossing the Zambezi River on the northbound leg, the port outer engine had to be closed down due to total loss of oil pressure. This necessitated turning back to Salisbury where a standby Canadair was available to resume the long flight to England. Two engines on this replacement aircraft also suffered the selfsame problem as the first. Fortunately these both occurred in the UK costing much wasted time and money. The aircraft eventually returned to New Sarum safely and disgorged a very relieved bunch of pipers.
Each of the three Rolls Royce Merlin engine failures occurred when high-pressure oil hoses fractured. The replacement engines acquired and fitted in England were fne. But back in Rhodesia all Canadairs had been grounded to find out why relatively new, high-quality hoses had failed.
This led to the discovery that some hoses, all in different locations on affected engines, had been cut with a fine blade right up against the steel sleeve of a coupling. The cuts ran all the way around the lip of the coupling, penetrating two of the three braided reinforcement layers. The cut lines were so fine that they were undetectable until subjected to severe bending. The saboteurs knew their business because it would have been impossible for any technician conducting a routine pre-flight inspection to see the cuts.
Returning to Harold Grifths. Hisfirstinstructor had passed him to me because of his cocky attitude. I had to agree that Grif seemed to be a bit too sure of himself, but I experienced no difficulties and found him to be a good student who learned quickly and few well. In time to come Grif and his lovely wife Linda became special family friends.
Fire-fighting cock-up
THORNHILL WAS OPENED TO THE public one Saturday for static displays of aircraft and equipment, flying displays, guard-dog displays and, horror of horrors, a fire-fighting demonstration.
As Station Fire Officer I had to arrange a meaningful display involving a fuel fire sufficient in size to radiate enough heat to force spectators to keep a respectable distance. For this, a three-foot barrier in sheet metal was erected and filled with plenty of old tyres, rags and half drums of aviation fuel. Immediate upon ignition, huge fames shot up to considerable height with masses of fame, heat and boiling black smoke.
First and second rehearsals by the fire section had the flame extinguished in quick order and Flight Sergeant Dumas assured me that his men would do even better on the day of the show. I had my doubts because experience had shown me that success in practice, with no hitches, often results in cock-ups and major embarrassment.
At the appointed time, with everyone’s attention focused by the public address system, Flight Sergeant Dumas walked up to the tank and initiated the fire. Spectators had moved back from the intense heat as the main Rolls Royce fire tender arrived and firemen commenced connecting their hoses. Immediately my doubts turned to concern because I could see that the black firemen, with so many spectators watching them, were overacting in typical African fashion.
As the fire hoses were rolled out to their correct positions, Flight Sergeant Dumas signalled the tender to provide foam. Seconds passed before a tiny trickle of liquid emerged from the nozzles where firemen stood braced for the pressure that failed to come.
The flames got bigger and hotter with spectators taking a few more paces backwards. Some of the hose tenders left their stations to seek out possible kinks in the line when suddenly full pressure came through to the nozzles. This threw the men who had remained at the nozzle ends straight into the air before the hoses broke loose and whipped around showering white foam over everything but the fire.
When the foam-soaked men regained control of their hoses and placed the gushing foam where it was intended, the fire went out. I was deeply embarrassed by such an appalling demonstration, but the crowd roared, “Encore! Encore!”
Congo crisis
DURING A VISIT TO SOUTH Africa, the then British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, had made his famous ‘winds of change’ speech in Cape Town. I can remember telling Beryl that he should have used the words, ‘WINDS OF DESTRUCTION’ because we could already see that the dismantling of the British Empire was doing no good at all to those African states
that had been granted independence. Infrastructures were collapsing and ordinary peoples’ standards of living were declining whilst the political ‘fat cats’ got fatter and military coups became order of the day. But it was not only Britain’s Empire that was being given away.
In mid-1960, chaos and savagery broke out in the Belgian Congo when the Government of Belgium handed control to unprepared black politicians. New names appeared in the papers—Lumumba, Kasavubu, Bomboko, Mabuto and Tshombe being the most prominent ones. Large numbers of soldiers of the Force Publique, who had previously been highly efficient and disciplined under white Belgian Officers, were suddenly leaderless and refused to take orders from any black politician.
Throughout the country the gendarmerie broke loose from their barracks with their weapons and went off on a spree of looting, rape and murder. The outrages, particularly against missionaries and nuns, were widespread and unbelievably cruel in nature. Seeking to escape the confusion and threat to their lives, thousands of white refugees fled into Northern Rhodesia.
Initial RRAF involvement was limited to the air transportation of distraught refugees from Ndola to Salisbury where huge transit facilities were established. After the last of the refugees had left, mainly bound for Belgium, the situation settled for a while but then it went from bad to worse.
Moise Tshombe, who was President of the Provincial Government of Katanga Province, attempted to take the initiative to regain control of the situation in his province. Realising that the Central Government had lost control he sought to save copper-rich Katanga that, by virtue of its socio-economic and geographical position, could stand alone.
Winds of Destruction: The Autobiography of a Rhodesian Combat Pilot Page 16