by John W Green
Immediately after the Christmas leave, the 64th entry (3M1) arrived at Cranwell. This was the time when some of our entry would be expected to be promoted to be Leading Apprentices to take charge of the Flights of the new arrivals. A list appeared on Standing Orders for some from our Flight to report to the Guard Room on a specified evening. Everyone knew that this would be the occasion when the selected few would be promoted. My name and number were included and I attended together with the others - I was not quietly confident, but quietly hopeful. I had been performing pretty well and was achieving high marks in the subject that we were studying. If I was not the best, I had been very near the top. I had kept my nose clean and my kit always passed inspection without too much trouble. I didn’t know but that evening was to be a pivotal point in my career in the RAF. I don’t know why, and of course I never will, but the Duty corporal said to me: ‘Oh, there’s been a mistake - your name shouldn’t have been on that list. You can go back to your flight.’ ‘Right, Corporal,’ I replied, and made my way back. My embarrassment was short-lived because the others who had been promoted soon came back and were being congratulated by the rest of us.
Although I was very disappointed and a little disheartened, I made up my mind to be among the next group who were to be made up to Leading Apprentice. First of all, I had a go at joining the band as a trumpeter. What we called trumpets were really straight bugles because they didn’t have any valves. I am afraid I can’t claim to be musical at all, but I did manage to master the few of the notes possible on the so-called trumpet. It was only a few days after I joined the band that it was taken to Skegness to form part of a cavalcade. There was I, marching along with my trumpet to my lips, pretending to be playing. It suddenly occurred to me that the tune they were playing was quite simple, so I thought I would give it a try. Mistake! For a few seconds there was a certain amount of discord in the band, but I got away with it and reverted to pretending for the rest of the march.
As a member of the band (and saying that I really am flattering myself, because I could just about struggle through a couple of the tunes that they played) I was part of the contingent that went to the 1951 Farnborough Air Show. We were ‘under canvas’, in a field somewhere near Fleet. With limited ablution facilities and, no access to irons to press our uniforms, it was very difficult to produce any semblance of being smart. Nevertheless we, together with a large contingent of other RAF personnel, marched past King George VI. After this march-past, I was told that technically I was now allowed to wear a red flash behind the brass trumpet badge on my arm. However it never came to that, because the bandmaster eventually realised that I was not really an asset to the band, so I had to hand in my trumpet. In reality this seemed only fair because the band was quite good, and to be honest was better without me. My only regret was that I never did get a chance to blow a reveille or a ‘Flag down’, both of which I had practised and managed to get right. The band was always popular whenever it played at any function in the Astra cinema on the base. On those occasions there was always a chorus of apprentices, including me, who would chant ‘Sussex! Sussex! Sussex!’ and we continued until the bandmaster gave in and it was played. Then we would all join in and sing out ‘You can tell them all because they know sod all at Sussex by the sea.’ Sometimes there were variations to that chorus. There was always a certain feeling of resentment among us apprentices. We thought that Cranwell College had usurped our anthem. We were the Lincolnshire Apprentices, they were cadets.[3]
In addition to joining the band, I decided to become a member of the boxing club to adopt a more prominent presence. Within a few months of joining the RAF we all had to take part in a boxing bout within the entry. I did alright in that; I forget which member of the entry I was pitted against, but his heart didn’t seem to be in it and I managed to knock him out of the ring onto one of the judge’s tables in the second round. When the opportunity arose, joining the boxing club seemed a good idea. I did say that it was to place myself more in the limelight but there may have been a secondary motive because, although those in the boxing club had to do training immediately after reveille at 6.30 in the morning, it meant that they went to late breakfast and avoided morning parade, which was quite a bonus.
Joining the boxing club meant that at one stage I was involved in an inter-entry contest at Cranwell, in which I came up against an apprentice about a year my senior. In the first round I took quite a lot of punishment, and at the end of that round my Second said to me that he had heard my opponent say to his Second, that he was going to give ‘that fat-faced little bugger’ a good hiding. Whether the more senior entry apprentice in the opposite corner had really said that I will never know, but it had the desired effect, because I became all fired up, threw caution to the wind, and in the second round I held my own. Then in the third round I made a mess of him. Mind you I was covered in blood, a lot of it my own, even on the back of my vest, but I won the bout. This was much to the delight of the members of the 2M6 Entry. As a consequence of this I was chosen to be part of the team to represent Cranwell at the inter Apprentice and Boy Entrant Schools in a tournament at Halton.
When we went down for the competition, because some members of other teams had been changed around, it was decided that I would not fight at 8 stone 7 pounds, which was my normal weight. The trainer said I would have to fight in the 8 stone and under group, and I would have to lose 7 pounds. This was only three days before the bout. I was not allowed to eat and had to train wearing two overcoats, the overcoat of the largest member of our team was put on me over my own overcoat, and I then had to exercise with the rest of the team running around in the gymnasium, doing exercises and skipping. After this I was fed with teaspoons of Andrew’s Liver Salts to dry up my blood, at least that’s what the trainer said. Much to my surprise I just made the weight, but the officials had to allow me to remove my trunks at the weigh-in. My first bout, and last, was against an apprentice who although only eight stone was nearly 5ft 8in tall. I never got near him; he easily out-pointed me and gave me a pretty good beating - apart from being tall he was quite a good boxer and he went on to win at that weight. No more late breakfasts or missed morning parades for me - or boxing.
At that tournament, one member of the 2M6 entry did very well but, his name, like the names of many of other members of the entry, I have unfortunately long since forgotten. However, I do remember a Phil Clifford, who claimed to have been a minor ballet dancer, and had been in a performance that had starred Margot Fonteyn. I never saw him dance, but I did see another of his talents: he could impersonate the way people walked, so much so that we could always recognise the person that he was impersonating.
3 www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sussex_by_the_Sea
Scarlet Fever
Although I had resolved to make myself into a likely candidate for making up to Leading Apprentice, when the time came round with the arrival of the 3M5, once again I wasn’t among the chosen few. Another time for reassessing where my future should lie.
There was a saying in the RAF and maybe it still exists: ‘If it moves, salute it; if it doesn’t, whitewash it’. This was very much the case when preparing for any big inspection. I did once hear of coal being whitewashed, but I never saw that. What I did see was the whitewashing of the kerbstones along the edge of the road by the barracks. I saw it very close up and personal because I was one of those doing it. Saturday morning fatigues meant that we were given cleaning tasks in and around the barracks. It was a bitterly cold morning, and Lincolnshire knows how to be cold. I was unlucky to be one of those who were allocated an outside task. Dressed only in fatigue kit, which was not really warm enough because it was overcoat weather, two of us were given the task of whitewashing the kerbstones. I was given one side of the block, and the other apprentice was assigned to the other side. As I brushed on the whitewash I could see it freezing into patterns. It took me just under an hour to complete the section that I had been given. When I
had finished I reported to the Corporal Apprentice who was in charge, and he came and inspected my efforts ‘That’s OK,’ he said, ‘but just hang on a sec while I check the other side.’ He came back a minute later: ‘No, the other side is much better. Do your bit again.’ So, with numb fingers I went back to where I had started and began all over again. Fortunately this time it was much quicker, but no warmer, and the other apprentice who was a really ‘good sort’ and knew how cold the job was came and gave me a hand as soon as the Corporal Apprentice was out of sight. So I was able to report back again after about ten minutes to get a seal of approval, and was then allowed to get back into the warm. It took ages for me to get any feeling back into my fingers.
This proved to be a useful lesson in what to do when on fatigues. Once the job’s done disappear and keep out of sight, and that is exactly what three of us did a few weeks later. We hit on the idea of getting off camp to a small roadside café which was isolated in the middle of nowhere, just outside the perimeter fence. I have no idea how we managed to get there, but we did. We’d been sitting in a corner, in hiding mode, for about half an hour having cups of tea when in walked a drill Corporal. He got his cup of tea, sat down, and then he saw us. He, like us, wasn’t supposed to be there, certainly not at that time of day. He gave us a look which we interpreted as ‘I won’t say anything if you don’t’. We finished up and left fairly soon after that. There was no come-back so we assumed that we had interpreted his glance at us correctly, but we couldn’t use that hidey-hole again.
By now we were beginning to adopt the characteristics of ‘old hands’, and the Leading Apprentices in our Flight had been replaced by two who seemed to be far less tyrannical, and we worked well with them. A small unauthorised concession that we were allowed to get away with by the L/As was listening to the radio for a while after lights out at 10 o’clock. We were beginning to be quite adept in matters electrical and someone had rigged a switch on the door so that the power was disconnected from the radio if the door was opened. The radio, of course, had valves which took a time to warm-up, and this could take up to half a minute. One night when we were all abed listening to our favourite station AFN (American Forces Network), we heard the approaching staccato click of the boots of the duty corporal (not an apprentice), in the corridor. Although the radio was playing music reasonably quietly, it would have been possible to hear it just outside the door. There was a pause at the door, then the corporal threw the door open ... silence. He stood there for a few moments then turned, went out and shut the door. The clicks then started to move away, the radio came on and although the volume had not been increased it seemed to be much louder than before. Another pause, then an increased pace of clicks and the door was once again thrown open, followed again by silence. The process was repeated once more. As the corporal started to move away for the third time the apprentice nearest the radio, and who owned it, got out of bed and managed to switch it off. The corporal must have heard something because he clicked straight back into our Flight with his studded boots all over our polished floor. ‘What are you doing out of bed?’ he demanded in a whisper that we all could hear. ‘I’ve got to go to the toilet, Corporal’ was the quick reply. ‘Well be quick about it and get back into bed if you don’t want to end up on a fizzer.’ We got away with it, but we did have the radio on a lower volume from then on and it was always switched off when AFN closed down at night with the song ‘It’s time to say goodnight’ by Al Bowlly.[4]
I have mentioned that we were becoming versed in matters electrical, but perhaps that became a little questionable on one Friday evening, when we were preparing for a CO’s inspection the next day. Practically everyone was trying to iron their uniform at the same time and the fuses to the Flight kept blowing. Some bright spark (pun intended) decided to put a six-inch nail in place of the fuse. The hard wiring burnt out.
Although we normally kept our socialising within our own entry in the NAAFI, on one occasion during my second year I was talking in a small group with some other apprentices from different entries, and it came up in the conversation that I came from Lee- on-the-Solent and used to swim out to the end of the pier. Whereupon one of those in the group from the 2M1 entry said, ‘I know you. Do you remember the time when we climbed hand over hand on that bleeding cable, to get back to the beach?’ ‘I couldn’t forget that in a hurry,’ I replied. Even though I never got to know his name, and he was in a different squadron from me, he was clearly a Gosport lad.
Also during my second year, one Friday evening after Flight cleaning I felt rather ill and walked all the way to the Sick Bay at the other end of the camp. When I got there and saw a Medical Orderly, he looked at me and said ‘You’re only trying to get off the big parade tomorrow. Go back to your barracks.’ So I walked all the way back. When I eventually got back I felt really groggy, and one of the members of the Flight who had been FTed, from the 2M1 entry - who knew the ropes pretty well and was a bit of a barrack-room lawyer - said to me ‘get into your bed’. I was only too pleased to do it. He then organised an ambulance to be called for and I was carted-off, back to the sick bay, and admitted. There was only one ward on the base, which coincidently happened to be the ward in which I had been born.
The next morning the nursing sister or matron came in to do her rounds. As I lay to attention, as you did, she said ‘pull up your pyjama top.’ The whole of my chest and parts we won’t mention were covered with a bright red rash of quite large spots. ‘You’ve got Scarlet Fever.’ She turned to one of her staff: ‘Isolate this patient.’ From then on things became a bit hazy. I think that I fell into a coma because I didn’t know anything for another twenty-four hours. I effectively lost a day of my life. When I came to, I discovered that I was now in a different hospital about twenty miles away, in Nocton Hall, with no recollection of the journey. Eventually three others from my Flight joined me. Scarlet fever in young children was very common and not worth worrying about, but on the other hand, catching it as an adult could be quite serious. The four of us were in isolation, each with our own room. We spent two weeks at Nocton Hall before we were returned Cranwell. On the plus side for this medical incarceration, as soon as we were over the worst of the infection, to help us with our recovery we were given each evening a bottle of Mackeson Stout. The other three ‘inmates’ didn’t like it. Guess who got four bottles each evening! It was quite pleasant, leisurely drinking the ‘medicine’ and more often than not listening to Teresa Brewer singing ‘Put another nickel in, in the Nickelodeon’ on the radio as it was the most popular song at that time.[5]
Apart from missing two weeks of training, another downside of our stay in Nocton Hall was the fact that our uniforms were fumigated, which resulted in them being so permanently creased and crumpled that it was impossible to iron them into any respectable shape. Fortunately, two weeks after we were returned to the fold, we were issued with replacements. The new uniforms presented their own problems. They made us look a bit like new recruits, and my new trousers didn’t fit any better. Our old uniforms, after being ironed almost daily for over a year, had lost quite a lot of their original nap, so they had a much smoother surface and ironed up quite crisply and the frequent cleaning of the buttons had made them smoother so that they shone more.
I would like to say that while I was in hospital I had time to think about my future plans, but to be truthful, I had completely forgotten about my previous setbacks. Once I had returned to Cranwell, I began to give it some serious thought. Eventually I came to the conclusion that the RAF and I would have to go our separate ways. I also knew that if I managed to ‘work my ticket’ (get out of the RAF) too soon I would still have to spend some time to complete my National Service, but if I left it too late and passed out, it would be almost impossible not to serve the full twelve years. There was another alternative. It was possible to ‘buy yourself out’ as one of the FTd Apprentices in our Flight had done. The problem with this was the fact that the money involved was w
ell beyond the means of my family. Also even if it had been within our means, I didn’t think Dad would be prepared to try to ‘come up’ with the money. I knew that he would be disappointed with me for trying to leave the RAF.
So I decided for my first move that I would start to perform less well in what we were studying. I was up there with the best, which meant that I would have to be subtle in how I went about it. I soon realised that you had to know your stuff pretty well when taking multiple-choice assessments. Putting down wrong answers, but not ones that were blatantly wrong was not easy. Gradually I worked my way down the ranking. The result of this was that I had to start attending extra evening classes with those who were struggling. This really was mind-numbing, having to go over and over topics that I had understood the first time round, but nevertheless I persisted. Then one day my name came up on orders and I was summoned to see the Wing Commander. As I stood to attention in front of him I could see that he was not in a good mood. After a few questions, in the answers to which I tried to imply that I had been happy when it was radios that we were learning about, but I wasn’t getting on so well with radar, he came to the point. ‘I know what you are up to, Green. Well let me tell you this, I will keep FT’ing you for as long as it takes.’ Then he paused and gave me a long, hard, icy look to show that he meant it. ‘I don’t want to see you here again. Dismiss!’ Sharp about turn and I was outside the door