I know that job transfer was all part of serving my apprenticeship, but when I was told to report to the construction site of the extension to Colston Road School, I was disappointed. Up until then, I had been on jobs of two weeks’ duration. I knew Colston School – it wasn’t far from my home in Springburn – and I knew that the job there was very definitely long term. I suppose I was prejudiced before I even started, but it was worse than I thought. I realise now that it was all part of serving my time and learning all aspects of an electrician’s job. But squatting day after day in the cold concrete ducts of a half-built school, drilling hundreds upon hundreds of holes in hard concrete walls before fitting rawlplugs into them for the armoured cables, really sickened me. I grew to hate the job and started to take days off. I really dreaded going into Colston School every morning. I started to think about branching out.
Chapter Four
Conduct: Exemplary
The new jet fighter aircraft were always zooming about in the skies. I could recognise the Meteors, Vampires and Canberras and felt a thrill every time I saw them flying high above me. The more I saw them, the more I thought about flying them. In those days, I used to read comics every week. There was a wide choice: the Hotspur, the Rover, the Adventure, the Wizard and the Champion, to name only a few. These were columns of solid print, with only one exciting picture at the beginning of each story to illustrate the key point of that week’s adventure. Strang the Terrible would be left in dire straits, about to be crushed by some huge stone, or tied to a stake ready to be burned alive – you just had to read the follow-up. Each week Sergeant Matt Braddock, the modest Victoria Cross-winning bomber pilot, would overcome impossible odds. I wanted to be like him.
On the day I turned seventeen I took time off from Colston School and went into town, heading for the recruiting office of the Royal Air Force.
‘Yes?’ A smartly uniformed RAF officer looked up at me. Judging from his sparkling appearance I thought he must be at least a group captain. As I soon learned, he was a flight sergeant.
‘I’d like to join the RAF,’ I said to the flight sergeant.
He rose to his feet, hand stretched out in welcome. ‘And what sort of a job would you like to do in the Royal Air Force?’
In my innocence, I thought everyone in the RAF got to fly Spitfires. ‘I want to be a pilot,’ I answered in all honesty.
‘Just the sort of chap we’re looking for!’ The flight sergeant welcomed me with a confident smile and firm handshake as his free hand stretched for an application form. I signed on for a five-year regular engagement.
I knew I’d blundered the minute I jumped out of the truck at RAF Bridgnorth. It looked dreary on very first impressions. I guessed the disabled Spitfire imposingly propped up at the camp gates was the closest I was going to get to a plane.
A squad of corporals – I soon found out that they were our drill instructors, or DIs – was waiting for us, yelling and screaming at the tops of their voices as they marshalled the new arrivals into a three-deep parade. We struggled to get our backpacks and kit organised and shuffled roughly into line. Then, with four or five DIs bawling out indecipherable orders as loud as they could shout, we were marched away from the guardroom area down towards our billets.
‘Halt! You bunch of useless layabouts!’ One DI’s voice sounded louder than the others when we came alongside a row of long wooden huts. ‘You lot couldn’t march to save your useless fucking lives!’
‘Shut up!’
‘Don’t move!’
‘Stand still, you bunch of fucking nancy boys!’ Suddenly the shouts came from every side. There was consternation in the ranks as we bumped and pushed at one another in an effort to sort ourselves out.
‘Right turn! Are you all fucking stupid? I said, right turn!’ The voice rose to a demented scream as others bellowed and cursed around us. At last we got ourselves sorted out and facing towards the wooden huts. A nervous silence hung over us. I had heard swearing before, but never like this. Was this the way they were supposed to talk to us?
‘Right!’ one of the DIs shouted in a more-or-less normal voice. ‘These are D squadron’s billets and you miserable-looking bunch of pricks are, God help me, D squadron. You’ve got five minutes to sort yourselves into groups of twelve and move into a billet. I don’t want to see anyone standing out here in five minutes. Right? Now move!’ The last word was a hysterical shriek.
We had only just dumped our kit on the beds when the door to the billet burst open and in stormed a corporal drill instructor. We all turned to stare nervously at him, as he seemed about to explode from apoplexy. ‘Attention!’ he screamed. ‘A-fucking-tention!’ He put his face right up against one of the guys in our billet and screamed at him. ‘Are you fucking stupid or something? Stand to attention.’
He stalked to another man and gave much the same performance. Eventually, by dint of screaming and yelling, he got us all standing by the sides of our beds. ‘Now,’ he breathed, looking at us in obvious disgust. ‘I’ll let you off this time, but the next time I walk through that door’ – he pointed at the billet’s entrance – ‘whoever sees me first will shout, “NCO present!” And you will all jump to attention, understood?’
‘Yes.’ A mumbled response greeted him.
‘Understood?’ he screamed. ‘Let me hear you.’
‘Yes, sir!’
This set him off again. ‘Corporal!’ he yelled. ‘You call me Corporal.’ He strode round the room actually growling. I know now it was just an act to intimidate us. I wasn’t scared at the time, just puzzled that a man could make such a prick of himself and think he was impressing me.
That was my introduction to RAF Bridgnorth. I’ve never liked loud people – I think it hides a weakness – and this corporal idiot was the loudest man I’d ever heard. I definitely knew that I wasn’t going to like Bridgnorth.
Our training started right away: square bashing, weapons training and fieldcraft. It wasn’t so bad when you were actually doing something and I suppose they’ve got to scream and shout to impose their authority and get you to jump to their attention, but I actually liked the square. I enjoyed the precision marching and the rifle drill, but I couldn’t put up with all the swearing and the stupid, impossible threats to tear off my arm and beat me to death with the soggy end.
My pal there was a guy called Alan Patterson from Larkhall near Glasgow. He was a rough-and-ready type and was always getting into fights. Fortunately. he was a handy amateur boxer so could look after himself all right. I used to pal about with him and go drinking at the NAAFI when we weren’t cleaning our kit or polishing the floors of the billet.
I was never a particularly good airman, as we were called, though for the life of me I don’t know why we had that title. My full title was Aircraftman Second Class, the lowest form of life in the RAF, as the screaming DIs constantly reminded us. I just got on with my basic training and hoped that I would go somewhere decent when it was all over. We had as much chance of getting into the air as a one-legged man has of winning an arse-kicking competition.
One day I had to go for a haircut and, when I was sitting in the camp’s barber’s shop, which sold everything from cheap jewellery, watches and cigarette lighters to tobacco and sweets, I noticed that the shop took up only about one third of a billet-sized hut. The other sections of the hut held a library and an empty classroom. I looked at the construction of the internal walls. They were a soft fibreboard. I could almost press the wall in with my hand and I knew I could certainly stick a bayonet through it.
A couple of nights later I found myself entering the unlocked classroom and in five minutes I had cut a gaping hole through to the barber’s shop. I needed cash, so I emptied the till and packed all the fags and tobacco I could into the old kit bag I had got hold of. The cheap costume jewellery, watches and lighters seemed valuable at the time, so they went into the kit bag too.
I knew there would be almighty hell to pay, so I hid the jam-packed kit bag in an air-raid shelte
r behind the firing range and was in the NAAFI before 9.30 pm. Alan was there and I told him what I had done. He didn’t believe me at first, but when I showed him a small wad of notes he realised that I had to be telling the truth. Later on I showed him the kit bag of stuff and we agreed that it would be easy enough to get rid of the fags and tobacco, but too dodgy to try and sell the jewellery and other things. We also agreed that we couldn’t sell the fags in the camp, as people would ask questions. In the end we split the goods into two parcels. The fags and tobacco stayed in the kit bag, the other stuff we repacked in a small case and stashed it just outside the boundary fence of the camp.
The first chance we got, we collected the kit bag and, wearing our uniforms, we took the bus to Wolverhampton. We really didn’t know where we were going to sell the stuff, but picked a transport-type café that seemed to have a rough-and-ready trade and where we felt comfortable. Sure enough, the man behind the counter showed immediate interest when we told him that we had just come back from an overseas posting and had smuggled back extra fags and tobacco. The deal took about two minutes, with us accepting his offer of half his own marked-up prices. The café owner was left with the kit bag; we left with just over £50 between us.
I had been expecting to see the police in the camp, or hear it mentioned on the camp radio station. But no, nothing was said, a police technique designed to tempt the perpetrators into talking about the job or trying to sell the goods and so give themselves away.
The lift I got from the success of my job kept me going for a few weeks and everything seemed a bit brighter. It’s great the difference a few quid makes and I still had the rest of the gear to sell. In order to play it safe, Alan and I had agreed to keep the other things until we went on leave at the end of our basic training. We planned to take it home with us then and try and sell it. In the end, when we inspected the gear properly, we realised that most of it was rubbish. So we tossed the ‘jewellery’ and split the watches and lighters between us. Then we hid it again until we would be going home.
At the end of the eight-week training course, I was posted to RAF Melksham, Wiltshire, a training camp for the electrical camp. We collected our stashed loot and took it home with us on our seven-day end-of-training leave. Alan and I had a last drink together on the train home and made all sorts of arrangements to meet up sometime. He got off the train at Motherwell carrying his little parcel of goodies and I bet he did the same as me: gave them all away. That was the last I saw of him.
I was probably the first guy that ever stood at the corner of Palermo Street in an RAF uniform instead of the usual HLI kit. The boys welcomed me back and I told them my tales of derring-do at Bridgnorth – most of them grossly exaggerated, of course, just like the HLI boys. The seven days were over in a flash and before I knew it I was getting off the train at Melksham and looking for a bus up to the RAF camp.
RAF Melksham was a lot more relaxed than Bridgnorth. No more insane screaming and shouting. No more ‘Outside, D squadron!’ yells every time you sat down for a minute. No more organised marching up to the dining halls. There were cleaning duties in the billet and your kit had to be up to scratch, but that was acceptable. I had brought my bike with me to Melksham and had plenty of time to train; and, surprise surprise, for the first time since I had joined the RAF, I got to touch a plane. Only thing was, it was a German plane! They had several of these aircraft in our training hangar and we practised tracing circuits and soldering joints on them. Maybe they didn’t want us messing up British planes, worn out or not.
Even though things weren’t too bad at Melksham, it still wasn’t for me. When I signed on in Glasgow, I thought I would be flying about in the sky like Matt Braddock, not playing around with captured German aircraft. Once the novelty wore off, I fell back into my old ways of wondering how I could earn some money.
It must be true, that old proverb about birds of a feather flocking together, because out of all the guys in my billet, I found myself gravitating more and more to the company of a chap called Monty. We first got chatting because, like myself, he was Scots. It didn’t take either of us long to find a kindred spirit in each other and before long we were exchanging ideas on how to earn a few quid. As it turned out, Monty was a bigger crook than me. He had discovered a lorry park behind some buildings in Melksham and he told me that it had been a habit of his to raid lorry parks in the Borders. He wanted to check the loads of the parked vehicles. ‘You never know what you’ll find,’ he told me. ‘It could be anything… tobacco, shoes, clothing, even useless rubbish. Anything.’ I agreed to give it a go and off we went into the village.
We got among the lorries and checked two or three, looking for anything portable we could make money on. We were just folding back the tarpaulin of one lorry when a shout went up from the window of one of the houses overlooking the parking area. We had to run across an open area to get to the exit and whoever had spotted us would have seen our uniforms. Once on the road outside, we headed back for camp, but about halfway there we heard a lorry, obviously driving fast, coming up behind us. We ducked down in the ditch and waited until it had passed. Sure enough, it turned in at the camp gates and halted at the guardhouse. We managed to get back into the camp by crossing a couple of fields and made our way back to our billet.
We were disappointed, but felt lucky to have avoided capture. Later on, we both realised that we hadn’t thought it through. What if we had stolen something? Where would we have put it? Where would we have sold it? It was one thing to raid lorries on your own stamping ground where you knew plenty of hiding places, even your own house, if necessary. Here, it was different. And now we didn’t dare go back to the lorry park anyway – they’d be on their guard. We were really a bit disappointed and still short of cash.
I told Monty about my success at Bridgnorth and we decided to check out the situation at Melksham. My experience with the barber’s shop had shown me what to look for and, sure enough, when I went to the camp shop the next day, I found exactly the same set-up. However, it proved to be a better target than my last effort. It was an almost identical hut, converted into three distinct sections. At one end the barber’s shop flourished and looked quite an attractive prospect, every bit as easy as the one at Bridgnorth. Then there was a middle section that seemed to be some sort of reading lounge. It had tables and chairs along with three or four old armchairs in it. I think it was just used as a waiting room if the barber was busy. But the last section was an eye-opener: a post office. My heart started thudding the moment I walked inside, making a small purchase as an excuse to enter the premises. The first thing I saw was a massive safe and pound signs flashed before my eyes. The shop was also stocked with all sorts of attractive items.
It was easy, except for the safe. The waiting room windows were left open and it took seconds for us to get inside. Another couple of minutes and the beaverboard partition wall was torn open. We had the foresight to bring two large suitcases and we filled them with everything we could get our hands on. There were boxes of pens, watches, ornaments, souvenirs, lighters and other interesting stuff. It made quite a haul, definitely my biggest so far, when we counted the sheets of half-crown savings stamps we found in a drawer.
But the safe defeated us. I felt gutted to leave it untouched, but we had no option. It could have easily and quickly been ripped open along its seams, but in those innocent days this knowledge was beyond me.
We hid the suitcases in dense undergrowth on a railway embankment near the camp and spent the rest of the evening in the NAAFI congratulating ourselves on a job well done. We had found about £40 in cash; along with the savings stamps, which we intended to cash piecemeal so as to avoid suspicion, it came to about £100. It was a good haul for two skint airmen. We lived quite lavishly for a week or two on the money, going into the big NAAFI club in Chippenham and ordering fancy meals.
Once again I had got into competitive cycle racing and entered an inter-camp cyclocross event. This particular race was over a distance of about
eight miles, half on roads and half across fields. I entered it on my immaculate road-racing bike – ten gears, racing wheels, lightweight tubulars and all. I only finished third in the actual event, but the two men who beat me were both top-class riders. A guy called Edney, an English amateur champion, was first and a professional road racer called Holliday finished second. I was very pleased with myself over that and won a prize of 7s. 6d.
Just before the three-month deadline for buying myself out of the RAF ran out, I put in my application for discharge by purchase. I actually thought that all I had to do was put in the form, pay the £25 and leave, all in the one day. Not so! I had to make the application, then have an interview with some wing commander. I remember him asking me if I was missing my mother. I told him that I had only joined up because the flight sergeant in Glasgow had told me I could become a pilot. He smiled at that and put my papers in for processing. He said it would take a few weeks and in the meantime I was to carry on. If I changed my mind I was to let him know immediately. He was a nice guy.
By now it was close to Christmas 1954 and we were all going home on leave. We got paid extra money, ‘credits’ they called it and were given travel warrants home. Monty and I had agreed that the best thing to do with our two suitcases, still hidden on the embankment, was to split up the stuff between us and sell it at home in the few days before Christmas, when we could expect higher prices. It was a good idea, only messed up by the fact that when we went to get the cases they were gone! We searched up and down that embankment in case we had missed the precise hiding place, but it was no good: they were gone and we had to write them off. It was quite a disappointment to me. On the day we left the camp to head for the railway station I walked along with Monty. There was something about him that was different. Somehow or other he wasn’t as talkative as usual. Then just as we entered the station he turned very abruptly on his heel, saying something about having to go somewhere on his own and off he went. I thought it was odd behaviour because he was catching the same train as me, all the way to Carlisle. It was only later on that I thought about the disappearance of the two suitcases. Until this very day I still don’t know for certain if he took them, but I can think of no other reason for his odd behaviour. As I said before, Monty was a bigger crook than me. He never returned after Christmas and was posted absent without leave.
Armed and Dangerous--This is the True Story of How I Carried Out Scotland's Biggest Bank Robbery Page 4