By the Skin of my Teeth: The Memoirs of an RAF Mustang Pilot in World War II and of Flying Sabres with USAF in Korea

by Colin Downes

  Greater London is a huge collection of urban villages and Hampstead consisted of a largely artistic community with a history of famous musicians, writers, poets, painters and artistes. Consequently, there were no military or industrial targets, but in the adjacent district of Cricklewood to the west, then a largely Irish community, was the Handley Page Aircraft factory producing the Hampden medium bomber and the Halifax heavy bomber. A short distance to the north was the famous RAF air base at Hendon, and so the bombs that fell on Hampstead were in all probability intended for one of these two targets. Although the bombs we received were the result of poor marksmanship on the part of the Luftwaffe, there were some who attributed the German’s wrath to an evil Nazi plot to blow up Carl Marx resting in Highgate Cemetery; or the affluent Jewish community living in the neighbouring district of Golders Green; or the left-wing intelligentsia of Hampstead Village. Whatever the reason, the result was the unfortunate destruction of two fine old inns on Hampstead Heath: ‘Ye Olde Bull and Bush’, the theme of a popular music hall song, and ‘Jack Straw’s Castle’, an eighteenth-century coaching inn on the old toll road out of London to the North; and the site of a gibbet for the hanging of highwaymen preying on travellers to and from London. The name derives from Jack Straw, a common priest who led the peasant uprising in Essex. He became lieutenant to Wat Tyler in the Peasant’s Revolt against Richard II in 1381. Jack Straw addressed the assembled peasants on Hampstead Heath from a hay wagon, referred to as Jack Straw’s ‘Castle’. The original coaching inn was built on this site in 1721, together with horse troughs and a large shallow round stone pond to refresh the horses after their climb up the steep hill from London: and here I would sail model yachts and boats.

  Fortunately, despite the debris from the bombs that fell on Hampstead my mother and the house remained unscathed throughout the war. Before marrying my father, my mother was a fashion designer for Coco Chanel in Paris. She had a fashion house at London’s ‘West End’ in Bond Street, and consequently during my school holidays I would meet wives of many well-known personalities. My mother moved in a circle of artistic friends and during my visits from school and later while in the RAF, I met several famous representatives of the arts. Two great opera singers I met after the war remain vividly in my memory: Elizabeth Schwarzkopf who completely overawed me: and the great Italian tenor Beniamino Gigli, who gave me an inscribed silver cigarette case. The violinist, Yehudi Menuhin; the painter, Augustus John and the sculptor, Siegfried Charoux were other established artists I met when visiting my mother in Hampstead. During my adolescent and early maturity years a stay with either of my parents gave me a very different and diverse change of scene. With my mother it was always the arts: with my father it was field sports which included dogs, horses, guns, fly rods, cycling and walking. However, during the half-term break at school it was always my mother who visited me, and she would cause a stir when she arrived in her Singer Le Mans; especially with my housemaster, John Appleby, who was a bachelor. Telling me to bring a friend, we would squeeze into the two-seat open sports car – I do not remember it ever raining at half-term – as my mother roared off at high speed to some hostelry for a lengthy lunch. This was followed by a walk along either the beach or the river before she dropped us off at the school on her way back to London.

  The period of the early forties was for me the most influential of my life. It brought the end of my schooling, an abbreviated stay at university, my entry into the Royal Air Force and my participation in the Second World War. My private schooling was considered by some as privileged, although at the time it did not appear so to me. I recall my preparatory boarding school on the Channel coast of Kent, if I recall it at all, as a twentieth-century version of Dotheboys Hall in ‘Nicholas Nickelby’ by Charles Dickens. My memories of it are of a harsh teaching institution with a brutal and sadistic staff. It was a traumatic experience for an only child brought up in a sheltered existence at home. I remember the inadequately heated class-rooms and common-rooms in winter and the bitterly cold dormitories as I curled into a shivering ball in my bed trying to sleep dressed in socks and flannel pyjamas while wrapped in a woollen dressing-gown. I was awakened, it appeared, almost immediately, while it was still dark, for supervised washing in freezing cold water. This Spartan establishment believed fervently in the benefits of corporal punishment to instil discipline and to develop moral fibre. Even slight peccadilloes and minor infractions in class were subject to the canning of the proffered hand, leaving it inoperative for the rest of the day. More serious misdemeanours were punished at night in the dormitory in front of an attentive audience of classmates. This was in effect a double punishment for the unfortunate culprit as he lay in bed after ‘lights-out’ trembling in trepidation awaiting the arrival of his beater. The canning was carried out on bare buttocks in the centre of the dormitory, as the recipient clenched his teeth to stifle any cry of pain in front of his room-mates and then attempted to return nonchalantly to his bed; to lie shivering in the dark as he cried himself to sleep. I was a member of the school choir and I recall the discomfort of singing dressed in a thin surplice and Eton collar in the freezing cold chapel with the interminable evensong services. After the service the headmaster, our ‘Wackford Squeers’, gave his only contribution to the school curriculum when he regaled the assembled school with his derring-do as a staff officer speeding glum heroes up the line to death during one of the greatest fiascos of the First World War – Gallipoli. Fortunately, my move from the treble section of the school choir coincided with my departure to my secondary school: a much more benevolent institute of learning where corporal punishment was rare and properly regulated.

  The English public boarding school was a good preparation for entry into the armed forces, with uniformed discipline and a system of rewards and punishments. The system was supervised by an appointed student authority responsible to a housemaster for the enforcement of discipline and the administration of judicial punishments. Military discipline was enacted and experienced while serving in the Officer Training Corps (OTC) that provided all aspects of initiation into the British Army. Clayesmore was a boys’ boarding school with an Anglican persuasion; located in extensive grounds at Iwerne Minster in the beautiful county of Dorset. The village of Iwerne Minster, as the name implies, was the site of an early monastery alongside running water. It was a small, model English village, created by an enlightened nineteenth-century squire of the manor; with a fine twelfth-century church, and evidence of habitation going back to Roman and Saxon times. Clayesmore School had previously been part of Winchester College before breaking away to become an independent public school. It was at this attractive location that I spent the most impressionable and enjoyable period of my schooling as we attempted to adhere closely to the school motto – Dieu premier, donc mes freres. Although in no sense a military academy, Clayesmore made a continuous contribution to the armed services during both world wars. In the Second World War more than half of the school’s war casualties resulted from flying service in the RAF.

  The teaching staff was recruited from Oxford and Cambridge; preferably with a Blue at cricket, rugby football or athletics. An exception to this was my music master for whom I had great respect, not only for his musical achievements as the school’s director of music, but because he served with distinction as a fighter pilot in the RFC during the First World War; surviving ‘Bloody April’ in 1917. Reggie Sessions produced and directed a fine school orchestra for concerts and theatrical productions. He was also to create a very creditable brass band for the school OTC, with rousing renditions of Sousa for parade inspections despite disconcerting official War Office pronouncements and portents that in the event of hostilities in the neighbourhood the OTC would cease to exist! His organ voluntaries before and after matins and evensong on Sundays did much to make these lengthy services bearable while sitting on the wooden benches. Although my talent as a pianist was a great disappointment to my mother, who played the piano and the guitar, and to my music maste
r, I did learn from him that it was not necessary to be a musician to be musical and to appreciate Mozart. My housemaster, John Appleby, also had an influence on me in passing on some of his love of English literature and poetry; and the art of the printing press. He had a long teaching career at Clayesmore, becoming the school’s ‘Mr Chips’, although, in his case he was known to his boys simply as ‘Apples’. The headmaster, Evelyn King, was for us a remote figure that we saw only at school assembly and chapel. However, he was an academic of many parts as well as an astute businessman and a political chameleon. For a while at the start of the war he was an army colonel until he left the army to become a Socialist Member of Parliament. He returned to Clayesmore as headmaster at the war’s end, and on losing his socialist seat he became a Conservative Member of Parliament. In his latter years he became an academic once more and a respected author. Of all the teaching staff at Clayesmore the most memorable for me was Carl Verrinder; a truly remarkable man who taught physics, chemistry and many other sciences. I shall always remember his laboratory sessions as both entertaining and exciting. He had an absent minded habit of picking up stray chemical elements littering the benches in his wanderings while supervising experiments. On one occasion, while I was endeavouring to persuade a Bunsen burner to function, I saw our chemistry teacher leap into the air with a shout of pain as he frantically beat at his trouser pocket from which issued smoke and flames. Apparently, in the process of picking up various chemicals and putting them in his pocket, he selected some that when grouped together produced spontaneous combustion. After several attempts to quench the flames with misguided beakers of water directed at his person, we managed to put out the fire; leaving him with charred trousers showing some pink, scorched flesh where his pocket had been. Our wet and embarrassed chemistry teacher limped off to the school sanatorium where the matron removed the remains of his trousers to treat his burns. Carl Verrinder had a very varied life with an inexhaustible supply of energy and his spectrum of interests, for which he had the appropriate talents and expertise, was certainly impressive. As a chemist, apart from an ability to summon up spontaneous combustion, or as a physicist he could have contributed significantly to industry. However, he preferred to devote his time and passion trying to instil his enthusiasm into his students, no matter whether the subject was scientific; the activity sporting; or the art dramatic. As an Oxford Blue he coached the school rugby football, cricket and athletic teams. As an artist and actor he produced and directed the school dramatic society plays, with always one Shakespearean play during the year. And as climber, mountaineer, skier and canoeist he organized and led school trips and expeditions during the school holidays. I was to learn more from him than the rest of the teachers put together, including a more lasting appreciation of Shakespeare than gained in the classroom.

  It could be said of Clayesmore that in time of war its main function was the supply of recruits to the armed forces. This included one VC during the First World War. Throughout the Second World War, in addition to a steady supply of volunteers to the three Armed Services, the school provided a contingent from the OTC for the Home Guard platoon of Iwerne village. The Home Guard had developed from the earlier force of local defence volunteers, the LDV, created to protect Britain in the event of invasion. The school’s Home Guard platoon formed the major portion of Iwerne Minster’s defence of the Realm in providing the resistance to German airborne forces landing in the area; while the remnants of the British Expeditionary Force, recently evacuated from Dunkirk, would tackle the German Panzer force landing on the beaches. Winston Churchill’s stirring words on how we should greet a Nazi invasion was fresh in our minds, We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing-grounds, we shall fight in the fields, and in the streets; we shall never surrender.

  I recall the annual return to Clayesmore at the start of the school term as a major military exercise with hundreds of boys loaded with their trunks and ‘tuck boxes’ assembled at Paddington Station. The harassed school staff deployed everybody and their baggage onto the special train for Semley, the nearest station on the Great Western Railway for the school. Here a similar exercise took place to load everybody and everything into a fleet of coaches to the school. Surprisingly, there were no major problems and no loss of baggage, or boys, in returning to school that autumn of 1940. After witnessing part of the Battle of Britain over London during the summer holiday, I continued to be on the fringe of the air battle as the Luftwaffe attacked western targets. On one occasion while cycling near Blandford Camp I took refuge in a ditch as a German bomber strafed the countryside. On another occasion an RAF Hurricane shot down a Bf-110 fighter over the school and it crash-landed on a nearby hillside. The Hurricane returned flying low over the school before climbing in a victory roll and I wondered if the pilot was an old boy from the school. The village alarm sounded and senior members of the cadet corps rushed to draw rifles and join the local village defenders to apprehend or battle any survivors of the crash. Led by the solitary representative of the village constabulary, we advanced in line abreast up the hill with bayonets fixed to the crashed aircraft. As we nervously approached the twin-seat Bf-110, which appeared intact apart from a wheels up landing, we saw the pilot standing by the gunner’s machine gun, Luger pistol in hand, smoking a cigarette. He did not resist and handed his pistol to the constable. Which was just as well for, although we were issued with blank cartridges, none of the cadets had any live ammunition. The German’s contempt for this motley band of amateur soldiers was very apparent as he completely ignored his gunner dying in the rear cockpit. Perhaps our prisoner considered that his stay in England as a POW would be of short duration after the German invasion. The injured gunner was taken back to the school but died in the sanatorium.

  The weapons available to the school Officer Training Corps (OTC) were First World War Lee-Enfield rifles and bayonets, but the Home Guard members of Iwerne Minster village had to provide their own weapons such as shotguns, small calibre rifles or First World War souvenirs. Failing that they had to make do with an army issued pike. Later, we received the Mills hand grenade that was far more hazardous to the thrower than any anticipated assailant. A regular army corporal arrived with two boxes of grenades, together with one box of detonators, to brief us on the weapon. At least the Army appreciated that for our own safety someone should advise their rustic warriors on the workings, priming and throwing of the grenades. During the briefing and while demonstrating the priming of a grenade, the corporal commented, ‘Now then, Gentlemen, these grenades are very dangerous and can be lethal. This detonator can take off your fingers as it is very sensitive to any pressure; which is how it explodes the grenade. Therefore, when inserting the detonator into the grenade like so; both should be treated with the greatest of contempt’! The corporal looked a little askance at the resulting schoolboy laughter. These words of advice were to remain with me thereafter for whenever some danger threatened, or moments of panic arose, the worthy corporal’s words would return.

  The local Home Guard commander decided the grenades were too dangerous to store in the school armoury and ordered that they be stored in the village Home Guard armoury in a cellar beneath the village pub. The landlord of ‘The Talbot Arms’ and his regulars decided that tackling General Student’s elite paratroops was one thing but drinking their beer while seated above two boxes of live hand grenades was quite something else. They decided to hide the grenades in a safe place and someone had the bright idea to hide the boxes of grenades in the village stream below the bridge close to the pub. That winter a particularly high flood carried them away, not to be seen again for some years. The fate of the detonators is a mystery; but one summer some village children playing in the stream found the hand grenades and started playing catch with them. Fortunately, none of the grenades contained detonators.

  Some three years after I left school and returned to England with my ‘wings’, I attended an abbreviated commando assault course to fill in time before an assignment
to flying duties. We carried out firing practice on various weapons that included the throwing of the Mills hand grenade. One nervous participant managed to drop a live grenade after pulling the pin. The rest of us dived for cover behind a rampart but the thrower froze and with only seconds to live, the sergeant instructor, intent on a posthumous VC, was quick and adroit enough to throw the grenade clear before it exploded. I thought back to what mayhem there might have been had we ever practised live grenade throwing in the Home Guard where just carrying a loaded firearm around had been dangerous enough.

  During the summer and autumn of 1940 the Iwerne Minster Home Guard kept vigil for the arrival of the German gliders and paratroops. To facilitate this some local artisans built a wooden watchtower some thirty feet high on top of a nearby hill in Cranborne Chase and senior members of the school cadet corps participated in the watches. Few of us were brave enough to venture up the tower for our watch and this prudent sense of self-preservation was confirmed during the first gale of the autumn when the watchtower crashed to the ground; fortunately without any casualties. There was no thought of a replacement watchtower. During the vigils on that hill top in Cranborne Chase, the watches involving the dawn period stand out most vividly in my memory. I sat nervously awaiting the arrival of General Student’s Fliegerkorps and as the sunrise appeared so too did a beautiful vista of a verdant and peaceful Dorset. It was hard to realize at such a time that we were at war.

  With nothing to do until relieved on watch I listened to the many tales from the local Home Guarders who mostly had rural occupations. One exception was an employee at the pork pie factory in the village. These pies were great favourites in the school where the wartime diet was predictably monotonous. However, after hearing him describe their process of manufacture I could never approach them with the same enthusiasm afterwards, despite the delicious aroma of the hot, tasty and freshly baked pies. At a time when we experimented with the forbidden sins of tobacco and alcohol I found, in common with my friends, that draught cider held more attraction for me than beer. During cycle rides through the local countryside we sampled with awe the locally brewed cider that was of significantly higher alcohol content than the local beer. These cycle rides confirmed an old adage – Cider is treacherous because it smiles in the face and then cuts the throat. Listening one night to the cider making process from a fellow Home Guarder employed in the local cider distillery changed my perception. He explained to me that the enzymes in the apple juice required feeding with protein in order to produce the amino acid of the cider. To achieve this they tossed a large hunk of meat and even a carcass into the big distillery vat to produce the required body in the brew. I was surprised to learn what went into this vat and how quickly it disappeared. This may well have accounted for my subsequent and early conversion from the apple to the hop; starting with the sweeter malt stouts before graduating to and appreciating the delights of true English bitter ale. Some years later when stationed in Yorkshire I heard of a tragedy that occurred in the local brewery whose beer, I considered, lacked both taste and strength. It appeared that a brewery worker, maybe overcome by fumes while inspecting the large fermentation tank during the weekend, fell in. Unfortunately, his disappearance was not noted until the start of the working week. In recovering his remains they drained the fermentation tank and hundreds of gallons of beer flowed through the gutters providing a heady effluvium in the town. In rather questionable taste I could not refrain from commenting to friends that apart from the tragedy of the accident, it was also a pity and a waste of the beer as this was the only occasion when this particular brand of beer had contained any body!