by Andy Bull
The two Roses came down from Watch Hill later that evening. Clyde’s wife would be staying on in the United States for a while and would join him in the UK when she could. She and Billy began to plan a farewell party. The Aquitania was due to sail at noon on Wednesday, so they decided it had better be an early luncheon that day. Real early. They started it just after midnight. By the following morning they were holed up in the 21 Club. It had only just opened for the day, and they were pretty much the only people in there other than the staff, who were all preparing for the lunch rush. At 11 a.m., Clyde cut out for the harbor. The Aquitania was moored at West 50th Street, six blocks over. He hated long goodbyes, so he left the three of them at the club and caught a taxi to the pier.
At the waterfront, everything was in chaos. Only the previous day, President Roosevelt had declared that the federal authorities would be searching all foreign ships in American harbors, under the 1925 Neutrality Act, to check whether they were carrying weapons or other war materials. The German liner Bremen had been stuck in New York for two days while customs officials conducted their search. Her crew spent their time running lifeboat drills in the harbor, in case they were bombed or torpedoed when they finally got to sea. Like all the other ships, each and every one of her windows and portholes had been blacked out so she’d be harder to spot.
Clyde had been on board the Aquitania for thirty minutes when the captain’s voice came over the ship’s address system. He explained that the sailing of the French liner Normandie, also due out that day, had been canceled because she was carrying so few passengers. Those who had tickets to sail with the Normandie were going to be transferred to the Aquitania instead. The Aquitania’s departure had therefore been put back; she would now be leaving at 7:30 that evening. Faced with an eight-hour wait at the docks, Clyde decided there must be better things to do with his final few hours in New York. So he walked back to 21, hoping the others would still be there. And they were. He walked up to the table and announced, in his cheeriest voice, “It’s all over, I’ve won the war single-handed. Now, who’d like a drink to celebrate?”
“I sat down to tell them the real story,” Clyde remembered. “And Billy got a very serious look on his face.” Something in him had snapped in the short time since Clyde had left 21. Watching his friend go off to war, alone, without him, was more than he could take. “And he suddenly said, ‘That’s it, I’m going.’” Billy got up and walked away from the table. He had seven hours to get ready. He sent a telegram to a friend in Washington to double-check on whether his British visa was still valid, called his lawyer to give him instructions for tying up all those loose ends, then went to the head office of Dillon Read and handed in his notice. He decided to hold off from telling his family what he was up to. That, he thought, could wait. That night, he and Clyde boarded the Aquitania together. This time, both their wives came down to wave them off, neither sure when or if they would see their husbands again.
The Aquitania was at sea for eight days. The voyage took a little longer than usual because the ship, completely blacked out through the night, took a zigzag course, an evasive action designed to confound any lurking German U-boats. On the fifth day of the voyage, three days out from Southampton, war was declared.
—
Why did he do it? What made a man “blessed with all this world’s goods” give it all up to volunteer to fight someone else’s war? Billy’s English friends didn’t have either the time or the inclination to worry about it. “As regards Billy’s reasons for coming over, what his inner personal feelings were I cannot know,” wrote Mouse Cleaver many years later, “only surmise. He was a close friend of several of us, largely via the snow, [and] his wife was English. I might venture that he had become not so much English as more European. Maybe, maybe not. He was certainly not a rich kid looking for adventure. He knew exactly what he was doing, and the possible consequences.”
Plenty have tried to reason why. Among them, the writers, historians, and journalists who have touched on Billy’s life have come up with a range of answers, the most common of which was the one provided by Michael Seth-Smith, who put the decision down to the fact that “Billy disliked the influence of Nazism intensely.” Billy stopped short of providing an explanation in his diary. “My reasons for joining in the fray are my own,” he wrote, “and have no place here. Undoubtedly a great many people think I’m the original bloody fool, but again the object of this journal is not to discuss the pros and cons of a fait accompli.” So no one has ever had the definitive answer.
Until now. On September 10, only days after he had arrived in London, Billy wrote a letter to his sister. Rose understood Billy’s decision to volunteer. She had been prepared for it. His parents were startled by it, when he finally told them, but they soon came to accept it. But Peggy, who was living in San Mateo, California, safe with her family on the far side of the world, thought he was nuts.
Naturally, my coming over has been a shock to the family although I have tried to warn them I would do just that in case of war for the last two years. I want you to understand my reasons as you’re the only sister I’ve got and I think we’ve always been closer than the average brother and sister. As you know, I’ve spent most of the formative years of my life here at school, Cambridge, etc, and most recently working here. I have far more friends here than in America. I have an English wife of whom I’m extremely fond, and altogether my roots are almost stronger here than any place I know. They’ve been damn good to me in good times so naturally I feel I ought to try and help out in bad if I can. There are absolutely no heroics in my motives, I’m probably twice as scared as the next man, but if anything happens to me I at least can feel I have done the right thing in spite of the worry to my family—which I certainly couldn’t feel if I was to sit in New York making dough.
Flash back through the years. “The two great characteristics to develop in any child are courage and justice,” Billy once wrote. “Broadly speaking, with these well-developed a person can face the world and be successful.” He came to fight because his conscience told him that he should stand firm with his friends, with his new family, for his adopted country. He had no better reason than that. He didn’t need one.
But before Billy could serve, he had to be accepted. At this point, the RAF’s Eagle Squadrons of American volunteers hadn’t even been conceived, let alone organized. The idea for them was still being thrashed out, in fact, by Billy’s two old friends the Sweeny brothers, Bobby and Charles, who had taken those runabouts around Nice, Cannes, and Monte Carlo with him in his Bentley back in 1930. Charles Sweeny soon set up a Home Guard unit for Americans who were “deep-rooted in England.” He wrote to his father and had him send over fifty tommy guns for the unit to use. A little later, when he got permission to start recruiting American volunteers for a fighter squadron, he sounded Billy out about whether he would be interested in taking charge of it—a job that eventually went to Bill Taylor, Rose’s boss from the travel agency in New York. As Clyde remembered, “Billy insisted from the beginning that he would be posted to 601 or else he wouldn’t join the RAF.”
If, that was, the RAF even wanted him. As soon as they had docked at Southampton, Clyde had gone off to join up with 601. Billy had headed to London, to his club at Dover Street, where he discovered that only British citizens or sons of British citizens were eligible to join the Air Force. They were actively recruiting from around the empire, but it was felt, then, that taking in volunteers from neutral countries, especially the United States, could be troublesome politically. The US ambassador, Joseph Kennedy, was actively discouraging Americans from getting involved. “As you love America,” Kennedy had said, “don’t let anything that comes out of any country in the world make you believe you can make a situation one whit better by getting into the war. There is no place in this fight for us.” But then Billy never could stand American politicians. He decided “to pull every string” he could to get in.
The fi
rst thing he did was arrange to have dinner with Ben Bathurst, a friend of his at the St. Moritz Tobogganing Club, which controlled the Cresta Run. They met at the Savoy on Thursday evening, September 7. Bathurst was a barrister, like Bushell, but he was a little older than the rest of Billy’s St. Moritz crowd, and a little more influential too. His father was Viscount Bledisloe, who had been the governor-general of New Zealand. Ben had been an artillery officer in the First World War, and he was already in service again, as a squadron leader in the RAF. He promised to set up an interview between Billy and William Elliott, who was assistant secretary of the War Cabinet Secretariat, and Chief of Air Staff Cyril Newell. It was all fixed for that coming Sunday. The trouble was, the only paperwork Billy had with him was his passport, which was no good, since it showed he was a US citizen. So he and Bathurst concocted a story together. “I would have to make a very passable pretense at being Canadian and of Canadian parentage,” Billy wrote. “I had to make up some very watertight answers for any questions they might be expected to ask me.”
Billy spent most of Friday trying to think up his alibi. “I remember going out to Roehampton to play a little golf to try and get a healthy look on my face to survive the ordeal,” he wrote. “Needless to say, for once I had a quiet Saturday night—I didn’t want to have eyes looking like bloodshot oysters the next day.” Looking back, he added, “It might appear that I rather over-emphasized the importance of me being accepted. Perhaps I did a bit. It was largely a matter of pride and the terrific desire to be doing something.” He was desperately worried that he would be sent back to the US, humiliated. “I had walked out of my very good job on two hours’ notice. So far as my family were concerned, I had disappeared completely.”
In the end, the meeting passed easily enough. The main thing the officials seemed to want to know was whether it was true that Billy’s former employer, Clarence Dillon, had really once signed a check for $150 million to buy General Motors. “Yes,” Billy told them, “he did.” They just couldn’t quite seem to get their heads around the sum. He was accepted into the RAF that same day, on the lie that—as it says on his service record—he was born in Montreal. That evening he went to the Bath Club to celebrate. But first he sat down and penned that letter to Peggy, explaining what he had done and why he had done it. His feelings were so fervent that he even offered to help Peggy and Jennison volunteer too. “Please let me hear from you sometimes,” he wrote. “Let me know if Jen wants to come over as I can fix it all right if he does. As I was the first volunteer American accepted I had to go and see the Chief of Air Staff who runs the whole show, so I know the ropes. Rose is forming an ambulance corps of 40 drivers and 20 ambulances so if you want something to do and could leave the house with the family, there is your chance.”
The first step was basic training. It wasn’t quite the glamorous life Billy had imagined when he was talking to the 601 lot back in St. Moritz. He was sent up to camp at Cambridge for six weeks. “I must admit that I never thought eight years ago I should be returning to Cambridge, going to lectures, and being told to be in by 10pm. Although I will admit the curriculum is a bit different,” he wrote. He told Peggy, “I’m learning how to kill them instead of how to take their money—I don’t know if there is much choice except one’s slow and the other’s quick.” It was all drill and discipline, then ground training: “navigation, photography, gunnery, wireless, etc.” He had been put in a flight along with “a lot of crazy continentals, from places as far afield as St. Helena, New Zealand, Africa, Ceylon, Seychelles Islands, Papua, and Canada. It was, he readily admitted, a tedious life. “We live on straw, high tea at 5.30pm, up at 6 in the morning. And it’s bloody cold. But needless to say we’ve never been healthier.” He hated the drills, the marching, and learning how to form fours. “I’d just got it right, when they go and decide that from now on we must only form threes.” They had only been there a fortnight when they had their first deserter. “They brought him back today and he went straight off to the loony bin. Maybe he wasn’t so crazy!”
Rose arrived in London in the middle of October. As Billy said, she had vague notions about starting a volunteer ambulance corps. But she soon found that the idea was wildly impracticable, because there were so many bureaucratic hoops to jump through. On top of which, of course, she hadn’t the slightest shred of relevant experience. “To be an ambulance driver,” she noted pithily, “is very much like putting one’s son down for Eton, you have to do it the day he is born.” And besides, only “a few wounded soldiers have come back, but most of those who have returned had some other illnesses, such as dysentery, skeptic [sic] wounds—nothing to do with actual fighting.” All the other volunteer corps were, “as far as I can see, literally just sitting on their fannies doing nought.” Worse still, those friends of hers who had signed up as volunteers had been promptly posted to the other end of England from wherever it was their husbands were stationed. “Another typically British habit. Not for me.”
By now, Billy had been moved on to elementary flying training school at Yatesbury in Wiltshire. They were let up, at last, in Tiger Moths. He got leave each weekend and would always race up to see Rose at Claridge’s, where she was staying.
Billy always had a couple of his new comrades in tow. They were, Rose said, “all 18 year olds from Australia, Canada and South Africa. Such babies. They all looked up to Billy, told him all their troubles, everything from their debts to their blind dates.” Her plan, as explained in a letter, was this: “I am organizing my own Corps, called ‘The SLOTTS’—“Sex Life of the Troops!” Actually, I am trying to arrange amusement and places to stay for poor unfortunate Colonials, who are training and are dependent on their pay, and do not know one solitary soul in England, and just sit at various training camps twiddling their thumbs—thumbs, I said. I shall most probably end up being ‘the Madame’ for the troops.” She was as good as her word: she launched a volunteer corps with the rather more sober, and suitable, name the Western Counties RAF Hospitality League. Tatler even ran a feature on them. “As I say,” Rose wrote, “a man can’t do his best unless he’s happy!”
Which Billy was, roving around the south of England in his Tiger Moth, practicing his barrel rolls and Immelmann turns, learning, in short, the difference between flying for fun and flying to fight. These were strange days in Britain, as her citizens endured the phony war, wondering when the fighting would start in earnest, and how long it would last when it did. In the autumn of 1939, Billy’s biggest worry was that the war might be over before he’d even had a chance to get into the action. “It is quite plausible,” he wrote, “that it will all be over before I am fit for anything. There seem to be very diversified opinions here although I think everyone feels it will either all be over by Xmas or go on for five years or so.” Much as he would have liked to hold forth his own opinions, he couldn’t, by letter at least, since “the censors and the head beak would have me in irons.” He felt able only to hint that, as far as he could see, it all depended on the Russians. “Since their entry, I think mostly the ‘longs’ have it by a pretty safe margin, although many people qualify that by saying it will go on as long as the Russians want it to.”
In the weeks while Billy was away, Rose whiled away the days in London. She and Billy had spent $10 on a car, “a 1930 Austen [sic] which looks very much like an antiquated London taxi,” which they’d nicknamed Annie, so she could get down to see her mother in Glynde, back near the church where she had married Warwick all those years before. Otherwise, Rose was camped out at Claridge’s. She wrote one long letter and had it copied out so she could send it on to her group of friends. It provides a fine portrait of life in the capital at the time.
Life goes on pretty much the same, except everyone is in the country. And London looks awfully bare—so many of the houses are hermetically sealed and boarded up. All the restaurants and night clubs are wide open and packed jammed every night—women no longer have to dress, men of course nearly all in uniform.
Every now and again one sees a man in a tail coat, and he looks positively incongruous! Bill has not got his uniform yet, but is about to be measured for one any minute—big excitement. The “black-outs” really are fantastic. Unless it’s a pretty clear night, you literally cannot see your hand in front of your face.
Bond Street consists chiefly of sandbags on both pavements, so that walking there three abreast is out of the question, because one is perpetually catching a toe or heel on the corner of a sandbag, and I don’t mind telling you, that a sandbag is as hard if not harder than a piece of concrete. All the shop windows have paper tape stuck all over them to avoid splintering etc. Some very chichi ones have their names written in the tape, or a picture of the type of things they sell inside!
I shall never know how taxi drivers know where the hell they are going, as honestly, if they used a torch they could see much more than with the regulation lights they have now, and of course one can never tell if it’s a free cab or not, so that if one is trying to get one not off a rank, one is liable to become quite hoarse and worn out screaming at those already with fares.
Even in the country, one is only permitted to use either side-lights, or else a black metal contraption on the head lamp, with a hole a quarter of the size in the middle, and that pitiful ray of light is all one is allowed—so somehow I feel I won’t be tearing around at night very frequently.
Down at my mother’s house, in the depth of the country, where I stay during the week, all the curtains have been heavily interlined with black material, and not a crack of light is supposed to show from anywhere. We are not even allowed to put the light over the front door on, which, heaven knows, is no arc light, when anyone arrives. Bloody silly, I think . . .
The news we get is pretty sparse, but at least it’s official and on the level. As far as the war in the air is concerned, I think we are doing pretty bloody well. The Germans, over the radio, are trying to make us believe it was the British who tried to blow Hitler up—whoever did try was a man of iron. About six times a day the Germans broadcast, one of the announcers is supposed to be a man called Baillie-Stewart, who went to jail here about three or four years ago for selling secret documents to the Germans, and apparently when he was released a few months ago, stamped out of prison, saying he would never see this country again, and if there was any way he could do us down he would, and rushed back to Germany: another announcer is known as “Lord Ha Ha,” because he has such a pompous voice. They are all English. They have such a ridiculous way of putting over their propaganda, that even an infant in arms could do nothing but rock with laughter. Every time any of our statesmen make a speech, especially Winston Churchill, whom they loathe, the next day that poor unfortunate individual really takes a beating. He’s a liar, war mongrel, and decadent illiterate. They don’t care what they say, and if they have nothing to pick on, they tell us what we all refer to as a bedtime story, rather like an Aesop fable, with Chamberlain or someone as the fox and piece of cheese, or one like it. It’s too fantastic, I wouldn’t miss listening in for anything. It has almost made up for not having Charlie McCarthy and Jack Benny.