Worthy Down Memories
The memories below have been kindly written and sent to me by Marcus de Mowbray.
Stephen Arthur de Mowbray - Training Experiences As A Fleet Air Arm Observer/Navigator In WW2
Throughout my life my father, Stephen de Mowbray, has occasionally made brief references to his time training for active duty in the Fleet Air Arm. He never went operational, and ultimately worked for the Foreign Office and travelled to many parts of the world. When he re-married about 30 years ago he had effectively retired but his new wife worked for the United Nations and he had another round of globe-trotting with her.
Sadly it was during this period that he caught the most dangerous strain of malaria and only just survived after a high speed long distance sprint in an emergency ambulance to a specialist hospital. Later he suffered a stroke and his communicating abilities have been seriously affected by these problems. His memory is also erratic, sometimes he has little or no knowledge of what he has done, but sometimes startlingly clear memories return with the correct stimulus. In his home environment the daily routine sometimes does not stimulate his memories, or if they are stimulated he does not necessarily share them, but when out for a walk or going on an outing the process of moving and seeing new things sometimes gives him something new to talk about and then sometimes this brings back old memories. When they do return they are consistently sharp and reliable.
Various members of my family are trying to piece together different aspects of his life, his work made him somewhat reserved anyway, but as a transport enthusiast I am taking an interest in his brief career in aviation. I remember snippets he has said over the years, and more recently he does seem to be better able to remember the distant past than the more recent past.
Three or four summers ago my Sister and I took him to RNAS Culdrose Air Day in Cornwall. The flying was postponed and reduced by bitter cold and driving rain. At one point we were sheltering under the wing of a Catalina Flying Boat, a plane I had never heard him talking about. As he looked up he started saying “ I’ve been there, up there on the roof, I remember that hand rail”. Suddenly the memory of a whole incident came back to him which I will describe later.
What follows therefore is a combination of things he has told us over the years plus some of the memories that have come back to him since he returned to UK five years ago to finally retire properly, now that he is in his 80s. Independent research has confirmed some of the information, places and people he has mentioned, plus the fact that he can sometimes not remember an event at all but when I or someone else describes it he will sometimes suddenly remember and interrupt when he hears incorrect details. In fact it is often small mistakes in someone else’s telling of his story that seems to jog the memory itself.
Towards the end of WW2 Dad joined the Fleet Air Arm to train as an Observer/Navigator, which was a common role in FAA aircraft, where there was also a pilot, rear gunner, radio operator or others. He grew up in Lymington, Hants where his father was a Doctor, and now that Dad has retired he has moved back there. On a recent walk by the quay and river front we passed the Air Cadets building and he told me this was where he joined the Air Training Corps.
It seems his first proper training was at Worthy Down, near Winchester and many aircraft he has described flying in and seeing were indeed based there; the planes he can remember from his training days include Percival Proctor, Westland Lysander, Avro Anson, Supermarine Walrus, Consolidated Catalina, Fairey Swordfish, Albacore and Barracuda Mk 1 in which he remembers sitting by outward bulging windows. His time in a Walrus might well have been at Southampton or it could have been “near Dundee” which was where he also flew in a Catalina. I did an internet search and found Arbroath seemed to be the location and the name did sound familiar to him. We had always known about his flights in Swordfish but until recently did not know about the others. The “Stringbag” was clearly his favourite.
Dad has frequently mentioned that Laurence Olivier was his pilot at Worthy Down, and research has confirmed this, it has also shown that Ralph Richardson was also there at the same time, but I have never heard any mention of him from Dad.
It seems to me that he had few flights in most of the planes listed, and some seem to have been pleasure rides rather than official flights, including being given control of an Anson for a few terrifying minutes while the pilot had “other matters to attend to”. It seems possible to me that the FAA would make trainees fly in various different planes to give them a range of experiences.
It seems though that he spent most of his time in the three Fairey aircraft, the Swordfish open cockpit bi-plane torpedo plane, the Albacore which was based on the Swordfish but with a closed cockpit, and the Barracuda which was an all-metal monoplane torpedo bomber of more modern but rather ungainly look, now virtually forgotten.
Dad has described:
~ Trainee friends lashing their bicycles, small motorcycles, and even themselves to the undercarriage of Swordfish when going to visit other bases.
~ A night training mission attacking an old target ship out at sea. One pilot misjudged his height and collided with the ship (possibly superstructure or radio mast), another hit the sea and was lost and a third bounced off the crest of a wave, but the dummy torpedo was ripped off, taking part of the floor, rear gunner’s seat, and the rear gunner with it; the body was never found. The propeller was badly damaged and Dad remembers seeing the Swordfish approach to land, the engine was at full revs trying to maintain speed and altitude and was glowing brightly red hot, sputtering badly and making a comet-like trail of sparks in the darkness. They only just managed to make the field (Worthy Down?) and came to a halt. Dad and others ran up to help, and they had to struggle to get the pilot to let go of the controls as he was frozen rigid by shock. The Observer was lying shaking on the remains of the floor, and behind him was a hole “about the size of a saucer” through which the gunner had been pulled. Dad could not stop staring at the small hole and wondering how a human could have got through it. It seems that 6-9 trainees lost their lives that night.
~ A flight over the sea on a bitterly cold and dark night during which Dad instructed Olivier to make a turn, but O characteristically decided he would have more fun disobeying and following his own course. It seems the rule is that the pilot should obey the Navigator, so Dad was irritated and deeply concerned that they would get lost. He ordered the course change again, but when Olivier still refused to turn Dad held his speaking tube out into the freezing and damp night air, which would have blasted at more than 80 knots into Olivier’s ears. “He never disobeyed me again” was Dad’s terse remark.
~ Olivier being the centre of attention and hugely popular with all but top brass. Olivier was extremely funny, witty, engaging and prepared to do anything, break any rule and throw all caution to the wind for any chance of fun and thrills
~ Olivier taking off and landing more-or-less vertically, and even throttling down and effectively flying backwards across the field when there was a strong headwind. Although this was apparently possible in a Swordfish, with its stall speed of approximately 28-30 knots, it was apparently strictly forbidden, and Olivier was in trouble several times for this sort of thing, as well as flying low, under bridges and other reckless thrills.
~ Olivier “borrowing” a plane to take his girlfriend to dinner, running out of fuel on the way back and ditching in the sea.
~ Olivier deciding to take off without clearance and oblivious of another plane coming in to land from above and behind them. The rear gunner and Dad shouted at Olivier who swerved but it seems that one wheel did make glancing contact with their top wing. Dad knew this was very serious, and as they rolled to a halt a senior officer strode out towards them, face red with rage. Dad was really fearful of what would happen to them. Just as the Officer approached Olivier stood up, pointed straight at him and started bellowing with laughter at the top of his stage-trained voice. The Officer was totally crestfallen, deflated and even humiliated by this astonishing outburst; he turned, and walked quietly away.
~ Dad had unbuckled his lap strap to help him manipulate his navigation charts on one flight. The plane started banking and gradually banked ever steeper. Suddenly Dad realised that Olivier was doing an unannounced barrel roll and it was too late to buckle up or get his parachute on, so he hung upside down from the edge of the open cockpit by just his hands and knees , at about 3,000 feet.
~ Despite Olivier’s great popularity and larger-than-life enthusiastic character, Dad remembers that eventually the FAA decided that Olivier’s talents would be of “much greater use to the War Effort making patriotic films than bending precious aircraft” and he was “allowed to go”.
At some point in his training Dad was up in London and walking along the south bank of the Thames at Cherry Garden Pier, Bermondsey. I live near there, and on one of his visits about 8 years ago we went for a walk there and he suddenly remembered his war time visit there, but cannot remember why he was walking there. He was looking down river towards Greenwich and suddenly saw something distant streaking down towards the ground. Next he heard a huge explosion, then the
sound of the object falling. He was totally confused, and only much later realised that it was a V2 rocket whose supersonic descent he had seen quite a few seconds before its sound arrived.
After a certain amount of time at Worthy Down Dad was sent up to Scotland for sea training, but at some point he was also in class with Brian Trubshawe, and Dad remembers him as methodical but a bit dull …obviously better qualities for a pilot than the risky but more fun Olivier approach! I think at about this time he also became friends with John Proctor who eventually became an airliner pilot with BEA, who died in his hotel room after a flight out to the Mediterranean. He also became lifelong friends with Derek Hill-Smith who later became a Judge, and Martin Seth-Smith (my Godfather) who died recently. Seth-Smith was a submariner and ended up Commander of HMS Alliance which is now in the Submarine Museum at Gosport. The three of us had been planning a visit but sadly he became too ill. One of Seth-Smith’s brothers and one of his cousins became pilots. One of them was testing the Fairey Firefly over West London when a tail-plane part fell off and the plane crashed; the pilot heroically stayed in to the end to ensure he crashed into a field rather than into the crowded streets and market. Martin Seth-Smith , my Dad’s oldest and best friend, was in London at the Admiralty at the time and immediately rushed over to the crash site as soon as he heard the news.
Dad does not remember much about his time in Scotland, but perhaps he was not there very long. One striking memory did come back to him at RNAS Culdrose when we were sheltering from driving rain under the wing of a Catalina. He was looking up at the engine, wing and forward fuselage roof and suddenly noticed the hand rail and remembered that he had encountered one before: while up “near Dundee”, (almost certainly Arbroath) they had landed in the Catalina in a gale and strong tide and were getting blown towards rocks. Dad was ordered up onto the roof with a boat hook on a long pole to try and grab onto a mooring buoy. He had to go up through a hatch in the cockpit roof and crawl along the top of the fuselage. There is a narrow flattish area just wide enough for this between the roof and the “pylon”, a big vertical structure on which the high plank-like wing sits. The two engines are on the wing, as close as possible to its centre. I think the aluminium propeller blades are about 10or 11 ft in diameter and that Catalinas have Pratt and Witney radial engines of about 2,000 or 2,500 horse power. There is a small triangular gap between the fuselage roof, the pylon and the arc of the propeller, and that is where Dad had to crawl to. The pilot was having to keep both engines at highish revs to avoid being swept and blown on to the rocks. While reaching out with the long boat hook with one hand, and clinging tightly to the handrail with the other, Dad had to remain lying along this narrow area, with the roar of the engine and the propeller blades spinning just a few inches from him. This would not be a pleasant place to be at any time when the engines were on, but at night in a raging Scottish winter gale this would be particularly unpleasant. Clearly he had banished this memory for decades.
It is possible that the fatal night training accidents mentioned before occurred here at Arbroath rather than at Worthy Down, but so far I have not been able to get a definite idea of where they occurred.
I think that his time at Arbroath was during the final stages of his training. It might have been here that he moved on to Fairey Barracudas, which seem to be the planes he would have gone operational in. He remembers that the Navy were not fond of the Barracudas and wanted American planes.
The Barracuda Mk 1 had bulging windows either side, below the wing roots, and this was Dad’s place as O/N. He loved the panoramic view from these windows. When diving he would pull back the cockpit canopy and stand up on a ledge with his head out of the cockpit, which he says he enjoyed greatly. This was not just for fun: in action the pilot was supposed to dive steeply and concentrate on the target to release the torpedo at the correct time and angle. The O/N’s job was to get his head outside the plane and look out for approaching enemy fire or aircraft, and advise the pilot which way to turn to avoid them. The phrase “in the line of fire” seems very appropriate!
A few years ago, on our way home from Culdrose, we stopped at the Fleet Air Arm Museum at Yeovilton where Dad was delighted to see a Walrus, Swordfish, Albacore and even the remains of a crashed Barracuda. At that time Dad was not sure if he correctly remembered the bulging windows, but a print on the wall of the Mueum’s Café clearly showed bulging windows on a picture of a Mk1 Barracuda, another proof that although aspects of my Dad’s memory are impaired, other details do sometimes become totally clear and reliable. In fact I had never heard him mention Walruses before going to the FAA Museum, but as soon as he saw it across the gallery he remembered going up on the wing to hand-crank the engine, and even before we reached it he said that he had virtually a proper office inside it, complete with a chart table; as we neared I looked inside and he was spot on. He was delighted and said “Yes, that’s my old office!”
After training Dad was ready to go operational. He was in port (I do not know which, and assume he was with a complete squadron) and was waiting for an Aircraft Carrier to take him out to the Pacific. The carrier was only a day or two’s sailing away when they heard news of the nuclear bomb drops in Japan, and it seems that just four days after the second one he was demobilised.
Soon later Dad was put in charge of ten men and given two large military trucks and they were sent out for about 18 months to drive all over Britain and repair or help out with whatever was needed, wherever they were, so they did repairs, building work, painting, food and water runs for remote Scottish villages, helping on farms, in factories, military bases, railway stations, and it seems that this and his FAA training were some of his happiest times. He still yearns to drive another big Army truck!
After this Dad went to University and then started government work in the Foreign Office which sent him and us overseas.
He was first posted to Baghdad, where my older brother was born. Dad has some old cine film he took of the Coronation of the King of Iraq.
After a few years there they returned to UK and I was born in Lyndhurst; I was weeks over-due and my parents had been getting back from Iraq as fast as possible, again, some nice cine footage of sea voyages.
In 1958 after about 2 years in England and when I was about 2 and my sister was a baby, Dad was posted to Montevideo, Uruguay, and it was here that my younger brother was born. We were there for about four years, then 2 more in England, then we went out to Washington D.C. for about 4 ½ years.
When we returned from USA the family stayed in England, but Dad was now involved in Mediterranean affairs so he was based in England but flew out for a week or two at a time over there.
One interesting thing related to flying and Navy happened to Dad while we were in Montevideo and concerns HMS Warrior. She was a British built WW2 aircraft carrier which was immediately assigned to the Canadian Navy whom she served for several years before being given back to Britain. She was re-fitted and used for testing “Rubber Deck Landings”. The reason was that carrier aircraft have very heavy undercarriage, and early jets like de Havilland Vampires had insufficient power for much payload. The plan was to make planes without under-carriages (apparently about 25% of gross weight) and use sleds to launch them from the catapults, then for them to land on a rubberised deck. The tests were carried out successfully, but newer more powerful jet engines were being developed so the plan went no further. HMS Warrior was next used to observe the British Nuclear Tests in the Pacific. After that she was no longer wanted by the Navy (perhaps not surprisingly) and she sailed to Punta Arenas (?) in Argentina, with a view to sell her to them.
Dad had to fly down there with the British Ambassador Sir Nicholas Henderson and British and Argentinian navy and government personnel. They flew out in three Douglas DC3 Dakotas. The one Dad was in had a serious engine fire and had to make an emergency landing. That whole region of north eastern Argentina, with the Atlantic to the east and the vast River Plate estuary to the north is an endless marshland, lightly populated even now, and the plane was out of all radio contact. The Uruguayan pilot managed to do one low pass to see where cattle scattered to indicate more solid land, and he managed to crash land without anyone getting seriously injured.
After a few hours a Gaucho (Cowboy/rancher) found them, and returned to his ranch to get a wagon. A few hours later he returned with a large ox cart they all stood in it while one of them took a photo. We still have this delightful picture: the Ambassador tall and smart, my Dad beside him in mackintosh contentedly puffing away on his pipe, and several British and Argentinian Navy Brass all tightly packed in and chatting away without a care in the world. The photo just shows a collection of smart men standing packed in an old wagon, so it has no particular interest until you learn of the circumstances! The Gaucho took them to his ranch house, killed some chickens and made them a great feast. We had no news for three days until eventually a series of horse riders, drivers and phone calls got the message back to Montevideo that all were well.
Thanks to Dad’s work I have travelled a lot in many planes and even great ocean liners, and this has sparked a life-long interest in all modes of transport.
I am sure there are plenty more memories still to emerge and will add these at a later date. I cannot state CATEGORICALLY that all details are correct as I am writing down my Dad’s memories and impressions, and some of these are based on my old memories of what he told us, but I can say that nothing he has said has been shown to be anything other than correct and accurate, and I have tried to keep my account of his memories as accurate as possible.
Stephen Arthur de Mowbray - Training Experiences As A Fleet Air Arm Observer/Navigator In WW2
Throughout my life my father, Stephen de Mowbray, has occasionally made brief references to his time training for active duty in the Fleet Air Arm. He never went operational, and ultimately worked for the Foreign Office and travelled to many parts of the world. When he re-married about 30 years ago he had effectively retired but his new wife worked for the United Nations and he had another round of globe-trotting with her.
Sadly it was during this period that he caught the most dangerous strain of malaria and only just survived after a high speed long distance sprint in an emergency ambulance to a specialist hospital. Later he suffered a stroke and his communicating abilities have been seriously affected by these problems. His memory is also erratic, sometimes he has little or no knowledge of what he has done, but sometimes startlingly clear memories return with the correct stimulus. In his home environment the daily routine sometimes does not stimulate his memories, or if they are stimulated he does not necessarily share them, but when out for a walk or going on an outing the process of moving and seeing new things sometimes gives him something new to talk about and then sometimes this brings back old memories. When they do return they are consistently sharp and reliable.
Various members of my family are trying to piece together different aspects of his life, his work made him somewhat reserved anyway, but as a transport enthusiast I am taking an interest in his brief career in aviation. I remember snippets he has said over the years, and more recently he does seem to be better able to remember the distant past than the more recent past.
Three or four summers ago my Sister and I took him to RNAS Culdrose Air Day in Cornwall. The flying was postponed and reduced by bitter cold and driving rain. At one point we were sheltering under the wing of a Catalina Flying Boat, a plane I had never heard him talking about. As he looked up he started saying “ I’ve been there, up there on the roof, I remember that hand rail”. Suddenly the memory of a whole incident came back to him which I will describe later.
What follows therefore is a combination of things he has told us over the years plus some of the memories that have come back to him since he returned to UK five years ago to finally retire properly, now that he is in his 80s. Independent research has confirmed some of the information, places and people he has mentioned, plus the fact that he can sometimes not remember an event at all but when I or someone else describes it he will sometimes suddenly remember and interrupt when he hears incorrect details. In fact it is often small mistakes in someone else’s telling of his story that seems to jog the memory itself.
Towards the end of WW2 Dad joined the Fleet Air Arm to train as an Observer/Navigator, which was a common role in FAA aircraft, where there was also a pilot, rear gunner, radio operator or others. He grew up in Lymington, Hants where his father was a Doctor, and now that Dad has retired he has moved back there. On a recent walk by the quay and river front we passed the Air Cadets building and he told me this was where he joined the Air Training Corps.
It seems his first proper training was at Worthy Down, near Winchester and many aircraft he has described flying in and seeing were indeed based there; the planes he can remember from his training days include Percival Proctor, Westland Lysander, Avro Anson, Supermarine Walrus, Consolidated Catalina, Fairey Swordfish, Albacore and Barracuda Mk 1 in which he remembers sitting by outward bulging windows. His time in a Walrus might well have been at Southampton or it could have been “near Dundee” which was where he also flew in a Catalina. I did an internet search and found Arbroath seemed to be the location and the name did sound familiar to him. We had always known about his flights in Swordfish but until recently did not know about the others. The “Stringbag” was clearly his favourite.
Dad has frequently mentioned that Laurence Olivier was his pilot at Worthy Down, and research has confirmed this, it has also shown that Ralph Richardson was also there at the same time, but I have never heard any mention of him from Dad.
It seems to me that he had few flights in most of the planes listed, and some seem to have been pleasure rides rather than official flights, including being given control of an Anson for a few terrifying minutes while the pilot had “other matters to attend to”. It seems possible to me that the FAA would make trainees fly in various different planes to give them a range of experiences.
It seems though that he spent most of his time in the three Fairey aircraft, the Swordfish open cockpit bi-plane torpedo plane, the Albacore which was based on the Swordfish but with a closed cockpit, and the Barracuda which was an all-metal monoplane torpedo bomber of more modern but rather ungainly look, now virtually forgotten.
Dad has described:
~ Trainee friends lashing their bicycles, small motorcycles, and even themselves to the undercarriage of Swordfish when going to visit other bases.
~ A night training mission attacking an old target ship out at sea. One pilot misjudged his height and collided with the ship (possibly superstructure or radio mast), another hit the sea and was lost and a third bounced off the crest of a wave, but the dummy torpedo was ripped off, taking part of the floor, rear gunner’s seat, and the rear gunner with it; the body was never found. The propeller was badly damaged and Dad remembers seeing the Swordfish approach to land, the engine was at full revs trying to maintain speed and altitude and was glowing brightly red hot, sputtering badly and making a comet-like trail of sparks in the darkness. They only just managed to make the field (Worthy Down?) and came to a halt. Dad and others ran up to help, and they had to struggle to get the pilot to let go of the controls as he was frozen rigid by shock. The Observer was lying shaking on the remains of the floor, and behind him was a hole “about the size of a saucer” through which the gunner had been pulled. Dad could not stop staring at the small hole and wondering how a human could have got through it. It seems that 6-9 trainees lost their lives that night.
~ A flight over the sea on a bitterly cold and dark night during which Dad instructed Olivier to make a turn, but O characteristically decided he would have more fun disobeying and following his own course. It seems the rule is that the pilot should obey the Navigator, so Dad was irritated and deeply concerned that they would get lost. He ordered the course change again, but when Olivier still refused to turn Dad held his speaking tube out into the freezing and damp night air, which would have blasted at more than 80 knots into Olivier’s ears. “He never disobeyed me again” was Dad’s terse remark.
~ Olivier being the centre of attention and hugely popular with all but top brass. Olivier was extremely funny, witty, engaging and prepared to do anything, break any rule and throw all caution to the wind for any chance of fun and thrills
~ Olivier taking off and landing more-or-less vertically, and even throttling down and effectively flying backwards across the field when there was a strong headwind. Although this was apparently possible in a Swordfish, with its stall speed of approximately 28-30 knots, it was apparently strictly forbidden, and Olivier was in trouble several times for this sort of thing, as well as flying low, under bridges and other reckless thrills.
~ Olivier “borrowing” a plane to take his girlfriend to dinner, running out of fuel on the way back and ditching in the sea.
~ Olivier deciding to take off without clearance and oblivious of another plane coming in to land from above and behind them. The rear gunner and Dad shouted at Olivier who swerved but it seems that one wheel did make glancing contact with their top wing. Dad knew this was very serious, and as they rolled to a halt a senior officer strode out towards them, face red with rage. Dad was really fearful of what would happen to them. Just as the Officer approached Olivier stood up, pointed straight at him and started bellowing with laughter at the top of his stage-trained voice. The Officer was totally crestfallen, deflated and even humiliated by this astonishing outburst; he turned, and walked quietly away.
~ Dad had unbuckled his lap strap to help him manipulate his navigation charts on one flight. The plane started banking and gradually banked ever steeper. Suddenly Dad realised that Olivier was doing an unannounced barrel roll and it was too late to buckle up or get his parachute on, so he hung upside down from the edge of the open cockpit by just his hands and knees , at about 3,000 feet.
~ Despite Olivier’s great popularity and larger-than-life enthusiastic character, Dad remembers that eventually the FAA decided that Olivier’s talents would be of “much greater use to the War Effort making patriotic films than bending precious aircraft” and he was “allowed to go”.
At some point in his training Dad was up in London and walking along the south bank of the Thames at Cherry Garden Pier, Bermondsey. I live near there, and on one of his visits about 8 years ago we went for a walk there and he suddenly remembered his war time visit there, but cannot remember why he was walking there. He was looking down river towards Greenwich and suddenly saw something distant streaking down towards the ground. Next he heard a huge explosion, then the
sound of the object falling. He was totally confused, and only much later realised that it was a V2 rocket whose supersonic descent he had seen quite a few seconds before its sound arrived.
After a certain amount of time at Worthy Down Dad was sent up to Scotland for sea training, but at some point he was also in class with Brian Trubshawe, and Dad remembers him as methodical but a bit dull …obviously better qualities for a pilot than the risky but more fun Olivier approach! I think at about this time he also became friends with John Proctor who eventually became an airliner pilot with BEA, who died in his hotel room after a flight out to the Mediterranean. He also became lifelong friends with Derek Hill-Smith who later became a Judge, and Martin Seth-Smith (my Godfather) who died recently. Seth-Smith was a submariner and ended up Commander of HMS Alliance which is now in the Submarine Museum at Gosport. The three of us had been planning a visit but sadly he became too ill. One of Seth-Smith’s brothers and one of his cousins became pilots. One of them was testing the Fairey Firefly over West London when a tail-plane part fell off and the plane crashed; the pilot heroically stayed in to the end to ensure he crashed into a field rather than into the crowded streets and market. Martin Seth-Smith , my Dad’s oldest and best friend, was in London at the Admiralty at the time and immediately rushed over to the crash site as soon as he heard the news.
Dad does not remember much about his time in Scotland, but perhaps he was not there very long. One striking memory did come back to him at RNAS Culdrose when we were sheltering from driving rain under the wing of a Catalina. He was looking up at the engine, wing and forward fuselage roof and suddenly noticed the hand rail and remembered that he had encountered one before: while up “near Dundee”, (almost certainly Arbroath) they had landed in the Catalina in a gale and strong tide and were getting blown towards rocks. Dad was ordered up onto the roof with a boat hook on a long pole to try and grab onto a mooring buoy. He had to go up through a hatch in the cockpit roof and crawl along the top of the fuselage. There is a narrow flattish area just wide enough for this between the roof and the “pylon”, a big vertical structure on which the high plank-like wing sits. The two engines are on the wing, as close as possible to its centre. I think the aluminium propeller blades are about 10or 11 ft in diameter and that Catalinas have Pratt and Witney radial engines of about 2,000 or 2,500 horse power. There is a small triangular gap between the fuselage roof, the pylon and the arc of the propeller, and that is where Dad had to crawl to. The pilot was having to keep both engines at highish revs to avoid being swept and blown on to the rocks. While reaching out with the long boat hook with one hand, and clinging tightly to the handrail with the other, Dad had to remain lying along this narrow area, with the roar of the engine and the propeller blades spinning just a few inches from him. This would not be a pleasant place to be at any time when the engines were on, but at night in a raging Scottish winter gale this would be particularly unpleasant. Clearly he had banished this memory for decades.
It is possible that the fatal night training accidents mentioned before occurred here at Arbroath rather than at Worthy Down, but so far I have not been able to get a definite idea of where they occurred.
I think that his time at Arbroath was during the final stages of his training. It might have been here that he moved on to Fairey Barracudas, which seem to be the planes he would have gone operational in. He remembers that the Navy were not fond of the Barracudas and wanted American planes.
The Barracuda Mk 1 had bulging windows either side, below the wing roots, and this was Dad’s place as O/N. He loved the panoramic view from these windows. When diving he would pull back the cockpit canopy and stand up on a ledge with his head out of the cockpit, which he says he enjoyed greatly. This was not just for fun: in action the pilot was supposed to dive steeply and concentrate on the target to release the torpedo at the correct time and angle. The O/N’s job was to get his head outside the plane and look out for approaching enemy fire or aircraft, and advise the pilot which way to turn to avoid them. The phrase “in the line of fire” seems very appropriate!
A few years ago, on our way home from Culdrose, we stopped at the Fleet Air Arm Museum at Yeovilton where Dad was delighted to see a Walrus, Swordfish, Albacore and even the remains of a crashed Barracuda. At that time Dad was not sure if he correctly remembered the bulging windows, but a print on the wall of the Mueum’s Café clearly showed bulging windows on a picture of a Mk1 Barracuda, another proof that although aspects of my Dad’s memory are impaired, other details do sometimes become totally clear and reliable. In fact I had never heard him mention Walruses before going to the FAA Museum, but as soon as he saw it across the gallery he remembered going up on the wing to hand-crank the engine, and even before we reached it he said that he had virtually a proper office inside it, complete with a chart table; as we neared I looked inside and he was spot on. He was delighted and said “Yes, that’s my old office!”
After training Dad was ready to go operational. He was in port (I do not know which, and assume he was with a complete squadron) and was waiting for an Aircraft Carrier to take him out to the Pacific. The carrier was only a day or two’s sailing away when they heard news of the nuclear bomb drops in Japan, and it seems that just four days after the second one he was demobilised.
Soon later Dad was put in charge of ten men and given two large military trucks and they were sent out for about 18 months to drive all over Britain and repair or help out with whatever was needed, wherever they were, so they did repairs, building work, painting, food and water runs for remote Scottish villages, helping on farms, in factories, military bases, railway stations, and it seems that this and his FAA training were some of his happiest times. He still yearns to drive another big Army truck!
After this Dad went to University and then started government work in the Foreign Office which sent him and us overseas.
He was first posted to Baghdad, where my older brother was born. Dad has some old cine film he took of the Coronation of the King of Iraq.
After a few years there they returned to UK and I was born in Lyndhurst; I was weeks over-due and my parents had been getting back from Iraq as fast as possible, again, some nice cine footage of sea voyages.
In 1958 after about 2 years in England and when I was about 2 and my sister was a baby, Dad was posted to Montevideo, Uruguay, and it was here that my younger brother was born. We were there for about four years, then 2 more in England, then we went out to Washington D.C. for about 4 ½ years.
When we returned from USA the family stayed in England, but Dad was now involved in Mediterranean affairs so he was based in England but flew out for a week or two at a time over there.
One interesting thing related to flying and Navy happened to Dad while we were in Montevideo and concerns HMS Warrior. She was a British built WW2 aircraft carrier which was immediately assigned to the Canadian Navy whom she served for several years before being given back to Britain. She was re-fitted and used for testing “Rubber Deck Landings”. The reason was that carrier aircraft have very heavy undercarriage, and early jets like de Havilland Vampires had insufficient power for much payload. The plan was to make planes without under-carriages (apparently about 25% of gross weight) and use sleds to launch them from the catapults, then for them to land on a rubberised deck. The tests were carried out successfully, but newer more powerful jet engines were being developed so the plan went no further. HMS Warrior was next used to observe the British Nuclear Tests in the Pacific. After that she was no longer wanted by the Navy (perhaps not surprisingly) and she sailed to Punta Arenas (?) in Argentina, with a view to sell her to them.
Dad had to fly down there with the British Ambassador Sir Nicholas Henderson and British and Argentinian navy and government personnel. They flew out in three Douglas DC3 Dakotas. The one Dad was in had a serious engine fire and had to make an emergency landing. That whole region of north eastern Argentina, with the Atlantic to the east and the vast River Plate estuary to the north is an endless marshland, lightly populated even now, and the plane was out of all radio contact. The Uruguayan pilot managed to do one low pass to see where cattle scattered to indicate more solid land, and he managed to crash land without anyone getting seriously injured.
After a few hours a Gaucho (Cowboy/rancher) found them, and returned to his ranch to get a wagon. A few hours later he returned with a large ox cart they all stood in it while one of them took a photo. We still have this delightful picture: the Ambassador tall and smart, my Dad beside him in mackintosh contentedly puffing away on his pipe, and several British and Argentinian Navy Brass all tightly packed in and chatting away without a care in the world. The photo just shows a collection of smart men standing packed in an old wagon, so it has no particular interest until you learn of the circumstances! The Gaucho took them to his ranch house, killed some chickens and made them a great feast. We had no news for three days until eventually a series of horse riders, drivers and phone calls got the message back to Montevideo that all were well.
Thanks to Dad’s work I have travelled a lot in many planes and even great ocean liners, and this has sparked a life-long interest in all modes of transport.
I am sure there are plenty more memories still to emerge and will add these at a later date. I cannot state CATEGORICALLY that all details are correct as I am writing down my Dad’s memories and impressions, and some of these are based on my old memories of what he told us, but I can say that nothing he has said has been shown to be anything other than correct and accurate, and I have tried to keep my account of his memories as accurate as possible.