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Fighter Heroes of WWI: The untold story of the brave and daring pioneer airmen of the Great War
Joshua Levine
The first heroes of the air.Rewriting the rules of military engagement and changing the course of modern history as a result, the pioneering airmen of the First World War took incredible risks to perform their vital contribution to the war effort.Fighter Heroes of WWI is a narrative history that conveys the perils of early flight, the thrills of being airborne, and the horrors of war in the air at a time when pilots carried little defensive armament and no parachutes.The men who joined the Royal Flying Corps in 1914 were the original heroes of flying, treading into unknown territory, and paving the way for later aerial combat. They became icons for the soldiers in the trenches, and a stark contrast to the thousands on the ground fighting faceless thousands as men fought aircraft to aircraft and man to man - for the first time the air became a battlefield of its own.The war changed flying forever. In 1914 aircraft were a questionable technology, used for only basic reconnaissance. But by 1918, hastened by the terrible war, aircraft were understood to be the future of modern warfare.The Wright brothers' achievements of a mere ten years earlier and Blériot's crossing of the Channel just a few years before the war seemed a distant memory as aircraft became killing machines - the war becoming the ancestor of the fearsome air wars of later years.The stories reveal the feelings of those who defended the trenches from above and witnessed the war from a completely different perspective -the men who were the first fighter heroes of the air.





Copyright (#ulink_648efcdb-4e88-5fa2-9506-1b21e94e016b)
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
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First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2009
Copyright © Joshua Levine 2008
Joshua Levine asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007274949
Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2014 ISBN: 9780007374069
Version: 2014-08-15

Dedication (#ulink_ef616b78-180b-5968-a1d9-6ca2f0fa1b4c)
For Dorothy Sahm

Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
Prologue: December 1917
1 Emulating the Birds (#u41fa3c3a-2800-5574-aa6f-a007e3c51beb)
2 The Combatants (#uc9de431b-3110-5d0b-bea6-2b568de2161c)
3 A Flying Start (#uc8f53aac-659f-5f8a-bfee-dd1225fe0f5b)
4 And so to War (#litres_trial_promo)
5 An Office Job (#litres_trial_promo)
6 Fighters and the Fokker Scourge (#litres_trial_promo)
7 Life and Death (#litres_trial_promo)
8 Over the Top (#litres_trial_promo)
9 Bombing and the Royal Air Force (#litres_trial_promo)
10 A Fight to the End (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue
Picture Section
Keep Reading
Searchable Terms
Acknowledgements
Archived Sources
About the Publisher

Introduction (#ulink_f172464b-a29f-5420-a788-cf519bd23538)
There are certain historical subjects which can always be counted on to capture the public imagination. One of these is infantry fighting on the Western Front, with its vivid evocations of suffering and wasted life. Yet taking place above the very same Western Front was a conflict that is less well known, but which deserves to become just as embedded in the public consciousness – the Great War in the Air.
Most people will have heard of Baron von Richthofen, but they will have little idea of why he was flying or who he was flying against. Yet the story of air fighting is one of intense human emotion, of young men growing up quickly in an exciting and terrible world, of chivalry and fear and danger, of the creation of modern warfare, of the development of modern sensibilities. Such an extraordinary story deserves a wider audience, and an acknowledgment of its place in history.
In 1976, it began to reach that wider audience when the BBC broadcast a television drama called Wings. Set in a Royal Flying Corps squadron in 1915, its central character is a young blacksmith who becomes a sergeant pilot on the Western Front. It is a moving series, which portrays the lives of young men attempting to make sense of a strange and terrifying world – and that is exactly what this book tries to do; to place individuals in the foreground who can paint detailed pictures, whilst never losing sight of the chaos erupting in the background.
Whilst writing this book, I have discovered how vivid and evocative a world it can be; I have found myself immersed in it – in its diaries, novels, letters, memoirs, aircraft, people, and sensibilities – only returning to the twenty-first century to pay the occasional bill. I hope that you, the reader, find yourself similarly engaged (not perhaps to the detriment of your household finances) so that the exploits of Mannock, Ball, James, Powell, and many others, become important to you. It is easy to identify with these recognizably modern men, carrying out a modern activity, with surprisingly modern attitudes, from a time long gone.
Whilst the time may have gone, one of its inhabitants is still with us. Henry Allingham, 111 years old as I write, served with the Royal Naval Air Service on the Western Front and at Jutland. He is a Victorian by birth, who has watched troops return from both the Boer War and the Second Gulf War. He has outlived many comrades by over ninety years, and he is the sole founder member of the Royal Air Force still alive. In the year of its ninetieth anniversary, it is fitting that we should remember the men who came together, some willingly, others less so, to form the Royal Air Force, and equally fitting that we should remember the thousands of airmen who died as it came into being.
In the pages that follow, the thoughts, feelings, fears and sensations of long ago are aired. Listen to them, and enter a world quite different to our own – inhabited by people not so very different at all.
JOSHUA LEVINE

PROLOGUE (#ulink_b2e0a62e-9a32-5558-9b5b-521ef8385354)



December 1917
“Some time after the Cambrai attack in 1917, my scout squadron, No. 3 RFC, which was equipped with single-seater Sopwith Camels, each carrying two Vickers guns firing through the propeller, was stationed near Bapaume, and was manned by comparatively new pilots with no combat experience to speak of, as the squadron losses in the Cambrai battle had been complete, with the exception of two pilots – myself and a Captain Babington.
One day after the two flights, ‘A’ and ‘B’, the latter under my command, had been detailed to carry out a routine patrol over the enemy lines, I remember walking across the worn grass on a bright sunny morning towards our eight machines lined up in front of the hangars. The air mechanics were standing by as usual after having very carefully checked over guns and engines. They helped us into our cockpits and saw us settled in our seats and safety belts fastened, then they climbed down with a quiet, ‘Good luck, sir.’
It was only then that the tension that was always present just before taking off on a patrol left us and we were able to think of our immediate duties. After having repeated the mechanics’ ‘Contact!’, our engines roared into life and we all revved them up against the chocks with the mechanics holding down the tail to check that we were getting full revolutions. Then I throttled down and after a glance round the flight to see that all were ready, I taxied into the wind and took off, closely followed by the whole patrol.
We climbed to cross the trenches a few miles away at 12,000 to 13,000 feet, and while doing so, fired a few rounds from both of our guns to make sure there was no jamming as this was very difficult to clear while in action. Our Camels being tail heavy, the stick had to be held between our knees to free both hands to clear the stoppage, otherwise the planes immediately shot up into a loop. The trenches beneath us wound like long scars meandering across the seemingly lifeless dun-coloured countryside, pitted with thousands of shell craters, not a single tree or building left standing anywhere near the lines.
Very soon, we heard and saw our usual welcome from ‘Archie’, bursting in black puffs all around us, but carried on, only varying our height to spoil his aim. After crossing the lines without further incident, we found that the fresh wind, which always seemed to blow to the east, was drifting us too far into enemy territory, and it would have been unwise to penetrate, our limit of flying time being only two hours: a return slow flight against the wind under possible attack might have exhausted our petrol before it was possible to reach our landing field. I therefore gave the signal to turn north, parallel with the trenches, and we continued our patrol.
Just then, several thousand feet above us and right in the sun, I saw a formation of sixteen enemy aircraft (we were always outnumbered) and in a few seconds they were diving on our formation from all directions, and the air was full of tracer, and twisting and turning machines, engaged in a general dogfight. One of ours was soon in difficulties and was seen to go down, out of control, at the same time as two of the Huns also broke off, apparently badly damaged. We closed formation again with ‘B’ Flight still intact, followed by two of ‘A’ Flight, and waited for the next assault, as the Germans had dived past us after their first attack, and were now gaining height again. They were a squadron of Richthofen’s Circus, and they were painted in all sorts of colours and patterns, and one, I noticed, had a wavy red snake painted along the fuselage. But there was not much time to wonder at them, as part of their squadron had been kept in reserve a few thousand feet above: their Albatroses could always out-climb and out-dive our Camels, as they had beautifully streamlined plywood fuselages and powerful engines, while our machines were still at the fabric-covered wooden-framed stage, with rotary engines.
These Huns came down at us and one of ‘A’ Flight was soon in difficulties, being surrounded by at least three of the enemy, and fighting hard against such odds. To go to his assistance was, of course, the only thing to do, and by waggling my wings from side to side, I gave the one signal we could use in those days in an emergency, for the rest of the flight to follow. But in all the excitement and tension, my turn to the right was not noticed, and I realised that I was single-handed in the rescue attempt, and would have to deal with four Huns, as by the time I reached the scene, our machine was already going down practically out of control, and I was quickly in a dogfight with three highly coloured Albatroses.
I picked on the one which seemed to be piloted by the leader as it had a small triangular black flag attached to the vertical fin of his rudder, besides being vividly coloured. We engaged in the usual circling tactics, each trying to out-turn the other and keep on the inside, and in this manoeuvre, I was successful owing to the remarkable turning property of the Camel, and I held the inside position with my guns aimed at the front of the Hun machine. We were so close that I could clearly see the pilot’s white face with his goggles and black flying helmet, looking over the side at my machine, and although I fired several short bursts, I could see all my tracers swinging to just miss his tail. My Camel was very near to the limit of its turning circle, but I realised that I had to turn just that little extra in order to rake his fuselage with my fire.
We had been circling for what seemed like hours but must have been only minutes, when I pulled the Camel still further round on its left hand turn, and loosed off a long burst which hit just behind the pilot, and put his machine out of control. We both fell away, myself in a fast full-power spin. By this time, three other enemy aircraft had climbed above us, waiting their chance, and I realised that as I came out of my spin, I would present a good target on straightening out in a vertical dive.
After falling about a thousand feet, I stopped the spin, and immediately did a fast turn and climb to face two of the diving enemies as they came at me, their tracers crackling past and my guns replying, but all without apparent effect. The two Huns had dived past as I turned to meet the third machine which was following the first two, and I noticed his painted red nose and blue fuselage, and realised too late, that he had a bead on me. A frantic pull over on the joystick was also too late, and the next thing I knew was a stunning sledgehammer blow as a bullet sunk into my right thigh.
Recovering from the shock, and finding the Camel in a vertical climb through the instinctive pulling back of the stick after being hit, I pulled over hard into a quick roll, just in time to miss a burst from a diving Hun, who was waiting above. It must have been about this time that my feed pipe was partly shot through, and the escaping petrol started spraying over my right leg, making it numb and cold, but my worry now was how to get out of the fight alive, and reach our lines again.
Three Huns were now following me down in a steep dive, firing as they came, but when any of them approached too close, I pulled the Camel into a vertical climb, and fired bursts at the nearest, then turned and dived again towards our lines, still some miles away. These manoeuvres continued in a running fight for a long time, and I began to feel a little sick through loss of blood, especially when my leg felt hot and warm instead of cold, through blood running down from my wound overcoming the previous numbness.
With all these odds against me, there suddenly came the realization that these Huns were out to kill me without mercy or hesitation, crippled as I was, and the enormity of it momentarily created the thought that just by turning towards enemy territory, this fate could be avoided, and I should be saved from further suffering. Perhaps some feeling of pride overcoming the indignity of the suggestion enabled me to regain my self-control, and to continue the running fight towards our trenches, losing height and turning every now and then to face and drive off my attackers.
Down to about a thousand feet, and feeling pretty weak, I managed to find a stick of chewing gum in my flying coat breast pocket, and I ate that, paper and all. The Huns followed down to 500 feet, just above their trenches, and then turned away as I crossed our lines at 200 feet, making for one of our emergency landing fields, containing a hut and one air mechanic on duty.
With some difficulty, as I could not see very well, and my Camel was badly shot up, with most of the flying wires cut and dangling, I made a fair landing, and was helped out by the airman. In getting out, I could not help noticing a neat group of four bullet holes in the cowling behind my seat, and about two inches behind where my head had been; an inch or two further to the rear and this burst would have hit my petrol tank, and what we all fear most – to be set on fire in the air – would have happened. And there would have been no escape, parachutes for pilots not having been issued.
Why those bullets should have missed me is one of the unsolved mysteries of my life; some lasted a few weeks, others months, one never knew. So often had I packed up my roommates’ belongings, always left ready in case, and forwarded them to relatives, wondering when my own turn would come. Now it had – and more fortunately for me than for most of these young pilots.
The airman soon had a stretcher party along which took me to an advanced dressing station, where my wound was dressed, and a day or two later, I was on my way to Rouen, then back to London. After some two months in hospital, convalescing, I was posted to a training squadron as flying instructor, and only returned to active service just before the end of the war.”
Howard Brokensha

1 (#ulink_03156986-f69d-536a-a7bf-77aaa80ea096)


Emulating the Birds
If you happen to be reading this book on board a commercial flight, take a look around you. You are sitting in a pressurized cabin. You have no real sense of movement and you probably have no view. Your fellow passengers are eating and drinking, reading and sleeping. Unless they are nervous flyers, they are unlikely to be reflecting that they are breaking the laws of nature and defying common sense. The ‘wonder of flight’ is in short supply on the transatlantic run – but it has not always been so. In 1915, Duncan Grinnell-Milne was a young officer serving in the Royal Flying Corps. On a BE2c reconnaissance flight over the German lines in that year, in the midst of the bloodiest war ever fought, he experienced an overwhelming sensation:
I must be asleep, dreaming. The war was an illusion of my own. Surely the immense and placid world upon which I gazed could not be troubled by human storms such as I had been imagining. In that quiet land human beings could never have become so furiously enraged that they must fly at each other’s throats. At 10,000 feet, on a sunny afternoon, with only the keen wind upon one’s face and the hum of an aero-engine in one’s ears, it is hard not to feel godlike and judicial.
In flight, the normal yardsticks that apply on the ground are suspended. Perceptions of speed and distance are altered. Mountains, rivers, urban sprawls, even battlegrounds lose their significance. This is why man has always dreamt of flying: to distance himself from his human frailty and place himself closer to the mysteries of the universe. Yet the godlike sensation felt by Grinnell-Milne also encourages a sense of power. The desire to fly has long been accompanied by the urge to dominate. In 1737, almost 200 years before powered flight, the poet Thomas Gray imagined the sky as a battlefield on which England could affirm her superiority:
The day will come when thou shalt lift thine eyes
To watch a long drawn battle of the skies,
And aged peasants too amazed for words,
stare at the flying fleets of wondrous birds.
And England, so long mistress of the seas,
Where winds and waves confess her sovereignty,
Her ancient triumphs yet on high shall bear
And reign the sovereign of the conquered air.
In 1907, before a truly reliable aircraft had even been constructed, H. G. Wells was already predicting how the new technology would be used to wage war. In The War in the Air, described by Wells as a ‘fantasia of possibility’, he imagines a future conflict in which New York is destroyed by bombs dropped from German airships. The city becomes a ‘furnace of crimson flames, from which there was no escape’. The central character, a young British civilian, witnesses the devastation, recognizes that national boundaries no longer exist and awaits the collapse of civilization. We still await the collapse of civilization, but Wells’ predictions have proved more than mere fantasias of possibility.
On 17 December 1903, however, no such thoughts were in the minds of Orville and Wilbur Wright, bicycle shop owners from Dayton, Ohio. On that morning, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, a site chosen for its forgiving sands and coastal breezes, Orville flew the first aircraft, powered by a tiny petrol engine. The Wright Flyer harnessed the wind and struggled into the air. It flew a distance of 120 feet at a height of ten feet. The brothers believed that the key to successful flight was control of an inherently unstable machine and that the key to control was to copy a bird in flight by warping (or twisting) the machine’s wings. As the wings were warped, the end of one wing would receive more lift than the other and that wing would rise, banking the machine and turning it in the direction of the other. In this way, the machine could be guided onto a particular course, as well as returned to stable flight when tipped by a gust of wind.
Over time, the Wrights improved their machine until, on 5 October 1905, Orville flew twenty-four miles at a speed of thirty-eight miles per hour. The brothers remained quiet about their achievements, commenting that of all the birds, the parrot talks the most but flies the worst. In fact, they were nervous of competitors discovering their secrets. They carried out no flights in 1906 and 1907, on the advice of their attorney, as they attempted to sell the machine to military authorities across the world. They were charging $250,000, but refusing to give a demonstration until a contract was signed. Unsurprisingly, nobody took up their offer.
In September 1906, the first machine took to the air outside the United States, flown by Alberto Santos-Dumont at Bagatelle, near Paris. French aircraft designers began to make impressive progress and they were soon claiming world records for flight duration and distance. They were unaware of the advances made by the Wrights, however, so when, in August 1908, Wilbur demonstrated the Wright Flyer at Hunaudières, near Le Mans, his audience was astounded. Not only had he complete control of the machine, but he was even able to carry a passenger. French claims were quietly dropped. In July 1909, the Wrights finally sold their aircraft to the U.S. Army but in the years that followed they became mired in patent litigation, and their creative drive petered out. In 1946, James Goodson, a colonel in the U.S. Air Force, persuaded the elderly Orville Wright to attend a military conference in New York. The two men flew together. Goodson remembers:
The hostess on the aeroplane saw this elderly gentleman and she approached him and asked, ‘Are you enjoying the flight?’ and Orville said, ‘Yeah, very much.’ She said, ‘Have you flown before?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I’ve flown before.’ She said, ‘That’s great! Do you enjoy it?’ He said, ‘I enjoyed the first flight and I’m enjoying this one too …’
Once at the conference, Orville was keen to distance himself from the world of modern aviation:
In introducing Orville to the conference, Eddie Rickenbacker, the First World War ace, said in his usual flamboyant manner, ‘Today, we have fleets of aircraft flying to all corners of the world. We’ve brought the world together. We’ve just finished a war in which fleets of aircraft have destroyed the industrial potential of entire nations. Fifty years ago, no one would have believed this but two men – and two men alone – had a magnificent vision and we’re fortunate to have one of them here today. I give you Mr. Orville Wright!’ There was a standing ovation, and little Orville stood up. He said, ‘My name is Orville Wright.’ There was a blast of applause. ‘But that’s about the only true thing that Eddie Rickenbacker has said. Wilbur and I had no idea that aviation would take off the way it has. As a matter of fact, we were convinced that the aeroplane could never carry more than one passenger. We had no idea that there’d be thousands of aircraft flying around the world. We had no idea that aircraft would be dropping bombs. We were just a couple of kids with a bike shop who wanted to get this contraption up in the air. It was a hobby. We had no idea …’
Given the strenuous efforts of the brothers to sell their machine to a military bidder, Orville’s words might appear slightly disingenuous, but in their wake, designers across the world competed to produce faster and more reliable aircraft. In Germany, research was focused not on aeroplanes but on dirigible airships. The first Zeppelin had flown in July 1900 but it was not until 1907, prompted by the military authorities, that work began on a large-scale airship.
In 1908, the first flying machine took to the air in Britain. It was flown by an American, Samuel Cody. Cody, cowboy, actor, kite inventor, balloonist, aviator and eccentric, had arrived in Britain in 1901, bringing his Wild West stage show with him. Dolly Shepherd, a pre-war balloonist and parachutist, remembers being drafted in to act as his assistant:
Cody was a sharpshooter with long hair, pointed beard, great big hat and white trousers. He was quite a showman. When I met him, he was frustrated because he used to shoot an egg off his wife’s head and the night before, he had grazed her skull. ‘Don’t despair!’ I said, ‘I’ll take her place!’ I’d never even seen the show, but that night, I went up on stage, and he put an egg on my head and took aim. What I hadn’t reckoned for – his son came up and blindfolded him. I didn’t dare move but he shot the egg and all was well. The next day, Cody invited me to see his kites. He had to do the sharpshooting business and theatrical things to make money. But he was making his big kites in the great hall at Alexandra Palace.
These were man-lifting Boxkites, which Cody intended to sell to the military authorities for use as observation posts. Over the years, Cody progressed from kites to airships to aircraft, and in October 1908, his flying machine, powered by an Antoinette engine, flew for a distance of 1390 feet. One of his first flights is remembered by Edward Bolt, an NCO with the Royal Engineers Balloon Section at Farnborough:
He was doing practice flights for a long time before he got off the ground. I remember one of his flights when I was one of the markers. He circled for a mile and there were twelve of us stood there with flags until he’d completed his circuit and landed. We all came towards the machine and Cody said to our corporal, ‘Here’s a pound! Take these men to the Queen’s Hotel and buy them a drink! That’s the only pound I’ve got left …’
In May 1909, John Moore-Brabazon (who later proved an old adage by flying a pig in his passenger seat) became the first British man to fly an aircraft in Britain. Five months later, he collected a prize of £1000 offered by the Daily Mail to the first person to fly a circular mile in a British aircraft. Recalling this event, Moore-Brabazon describes it as ‘the real start of the British aeroplane industry’. Despite his achievements, there were many in Britain, including Lord Northcliffe, owner of the Daily Mail, who were worried that the country was falling dangerously behind its rivals. The newspaper attempted to rouse public concerns, by announcing that Britain was ‘no longer an island’, and it offered a new prize to the first pilot to fly across the English Channel. On 25 July 1909, the prize was won – but not by a Briton. Louis Blériot, a Frenchman, flying his own monoplane, flew from Calais to Dover in thirty-seven minutes. Northcliffe’s fears concerning British vulnerability appeared justified. ‘The British people have hitherto dwelt secure in their islands … but locomotion is now being transferred to an element where sea power is no shield against attack,’ warned the Daily Mail. Describing Blériot’s achievement with barely a hint of sour grapes, Moore-Brabazon comments:
He rather gallantly and very luckily crossed the Channel in a monoplane tractor with a three cylinder air-cooled engine that never before or after – even when copied – ever ran so long. His success was due to running into a very big shower of rain that cooled his engine when in sight of our shores.
Lucky or not, Blériot’s achievement hastened British aircraft development. Across the country, engineers and mechanics began to adapt their skills to the design and construction of flying machines. Frederick Handley-Page was eventually to become a celebrated aeronautical designer, responsible for the first heavy British bombers which flew towards the end of the Great War, as well as the Second World War Halifax bomber. At first, however, he was working out of a shed in Barking, with a coppersmith, Charles Tye, as his sole assistant. Tye recalls meeting Handley-Page in a pub:
One Friday night, the barmaid said to me, ‘Charlie, the gentleman sitting down there with a beer is looking for a coppersmith who can use a blowlamp.’ So I looked round and saw Handley-Page. I went across to him and he told me he was opening up a workshop and was building a ‘machine’. I didn’t know he meant an aircraft. But I went down to his workshop, where he only had a little coke brazier. There were two benches with wing spars that would take the wings of the monoplane that he was building, but apart from that, the shop was bare. He had no tools whatever – only a plane and some chisels. So we started to build the machine together. I was making all the fittings. I was brazing pieces of tube onto plates that would take the struts. As we went on, we took on a carpenter called Cyril who made the ribs and the longerons. By the time the aircraft was finished, there were a dozen of us working on it. We called it Yellow Peril because the wings were covered in fabric and doped in a yellow cellulose material.
Other great aeronautical companies were also setting up. The Avro company was formed by A. V. Roe, a marine engineer from Manchester, who had made detailed observations of birds while at sea. In June 1908, four months before Cody’s maiden flight, Roe almost took to the air in a machine of his own design, but he never quite made it off the ground. Geoffrey de Havilland – who would one day design the Mosquito, the Second World War fighter-bomber, and the Comet, the world’s first jet airliner – began work on his first aircraft in the same year, in a shed off the Fulham Road in London. He flew the machine, eighteen months later, from a hilltop on the Hampshire Downs. It took off, flew for thirty-five yards, and crashed. De Havilland suffered only cuts and bruises, but the machine was wrecked.
A crucial boost to designers arrived in 1909 with the introduction of the French Gnôme rotary engine. Rotary engines had a better power-to-weight ratio than conventional engines, they reduced vibration and they were far more efficiently cooled, due to the rotation of the cylinder block around the crankshaft. Copies of the Gnôme engine were soon produced, and powered flight became a far more practical proposition.
It was not long before flying gripped the British public’s imagination. In 1910, Claude Grahame-White, a motorcar dealer, established an aerodrome at Hendon in north London – nowadays the site of the Royal Air Force Museum. ‘London Aerodrome’, as Grahame-White called it, quickly became a venue for aerial displays and joyrides for day-trippers. Eric Furlong was a young man, living in Hendon, whose interest in flying was sparked by visits to the aerodrome. He remembers:
Clarence Winchester was a freelance pilot with his own aeroplane giving joyrides to people for something like £1 a time. He used to put the passenger in the aeroplane and then start frightening them by telling them that they mustn’t touch this, that whatever they do, they were not to lean against that, that wire was absolute death if they got tangled up in it. By the time they took off, the passenger was jelly. When we asked him why he did this, he said, ‘Well, they think they’re getting their money’s worth if they’re really frightened …’
On Sundays, Frederick Handley-Page would send his aircraft, Yellow Peril, down to London Aerodrome, where its pilot would give joyrides. There was one man who refused to take a ‘flip’, however, as Charles Tye recalls:
Every Sunday, we used to take people up for trips. From Hendon, round Hyde Park and back. I don’t suppose the trip lasted more than ten minutes and we used to charge a guinea. One particular Sunday, Handley-Page was there himself and I saw him talking to the actress Gladys Cooper. We hadn’t had a customer for a while, and the pilot, a man named Whitehead, said to me, ‘I wonder if Miss Gladys Cooper wants a trip? Go and ask! And if she doesn’t want a flip, ask Mr. Page if he’d like one. I don’t think he’s ever been in the air before!’ So I went over and just stood aside Mr. Page while he was talking to Gladys Cooper. ‘What do you want, Charlie?’ he asked. I said, ‘Mr. Whitehead is sitting up there and he’s getting fed up. Is anybody coming up?’ He said, ‘No!’ So I said, ‘Well, he says he’d like to take you up as he doesn’t think you’ve been in the air before!’ He looked at Miss Gladys Cooper and he took me aside and whispered in my ear, ‘You go back and tell Whitehead – I build them. I don’t bloody well fly them!’
For a number of years, the military authorities in Britain had financed the development of airships while leaving aircraft production to private enterprise. However shortsighted this may now seem, the fact was that early aircraft could not reach high altitudes, they could not carry great weights and they could not fly at night or in high winds. Airships could do all of these things. They were also considered rather more genteel than aeroplanes. Robert Pigot recalls an agreeable morning spent aboard an airship, while serving with the Royal Flying Corps in 1913:
I was living about fourteen miles from Farnborough, where I was stationed, and one morning, I thought I’d go home for breakfast so I flew my airship over and circled round my house until the butler came out. He fetched the gardener. The two of them pulled me down and tied the airship to a tree at one end and a garden roller at the other. And I went in and had breakfast.
Over time, as aircraft became sturdier and more reliable, the military authorities began to take them more seriously. A 1911 report of the Committee of Imperial Defence declared that aeroplanes could ‘keep army commanders in the field as fully informed as possible of the movements of the enemy’. The idea of entrusting the role of military reconnaissance to a fleet of flying birdcages was unsettling to the armed forces. It was particularly unsettling to the cavalry, whose job reconnaissance had always been, and who still dominated the War Office. There was not yet any official expectation that aircraft could contribute to military operations, drop bombs, or engage in air-to-air combat, but there was now the prospect of a role.
The new thinking was reinforced in April 1911, with the establishment of the Army Aircraft Factory (later renamed the Royal Aircraft Factory) at Farnborough. Under its Superintendent, Mervyn O’Gorman, the Factory assembled a team of designers, who were immediately hampered by the limitations placed on the Factory by its charter, which stated that it could not manufacture new types of aircraft, merely produce conversions from existing aircraft. Geoffrey de Havilland joined the Factory as a designer. He describes how it was possible to circumvent the Factory’s restrictive charter:
We weren’t supposed to design new aeroplanes but we could reconstruct them from a landing wheel or a few old bolts from a crashed machine. In this way, during my time at Farnborough, we designed and built several new aeroplanes. When I’d been at Farnborough for about a year, we designed the BE1. We did it by taking a small part of a broken-down French Voisin and reconstructing it into something totally different. The BE1 was quite a successful aeroplane but it was unstable – meaning that you had to control it all the time. I was not very interested in stability until Edward Busk, who had studied the theory of stability, joined the Factory. He took the BE1 and applied his knowledge to modifying it in order to get stability. He moved the lower plane back about three feet, which was equivalent to moving the centre of gravity forward, he fitted a bigger span tailplane, he fitted a fin in front of the rudder and we ended up with a really stable aeroplane. It was quite astonishing to be able to get into this machine, after the unstable machines of the early days, and fly around with hands and feet off indefinitely. That machine eventually became the BE2c and it was really the start of practical, stable aeroplanes.
The Factory produced a series of aircraft, each classified by type. The first type, designated BE (Blériot Experimental) was a ‘tractor’ biplane, with the propeller at the front of the aircraft. This is the type described by de Havilland. The second type, designated FE (Farman Experimental), was a ‘pusher’ biplane, with the propeller behind the fuselage. A third type, with the elevators at the front, was named SE (Santos-Dumont Experimental). The final type produced by the Factory was the RE (Reconnaissance Experimental). Different versions of these types constituted the Factory’s output throughout the Great War.
As the Army Aircraft Factory came into being, a body of men was needed to fly the new machines. On 1 April 1911, the Air Battalion, Royal Engineers was created. Consisting initially of 14 officers and 150 other ranks, it was decided that officers could join the battalion from any arm or branch of the army but that the other ranks must come from within the Royal Engineers. Pilots would not be trained ab initio, however. Prior to joining, they would have to learn to fly at their own expense, before being reimbursed on acceptance by the Air Battalion.
While the British High Command could not see beyond the possibilities of aerial reconnaissance, Germany was proposing a far more aggressive function for its airborne fleet. The Germans considered the Zeppelin airships superior to any weapon possessed by any other nation. General von Moltke, the Chief of the German General Staff, announced to his War Ministry that ‘its speediest development is required to enable us at the beginning of a war to strike a first and telling blow, whose practical and moral effect could be quite extraordinary’.
On 13 April 1912, the Air Battalion was superseded by a larger organization: the Royal Flying Corps. This was intended to join together, under a single umbrella, the army aviators of the Air Battalion with a group of naval aviators who had been running their own flying school at Eastchurch, on the Isle of Sheppey. The Royal Flying Corps comprised a military wing, a naval wing and a Central Flying School at Upavon, on Salisbury Plain.
Doubts were expressed about the location of the Central Flying School. The area around Upavon was prone to dangerous air currents, which had brought down many aircraft over the previous few years, causing the area to become known as ‘The Valley of Death’. Another issue was the status of The Royal Flying Corps. As a corps, its leaders would be subordinate to those in the established services, guaranteeing it little say in its own destiny. Nevertheless, it appeared that unity had been imposed on the world of British military aviation.
That unity did not last very long. The Admiralty was not keen to hand control of its flying matters over to an army corps. It therefore rejected the idea of a ‘naval wing’ and announced the formation of the Royal Naval Air Service, under the command of Murray Sueter. This unilateral decision went entirely unchallenged, leaving the Royal Flying Corps to represent the army alone – although, officially, the Royal Naval Air Service did not come into being until July 1914. Philip Joubert de la Ferté, an early member of the Royal Flying Corps, who was to fly one of the first two ‘shows’ of the war in August 1914, remembers the divide between army and navy:
The Admiralty never really accepted the recommendations of the Committee of Imperial Defence. They didn’t want to be organized by the War Office in any way. They paid lip service to the royal warrant for a period of years, but they went along in their own way. When the Royal Flying Corps was formed, Brigadier General David Henderson took the military and naval wings under his charge. He was an authority on reconnaissance – he’d written a book on reconnaissance. He was a soldier, not an airman. Looking at an aeroplane, he could only imagine flying over an enemy force at low speed so that you could literally count the men on the ground. He believed that there should be no aeroplane with an engine more powerful than it should have a speed of more than 100 miles per hour in the air. The Admiralty, on the other hand, was looking into the problem of fighting and offensive operations in the air. It was fully alive to all the possibilities and it wanted bigger and faster aeroplanes than were thought necessary for the army. The navy took a much broader view.
The intention of the War Office was that all military aircraft would be built by the Royal Aircraft Factory but the Admiralty began to turn to private enterprise to design and build its machines. While it was hardly satisfactory that the infant British flying service should consist of two rival organizations, it at least meant that, eventually, a greater choice of aircraft and engines would be available to both branches. Once the war had begun, this would prove crucial.
At the date of its formation, the Royal Flying Corps had only eleven aircraft in active use. An up-to-date, reliable machine was needed that could be produced by the Royal Aircraft Factory. To this end, Military Aeroplane Trials were held on Salisbury Plain in August 1912. The machine which most impressed the judges was designed and built by Samuel Cody. Handley-Page’s assistant, Charles Tye, was present:
I was in the next shed to Cody. All the hangars were built by the government and they wanted a machine for the Royal Flying Corps. There was about fifteen sheds. A. V. Roe had one, Martinsyde had one, we had one, Samuel Cody had one. I used to do a bit of work on Cody’s machine – I used to true it up for him now and again. When I had trips with him, I sat on a bicycle seat behind him with my hands on his shoulders. His machine was a pusher type with the prop behind. We used to call it the ‘Cathedral’ because it was so huge.
The trials were that you landed on a ploughed field and you got off again. The only thing was that every machine that landed on that ploughed field couldn’t get off again. Cody was the last one to land on this ploughed field and it had been raked up so much by the time he landed. He had a son with him and I was there too. Cody was sitting up at the top of this machine while the inspector was testing his tank and testing all his controls. When Cody had word to get off, his son called out ‘Look!’ What he’d seen was that there was a space in that field that was nearly bare. The machines that had been trying to take off previously had flattened down the ground. It was like a steamroller had been over it. I believe that if Cody had landed first, he wouldn’t have got off that ploughed field.
Although he won, Cody’s machine was never taken up by the Royal Flying Corps. N. V. Piper remembers why:
In 1912, I was lent to Cody and I worked with him, building a replica of the machine that had won the military trials, the sale of which was part of the prize of those trials. Major Raleigh smashed the replica on a very short flight. He’d been flying an aircraft that had been sluggish on the controls but the Cody was hypersensitive, particularly on the fore and aft control. So he crashed it. We rebuilt it and brought it back, but in the meantime the machine that had won the military trials crashed, and it was decided to drop the Cody machine.
Instead of Cody’s machine, the Royal Flying Corps adopted the BE2, the machine worked on by Geoffrey de Havilland at the Royal Aircraft Factory. A year after the Trials, Cody crashed his machine on Laffan’s Plain. Edward Bolt was present:
Cody took up a passenger, a man that came from Reading. Leon Cody and I were watching and all of a sudden, the machine started wobbling and we could quite clearly see that the passenger was grabbing hold of Cody’s shoulders, which I am sure caused the crash.
Frederick Laws, an NCO with the Royal Flying Corps, ran over to the crumpled aircraft, where he found both Cody and his passenger lying dead. Cody was fifty-one years old. Remembering him, Laws comments, ‘I wouldn’t say he was unbalanced – but he was erratic.’ Erratic he may have been, but with his tireless enthusiasm and air of self-invention, Cody embodies the age of the pioneers. At his funeral, his importance as an aircraft designer was recognized. James Gascoyne, a Royal Flying Corps mechanic, was a wreath bearer:
Cody’s funeral was a very, very ceremonial affair. It lasted about two hours, I suppose. It was an enormous gathering of civilians and soldiers.
Shortly after the Military Trials, in September 1912, the British army held its annual manoeuvres, in East Anglia. During the exercise, a red army, commanded by Sir Douglas Haig was soundly beaten by a blue army, commanded by Sir James Grierson. The deciding factor in Grierson’s victory was his use of aerial reconnaissance. One of Grierson’s aircraft, piloted by Lieutenant Arthur Longmore, with Major Hugh Trenchard (a name to remember) as his observer, spotted the advance of Haig’s troops and immediately reported its findings. Grierson, meanwhile, had hidden his troops from observation, remarking afterwards that he had ordered them ‘to look as like toadstools as they could and to make noises like oysters’. The blue army’s victory, apparently inspired by Lewis Carroll, ensured a role for aviation in a future war.
While the ‘military wing’ concentrated on preparing for the role of reconnaissance, the ‘naval wing’ trod a more experimental path, prompted by Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty. Churchill, always open to novel ideas, had been an early supporter of flying. Philip Joubert de la Ferté remembers:
Churchill had become First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911. He got to hear of the activities at Eastchurch and he decided that he should take some interest. Not only did he take an interest, but he learnt to fly. He was a perishing pilot, most dangerous, but he did it and he got to know something about the air, and it was his authority and his enthusiasm which got the Royal Naval Air Service off to a tremendous start.
The Admiralty began investigating the most effective methods of bombing ships and submarines, although not always with sufficient flexibility. In 1912, Victor Goddard, a cadet at Dartmouth Naval College, witnessed the invention of a fellow cadet:
Cadet Robinson had devised a bombsight which allowed for the drift of the aeroplane in the air, and also for its forward speed of flight. This was something which was new to me, and I think it was new to the whole world. At any rate, he was almost certainly the first person to submit a bombsight to a government department. The reply from the Admiralty was that their Lordships saw no application for this invention.
Nevertheless, their Lordships examined other interesting possibilities, including the bombing of longer-range targets such as German airship bases. The navy felt vulnerable to Zeppelin bombing, as their own bases were to be found along the coast, and so a chain of air stations was constructed from which naval airships and aircraft could strike out against enemy raiders. As a result, the Royal Naval Air Service was to become responsible for the defence of the mainland from aerial attack in the forthcoming war.
As the prospect of a European war became more real, it was very clear that aviation would have a part to play, if, at first, only in an observational role. Nevertheless, that prospect ought to have been sufficient for the politicians and generals to predict an aerial escalation. To send an aircraft up to spy on the enemy is to invite preventative measures, and the simplest way to prevent an aircraft from spying is to send another aircraft up to shoot it down. Every aircraft would therefore need the means to defend itself. This had all been foreseen in a Royal Flying Corps training manual, produced a few months before the outbreak of war:
It is probable that one phase of the struggle for the command of the air will resolve itself into a series of combats between individual aeroplanes or pairs of aeroplanes. If the pilots of one side can succeed in obtaining victory in a succession of such combats, they will establish a moral ascendancy over the surviving pilots of the enemy, and be left free to carry out their duties of reconnaissance.
Taken a stage further, if an aircraft is capable of observing the enemy in its activities, it is surely capable of disrupting those very activities by dropping bombs. Yet every aircraft that went to war in the summer of 1914 was completely unarmed and unprepared to carry arms of any kind. When asking why, it should be remembered that at the outbreak of war aeroplanes had been flying for less than eleven years. They were not yet sturdy platforms for guns or bombs. They were flimsy contraptions, liable to tear themselves to pieces if handled roughly or landed steeply. And they were deliberately flimsy in order to minimize the weight of a craft that was breaking the laws of nature by taking to the air in the first place. Aeroplanes were still mistrusted for their very novelty. It was to take a war to demonstrate the extraordinary potential of the flying machine.
If there were still military doubts about the machines, there were also doubts about the men flying them. Many of the early flyers had been daredevils and risk-takers, non-conforming young men who valued adventure above duty, individuality above discipline. Edward Peter was such a man. Charles Tye remembers how, in 1912, Peter had jumped into Handley-Page’s precious machine and made off:
Edward Peter got up and he got into Yellow Peril. And all of a sudden, he was trying the controls – he was working the empennage and working the rudder. Then, he opened up the engine full. I shouted out, ‘What are you up to, Edward? What the devil are you up to? Come you out! Come you out! This machine has never been up before!’ But Edward didn’t take no notice. He simply revved up and went over the chocks and away he went. He ran about 200 yards and he was in the air. He flew that machine as an experienced man. He turned it round and climbed and away he went. Next thing we heard, he’d landed at Brooklands Aerodrome. When he landed, he was interviewed by an official at Brooklands and he got severely reprimanded and they were going to charge him with flying a machine without a licence. Because he had no licence – and this was his first time in an aeroplane!
This was the sort of person who might well progress from civilian flying into the Royal Flying Corps or Royal Naval Air Service and it frightened the conservative majority within the armed forces. Claude Grahame-White, the pioneer and founder of the London Aerodrome, was something of a dandy. This ensured him a dry reception on his arrival in the Royal Naval Air Service, by whom he had been granted a commission. Lance Sieveking tells the tale:
Grahame-White had been given the rank of flight commander and we heard that on his first day, he had presented himself at the admiralty in his beautiful new uniform, a diamond tiepin and white spats. He was a very handsome man. ‘Well, old boy,’ he said jauntily to Lord Edward Grosvenor, in his office over the Admiralty Arch, ‘How will I do? Is it all right?’ Lord Edward looked at him critically and said in a tone of reproach, ‘I think you’ve forgotten one thing. The gold earrings, dear fellow …’
With aviation came a new breed of soldier and sailor; irreverent, questioning, likely to appreciate the ‘wonder of flight’ with which we began this chapter. Despite the best efforts of Hugh Trenchard, the man who was to take command of the Royal Flying Corps in 1915, the First World War flying services were never as regimented as the older services. Standards of dress and mess-room behaviour often fell short of accepted standards. Yet, these were men who were living on their nerves and putting all their energies into an undertaking that they were not likely to survive. These are the men whose voices will be heard in the pages that follow.

2 (#ulink_f421903e-1666-5044-b1d1-900036a40a58)


The Combatants
The following letter was written by a young man to his parents in 1916:
Last night I was just getting into my bed when a sponge full of water came along the room. At once the place was in a fine mess. I threw a jug of water, but the same was returned with interest. Next the place got so full of water that I ran into the garden, falling into a big hole full of mud. I managed to obtain two onions on my way back, and with these attacked the mob. All our beds are wet through. However, at last all got right again and we got our sleep. It was great sport.
The young man was not a schoolboy but a fighter pilot. His name was Albert Ball, and within a year he would earn a Victoria Cross, a Military Cross and three Distinguished Service Orders as arguably the greatest British fighter ace of the war. His letter describes the adolescent horseplay common in the squadrons. Situated in comfortable chateaux and farmhouses behind the lines, these squadrons served as a refuge from the realities of life in the air. When a man was killed, the custom was to carry on as though nothing had happened, to drink and sing, to shed no tears. With their outward confidence, emotional reserve and ‘great sport’, these squadrons brought the world of the English public school to France. It is not surprising that so many letters home were childlike. Albert Ball again:
Am feeling very poo-poo today. Five of my best pals were done in yesterday, and I think it is so rotten.
In terms of background, if not of achievement, Ball was a typical British Great War pilot. Middle class, public school educated, and keen, the squadrons were full of men like him. Frederick Winterbotham was one:
I was born in the reign of Queen Victoria, in 1897, and I always remember my annoyance at the age of three, when I was given a prayer book with Queen Victoria on it, and she died, and I felt that I had been done down because I no longer had a queen. I grew up in a normal household in Stroud in Gloucestershire, where my father had a law business. I suppose my great love was always ponies and horses. It went on throughout my life. I went to an excellent school in Eastbourne and then I went on to Charterhouse, in that hot summer of 1911. I loved Charterhouse. It was the most gorgeous place and we played every sort of sport and game. My only trouble was that I was growing rather too fast and after I’d been there for a couple of years, I was well over six feet and I’d outgrown my strength. I was no longer fit to play games properly – so the medical people said that I should go for a sea voyage. I persuaded my father and mother to send me round the world and I was fortunate in that I had relations and friends in various places.
So it was that I set off in 1913, to Canada, where I helped a man to build a house and clear his land up in the Rockies. Then I went to Vancouver, during the Canadian real estate boom, where I was pestered to buy land. Strange gentlemen would ring me up and say, ‘I see you’ve come from Gloucestershire, you must know the Duke of Beaufort, I’d like to come and see you and sell you some land.’ Actually, I did know the Duke of Beaufort, but I didn’t tell them that.
Having seen Canada, I crossed the Pacific to China in a big new ship that was full of dead Chinese, going home to be buried, and American missionaries, going out to China. I loved Japan, I had a marvellous time. In those days, the Japanese loved the English, and all the women wore kimonos and walked in wooden sandals. The drains in the villages were all open, you rode in a rickshaw and you drank green tea.
Leaving Japan, I went down to Shanghai, to see the British colony down there. Unfortunately, a man came aboard the boat, and took the next cabin to myself, and he had a rash all over him. I mentioned this, and a doctor was brought, and of course, it was smallpox. I was rather lucky. I’d had measles before I left England, and I was well vaccinated, and I didn’t catch it. Then I went on to Hong Kong, where I had friends, and then down to Australia. And in Australia, I went to live on a sheep station that belonged to a friend of ours from Gloucestershire. I was a jackaroo, 180 miles north of the nearest railway line, right out in the desert. I loved it. If it hadn’t been for the coming war, I might have stayed there. I adored the life.
However, I did come home. I stopped in New Zealand to see where my grandfather had once owned what is now the great suburb of Remuera, outside Auckland. Unfortunately, he sold it a bit too soon. Then, I came home, via India, and on the way, I remember hearing news that the Kaiser had taken a very large percentage out of all the fortunes of the rich Germans. It was a wealth tax, and I remember discussing it with people on board the ship, asking why he wanted all this money, and we all came to the conclusion that there was trouble coming.
Back home, in England, in 1914, I went back to Charterhouse for a term, and took my entrance exam to Trinity, Cambridge. But then, of course, came the outbreak of war. I was in camp with the Charterhouse Officer Training Corps, in Staffordshire, at the time. I went back home in my uniform to Gloucestershire, and people were making a fuss of anybody in uniform, and a woman came up to me at Gloucester Station, and she asked me to hold her baby for a minute, while she went and got something, but she didn’t come back …
I wanted to join up. I’d always been keen on horses, and I thought I’d join the local Gloucestershire Yeomanry, which was one of the very good yeomanry regiments. So, at the age of seventeen, I became a subaltern in the Yeomanry, where I had a glorious two years, training men and horses. I was given a hundred butchers’ boys and grocers’ boys from Gloucester who’d ridden nothing but a bicycle, and a hundred Canadian horses that had never been ridden at all, and I had to put them together and make them into a squadron of cavalry. Which was quite an interesting job, actually. But before long, cavalry weren’t wanted any more and we had to get rid of our horses. I suppose it was one of the most traumatic days that I ever remember, because we all loved our horses, and we had to take them away and load them onto a train and send them off, goodness knows where, after having trained them up for two years. They then said that they were going to give us bicycles but I didn’t really fancy that very much.
I’d met a man quite recently, who’d been flying and he’d been explaining to me how he was cooperating with a new, very secret weapon, called a ‘tank’ and it was the greatest fun. So I went back and told my colonel that I was going to go flying. He was a little bit cross, but I said, no, it’s the thing for me, so off I went. I went to see some people in London, in the War Office. There was a very nice young cavalry officer who was interviewing possible candidates for the Royal Flying Corps. He noted my shoulder straps, and he said, ‘Ah, you’re Gloucester Yeomanry. You ride a horse?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I do.’ ‘Do you know where the pole star is?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I think I could find it.’ ‘You’ll do,’ he said.
British society in 1914, patriotic and obedient, was firmly ordered by class. Frederick Winterbotham represented the next generation of officers and empire builders. Young men like him, and those from every social class for that matter, knew their place. They were born with a role to fulfil, and, when war came, a new and appropriate role was assigned, and carried out unhesitatingly. For all that the new flying services attracted men of originality and disregard for military custom, their originality usually only extended to their immediate world. Larger moral and political conventions remained unchallenged. The structure of the flying services neatly reflected the social order; officers came from one background, the rank and file from another. In general, pilots were officers, while the riggers who tended the airframes, and the fitters who looked after the engines, were in the ranks. Occasionally, however, the social order blurred. Within the squadrons there were a number of sergeant pilots, from humble backgrounds, who lived and messed separately to the officers, but who experienced precisely the same dangers. Among these were men who had learnt to fly in the pre-war pioneering days. Donald Clappen was one of them:
I was always interested in flying. I used to take the aviation journals, Flight and Aeroplane. Then in July 1911, the Gordon Bennett Cup took place at Eastchurch. I was living at Westcliff-on-Sea at the time, and I took an excursion boat across to Sheerness and I saw all the famous pilots flying. The Gordon Bennett Cup was an international affair. Pilots represented their countries. I saw not only my first flying, but also my first crash.
It appears that Gustav Hamel, a famous British pilot, was flying practice laps in a Blériot, but found that his time was slightly slower than that of a rival Nieuport machine. Blériot himself was present, and he decided to cut about a foot off of each wing. This went well. Hamel was faster in his next practice circuit. But in the actual race, he got to the first pylon, overbanked and flew straight into the ground, with the engine running full on. He was thrown twenty-five or thirty yards, rolling over and over. The machine was a total wreck, but Hamel was only badly bruised, and didn’t even break a bone.
It was as big a crash as one could ever wish to see – yet he got up almost unhurt. That made me think that aviation was not quite as dangerous as I had believed. However, everyone thought I was quite mad to want to learn to fly. In fact, so much so, that I hardly told anyone of my interest – not even my own parents. That’s why I started off by getting myself apprenticed to the Chanter School of Flying at Hendon, just as a start. They had an advertisement in one of the aviation journals.
The Chanter School was rather a ropey concern. It had two Blériots and a machine which they were building themselves. They ceased to exist in October or November 1911, by which time I’d learnt to sweep the floor and push the machines about. I then got in touch with the Blériot Aviation Company, also at Hendon, and asked if I could join them as an apprentice, with a view to becoming a flying pupil at a later date.
I joined Blériot in November 1911, and I was just a general dogsbody at first, but I was allowed to fly. Learning was entirely a solo effort. There were no dual-control machines, nor were there any machines that could take up a passenger. At first, the aircraft was raised onto a pedestal, showing what it was like, and the view one would get as a pilot in the flying position. Then one was put into the machine, told to keep straight ahead, towards a tree or something like that on the other side of the aerodrome. One learnt to roll across the ground. From thence, one started by doing short hops, followed by longer hops, until one could fly straight across the other side of the aerodrome. After that, one was able to do half circuits, one to the left and then to the right, and so forth, until one was able to fly in a complete circuit around the aerodrome.
The first time I flew was quite by accident. I was in a machine which was not supposed to fly. It had been detuned. I was rolling across the ground, doing a straight, as I thought, when suddenly I found the ground receding under me. Of course, this was so unexpected that I pushed my stick down and landed with a bit of a crash and found myself with the undercarriage spread all around me and the prop broken. My instructor – Monsieur Salmet – came rushing up to me, ‘Why you fly? Why you fly?’ I had no answer. I didn’t know.
What had happened was that a gust of wind had caught my plane and it had taken off without my expecting it to. In those days, no one ever flew unless it was dead calm. My punishment was that I was not allowed to practise on an aircraft until I had participated in the repair of the machine, which took some months. That put me back quite a lot, but I still qualified for my pilot’s certificate when I turned eighteen. After that, I was made a sort of assistant instructor, but I was also expected to do absolutely everything connected with the running, repairing and mending of the aircraft, tuning up of the engines. I did everything concerned with the maintenance of the machines.
In general, the majority of pupils were army officers, who were learning to fly with a view to joining the Royal Flying Corps, which had started in 1912. There were a few others – some rich people who went on to buy their own aircraft. And most weekends, at Hendon, there were competitions and flying displays. It was quite a fashionable affair, almost like Ascot, with people flocking down to see the flying.
I was assistant instructor until April 1914, but then Blériot moved to Brooklands, and I became an instructor at the Hall School of Flying at Hendon, which consisted of two Blériots, a Deperdussin, a Caudron and an Avro. I received a pound a week, and we taught a few pupils.
I was on holiday in Scotland when the war broke out. It didn’t upset my holiday. I was thinking this war would be of the nature of the Boer War. But when I got back to Hendon, I found that the cry had gone out for pilots for the Flying Corps, and that a few of the instructors had actually become sergeant pilots. So I promptly put my name down. I signed the papers and waited. I continued instructing with the Hall School – but nothing happened. A lot of my friends were joining up, anxious to get into the war as quickly as possible, as everyone thought the war would be finished by Christmas. I found they were joining the London Scottish, so I spent all day queuing and found myself a perfectly good private in the London Scottish territorial battalion.
By April 1915, I was looking up with great envy from the trenches at the aircraft flying above, so I put in another application to join the Royal Flying Corps. I said that I’d already applied, but had had no reply. My colonel was not very keen because he was losing a lot of his personnel. So he instructed that he would pass on any application if the applicant could get somebody to apply for him from whatever regiment he wished to join. In my case, I knew nobody in the Royal Flying Corps.
Just a week before the Battle of Loos – we were resting behind the trenches – I went up to Auchel where I was watching the aircraft with envy. As I stood, watching the machines landing, a general emerged from the office. As he stepped into his car, acting on the spur of the moment, I said, ‘Please sir, may I speak?’ He looked round, astonished, and didn’t say anything. I pulled out my application papers and told him my story, the fact that I was a qualified pilot, that I wanted to join the Royal Flying Corps but had some difficulty getting anyone to apply for me, that I had replied and had heard nothing more about it. In a very deep voice, he told another officer, also a brass hat, ‘Make a note of that; make a note of that’ … and so on. He said, ‘I’ll see what we can do.’ In the meantime, he called to an airman and said ‘Is there a transport going back towards the trenches, to Béthune? If so, make sure this soldier gets a lift back.’ With that I saluted smartly and off he went. In the tender which took me back to Béthune, I asked the driver, ‘Who was I speaking to?’ ‘Blimey,’ he said, ‘You’ve got a nerve! That was General Trenchard. He’s in charge of the Royal Flying Corps!’
After that, I went through the Battle of Loos, twice over the top. We had a pretty bad time. Each time, I was lucky to get away with it. At one point, there was only one other fellow left in my section. On 9 October, as I was coming out of the trenches, I was greeted by a telegram which said, ‘Report at once to the War Office.’ That night, not having slept for days, dirty and filthy, I was given a first-class warrant and I found myself back in London on a Sunday morning. I wasn’t feeling too good, and I was sent to a specialist, who pronounced that I needed three weeks’ rest. After that, I was in the Royal Flying Corps.
Cecil King was a working-class boy who joined the Royal Flying Corps in 1913. He was to become a rigger and, ultimately, a flight sergeant:
Originally, I was an apprentice to a wheelwright and coach builder in the country, but after I’d come through my apprenticeship, I came to London. I did roughly a year’s work in a London workshop, which was partially underground, and very depressing, and I wanted to get into a more open-air life. I cast about to see what I would do and one day, when I was walking in Kingston, I met two soldiers. They had an unusual badge, with the letters RFC, on their shoulders. I got into a conversation with them and they told me they were members of a new unit called the Royal Flying Corps, which had just started – and why didn’t I join?
I’d never heard of the Royal Flying Corps, and I didn’t know there was a military regiment concerned with flying. Actually, I wasn’t bothered about that – I just knew it would be out in the open air and on big open fields. That’s what I wanted. I was interested in flying, though. In 1911, I’d seen Gustav Hamel flying at Hendon. I remember the announcer said, ‘This is Gustav Hamel on an aeroplane with a Gnome engine.’ The crowd thought he’d said, ‘No engine’ and there was quite a stir.
But after I’d met these two members of the Royal Flying Corps, I went to a recruiting sergeant and asked him about it, and he said, ‘Yes, I think something like that has started, and if you’d like to join, I’ll find out for you.’ I decided I would go a bit further with it. I went to Kingston Barracks and made my final decision. I was sworn into the army there, and I expressed a desire to go in the RFC, so I was given a railway warrant and sent down to Aldershot. When I got there, I asked the first serviceman I saw, ‘Where are the barracks of the Royal Flying Corps?’ and he said, ‘Never heard of it.’
But by inquiring once or twice more I finally found that the Royal Flying Corps shared barracks with the Black Watch so I reported there, and I was sent up to a small building on the aerodrome at Farnborough where all the further particulars of my enlistment were taken down. I was sent back to the barracks for my first night. And when I woke up in the morning I heard the trumpets from the South Camp – that was the cavalry – and the bugles from the North Camp; and I was delighted. I thought, ‘I’m really and truly in the army.’
When war was declared on 4 August 1914, many of the men who were to fly were scattered across the globe. Charles Chabot was living in Bangkok:
The European population of Bangkok at this time was absolutely minimal. A hundred would cover the entire European population of Siam. Nevertheless we had enough English people to rake up a rugby football team. The Germans had a rugby team as well. As the final game of the season, the Germans challenged us and this match was to be followed by dinner at the German club. So we played the game and we were beaten by the Germans and we congregated for the party after the match. We were all mixed up around the table – a German here, an Englishman here, next to him a German, next to him a Frenchman and so on. It began and it was like every other rugby football dinner since time immemorial. And then came a bang at the door and a runner came in from the French Embassy with the extraordinary news of the outbreak of war and he was quickly followed by another runner from the German Embassy. We’d never thought of other chaps in terms of war and we didn’t know what we ought to do, whether we ought to seize a knife off the table and plunge it into the next chap, or what. After a little bit of discussion, we decided that as far as we were concerned, the war was going to start tomorrow. The party proceeded and that was that.
In Britain, the prevailing mood in August 1914 was euphoric. Leslie Kemp remembers:
The war came and threw everything and everybody out of balance. The enthusiasm for the war was really fantastic. There were actresses singing, there were concerts in Trafalgar Square and, if you enlisted, you were given the ‘King’s Shilling’. It was entirely different to the atmosphere that prevailed at the start of the Second World War.
Young men with romantic dreams of flying seized their opportunity. Charles Burne:
When I went home and told my father that I wanted to join the Royal Naval Air Service, he signed the papers but he said, ‘Don’t start flying. It’s only damn fools and birds that fly.’
At the beginning of the war, a man with specialist knowledge was a welcome addition to the flying services. William Richards, self-taught and highly motivated, was such a man:
My father and my mother emigrated separately in the eighties, around 1884. My father was from Cornwall, at a time when the Cornish tin mines were in difficulty and closing down. And people concerned with that sort of work, at that time, were emigrating. At the age of twenty-one, he went to New Zealand. My mother’s was an agricultural family in Essex. When she was about fourteen, they moved to New Zealand. She was that much younger than my father.
They met at Dougville, eight or nine years after arrival in New Zealand, and they fell in love, married, and there’s no doubt about it, it was a very happy and romantic marriage. She was a lovely person. I was born a year after their marriage on St George’s Day in 1893. They’d set up home in Auckland, in Queen Street, at that time, scarcely developed. They set up home in a kind of colonial style, and there’s no question that they were very happy. I have the photographs of myself as a baby, and they go to show that’s what it was – a happy home.
My mother contracted some sort of tropical fever at the age of twenty-five, and when I was a year and ten months old, she was taken from us, leaving my father with me, more or less in arms, to cope with a tragic situation. Friends came to his help, and I was looked after for a time, but it was quite clear to him that he couldn’t carry on. It so happened that a relative in Cornwall had lost her first baby, and been told that she couldn’t have another, and she, knowing my father’s predicament, wrote to him, suggesting that if he cared to bring me to England, she would take care of me.
So she became, in a way, my foster mother. We lived on a farm, very isolated. I had no contact with any other children excepting when I later went to a village school at St Neot. So I was mixing very freely with grown-ups, all of them occupied in agricultural work. My only playmate, as a matter of fact, was a sporting dog. And I became rather self contained, independent, perhaps a little bit difficult, being alone in that way. I developed into rather an interesting child, in that I insisted that I would set my own way of life, and form my own ideas. I had quite strong ideas as a child. When I reached the age of ten, the dear lady who had been looking after me decided to go to America with her husband, and my father felt it necessary that a home should be provided for me, so he decided to marry. And he did. He just married, not for any romantic reason. Just to make a home.
I was independent minded and I refused to accept my stepmother. And it wasn’t long before, on the excuse of going to spend a holiday with some friends in another part of Cornwall, I left home and refused to return. And from then on, I continued from one thing to another, living in different places, lodging with different persons, being employed in different things. I worked in the tin mines, and because I’d developed an interest in machinery, I was given some responsibility, even at a very young age. I was looking after power equipment, and doing survey work along the valleys for tin.
In the meantime, I took an interest in politics. At the age of eighteen, I stood with Isaac Foot, the father of Michael Foot, on his platform in Bolventor. I wrote letters for people in the farms who were scarcely literate. I had educated myself entirely – I was never coached, assisted or guided. I don’t think I was helped at any time. I just pursued my own way. I was good tempered, bright, inquisitive and well inclined to learn anything and everything from observation and experience. I gained a lot of experience.
It started to appear to me that I had a purpose in life. I was at that age, in my later teens, when a teenager develops this disposition. And I thought that my purpose could well be served if I were to adopt a religious career. I came under the influence of a book that was published at that time by the minister of the City Temple, Archie Campbell, The New Theology, which suited my ideas of religion. I was old enough to draw certain conclusions about the difference between fundamental religion, evangelical religion, and the more liberal attitude to religious dogma and doctrine. In that connection, I spoke in public on many occasions. And the local stewards of the Church nominated me for the ministry.
I accepted the nomination and acted on it. I went to London, where I was examined by a committee with the purpose of going to theological college, but I was turned down because my self-education had only equipped me for certain things. For example, they asked what books I had read. I couldn’t answer. I just hadn’t had books, the classics, and that kind of thing. I was just so completely self-educated, in a rag-tag fashion, quite uncontrolled, without direction. The committee put me back for a year, as a result of my inability to quote Shakespeare. My attitude of mind was, whilst religious to a degree, critical of a number of things that I could not accept, and I decided that my future would be secular and not religious. I turned immediately to earning my living in a commercial or engineering way, and dropped any idea of pursuing a religious life.
So I went to London with £5 in my pocket, knowing nothing more than that the streets of London were paved with gold, and my future was what I could make of it. I booked in at the YMCA in Tottenham Court Road, and within twenty-four hours I had a job at the London County Council as a temporary assistant.
By then, I had studied electricity and magnetism in books, and I’d given myself a fairly good grounding. And at the time, the big trans-continental wireless stations, Poldhu, Eiffel Tower and Nauen, were operating, and it was possible with a simple piece of apparatus – a crystal and a pair of headphones – to pick up those signals, and if you knew Morse code, you could read what they were saying. So I learnt the Morse code, and followed these transmissions as a kind of hobby. And in that way, wireless became my forte.
At the outbreak of war, I was fired with the idea, and I walked into a recruiting station and offered myself. They examined me as to who I was, and what I could do, and it came out that I knew Morse, and I was booked as one of the very, very few wireless operators for the Royal Flying Corps. One thing followed another. I was sent to study under Professor Price at the London Polytechnic for two months, and then I was handed a New Testament, a revolver, and I was told to proceed to 4 Squadron in France.
Archibald James began the war as a well-connected young subaltern in the 3rd Hussars:
My primary recollection of the first winter of the war is of mud, Flanders clay, our wretched horses standing on long picket lines, hock-deep in mud, misery, living on bully beef and biscuit, and great discomfort. We were employed as dismounted cavalry to take over trench lines, usually for a short time before infantry became available. The British front had been extended to the north. And the line in the north of Flanders was held mainly by old French Territorials. The trenches were very sketchy. And we were quite ill-adapted to this sort of work and quite unsuitably clothed for it, as indeed, at that stage of the war, were the infantry for trench warfare.
The worst episode of this period was three miserable days when we stood to in the afternoon, then rode about ten miles. On the way it came on to pour with rain. And by the time we got to about a mile and a half from the trenches we were to take over, we were all absolutely soaked to the skin. My trench was an isolated length, with no idea how far away the German trenches were. In the night, it stopped raining and started to freeze hard. We had three days in these wretched little trenches, frozen miserable. And we had the greatest difficulty getting rations up because, from one flank, the Germans overlooked our rear. And when we got back to billets after three nights in these trenches, we had without exception what became known as trench feet. We had one-third of the regiment out of action for a week while their wretched feet thawed out. My feet were throbbing with pain for at least a week.
We were then sent to take over from another cavalry regiment who had been occupying a trench line in Sanctuary Wood for three days. Our period was to be three days also. The wood was still composed of young larch trees which had been fairly heavily knocked about by rifle fire. The trench had been constructed shortly before by French Territorials. It had been too wet to dig down and the parapet consisted largely of dead French bodies covered over with a superficial covering of earth. There was no wire in front of us. And the German trenches were about thirty yards away. It was here that I received my first utterly trivial wound.
Opposite my troop front – as I say at thirty yards’ range – were the German trenches. And I quickly noticed, looking through a loophole, that opposite me was a place where the German trenches, for some reason, were shallower. And when a man walked along them, he appeared up to about the middle of his upper arm. This seemed to me to offer an opportunity. So I took a rifle from one of my troopers and posted myself at a loophole waiting for the next German to come along.
In due course, the German appeared. I’m a good rifle shot and it was no question that I’d got him. But what I hadn’t realized was that a German was watching the end of my rifle and had a shot at me. And as our trench wall was in no way bulletproof, the bullet hit me under my left arm and merely grazed the skin. But it certainly discouraged me from any further sniping.
We were relieved by the 16th Lancers. I had been convinced from what I’d heard while I was listening in the watches of the night, that the Germans were sapping under our trenches and so I reported to my commanding officer. He reported to brigade and nothing happened. The night after we left, the Germans blew a mine under the very trenches we had been in. And it cost the lives of five or six 16th Lancer officers and about twenty men, partly in a futile counter-attack which ensued from this episode.
Shortly after this, a circular came round all cavalry divisions asking for lightweight – specified lightweight – officers to become observers in the Royal Flying Corps. It came at a very opportune moment for me.
For Walter Ostler, the flying services offered an alternative to the trenches:
I well remember, one night, I was in a very crowded tramcar, going home from Finsbury Park to Wood Green. This lady – if I may call her so – simply pushed up alongside me and stuck this white feather in my buttonhole, much to my embarrassment. It was time to think about service in one of the Forces. For me, it was the Royal Flying Corps because the thing I wanted to avoid most of all was the Army and trench life in France. I’d spoken to soldiers returning from France during the winter of 1914 and they had two words for life out there: ‘Bloody awful.’
T. E. Rogers was an officer who had spent too long in the trenches:
I knew what war was like. I had seen death – too much of it. When I left the trenches, my brother officers said ‘Good heavens, haven’t you seen enough planes come down in flames?’ I said, ‘Yes, but haven’t you seen enough death in trenches?’ With flying, it would soon be over if you’d come to the end of your life. You didn’t have to sleep in mud, night after night, day after day, in mud and water.
When R. J. Duce’s wounds prevented him from continuing in the infantry, he saw the Flying Corps as an opportunity to continue the fight. The path that led him to the RFC began many thousands of miles from France:
I had been in India with one of the merchant banks before the war, and during my five years there, I had joined the equivalent of the territorial force. We were fully trained, to the extent that we were better armed with the Lee Enfields rifle than the British army in England. When the war started, after a little while, a notice came in the clubs, from the Inns of Court Officers Training Corps, asking if we would come home and join, and be commissioned into the British army. I asked the bank if I could go, and they told me that there were other people, senior to me, who should have the choice before me. I pointed out that these people weren’t going. They said that I couldn’t go, but I was going to go, anyway.
I didn’t expect to come out of the war alive. I had been living on the North-West Frontier, up near the Khyber Pass, and I had a lot of nice books and various other things, and I gave them all away, I had the idea, as did a lot of my friends, that I shouldn’t come through it, but I was of a very religious turn of mind, so it didn’t bother me.
I went down to Karachi, and I shipped on board a Japanese boat as a purser. There were forty-nine Chinese crew, six Japanese officers, and an English captain. I paid the captain six shillings a day for my food, and I got one shilling pay when I got to England. The bank sent my resignation after me. Just after I arrived in England, I was stopped, and asked, ‘What about joining up, young man?’ I said, ‘I’ve just come six thousand miles! Give me a chance!’
In the end, I didn’t join the Inns of Court, I joined the Artists Rifles. I was fully trained, so myself and three others, one from India and two from South Africa, were put on as orderlies in the sergeants’ mess. We waited so well on the sergeants that they were delighted. But we wouldn’t take that on permanently. Next, I was made an officer’s servant. Considering that I’d come from India where I’d had eleven servants, it was rather amusing. But then, I was commissioned into the 20th London, Royal West Kent Regiment. In due course, I went out to France.
On my first day in the line, I was on duty – and I remember looking over and seeing that the Germans were shelling from an armoured train that ran along a track. I was so interested to watch the shells suddenly appear like a panther approaching. You could see the shells coming over the last five yards. There was a young fellow there, named Atkins, and I chatted to him for some time. He said to me, ‘Yes, sir, this is my first time in the line.’ And then I walked about twenty yards away from him, to our company dugout, and I looked round, and in that second, a shell came over right on top of him, and the blast blew me down into the dugout. It was quite a first experience.
A while later, we sent over a party of twenty men, their faces blacked, to do a raid. A couple were officers, a few were NCOs and the rest were Tommies. I was in the front line, and a heavy barrage opened up, from behind our second line. We had to keep our heads down in the trench. Then, suddenly the Germans started shelling as well, for all they were worth. Something came down and hit my tin helmet, knocking it off. I picked up the helmet, put it back on, and one second later, something else hit it, and knocked it off again. It showed the value of these helmets. Once the shelling had stopped, we found a strange thing in the back of the trench: one of our own shells had hit a German shell in mid-air, and come down straight behind us in the trench. It should have burst – but it hadn’t.
I don’t know that I ever felt frightened – because I was too dedicated a patriot. And the finest patriot you can get is the Englishman living abroad. Having said that, I remember one incident – we were in France and I was in billets. I had a room by myself, and I woke up in the night to find that I was half hanging out of a dormer window. In my sleep, with the nerves that I must have had, I had thought that I’d been climbing out of the dugout.
At the end of June 1916, we marched down to the Somme. We were detailed to go over the top, in an attack on High Wood. I had No. 5 Platoon, B Company, and we were detailed to go all the way through. I was darned annoyed because I was going over first. We were to go over at 3.15 on Sunday afternoon, and while I was waiting, there was nothing to do but go to sleep, and I found that I was able to sleep at the side of the trench. When we went over, I was quite fortunate. Of the three officers of my company, two were killed and I was only wounded. Out of 480 men, 160 were killed, 160 were wounded and 160 got through. It was rather extraordinary. As I was stepping over the wire, I was shot straight through the foot, which knocked me down. If I’d put my foot down before, I’d have got it right through the knee. I laid out there for some hours, and then as I started to crawl back, parallel to the German line, a German came over the top, and stood, looking out, holding his machine gun. I just had to freeze. I can tell you, it’s quite a nervous tension to lie there for ten minutes, without moving, so that he thinks you’re a dead body. Gradually, I turned my head round to look, and saw that he had gone, and I crawled back. As I was crawling back, I followed a small trench, in which I came across a dead man. All I could do was crawl straight over him. It wasn’t a pleasant thing.
When I got back to the UK, I was on crutches, and I realized that I would be lame for a while, so I went into the Royal Flying Corps headquarters, and saw them. I said that I wanted to transfer to the Royal Flying Corps, and I was abruptly told to clear off, and come back when I hadn’t got crutches. I was then offered a job with Motor Transport, but I said no. I’d come all the way from India, and I didn’t want to take on a non-combatant role. So I put in again for the Royal Flying Corps and this time, I was accepted pretty quickly. I was given instructions to report to Edin, near St Pol, and I was sent to 98 Squadron.
William Berry, some way down the social order, was so keen to join the Flying Corps, that he accepted the only job available:
I didn’t think about volunteering straight away when war broke out. I rather fancy my parents were against it. They didn’t want me going out and getting killed. There were lots of posters up. Kitchener with a finger pointing, Kitchener wants you. There were all the recruiting meetings in Trafalgar Square with Horatio Bottomley very much to the fore. There were also recruiting sergeants who stopped you in the street and I was quite frequently stopped: ‘A young fellow like you, why aren’t you in the army?’ sort of thing. That was the general line, which was quite true, and I resented it very much because I really wanted to volunteer, but my parents weren’t very amenable. They were very patriotic, but in those days you obeyed what your parents told you, and I wasn’t twenty-one years old.
Then one day, I happened to go to the cinema in Croydon, and one of the newsreels showed a house in Belgium. There were German soldiers knocking in all the windows with the butts of their rifles. They then set the house on fire because it was in the way of their guns. I was very upset at this. I sympathized, and I thought, ‘Right! I am going to do something about it!’ So I wrote to the Royal Flying Corps at Farnborough.
I had had a pre-war interest in going to Hendon and seeing all the early pioneers. If you saw an aeroplane in those days, it was quite something. Flying, I thought, was the coming thing, and the RFC was open again for recruits. Directly the Flying Corps was opened, in about five minutes, it was full up, as they’d got all the recruits they wanted. They had no difficulty getting recruits of a good calibre who knew their trades and knew what they were doing. I wrote and said I wanted to enlist and I got a letter back immediately, saying that they would welcome me as a wireless operator, and would I go to the recruiting centre in Farnborough?
So I went to the recruiting centre and they said, ‘I’m sorry, you can’t join the Royal Flying Corps, it’s closed.’ I said, ‘That’s impossible, I’ve got this letter from them!’ and they said, ‘It closed this morning! You’re too late! Why don’t you join the local regiment, the Seventh King’s Royal Rifles?’ As my father had been in the ‘Shiny 7th’, I thought, ‘Well, that’s an idea.’ So I got the recruiting form and got three-quarters of the way through it when I thought, ‘No! I’m going to join the Flying Corps!’ I tore up the form and put it in the wastepaper basket.
I told the Recruiting Major that I was very disappointed that I’d got his letter but that now I couldn’t join, and he was very much impressed with the trouble I’d taken to get all that way from London to Farnborough. He said, ‘We are short of cooks. Have you ever done any cooking?’ I said, ‘I really can’t say I’m a cook, but to get into the Flying Corps, I’m willing to take it on.’ He said, ‘Right! Hold up your hand!’ I was sworn in, and I was a recruit and I spent that night at the recruits’ barracks at Farnborough.
Leslie Murton joined out of a desire to exact revenge:
I was born in Magdalen Street, Norwich, in my grandfather’s shop. My father was one of the finest turned shoemakers there ever was. One of the fastest. My eldest brother was a printer at the Eastern Daily Press. The next brother to him, Bertie, was training to be a hotel manager in London. Another brother, Sidney, was a motor mechanic.
I left school at fourteen, in the year that war broke out. At the time, it didn’t mean much to me. But one day I came home from school, and my mum told me to read this letter. She could never read or write. It was from my brother in London. He said the girls were putting white feathers in his cap as he walked through the streets. He said he couldn’t stand it, so he’d enlisted in the King’s Royal Rifles. At the same time, my eldest brother had enlisted in the 7th Norfolks. Well, after a period, my brother in London said he couldn’t stand the London people, they were rough to him, and in those days, you could transfer from one regiment to another, provided you had relations in the new regiment. So he transferred to the 7th Norfolks to be with his brother.
A little later, Sidney was sent straight to France as a transport driver. When he was there, he was sent down to the docks, where he met the regiments coming in, and he ran into my two brothers in the 7th Norfolks. He told me later that he’d said to them, ‘Thing is, I won’t see either of you two again.’ And he was true to his word. On 13 October 1915, the two of them were killed side by side.
When we got the news from the War Office, I had to go to my father’s place of business. I told him. He took his apron off, threw it down. I can see him now. He’d been a teetotaller for years but he said, ‘I’ll never come back till I’ve spent every penny.’ And my dad never came back to work again, until he’d drank his money away. And after that, my poor old mother tried to do something to herself, but she was saved. You can understand it, can’t you, when you lose two young boys of that age? It affected me as well. When I was old enough, I was going to get my own back.
From the time my brothers died, my mother put a memorial, every year, in the Eastern Evening News, where my brother had been a printer. One day, a man came to my office, where I was working, and said, ‘Excuse me, Mr Murton. Could I ask you a question?’ ‘Certainly,’ I said. ‘I see in the paper, last night, there was a memorial to the Murton brothers.’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I would like to know whether you’re a relation,’ he asked. ‘Matter of fact,’ I said, ‘they’re my two brothers, who were killed.’ ‘What I want you to know,’ he said, ‘is that I buried one of them. I was a stretcher bearer at the time, in France, in the 7th Norfolks, and I buried him, but the other one, his brother, was blown to pieces.’ And that’s the tragedy of my two brothers.
In the later part of 1915, the Royal Flying Corps formed a boys’ section. I was sixteen, and I forged my mother’s signature, and went up to Britannia barracks, where I was sworn in, and they told me that a month before I was seventeen, I would hear from them. And I did.
When I got called up, one evening, two military policemen came to my house with a warrant and said, ‘Leslie Murton?’ and my mother said, ‘Yes!’ because I was out with the boys. They said that I had to catch such and such a train tomorrow to London and then another to Aldershot, for the Royal Flying Corps. Next day, I took the train to Liverpool Street Station. I’d never been further than Yarmouth in my lifetime!
So at Liverpool Street, I got off the train and there was a policeman, and I said, ‘Excuse me, old chap, how do I get on the Underground?’ So he told me where to go. I followed his directions, until I saw a dustman, who was sweeping up the horse manure. I said to him, ‘Excuse me, where’s the Underground?’ ‘Down there!’ he said, pointing down some steps. ‘Look, old chap,’ I said, ‘I may have just come from the country, but I’m not daft enough to go down there! You’re trying to send me down the toilet!’ I thought he was. I’d never seen the Underground before. So he took me down and I got the train and went off to Aldershot. When I got there, I was really hungry, so I went out into the street, to a fried fish shop. I got some fish and chips, and just as I opened the paper to eat some, I saw my fish and chips going up in the air. Two military police had kicked it out of my hands. ‘You don’t do that here!’ one of them said. I was in the services now.
Those who joined the other ranks of the Royal Flying Corps often considered themselves a cut above the humble infantryman. Cecil King:
Everyone who joined the Royal Flying Corps in the other ranks held some trade or other, whereas the men in the general regiments – they might be anyone. All us recruits in the RFC had some kind of training or apprenticeship; we actually had to pass a trade test before we got in. And therefore we considered ourselves a bit superior to the infantry and cavalry who may have come from any walk of life. We also got more pay than they did and when they found that out, they were a little bit jealous.
George Eddington was not a born soldier:
The Flying Corps interested me because the army was rather a brutal affair full of big hefty Irishmen and that type of person. I was neither that way disposed nor that way built. It didn’t attract me a bit. I was a tradesman rather than a soldier, so the Flying Corps sounded attractive.
The Great War was a time of intense patriotism in the British colonies. Frank Burslem was born and raised in Trinidad, but he considered himself as British as any man born in the British Isles:
I thought that any enemy of England was an enemy of mine and I wanted to be in the war. When I was sixteen years old in 1917, I was six foot two tall, and I knew that there was a ship going from Trinidad to England with eight vacant berths. Local merchants paid for the berths and sent eight young fellows who wanted to join the army over to England. My father allowed me to go, but when he gave me my birth certificate, he told me I was to do some kind of war work like munitions or working the land. But when I got to England, I never showed my birth certificate to anybody. I told them that I was three years older than I really was, and I joined the army. I had no difficulty going against my father’s wishes – I was a patriotic youth and I wanted to be in it.
When we arrived in England, the eight of us went to New Scotland Yard, where we saw a fatherly sergeant and told him we wanted to join the army – and he put us in. Being volunteers, we had a choice of what service or regiment to go for. As the other fellows were going into the Artists Rifles, that’s what I chose too.
I went to the basic training camp at Gidea Park, but I didn’t like it very much. The marching was so strenuous and I found it numbed and cramped the muscles in my thighs and calves. I stood it for a week, but after that I reported ill, and went before the doctor. He expected somebody ‘swinging the lead’. He asked what the matter was, and I said, ‘Anchhylostomiasis, sir.’ ‘Good God, what’s that?’ he asked. It was hookworm. I told him that just before leaving Trinidad, the Rockefeller Foundation had tested me and discovered that I had hookworm. I knew that I still had it. It meant that I wasn’t strong enough to do the strenuous work in the infantry. So they sent me to hospital and gave me the remedy. After that I was cured, and I went back to the regiment, where I could stand the drill. But by now, I’d seen what life in the infantry was like, and I thought it would be better for me if I didn’t do that kind of work. As they didn’t form fours, or anything like that, I changed my papers for a commission in the RFC.
Stanley Walters had problems reaching Britain from Rhodesia:
I did my damnedest to join the Royal Flying Corps, but I hadn’t got any money to get to England. Eventually, I persuaded somebody to let me go in and see the manager of the Union Castle Company. He asked what I wanted to see him about. I said, ‘I want to join the Royal Flying Corps!’ ‘How praiseworthy,’ he said, ‘how commendable, what have I got to do with that?’ ‘I can’t get to England!’ I said. ‘How disappointed you must be,’ he said. I slid off the chair and went away. Six weeks later, at three o’clock in the afternoon, I got a message. The Land Steffen Castle sails at six o’clock. I could go in her as an assistant purser. He didn’t call my bluff. I made it. I got to England with one golden sovereign so I was compelled to join the Royal Flying Corps immediately on my arrival.
Frederick Powell was stuck in an infantry regiment with no immediate prospect of joining the fight. He knew nothing of flying. He merely saw the Royal Flying Corps as a passport to France:
In November 1914, a circular came round to our battalion asking for volunteers to be an observer for the Royal Flying Corps. I didn’t know what I was volunteering for; my only interest was to get out to France. There was no sense of my wanting to fly, but my regiment seemed to have no chance of getting out to France before Christmas. One point is that, at the time, an observer’s weight had to be ten stone or less, so when I got down to ten stone, I was transferred to the Royal Flying Corps.
They had asked for one officer from each battalion, and there were two of us who wanted to volunteer; a man named Knowles was top of the list, and I was second. They only wanted one, but Knowles told me that he didn’t really want to volunteer because he was engaged to a girl. So if we were asked for one from each battalion, he would stand down. In point of fact, when the moment arrived, he did not stand down; he went. But by great good luck, they asked for another officer from our battalion, so I went too.
Even though I went as an observer, after I had been there two days, I was put down as an orderly officer, which meant that I had to go and report to the adjutant at six o’clock in the evening, and sleep in his office all night, in case the telephone went.
As I reported to the adjutant, the colonel called him into his office. The adjutant went, leaving the door ajar. I didn’t want to eavesdrop but I heard the adjutant say, ‘We’ve got another officer called Knowles, who’s been posted to us.’ The colonel said, ‘Is he an observer or a pilot?’ The adjutant said, ‘An observer.’ The colonel said, ‘Oh, we don’t want any more observers! We’ve got nothing but observers!’ The adjutant said, ‘Well, what shall I do with him?’ The colonel said, ‘Send him back to his regiment!’ And that was the end of Knowles. It frightened me, so that first thing in the morning, I reported to the adjutant and said, ‘Is there any chance, sir, of me being able to learn to fly, to become a pilot?’ I thought he was going to say, ‘Oh no, certainly not!’ but to my astonishment, he said, ‘Really? Do you want to become a pilot?’ ‘Yes sir,’ I said. ‘Oh, good lad! Then start away. We’ll put you down as a pilot!’
Arthur Harris, a man who was to achieve notoriety as commander-in-chief of Bomber Command during the Second World War, used his connections to jump the queue into the oversubscribed Royal Flying Corps:
I went round to the War Office where I was interviewed by a rather supercilious young man. When I said I would like to fly, he said, ‘So would six thousand other people. Would you like to be six thousand and one on the waiting list?’ So I retired rather disgruntled and when I got back, my father had just returned from India. When I told him what had happened, he said, ‘Why didn’t you go and see your Uncle Charlie?’ I had many uncles. I didn’t know who or what or where Uncle Charlie was but my father gave me a note and I went back to the War Office. When I handed the note addressed to Uncle Charlie to the same supercilious young fellow, he said, ‘Oh, please sit down a minute, sir!’ which was rather a change from the day before. He came back about ten minutes later and he said, ‘Colonel Elliot is in conference and unable to see you at the moment but if you will report to Number 2 Reserve Squadron at Brooklands this evening you can start flying.’
Ernest Tomkins, from a humble background, demonstrated that ambition and enthusiasm could defeat social disadvantage:
I asked how I could get into the Flying Corps. I was mad on flying. ‘Not a hope!’ said my brother, ‘You’d have to apply for a commission.’ ‘That’ll do’ I said. ‘Don’t be stupid,’ he said. ‘You haven’t got a certificate of education.’ But he had a word with our CO, who agreed to get in touch with a schoolmaster who’d give me a test. So I took this test – I did some arithmetic and I wrote an essay on a subject I liked. About a month afterwards, I was sent in front of an Air Commodore. I was only eighteen – no age – and he had his staff with him and he said, ‘You’re applying to become an officer. Do you think you’re old enough to become an officer and a gentleman of the British army?’ I said, ‘Yes, sir,’ and I was marched outside. After everyone had been interviewed, the sergeant called out, ‘3659 Private Tomkins’. I took three paces forward and the Air Commodore was very friendly. He said, ‘You’re very interested in flying?’ I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ He had the essay that I’d written in front of him, called ‘The use of aircraft in modern warfare’. He complimented me on it and asked me questions about flying and engines. He said, ‘What makes an aeroplane fly?’ I said, ‘Air has weight. It will resist motion. Flight is secured by driving through the air a plane inclined upwards and forwards of the direction of motion.’ He was surprised and started asking me about combustion engines. Then he asked me questions about my school and family. I knew what I was in for because there were a lot of public schoolboys going in for commissions. So I withdrew while they deliberated. And when I went back, they all agreed that my papers should be forwarded to the War Office.
The Royal Naval Air Service, as befitted the flying branch of the senior service, took a rather high-handed attitude to its entrants. Donald Bremner remembers:
I went up to London once a fortnight to sit on the selection board for candidates for the Royal Naval Air Service. The officer in charge was Commander Samson, known as Sammy. He was a well-known character. He said what he thought to anybody. If you got on well with him – as I did – you got on very well. If you didn’t, you got out. Sammy instituted a procedure where we each had a pencil and paper and all the time we were asking questions of the wretched candidate, we fiddled with our pencils. When we’d asked enough questions, we laid our pencils down. If we were satisfied with him, we held the pencil point upwards. If we wouldn’t have him at any price, we held it point downwards. If there was anyone who was reasonable but we didn’t like him enough, Sammy advised him to try the Royal Flying Corps. Our decision was really based on whether we liked the fellow. We wanted young people, about nineteen was the best. We always felt that someone who rode horses had the right kind of hands for flying and that somebody who rowed on the river could be useful. Social class counted because we were choosing officer pilots. I don’t think people from a working-class background came before us – they were filtered out at an earlier stage. We wouldn’t have turned down a really good candidate just because he didn’t come from the right school but the organization of the RNAS was very similar to the organization of the navy – there was a bit of snobbishness.
Once the interview was passed, the medical examination posed fresh challenges. Vernon Coombs was fortunate to meet a friendly fellow candidate:
I was shortsighted and when no one was looking I wore glasses. I worried how I was going to get through the eyesight test. So I asked one chap what I should do and he said, ‘It’s easy! The bottom two lines of the eye-test chart are UBHDN, HRDNA.’ So I passed with flying colours – and I’ve never forgotten those letters. When I was flying, I always slipped glasses on underneath my goggles. No one ever noticed and I never found it any disadvantage at all. I never wore my glasses on the ground. When my goggles came off, so did my glasses.
George Eddington took a gamble which paid off:
At Warley Barracks, I saw a medical officer who stripped me and gave me a very thorough examination. I was rather deaf in the right ear but I was fairly sharp-witted. In one of the tests, he whispered into each ear whilst plugging up the other one. First he plugged up my right ear and asked me my brother’s name. I answered him. Then, he went to the other side and whispered something I couldn’t hear. I took a guess and said, ‘I haven’t a sister.’ He gave me the all-clear.
The Royal Flying Corps was not a male preserve. Women served with the RFC in a variety of roles. The Zeppelin raids inspired Florence Parrott to join up:
I never knew my own mother. I was brought up by an uncle. He was an engine driver. I went to school in Bletchley, and I was very happy there. We used to have lovely little operettas – I loved singing and dancing. I left school when I turned fourteen, and the next day, I was in London, in service. As quickly as that. Lady Leon lived at Bletchley Park, and she always took Bletchley girls when they left school. I was in her London home. I wanted to be a children’s nurse, but I wasn’t old enough.
I had to get up first thing in the morning, get the stoves going, and wash the steps outside. I was lucky, really, because I received a good insight into cooking, because I’m sorry to say that our cook liked the bottle more than anything else. She’d get halfway through a dinner and then she’d hand it over to me to finish. I was only fifteen, but I managed. The family never knew I was doing the cooking. The family was only Sir Herbert and Lady Leon, and their son, but they used to give big parties. All the beautiful fresh stuff, fruit, vegetables, flowers, used to come from Bletchley to the London residence, by road every day.
I got on all right with Lady Leon, but there was one French maid, and she apparently didn’t like me from the first, and I certainly didn’t like her. But at the finish, I ran away because I wanted to be a children’s nurse. I ran away and I got myself a job with a Japanese family. He’d been the Japanese ambassador to London, and they were returning to Japan, and they wanted to take an English girl with them. I got the job – but somehow my aunt got to hear about it and she fetched me back. I was packed up and ready to go, but my aunt wouldn’t let me. In those days, people didn’t trust the foreigners like they do today.
So I went back to Lady Leon and tried to settle down again, but I couldn’t. I ran away again. This time, I got with an extremely nice family. He was a captain in the army, and she was a tall, beautiful lady, and they had a lovely little boy. That little boy idolized me, and I idolized him. The mother always used to go in to say goodnight to the little boy, before going in to dinner, and one night, she fell, from top of stairs to bottom. And it killed her. It was terrible. The captain asked me if I would carry on with the child. One Sunday night, the head nurse left me to see to the bathing of the boy, and to put him to bed. She told me how to do my sleeves, and what to do. I did everything as nanny told me, but the old Victorian grandmother came in, walked to one side of me, discovered I hadn’t been vaccinated, and she sacked me there and then.
So I came back to Bletchley, where my uncle, being on the railway, got me a job in the refreshment rooms at Euston Station. Then some of the girls from Liverpool Street Station came to see me, and they said that they were getting a pound more than I was, so I went off there, and was taken on as a wine waitress in the dining room. I lived in a hostel, with a housekeeper, and that was very nice.
On a particular day, in 1917, while I was working at Liverpool Street, we had to serve a troop train. We gave each soldier a little box, with sandwiches, cake, cigarettes and an apple. When we’d served them, we let the guard know, and they started pushing all the boys onto the train. When they were all in, there was a shrill whistle and a blast of steam, and the train was ready to move out. The wheels were just turning, when three or four Zeppelin bombs came down. One after the other. Before we knew where we were, the corner of the station was blown apart. I got hit in my arm, by glass from the roof overhead. I was taken to St Bartholomew’s Hospital, where they got the glass out of me. There weren’t enough beds and we had to lie on the floor, and I said to the girl next to me, ‘When I get out of here, I’m going to join up! If I’m going to get knocked about, I’ll go where I expect it!’ I’d never thought about joining up before. It was the air raid that did it. When I was out of the hospital, I went along Oxford Street, to the Connaught Club, and went in and joined the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps. I was interviewed by several officers, who asked me what I’d been doing, and when I said wine waitress, they said they didn’t have anything like that, but they put me down as a cook. And they sent me to Denham, to the Royal Flying Corps, where the boys were training to be pilots.
Raynor Taylor served with the Glamorgan Yeomanry. He cared nothing for aeroplanes, or for class:
William Spencer was a member of a very well-to-do family. We did our infantry training together and after a week or two, when we’d found out how to form fours and march in step, we were sent on a route march. Coming back into camp, we felt just like soldiers, with our full pack, and we watched a motor car drive through the gate. It was William Spencer’s mother and father. They’d come to visit him. I can see the mother now – a big blousy woman, very arrogant. She stood there and Billy was in the same four as I was, and he couldn’t say hello to them because he was marching at attention, so he acknowledged them as best he could and marched on. Well, his mother wasn’t having that, at all! Her Willy, carrying a pack! Unheard of! He became embarrassed because she started ranting and raving, playing hell. Anyway, she made such a noise that he got transferred to the Royal Flying Corps as a pilot and an officer. He was shot down and killed on his first flight over the lines in France. His memorial’s in the cemetery, and every time I pass it, I think, ‘Eh, Billy. Your mother put you there. Because she couldn’t abide to see you carrying a pack.’

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A Flying Start
It is an extraordinary fact that, of the 14,166 pilots who lost their lives during the Great War, well over half were killed in training. Even without the obvious perils of combat, flying was a dangerous activity. In the years before the war, it had been even more so. Aircraft had been underpowered and slow. They were too fragile to risk being thrown around the sky, and flying – even for the thrill-seekers who pursued it – was usually more of a struggle to remain in control, than a dynamic effort to push the aircraft’s limits. Simply maintaining straight and level flight placed considerable strain on flying wires. When coming in to land, early pilots would push the nose of the aircraft down and lose height with the engine running. Their turns would be made flat, with the minimum of bank. Flying was hazardous enough, without seeking to add to the dangers.
There were those, of course, who sought greater thrills. Intrepid individuals competed in circuit races, where they would fly close to the ground and race around pylons, attempting to overtake each other. It was only on 25 September 1913, however, that British aviators were shown the true potential of their craft. On that day, a French airman named Adolphe Pégoud came to Brooklands Aerodrome to give a flying demonstration. Placing terrible strain on his Blériot monoplane, he performed a vertical dive, a tail slide and a loop. The public was inspired and so were fellow pilots. Gustav Hamel, the first man to carry airmail, wrote that ‘Pégoud’s flights have given us all a new confidence’. Confidence might have been misplaced, however. Eleven months later, Hamel died in a flying accident, and less than two years after that, Pégoud was killed in combat – by a German pilot whom he had taught to fly before the war.
For men entering the infant flying services, loops and tail slides lay in the future. First, they would have to master the basics of flight. Very few of them ever forgot their first trip in a heavier-than-air machine. Ronald Sykes, who was taught to fly by the Royal Naval Air Service in 1917, might speak for thousands:
I remember every minute of my first flight. Going round, feeling as though the world was whizzing – it was a terrific thrill. The great surprise was the effect of centrifugal force. When we were doing a sharp turn and the aeroplane was on its side, there was a pressure on me that pushed my head into the seat. That was a shock – I wasn’t expecting it. On another turn, I couldn’t lift my feet off the bottom of the aeroplane. After that, I did nothing but think about flying.
Nowadays, we are blasé about flying. The idea of looking down on the earth from a great height holds little wonder for the package tourist. During the Great War, however, for men such as Ernest Tomkins it was an unimaginable novelty:
It’s a very funny thing. Say you look down over the Clifton Suspension Bridge, you’re a little bit scared of the height. But when you get up high in an aircraft, you’re detached from the earth and you don’t realize you’re so high. You don’t feel a bit ‘windy’ about being up that high. Even getting on top of a house and looking down gives you more sense of height than if you’re up at 20,000 feet. It’s like you’re looking at a map.
Until late 1914, men joining the Royal Flying Corps had to pay for their own tuition. They attended the civilian flying schools where they trained on some very primitive machines. In October 1914, Graham Donald trained on the most primitive:
I got started training on a genuine American Wright Biplane with twin propellers, chain driven – one of them with a cross chain which makes most engineers shudder. It was completely, inherently unstable and a lot of people said that if you could fly a Wright Biplane you could fly anything. Well the fact remains that it flew. The speed range was about three knots: it flew level at 43 knots, began diving at 42 and stalled at 39 or 40. So you hadn’t got very much to play with. The instrumentation was simple – there was a length of fine cord about eighteen inches long tied to one of the struts in front of you. You kept your eye on these cords, the idea being that if they went sideways you were sideslipping. If the chord went limp, the only thing to do was to start singing ‘Nearer My God To Thee’…
In these basic machines, there was room for only one pilot. The instructor might give the novice some guidance, but essentially he was on his own. This method of training, known as the ‘French School’, was used to teach Eric Furlong to fly a Caudron, at the same school at which Donald Clappen, from the last chapter, was an instructor:
I learnt to fly at Hendon in 1914 at the Hall School of Flying. I learnt on Caudrons. The Caudron was a small aeroplane with a nacelle rather than a cockpit. A nacelle was rather like a wooden bath that you sat in and the engine was stuck in front of you. There were open booms to the tail rather than a fuselage. It only had 35 horse-power and we used to say that if one horse died, you did, too. In fact the stall point and the maximum speed were very nearly the same. The engine was going flat out all the time you were flying and if it stopped for a fraction of a second, the machine came down as though you were falling down stairs. One thing I remember – the Caudron burnt neat castor oil and the pupil inhaled a good deal of it with the result that we all needed to go to the lavatory constantly.
At first, you were strapped into the nacelle and told about the engine and the rudder and told to keep the control stick in the centre. At Hendon, there was a white patch on the fence at the far side. I was told to taxi the Caudron over to the fence. The Caudron was extremely difficult to steer. The two booms at the tail made it want to run in one direction only and the only way to steer it was to give a burst of throttle, which lifted the tail and allowed you to swing it a bit with the rudder. Invariably you swung it too far and you made your way across the aerodrome in a shocking series of S turns. Eventually you got the hang of it until one day – to your great surprise and consternation – you kept the engine on longer than you were expected to and suddenly you were in the air. You felt as though you were fifty feet up – in fact you were probably three feet up. So you stopped the engine until you were on the ground again. After that, the instructor would tear you to ribbons but he didn’t mean it because you’d done a fairly straight flight and you’d landed all right. So then he’d tell you to go and do the same thing again. And as you got used to flying at five or six feet high, you gradually kept the engine on a bit longer and pulled the stick back a bit further and you got up higher until you were up to about fifty feet. And you’d go up and down the airfield, straight down the middle.
When you got that comfortably wrapped up, you’d try a turn. You would start off on the ground with the aeroplane at forty-five degrees to the white patch on the fence and you’d take off and when you’d levelled out at fifty to a hundred feet, you kicked on the rudder, which spoiled the aerodynamic state of the aeroplane and it dropped its nose and turned. It came as a shock because it felt like putting a brake on. The machine did a right-angled turn and down you went and landed. And you kept doing this, turning to one side and then the other, until you’d got it wrapped up. Nowadays, of course, one would be told to put on bank when turning, but at that time, the instructors knew nothing about aerodynamics. There was never any banking taught. So we were told to keep our turns absolutely flat, suicidal as it sounds. And after that you were allowed to struggle around the circuit. You sort of flew around the outside of the airfield and when you came back to where you started, you shut off the engine and landed. That was a circuit. And that’s how I learned to fly.
Another very basic machine used for training was the Boxkite. In this aircraft, the pupil was able to wrap his body around that of the instructor. Donald Bremner flew a Boxkite from Chingford in September 1915:
Boxkites were very queer old machines with a 50-horse-power Gnome engine. They had practically no instruments – just a rev counter. There was a petrol tap and a joystick and a rudder bar. The joystick was alongside the pilot and came up from the right, across in front at a bit of an angle. There was a little wicker seat, bolted to the lower wing. The instructor sat in that and you sat behind him – not strapped in at all – you just put your legs round his waist and hung on round his shoulders. When he took the machine up, you leant your right arm round his shoulder, and caught hold of the joystick. You both had your hands on it and that’s how you learnt to use it. After he’d taken you round a bit, you were then allowed to taxi the machine around the aerodrome using the rudder bar. Without taking off. Then the most heroic thing happened. You changed places with the instructor. He couldn’t reach the rudder bar. All he could do was put his hand on the joystick round your shoulder. And together you flew off. When he thought you were ready – or perhaps when he’d had enough – you were allowed to do hops. You took the machine up on your own and flew about ten or fifteen yards and then put the machine down again. When you’d done enough of that, you started doing circuits.
The Boxkite might have been basic, but its slow speed and limited climb allowed Humphrey Leigh to perform a feat quite beyond any modern aircraft:
My Boxkite was on the far side of Hendon Aerodrome. A mechanic started up the engine and said ‘Give me a lift to the other end of the aerodrome.’ I said, ‘All right,’ and he stood on one of the skids and held onto the frame. I started taxiing across the field. ‘No!’ he said, ‘Let her go!’ So I told him to hold on tight and I took off and landed on the other side of the aerodrome. He was a very brave chap – stood firm, held on and didn’t falter at all.
As the Royal Flying Corps began to justify its presence on the Western Front in the autumn of 1914, it increased the scope of its flying training. The Central Flying School at Upavon was expanded and several civilian flying schools (including Brooklands) were purchased. Most importantly, the Royal Flying Corps began to teach pilots to fly from scratch. Young men no longer had to pay for their own tuition – although those that joined the reserve squadrons continued to do so. The training aircraft of choice, remembered by Donald Bremner, was the relatively advanced Maurice Farman Biplane:
The Maurice Farman Longhorn was a big, clumsy aeroplane but rather pleasant to fly. It was a pusher, so you were sitting out in front of the engine in a nice comfortable seat and you weren’t looking straight down onto the ground like you were in a Boxkite. And it had an airspeed indicator.
Gerald Livock also preferred the Maurice Farman to the Boxkite:
I flew a Maurice Farman at Hendon. Oh, it was terrific. Magnificent. We didn’t have altimeters so I don’t know what height we went to, probably 2000 feet, and circled round Hendon. I’d only ever been up about 300 feet in my Boxkite. One felt like a God, looking down on these poor mortals below. One almost forgot to be frightened.
The Maurice Farman came in two versions – the Longhorn and the Shorthorn. The Longhorn was so called because of its pronounced outriggers to a forward elevator, giving it the appearance of a breed of cattle. Both aircraft were ungainly structures. Sixteen wooden struts joined the upper and lower wings together and they were interwoven with such a tangle of piano wires that it was said you could safely cage a canary inside. Nevertheless, they constituted a great leap forward for pupils as they were capable of dual-control flying – in other words the pupil and the instructor sat one in front of the other, each with his own set of controls. This meant, in theory, that pupils were able to learn in far greater safety. Although, as Eric Furlong discovered, theory and practice did not always overlap:
My application to join the Royal Flying Corps was finally accepted in the middle of 1917. I was posted to the flying training station at Harlaxton in Lincolnshire. I didn’t tell them at first that I’d already learned to fly in 1914. I thought that I would learn more if I kept quiet. Whereas in 1914, all my training had been done on solo machines, in 1917, the system was dual training with the instructor in the other seat. Well, the instructor realized on my first flight that I knew something about flying so he told me to take control. He didn’t like the way I turned using the rudder only, as I’d been taught. By 1917, training had progressed to proper banked turns. So he wrenched the controls out of my hand and said, ‘This is what I want! Do it like this, you see?’ and when we got to the next corner, he wrenched it out of my hands again and when we got to the last corner, I left it to him again. And then I just sat there and watched as we came gliding in. Wallop. We slapped into the ground and smashed the machine to smithers. He looked at me and said, ‘What did you do that for?’ I said, ‘I didn’t touch it!’ He said, ‘Neither did I!’ He thought I had control of the aeroplane and I thought he had control. That was my first landing in a Maurice Farman Longhorn.
In the early days, as Frederick Powell remembers, communication between instructor and pupil was difficult:
The instructor sat behind me in a dual-control Maurice Farman and he flew the machine while I lightly put my hands on the controls. We had no intercom in those days – so the conversation was shouting over the noise of a rattling engine. It was difficult to hear. Sign language came in handy. The sign I used most was the two-fingered salute.
Take-off and landing both presented difficulties for the pupil. Landing, argues Laurie Field, posed the greater challenge:
Landing was the most difficult thing of all because it’s the one thing that mattered! If you made a mistake in the air it didn’t matter – if you made a mistake in landing, you were in trouble. The knack of the landing is that when you come down, you’ve got your gliding height, your engine is off. You gradually pull your nose up as you lose flying speed, it stalls your aeroplane and the perfect landing is to have the wheels and the tail skid hit the ground together. This happened once in every twenty times. A bad landing is when you pull your nose up too early and you’re too far off the ground and your plane drops. If it drops sufficiently badly, your undercarriage is gone.
Reginald Fulljames was wary of taking off:
I was more anxious about taking off than landing because you were entirely dependent upon your engine and if the engine coughed or spluttered as you took off, you had very little chance of avoiding a crash. Whereas if the engine failed at two or three thousand feet, I had every confidence that I could land the aircraft somewhere. And in those days – according to my logbook – one in every five or six flights ended up in some sort of engine failure which necessitated a forced landing.
If a pilot did have to carry out a forced landing shortly after take off, then Brooklands was not the place to do it, as S. S. Saunders recalls:
One corner of Brooklands happened to be a sewage farm. This caused quite a lot of trouble with some of the boys because if they hadn’t climbed up sufficiently high and then had engine failure, they just came down in it. Everyone was warned to avoid it because if they didn’t … well … everyone avoided them …
Once dual-control training had become the accepted method of training, the first ‘solo’ flight became a critical event for every pupil. Vernon Coombs made his first solo by accident:
I was terribly anxious to fly solo and after I’d done one hour and thirty-five minutes dual, my instructor jumped out of the machine and shouted something at me. I thought he’d said, ‘Take it up!’ so I turned the machine round and I took it up. After I’d landed, he tore strips off me. ‘What the hell do you mean doing that?’ ‘You told me to take it up,’ I said. ‘No, I didn’t, he said, ‘I told you to take it in!’
F. D. Silwood failed to make it off the ground:
When the day came for my first solo, my instructor said, ‘Now look, if you treat it very carefully you can do your first solo on my aeroplane.’ So I got out into the middle of the aerodrome and my prop stopped. Well, of course, the normal thing to do is to call for a mechanic to start your prop but with the impetuosity of youth I thought I’d start the prop myself. As I swung it, the aeroplane started moving forwards. So I dashed under the plane, tried to get in the seat but I couldn’t and I fell over. The tailplane hit my head and knocked me to the ground. I watched my instructor’s beautiful aeroplane run away from me. It swerved to the left and I ran after it but it gradually gained speed until it started to turn towards me. I fell over which was just as well because the aeroplane took off over my head and flew at about fifty feet until it crashed. In the meantime, my instructor was going absolutely mad. I had to go in front of my commanding officer who told me, ‘Pilots are cheap but aeroplanes are very, very expensive. You made an awful mess of things today.’ I thought I was going to be dismissed from the service and I held my head very low and said I was sorry. But he had a half smile on his face as he told me, ‘Well, all right. We’ll forget it this time!’
Stanley Walters learnt an important lesson during his first solo:
The instructor said, ‘See the nose?’ I looked at it. ‘See that little cap on the top of the nose? Remember to hold that on the horizon!’ Then he hopped out of the aeroplane and said, ‘She’s all yours! Take it off and fly yourself! But wait a minute! There’s another fellow there, he’s going off solo from another instructor. Let him do his circuit and landing first. As soon as he’s in the air, you take off. Just do one circuit and landing!’ ‘OK,’ I said.
The other fellow was a man called Day. He took off. I was thinking that a hell of a lot of pupils and instructors would be watching me because it was my first solo. ‘One circuit and landing be damned!’ I thought. ‘I’ll do a couple of loops, but they’re all watching Day now, so I’ll wait till he’s landed.’ So I took off and followed Day round to watch his landing – and I saw him stall from about fifteen feet, hit the ground, and burst into flames. He was killed on his first solo. All arrogance in me also died. I did exactly what I was told. I completed my circuit and landed.
Charles Chabot’s first solo went according to plan:
When I went solo for the first time – it seems completely ridiculous in present-day terms – I had had fifty minutes of instruction. But off I went. At one end of Brooklands Aerodrome was a pub – the Blue Boar. We knew that if we came in at 100 feet over the Blue Boar, we were in the right position to land. The sun was just rising above the horizon and, as I came in, the shadow of the Longhorn was away on the left and, as I came down, it began creeping in under the plane, so when the shadow was properly comfortable under the wings, I yanked my stick back and sat down with a perfect landing on the aerodrome. My instructor was delighted. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Off you go, Chabot. Take your ticket.’
‘Taking your ticket’ meant taking the pilot certificate test conducted by the Royal Aero Club. Donald Clappen recalls the examination:
So far as the Aero Club certificate was concerned, one had to do five figures of eight observed by two qualified pilots who acted as observers. These observers were usually two of the instructors from one of the other flying schools. At the end of each flight of five figures of eight, one had to land within fifty metres of a specified spot, which was where the observers were standing. Then, came the height test. One had to fly up to a height of fifty metres, cut off one’s engine and land again within fifty metres of the spot where the observers were standing. Often, if it looked as though the pupil was going to land too far away, the observers would walk to where they thought he would land. They wanted the pupil to pass, so that they could get back to their own job of teaching people to fly. I do not recall a single pupil failing to land within the specified distance.
Humphrey Leigh confirms that the pupils were not always rigorously examined:
There was one old boy, a captain, who was terribly ham-fisted. He smashed pretty well every aeroplane he got into. Eventually the time came for him to take his ticket. I remember the CO of the station seeing me standing on the tarmac, beckoning me over, and saying, ‘Leigh, go and watch Captain X get his ticket, And what’s more, see that he gets it!’ So I said, ‘Aye, aye, sir’, and went off. In due course, the old boy had to land near the mark – and I was the mark. I could see that he was going to be miles away, so I ran like a stag. And as his aeroplane came to a grinding halt, the old boy said, ‘Have I got it? Was it all right?’ ‘Yes, sir! Yes, sir! Yes, sir!’ I said, clapping like anything.
Once the pupil had taken his ticket, he usually went to an advanced training school, to prepare for flying in action. Reginald Fulljames followed this path:
I was selected for fighter pilot training and I was sent to the Advanced School of Flying at Gosport. One morning, I was surprised to hear that the commanding officer wanted to take me up. This shook me because you seldom had any dual control after you’d gone solo. The commanding officer was the famous Smith-Barry and I suppose he was using me as one of his early guinea pigs, trying out his new ideas.
Major Robert Smith-Barry revolutionized flying training from late 1916 onwards. He had noticed that flyers who arrived on the Western Front were often hesitant and diffident in their approach to flying. This approach, he reasoned, must have been learnt from the instructors, who viewed instructing as a dead-end job. Smith-Barry aimed to revitalize teaching. He insisted that all pupils under dual training should sit in the pilot’s seat in front of the full set of controls. He developed the ‘Gosport tube’, which enabled the instructor to communicate with the pupil during the flight. He believed that a pilot, having flown solo, needed to learn advanced manoeuvres such as sudden turns and the correct way to recover from a spin. Of all the dilemmas that a pilot could face, the spin was the most feared. If the airflow over the wings decreased to the point where the machine could no longer sustain flight, it would fall out of the air. No longer an aircraft, cheating the laws of nature, it became a spinning hulk of wood, metal, wires and cloth. Until 1916, there was no known method of recovering from a spin. Some pilots who spun their aircraft managed to recover by chance, but they could not explain what they had done. Reginald Fulljames:
Smith-Barry showed me, above all else, how to get out of a spin. Smith-Barry was undoubtedly a genius and his methods are the basis for modern flying training. He had been injured in France at the beginning of the war, when he had spun into the ground. After that, he intended to find a proper way of getting out of a spin, and when he had discovered the answer, he pressed the Air Ministry very hard to be allowed to teach this in the Royal Flying Corps. The confidence that I could get out of a spin saved my life when I was being chased by Baron von Richthofen. I went into a deliberate spin and I got away.
Ronald Sykes remembers the feeling of a spin:
It was the most sickening sensation. You were thrown violently to one side of the cockpit with a fierce blast of wind on one cheek. You had to switch off the engine and straighten everything – the control stick and the rudder. You usually didn’t come out of the spin quickly. You just had to put everything central and wait. Eventually you entered a nosedive and you pulled the stick back slightly and you were all right.
Smith-Barry argued that, in order for pupils to be able to practise manoeuvres such as these, the training schools needed a standard type of dual-training machine that was capable of performing them. In December 1916, he was placed in charge of the Gosport School of Flying. The aircraft that he chose as his advanced trainer was the Avro 504K. Frank Burslem encountered great difficulty flying an Avro:
I was a very slow pupil. I suppose I was a little bit dense. I took eight hours to go solo whereas the average was about three hours. My problem was psychological. I went up in an Avro and was put into a spin by the instructor. He told me what to do and how to get out of the spin but when I saw the world turning round on an axis directly below me, I absolutely froze on the controls and I couldn’t do anything. I was so fascinated watching the ground, getting lower and lower, that I couldn’t do anything at all. The instructor was swearing and cursing and he overcame the pressure I was putting on the controls and he got us out of the spin about 500 feet off the ground. The instructors thought I wasn’t fit to fly the faster machines – the single-seater fighters – so I was sent to fly heavier machines – two-seaters.
Smith-Barry’s teaching methods prepared pupils for the realities of combat flying. They also allowed slower pupils – like Burslem – to learn their limits before it was too late. For the pilots such as James Gascoyne who relished the possibilities that flying offered, the sky was the limit:
A loop comprises racing your engine, opening your engine full out, putting it into a slight dive to get full speed, then all you do is pull back the joystick, right back into your stomach, and the machine goes up, over, and then drops. As it drops, you switch off the engine and come smoothly out into a glide. They are usually done at a height of a thousand feet or more to give you time to recover in case you lose too much engine speed and the machine comes straight down.
Ronald Sykes remembers the thrill of the vertical bank:
It was the most delightful manoeuvre. You could just move your stick an inch or two over to the side and she would immediately turn over onto a wingtip. At the same time, you pulled the stick back into your stomach and the nose began to whip round the horizon. You also had to put on full left rudder because the engine tended to make the nose climb into the sky on a left turn and the left rudder kept it down.
Pilots took pleasure in trying to outdo each other and achieve what had not been achieved before. Frederick Powell came up with an idea that was very nearly his last:
One night I was lying in bed and I thought, ‘I’ll do something nobody else has ever done – tomorrow morning I will loop off the ground!’ My Bristol Bullet had a maximum speed of about seventy miles an hour but I thought that if I held it down just over the top of the grass until I was going flat out, then I could go up in a very big loop and when I got to the top I could pull the joystick into my tummy, whip the tail over and gravity plus the engine would pull me round. So next morning, I went off and tried it. I pulled up in the loop, flipped it – and realized I hadn’t enough room. I have a feeling that my life was saved by some sheep grazing at the far end of the airfield. They all started to run out star fashion away from me and I was so interested in watching them that I didn’t stiffen myself up. I went straight into the ground at about 150 mph. I shot through the front of the aircraft, my belt broke, I hit my head on the instrument board and was knocked out. My legs shot through the rotary engine. Another quarter of a turn and I would have lost both my legs. As it was, I finished with the engine in my crotch. The ground was hard and nothing had sunk more than a few inches into the earth. Everything was flattened like a pancake. My CO stopped everyone from running out because he thought I was going to be a nasty mess. So he strolled slowly across to the crash. When he got there, he found me singing. I was quite out of it but I was singing the latest song:
Sprinkle me with kisses,
A lot of lovely kisses,
If you want my love to grow …
While practising something new in his Sopwith Camel, Graham Donald cheated death in a manner that might make a believer of the sternest atheist:
As I was approaching the airfield at 6000 feet, I decided to try a new manoeuvre which might prove useful in combat. It was to be a half loop and then I would roll at the top and fly off in the opposite direction. I pulled her up into a neat half loop but I was going rather slowly and I was hanging upside down in the air. With an efficient safety belt that would have been no trouble at all – but our standard belts were a hundred per cent unsafe. Mine stretched a little and suddenly I dived clean through it and fell out of the cockpit. There was nothing between me and the ground. The first 2000 feet passed very quickly and terra firma looked damnably ‘firma’. As I fell, I began to hear my faithful little Camel somewhere nearby. Suddenly I fell back onto her. I was able to grip onto her top plane and that saved me from slithering straight through the propeller which was glistening beautifully in the evening sunshine. She was now diving noisily at about 140 mph. I was hanging onto her with my left hand and with one foot hooked into the cockpit, I managed to reach down with my other hand and I pulled the control stick backwards to pull her gently out of her dive. This was a mistake – she immediately went into the most appalling inverted spin. Even with two hands on the top plane, I was slipping. I had about 2500 feet left. Remembering that everything was inverted, I managed to put my right foot on the control stick and I pushed it forwards. The Camel stopped spinning in half a turn and went into a smooth glide but upside down. It was now easy to reach my hand down (or up) and pull her gently down and round into a normal glide. I grabbed the seat cushion which was obstructing the cockpit, chucked it over the side and sat back down. I was now at about 800 feet but in spite of the extraordinary battering she had received, my little Camel was flying perfectly. One or two of the wings were a bit loose but nothing was broken. I turned the engine off in case of strains so my approach was made in silence. I made an unusually good landing but there was no one there to applaud – every man-jack of the squadron had mysteriously disappeared. After a minute or so, heads began to appear all over the place – popping up like bunny rabbits from every hole. Apparently, when I had pressed my foot on the control stick, I’d also pressed both triggers and the entire airfield had been sprinkled with bullets. Very wisely, the ground crew dived as one man for the nearest ditch.
As well as learning how to fall back into an aircraft from a height of several thousand feet, pilots had to learn to make cross-country flights. Charles Chabot remembers a particularly popular method of navigation:
One wasn’t particularly instructed in the use of a compass and our map-reading technique was not very good. When we had to get from A to B, most of us used to fly by ‘Bradshaw’. That was the name of the railway guide. One simply followed the railway lines. It was the recognized way of getting about.
A pilot who ‘Bradshawed’ his way down to a seaside resort, like Archibald Yuille, might have an enjoyable day out:
We used to go to Brighton and fly along the seafront and very often below the level of the pier. Then we’d zoom up over the West Pier, down again, zoom up over the Palace Pier and down again. We’d swing round and fly inland looking as if we were going to fly in the windows of the hotels then we’d zoom up over the roofs. That gave us great amusement but the people of Brighton didn’t like it very much.
As the war progressed, pilots began to learn to fly at night. Archibald Yuille recalls the difficulties:
It’s very funny, night flying. You get a good horizon to fly against and you can see water clearly underneath you but of course you can’t pick out roads or railway lines. The main thing is to keep your eye on the horizon and not find yourself getting into a dive when you don’t mean to. You had no aids – you were up there all by yourself in the dark for two hours. Not everybody has the mentality to do that. One of the things one did was sing – quite unconsciously. You’d come down absolutely hoarse.
Once a pilot had received his training, he was assigned to a squadron on active service. He was immediately confronted by his greatest challenge. He had to adapt to the reality of aerial warfare – and he had to adapt quickly. Some pilots were simply inept and no amount of training could make a difference. Harold Wyllie, an observer with 6 Squadron, was enraged by such a man in April 1915. His diary records:
Clarke was dreadfully smashed here today. Ross Hume was pilot and somehow managed to side slip and nose dive to the ground. This is wrong. Ross Hume stalled his machine turning. He was a rotten pilot and should never have been allowed to carry a passenger. Clarke died at 11.50 pm without regaining consciousness, thank God. He was one of the best fellows that ever lived and a valuable life has been thrown away by sheer bad flying.
By 1916, so many pilots were being lost that their replacements were barely trained when they arrived at the front. Cecil Lewis, arriving at 3 Squadron, was one of these replacements:
When I got to France, I only had about twenty hours flying and I was posted to a BE2c squadron down on the Somme. The CO took one look at my logbook and said, ‘My God, it’s murder sending you chaps out with nothing on the logbook. You’d better put in a bit of time!’ So he gave me an aircraft and I walloped off to have a look at the lines, to get used to the French maps, all the things that were different. One had always heard, ‘Behind the lines, this side of the lines, the lines, the lines, the lines …’ But I hadn’t a clue as to what the lines looked like – really from the air – looked like …
John Boon was aware of the fate that awaited many of these schoolboys, like Lewis, who arrived to do a man’s job:
We used to see the young men coming in to the orderly office to receive their instructions as to where they had to go. Then the tenders from the squadrons came to the headquarters to pick up them up. You used to see these young fellows with their brand-new wings, brand-new uniform, brand-new Sam Browne belt. Everything was new and smart. Some of these boys didn’t last twenty-four hours.
On joining the Royal Flying Corps or Royal Naval Air Service, the men of the rank and file were treated very differently from the officers. These were the men – the riggers and fitters and other technicians – who would be responsible for keeping the aeroplanes flying. They joined as tradesmen, but they were trained as raw recruits. William Berry made an inauspicious start:
At my very first parade, the man next to me stood there with his boots all dusty. The sergeant said, ‘Man left and right of him, escort him to the guardroom!’ When we got him there, they made him turn out his pockets and I’ve never seen anything like it. He had nails sticking into bits of toffee, stubs of pencils – it was so funny that I burst out laughing. The corporal in charge of the guard looked at me and said, ‘Laughing on escort – worse crime than the prisoner’s! Get in there along with him!’ So by ten past two on my first day, I was confined to barracks.
The discipline meted out to the recruits was of a traditional military variety. Cecil King:
If we were such a superior corps we had to show it in discipline, especially when walking out. We were expected to set an example to everyone. That’s why all our instructors came from the Brigade of Guards. Our discipline had to be second to none.
George Eddington remembers how the discipline was imposed:
What struck me most was the absolute domination of the routine. From your feeding, to your sport, it was all routine. You were made to realize that you were there to do as you were told and not to ask questions. Even a simple thing like turning right or left had to be done just so. Squads were formed in fours, which meant a complicated movement of the feet. The food was not too good at all. You were only allowed out of camp with a pass and you were allowed once a week, until eleven o’clock. You were made to feel that you were nobody at all. You were a soldier first and last. The instructors were, without exception, warrant officers, Guardsmen. They felt that a new-fangled thing like the Flying Corps was a lot of poppycock, and a waste of good men, and they didn’t forget to let us know. We weren’t made to feel that we were technicians. We were soldiers in the King’s army: ‘You are not a superior breed! Get rid of that idea as quick as you like!’
William Berry had a favourite NCO:
I remember Corporal Newbolt. He could have been acting unpaid for all I know. He was six foot odd of brute strength and he would come and put his face by your cheek, within two or three inches – and he would yell at you, ‘Do you know Mrs Newbolt?’ ‘No, Corporal.’ ‘Well, you’ll jolly well know her son!’ He didn’t say ‘jolly’…
Cecil King discovered that the smallest act could breach army regulations:
I remember walking through Aldershot and it came on to rain. I was wearing an overcoat, and I turned the collar up. All of a sudden, I heard a man shouting behind me, ‘That man!’ and I looked round. It was a military policeman on a horse and he said, ‘Do you know you’re improperly dressed?’ I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘How long have you been in the service?’ ‘Two months.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you’ve turned your collar up without orders. You’ll put it down in the proper manner.’ I didn’t argue the point. I turned it down. But it made me wonder why we had to have an order to be permitted to stay dry.
For some of the men the discipline proved unbearable. Edgar Wooley remembers an uprising in the ranks:
Amongst ourselves we decided we just could not stand the methods our military tutors were adopting. They were acting as a brake on our ability to do our technical training. They were preventing us from making progress as wireless operators. So we rebelled. We refused to carry on our technical training whilst the military training and discipline were so exacting. Word soon got round to those higher up and officers came along to find out what the trouble was. These officers picked out six men of our section – the assumed ringleaders. They were sent to Headquarters at Farnborough and sentenced to twenty-eight days’ confinement. During their confinement, they were visited by a military parson who, on questioning one of them, was surprised by his intelligence and his desire to be a good soldier and a good wireless operator. The parson asked him why he was there. The soldier told him of the recruits’ dissatisfaction at the treatment they had received at the hands of their military trainers. As a result of this discussion, the parson made a report to certain officers and the matter was brought up in Parliament – why was the Royal Flying Corps attempting to institute Prussian military methods into the British army?
Ultimately the six prisoners were released and the sergeant major in charge of training was relieved. He was replaced by another sergeant who found us to be a very satisfactory, efficient body of recruits – much to his surprise – and he couldn’t understand why we had acted as we did unless there were justified reasons for it. He said, ‘I want you now to be good soldiers and if you do as you’re told and you continue to do your work properly, we shall get on very well together.’ And that’s exactly what we did. When he reluctantly left us, we made him a presentation. We found out that this hefty, jovial, soldierly sergeant was a big pipe smoker so we were only too pleased to give him a couple of pipes in a case. He was clearly very pleased – and surprised.
Irish charm made S. S. Saunders’ life a little easier:
Sergeant Major Waddington from the Guards was a gentleman off parade, but a bastard on parade. I found that I could say things to him which he took in a good way because I was the only Irishman, and he sort of took things from me. One day, he put me on the Awkward Squad, because I wasn’t properly shaved. The Awkward Squad was a squad which Sergeant Major Waddington took himself after lunch. We had to get on parade with our full kit including rifles and full pack. And he’d drill us like hell up and down there for about an hour. And then he’d dismiss us.
Well, we were issued with rifles which the Infantry had had for some time, and some of them had been lying in the mud for ages and practically rusted through. They were cleaned up and issued to us. Well, I had a rifle one day on the Awkward Squad and we were doing a drill where you pull back the bolt and hold the rifle in a certain position so that the inspecting officer can look down the barrel, and see that it’s properly clean. We had done this four or five times but Sergeant Major Waddington wasn’t satisfied. He said we weren’t all together and we weren’t making enough noise. So he shouted, ‘Pull the bloody thing back till you break it!’
So I pulled the bolt, and when I did, it came away in my hand and left the head in the rifle. I just remained in the same position I was in, with my right forearm parallel with the ground and the bolt in my hand. He looked at me and he said, ‘What the bloody hell’s wrong with you Saunders?’ And I said, ‘Nothing sir. I’ve obeyed the last order. I’ve broken the bloody thing.’ The other chaps were getting a side glance in and he chewed them up. He shouted, ‘Look to your front!’
He came over and he looked at me and I could just see a slight suspicion of a twinkle in his eye and he turned round to me and he said, ‘Get off this squad immediately. You’re too bloody awkward for the Awkward Squad. Dismiss!’ So I hadn’t to go on any more on the Awkward Squad, but the other fellows had to make up for it.
For William Hawkins of the Royal Naval Air Service, the end of a day’s basic training brought a soothing recreation:
When I was training at the Crystal Palace Depot, square bashing, route marching and rifle training finished at about 5.00 pm and then, in the evening, we had dancing. There was no one of the opposite sex so we had to dance with each other. We waltzed and we did the Boston two-step – the old-fashioned dances. It was quite a lot of fun, actually.

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