A job on the ground had many attractions. Working as a skilled tradesman brought greater standing and a higher level of satisfaction than an Army or Navy other rank could expect. This status was reflected in the uniform for, unlike his counterparts, from 1938 onwards the ‘erk’ wore a collar and tie (it was six years before the Army caught up). Initially at least, there seemed a diminished likelihood of being sent overseas. It was also evident that ground crew duties carried less risk than serving in the air, or indeed anywhere. The importance this factor played in the decision-making process is hard to calculate. Wing Commander Jimmy Lawson of the Air Ministry Personnel Department recorded in a memorandum that ‘it is believed that a number of young men enlisted voluntarily or opted for the RAF on ground duties with the knowledge that such employment was the least dangerous in any of the services’.9
How Lawson, who elsewhere in the document shows himself to be sensible and humane, arrived at this conclusion was not made clear. It cannot have been his intention to portray aircraftmen as shirkers. Those who served on the ground anyway displayed their own brand of fortitude, enduring long hours in all weathers and often miserable conditions, and could show the same selfless disregard for their own lives when duty called, as an entry in the diary of 217 Squadron recording an air raid on their base at St Eval in Cornwall in May 1941 shows: ‘A/Cs Collier and Ball put up a very good show by towing a bowser which was on fire away so that it could burn out in safety. One of them actually had to climb under the bowser to attach a cable to it. Their prompt and courageous action undoubtedly saved another aircraft from destruction.’10
There was a steady flow of non-flying personnel who, despite intimate knowledge of the dangers involved, gave up a safe billet to volunteer for operations. It was not as straightforward a process as the authorities made it appear and answering the call did not guarantee acceptance, even at times when the need appeared to be urgent. ‘Chaps, driven by boredom, volunteer continually for Air Gunnery, but they aren’t accepted,’ wrote John Sommerfield to a colleague in November 1940. He was a former public schoolboy and a Communist who had fought with the International Brigades in Spain before joining up as a lowly aircraftman. ‘In the meantime the RAF goes on inserting 11 inch double column ads [in newspapers and magazines] for men to be aircrew.’11
An initial insistence on education to School Certificate standard was eventually dropped on the grounds that it ‘debarred many excellent candidates otherwise suitable’.12 Nonetheless it is clear that many who wanted to fly could not because they had not been given the basic education that would prepare them for the rigorous classroom training that all aircrew roles required. Geoffrey Goodman was bright and ambitious but his war-invalid father had been unable to find steady work and he had left school early. He was seventeen when the war broke out, working as cub reporter for a small magazine in Camden Town, north London. His Jewish background and left-wing sympathies reinforced his determination to fight Fascism and he felt flying with the RAF – ‘the most dramatic of the three services’ – was the best way to do it.13 When, having added a year to his age, he turned up at a recruiting office near Euston station, he found it was not as easy as that. ‘I wanted to go straight into aircrew [but] I didn’t have the required qualifications,’ he said. ‘I remember arguing with the recruiting sergeant who told me that once [I] was in I may be able to remuster.’ At the reception centre at Cardington he was advised to volunteer to train as a radio mechanic as an entrée to aircrew. While training at Cranwell a flight lieutenant told him he would be better off specializing in photography – a tip he followed and which led to him eventually being commissioned as a reconnaissance pilot. Goodman found that ‘about a third of the groundcrew lads wanted to get into aircrew – it didn’t matter what it was. If it wasn’t as a pilot then as a navigator or air gunner.’ The stumbling block was education – or lack of it. They ‘wished to do so but they were very much aware that they didn’t have the … qualifications to tackle the aircrew course’.
In the first five years of the war RAF numbers increased sixfold – from 175,692 in September 1939 to 1,185,833 in July 1944.14 This stupendous growth spurt required production-line methods to manage and for many recruits the plunge into uniform was disorienting, often shocking. They were passing from the realm of the comfortable and familiar into a baffling new domain that seemed unconnected with the civilian universe, filled with noise, discomfort and a total absence of privacy. The first stop for all, whether you were destined to be a pilot, a fitter or a ‘general duties’ dogsbody was one of the reception centres like Uxbridge, on the fringes of west London, Cardington in Bedfordshire, or Padgate, Lancashire, where you swapped your civvies for a uniform and acquired a service number that would henceforth be welded to your name.
Padgate was a vast, ugly, hutted camp near Warrington. No one who passed through its gates retained any happy memory of the place. ‘My main impression of Padgate is parading and waiting in biting cold and rain,’ John Thornley, a twenty-nine-year-old printer’s rep from Preston, confided to his diary after arriving there in December 1940. ‘The camp is built on marshy ground and is open to all winds.’15 Even young men who knew poverty and overcrowding felt the rawness of the place, and cringed at the constant state of exposure in which it seemed they would henceforth live. The nakedness was literal. Almost the first order an RAF entrant received was to drop his trousers and pants, prior to an inaugural ‘FFI’ (Freedom from Infection) inspection, one of many he would undergo in his career.
Nineteen-year-old Norman Lee, who had left his reserved occupation job with an engineering firm in Yorkshire to emulate his twin brother and volunteer for aircrew, arrived in Padgate in November 1941. For his first FFI he and his comrades ‘were lined up in a hangar facing the open side with only a sheet of hessian as a very inadequate screen between us and a crowd of WAAFs who giggled and made faces through the window of a low building opposite.’16 Then ‘to complete our embarrassment, as soon as the inspection was over we were marched straight into that self-same building’ where the female spectators served them plates of gristly brawn.
For gently brought-up young men like Sam Pritchard, the son of a Wesleyan minister who turned up in the spring of 1940 on his way to becoming a navigator, Padgate brought his first, rather dismaying, close encounter with the British proletariat. The thirty men in his barrack room ‘contained what I suppose must have been a cross-section of British society; a few types with a reasonable education and the remainder representing rapidly dwindling standards [down to] a group of foul-mouthed objectionable young men’.17 His first night was ‘miserable and unforgettable … lying in a bed with no sheets on; a mattress and a pillow filled with straw, looking round for a sympathetic or understanding face …’
By this rough immersion, the RAF might have unintentionally been doing the new boys a favour. It was sink or swim. To survive you had to cling to the nearest kindred spirit, and the experience encouraged instant and often lasting friendships. There was sanctuary, too, in the humour that pervaded everything: strong, black and subversive. Surreal wit combated their surreal new circumstances. As everyone constantly told everyone else, ‘if you can’t take a joke, you shouldn’t have joined’.18
Sam Pritchard and his comrades soon discovered ways to circumvent the obscenity-flecked rule of the NCOs who drilled them. A ‘favourite stratagem was to start giggling or laughing on parade whilst punctiliously and smartly obeying all the orders barked at us. This would first puzzle the corporal and then drive him to foul-mouthed hysteria … eventually when [he] finally accepted the impracticality of charging all of us under King’s Regulations, he would lower his voice to offer an extra pass out of camp if we “stopped our bleeding laughing”.’
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