The Inskip intervention was taken badly by the Air Staff who resented an amateur trespassing on their territory and, as they saw it, endangering Britain’s security purely for the sake of financial expediency. The assault on the thinking that had sustained the Air Force for much of its short life was most resented by the chief evangelist. The fact that he was nine years retired did not stop Trenchard from publicly and privately denouncing the shift to fighters. ‘The old man was obstinately unrelenting – not only at this time but even after the war broke out – about adherence in any circumstances to the bomber policy,’ John Slessor remembered.38 It would turn out that, in the short term at least, Inskip was right and the Air Staff were wrong. This realization did little to shake the faith of the bomber cult, an attitude that would have profound consequences when the time came for Britain to fight on land and sea.
4
The great lexicographer of slang Eric Partridge recorded that in 1937 soldiers and sailors began to refer to their Air Force colleagues as the ‘Glamour Boys’.1 The term was not necessarily admiring or affectionate. A little later on the RAF attracted another nickname. They were the ‘Brylcreem Boys’, a reference to their habit of slicking their hair with a best-selling pomade. The manufacturers, County Chemicals of Birmingham, were delighted with the association. In 1939, launching the ‘handy active service tube’ they chose to dress the model in Air Force forage cap and tunic and during the war a glossy-haired airman appeared regularly in their advertisements. It was only many years later that the man in the ads, one Tony Gibson, was revealed as a conscientious objector who did several stints in jail for his beliefs.2
Hair cream and the Air Force seemed to go together. The product had a practical use. Richard Passmore, a wireless operator/air gunner on Blenheims in the early part of the war, recalled how his ‘side cap hung above my ear at angle which mocked gravity and was a mute testimony to the adhesiveness of Brylcreem’.3 However, the main point of it was that it allowed you to look like an up-to-the-minute civilian male while wearing military uniform.
Like many of the trends adopted by the youth of Britain in the 1930s, the trend for sculpted men’s hairdos was imported from America via Hollywood movies. The notion of glamour was a contemporary one. If any branch of the armed services had claim to it, it was the Air Force.
The RAF’s modern image gave it a marked advantage over the other services in the competition for human resources. Expansion required men as well as machines, to fly them and to service them. In 1933 the RAF needed only one recruiting depot to fill its manpower needs, and took on less than a thousand extra men in addition to the regular Halton and Cranwell intakes. By the spring of 1938 there were eleven depots and thirty-one sub-depots which over the next eighteen months scooped up 43,795 recruits. With the introduction of conscription and the outbreak of war the numbers exploded. Between September 1939 and January 1942, 789,773 joined the ranks. By the time recruiting was halted in 1944, nearly 1.2 million men and women were wearing Air Force Blue.4
Trenchard had identified the need for manpower structures that were light and simple yet strong enough to support a rapid increase in numbers when needed. Initially, the system worked very well. In peacetime, in addition to the small core of regulars, the RAF could rely on a steady throughput of short service commission officers to supply most of its aircrew requirements. After doing their time they then passed into the Reserve of Air Force Officers (RAFO). The front-line squadrons were backed up by the amateurs of the Auxiliary Air Force and University Air Squadrons.
By early 1936, with the likelihood of war growing by the month, it was clear that these sources would soon dry up once the fighting began and a much bigger reservoir of aircrew would be needed. The experience of the last war had taught that ‘casualties in air warfare are high and the replacement of wastage is an even greater problem for a personnel than an equipment department’.5 The need to make good the ‘wastage’ – the term must have struck some as inhumane even then – prompted the creation of a pool of airmen who had received at least a basic level of flying training. They would learn theory at evening classes in city schoolrooms and practise at civilian air schools at the weekend, in readiness to fill the gaps torn in the front line when hostilities commenced.
The RAF Volunteer Reserve (RAFVR) hastened the transformation of the Air Force from a tiny elite dominated by the comfortably off and privately educated into a mass organization drawn from every level of Britain’s sharply stratified society.
From the outset it was presented as a democratic endeavour. ‘The social and political setting of the time had considerable influence on [the] proposed scheme and there was strong popular feeling against any “caste” or “old school tie” attitude’, the RAF internal narrative recorded.6 It was ‘visualized as a collection of young men drawn from the middle class in its widest sense and with no suggestion in its organization of a pre-determined social hierarchy’. In time it would be hailed as a great RAF innovation but the credit for the initial concept belongs as much to the imagination of an Air Ministry bureaucrat as it does to the progressive instincts of the Air Staff.
W. L. Scott was working for Air Commodore Arthur Tedder in the Air Ministry’s training department when he was set the problem of finding pilot material from new sources. He had won a DSC with the Navy during the previous war and went on to be knighted for his labours in the Civil Service. Despite his conventional background, he seems to have had a sympathetic understanding of the contemporary mood. He realized that to get the numbers it needed the Air Force would have to reach beyond the social groups it felt comfortable with and embrace the young men growing up on the suburban streets of modern Britain.
Britain in the 1930s was changing shape. Towns that had not altered for centuries were being transformed by giant cinemas and blocks of flats. The surrounding fields filled up with new housing, arranged in ‘crescents’, ‘avenues’ and ‘drives’ lined with mock-Tudor houses. The people who lived in them often also owned them. They worked in modern jobs in offices and factories and when they wanted fun looked to America to entertain them. They watched American films at the Odeon and danced to American music at the local Palais, which they drove to in small cars mass-produced by Morris and Austin. They had little reason to regret the passing of old Britain. They were interested in the future, and determined to have a place in it, and not on terms of deference or inferiority.
It was to this generation that the RAF now turned, but with some caution.7 Scott’s initial memo warned that the sort of men they were looking for were unlikely to take kindly to strict military discipline. Instead, ‘the desire to fly, patriotism, and retaining fees large enough to count in a young man’s weekly budget will be the means of attracting our reservists’. In addition, he proposed, it was important that the whole experience was fun. ‘Socially the reserves must be a great success,’ he wrote. ‘The young men must enjoy their evening meetings and their weekends.’8
This concept was a major departure from conventional military structures and a lot for the Air Staff to swallow. Its members had spent their lives inside an institutional cocoon where they kept company with each other and followed traditional leisure pursuits: riding, shooting, fishing and sailing by day,