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o. 1662 Heavy Conversion Unit, RAF Station Blyton, lay just north of Gainsborough and in the flat and featureless part of Lincolnshire amid heavily agricultural land. Its job, like that of Wratting Common, was to convert potential bomber crews to fourengined aircraft, in this case the Handley-Page Halifax Marks 2 and 5.

These two types, though fitted with Merlin engines, never equalled the efficiency and reliability of the Halifax Mark 3 with Hercules engines, and their operational ceiling and performance were generally inferior to those of the Lancaster. Blyton’s Halifaxes, too, were mostly ex-operational aircraft and not in the best of condition.

All this I was to discover later as I organized a bed, checked in at the Mess, and reported to the Navigation Section. The station was hutted and dispersed, like most of its wartime vintage, but to my eyes it did not appear as spruce and cared for as Elsham. The Navigation Section was a long hut with offices at one end, a lecture room at the other, and a crew room between. The Navigation Leader was Flight Lieutenant Bill Bentley, an avuncular man who seemed middle-aged to me but was probably no more than thirty. The navigation staff were a varied selection – an Australian, a Canadian, a New Zealander and several RAF navigators – but they had all done at least one tour of bomber operations and several wore the purple and white ribbon of the DFC. The atmosphere was friendly and leisurely, and I was not given a specific task straightaway. Familiarization with the Halifax was my first aim, and I was taken over an aircraft and shown the navigator’s position and instruments, the emergency equipment and exits, and the general layout.

Provision for the crew was more generous than in the Lancaster, and to my surprise both navigator and bomb aimer were accommodated in the nose compartment beneath the feet of the pilot and flight engineer, as was the wireless operator. What I particularly liked was that the front escape-hatch was also in the nose and easily accessible from the navigator’s position.

After a couple of not very active days I asked if I could have a flight.

An aircraft was about to take off on a Gee cross-country, and Flying

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Control asked the captain if he would stop in front of the tower and pick up a new member of the staff for an experience flight. I went out with my parachute and helmet and climbed aboard, shutting the hatch and then plugging in my intercomm to ask the captain where he wanted me. ‘How about the rear turret?’ he said, ‘we only have a mid-upper today.’ So as the aircraft taxied on I inserted myself into the rear turret, stowing my parachute, and waited for take-off, closing the turret doors behind me.

I had flown several times in a Lancaster rear turret, but I found that the Halifax Boulton-Paul turret was of a different design, with a single joystick control instead of the double-handled Frazer-Nash system in the Lanc. The control system was also much more sensitive, as I discovered just after we were airborne, when I grasped the joystick to rotate the turret to one side.

In a flash, or so it seemed, the turret had swung to the beam position, and its doors, which I had not locked properly, flew open behind me in the slipstream. The ground at the edge of the airfield looked uncomfortably close as it streamed past, and I moved the turret, more carefully this time, back to its fore-and-aft position, and closed and locked the doors: so much for familiarization with the Halifax. However, later in the four-hour flight I moved around the aircraft and began to feel more at home.

I had hardly been at Blyton more than a week when Bill Bentley buttonholed me in the Mess one day after lunch. ‘Better get your bags packed,’ he said, ‘you’re off to Shawbury on a Staff Nav Course.’ I had never heard of Shawbury or the Staff Navigator Course, but I was told that this was a prerequisite to becoming a competent instructor. I have little doubt now that Group Headquarters had told Blyton to nominate someone, and that as the latest arrival and most underemployed dogsbody, I had drawn the short straw. But however it happened, this was a significant step in my career, though I had no idea of it at the time, and indeed no concept of a ‘career’ as such. My chief aim was still to survive the war.

Shawbury, a few miles north of Shrewsbury, was the RAF’s Central Navigation School, at which all post-graduate navigation training was based. Starting in 1918 with the ‘School of Naval Co-operation and Aerial Navigation’ at Calshot on the south coast, the RAF had a long and varied history of specialized navigation training at several locations. Trenchard, as well as setting up the RAF College at Cranwell for officer training, introduced several specializations for officers of the General Duties (GD) Branch, who were then all pilots: Armament, Photography, Engineering, Signals and Navigation. The so-called Long Navigation Course, of one year’s duration, started in 1920 and in 1929 became the Specialist Navigation Course, qualifying its graduates for the symbol ‘N’ in the Air Force List and for a number of staff, instructional and research and development posts. The Spec N Course, as it was universally known in the RAF, continued through various changes and vicissitudes until 1966, when

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I was intimately involved in its evolution into the present Aerosystems Course, still active and still one year long in 2006.

Although there were officer observers in the First World War, their main task was reconnaissance and artillery spotting rather than navigation, and it was not until 1940 that the requirements of the Second World War caused aircrew other than pilots to be trained as navigators. They were still called observers, however, and continued to be so until late in 1943, when the ‘O’ flying badge was replaced by the ‘N’ badge, much to my chagrin and that of my fellow students at Jurby (still called No. 5 Air Observers’ School) in January 1944; the flying ‘O’ was much prized, and those who had qualified for it continued to wear it for many years, sometimes in defiance of regulations.

With the rapid expansion of Bomber and Coastal Commands, the need for navigators led to the creation of several air observers’ schools in the United Kingdom and in Commonwealth countries. This in turn led to a need for navigation instructors, for whom the long and relatively expensive Spec N Course was not justified. In 1942 the Staff Navigator Course was introduced at Cranage, which became known as the Central Navigation School (CNS); the course was of three or four months’ duration, and used Ansons for flying exercises.

In March 1944 CNS moved to Shawbury, and by this time was operating forty-two Wellingtons Mark XIII and four Stirlings Mark III. All unknowing, I arrived there in August at a time when great things were happening in the RAF navigation world. On 1 September Air Commodore Philip Mackworth was posted in as Commandant, with Group Captain F.C. (‘Dickie’) Richardson as his deputy and Director of Studies; both were prewar Spec Ns. In his book Man Is Not Lost (Airlife, 1997), Dickie Richardson describes how he and others had pressed for ‘what amounted to a service university of air navigation … a central repository of navigation knowledge covering every aspect of military aviation … a common forum where the air forces of the Dominions and ourselves could study and research side by side,’ co-ordinating the development of navigation from the user’s point of view and maintaining ‘continuous liaison with the Dominions and Allies by frequent flying visits and by drawing out staff and students from the RAF, the Dominion and Allied air forces.’ All this came to pass: Shawbury’s title, changed to the Empire Central Navigation School just after I arrived, became the Empire Air Navigation School before I left (presumably in recognition of the fact that the Royal Navy and the Army also were also involved with navigation). The Empire Air Armament School and the Empire Flying School were set up round about the same time – all this under a Socialist government! I have to admit that most of these significant changes went on over the heads of the humble Staff Navigator students.

I had already had a taste of the Welsh border country at Ludlow and Bridgnorth, and the rolling Shropshire hills were a pleasant change after

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Lincolnshire. Shawbury had been built just before the war as a training station, and its permanent buildings were well laid out and reassuringly solid. The Officers’ Mess was a large and splendid one (with a minstrels’ gallery over the dining room), but uncomfortably overcrowded as usual in wartime, and some of us were given rooms in one of the pre-war married quarters now used to house the overflow from the Mess. My room-mates, Jimmy Treen and Ward Thomas, were about the same age as myself, and at around 20 we were probably the youngest (and the most junior) on the course. No. 95 Staff Navigator Course had about forty students, all with a bomber background, but including several from overseas commands and all with operational experience.

I still have a copy of the course syllabus, with the ‘Man Is Not Lost’ motif on the front cover. The foreword explains that the aim of the course is to equip graduates to fill staff and instructional navigation posts throughout the RAF. Since it was primarily designed to meet the needs of the service as a whole and not those of any particular command, it would be mainly concerned with ‘those permanent and fundamental principles on which the practice of navigation depends’ (a suitably resounding if rather pompous phrase). The foreword continues: The graduate will have a sound basis on which he can continue to build his technical knowledge and he will know where to find information which he may require in the course of his duties. He receives training in the art of instruction … he must combine the ability to state a sound case with some knowledge of administration and organization in the Royal Air Force …

And an ominous conclusion: Written examinations are set in all subjects, except in lecture technique, administration and organization; for these latter, marks are awarded on lectures given by students.

We could see that this was going to be no picnic. Many of my fellowstudents had, like me, recently finished a tour of operations and were not particularly enamoured at the prospect of hard and unremitting work for thirteen weeks; the easy-going atmosphere of a bomber squadron seemed a distant dream. Still, to most navigators the subject of navigation cannot fail to be absorbing, and we had nearly forty hours of flying to look forward to – in my case in a new type of aircraft, the Wellington. There was talk, too, of an overseas flight (and not in an easterly or southerly direction).

Our classroom was the regulation wooden hut, heated by coke stoves but well maintained and highly polished; permanent buildings were reserved for the upper classes, the Spec N students, who were treated with respect on the few occasions on which we came into contact with them.

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With the Boffins ‘Boffin, n. esp. Brit. colloq. – a person engaged in scientific (esp. military) research [20th c.: orig. unkn.]’ – Concise Oxford Dictionary.

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n 1862, a Lieutenant G.E. Grover of the Royal Engineers reported on the results of his investigation and experiments in the uses of balloons in military operations. The War Office did not see fit to give Grover a grant for further work, but in 1878 allocated £150 to the Royal Engineers to build a balloon at Woolwich Arsenal (perhaps the first British Air Estimates). A balloon factory was established at Aldershot (where else?) in 1890, and moved up the road to South Farnborough in 1905. HM Balloon Factory became the Army Aircraft Factory in 1911, and the Royal Aircraft Factory the following year, as the increasing interest in heavierthan-air craft was given a fillip by Bleriot’s 1909 Channel crossing in his monoplane. The name had to be changed yet again on 1 April 1918 to avoid confusion with the Royal Air Force, formed on that date, and Farnborough became the Royal Aircraft Establishment. In the early 1950s the local people still called it ‘the Factory’ (and no doubt some of the older generation still do).

In the early days the Royal Engineers ran a Balloon Section, parallel with the balloon factory element, which trained aviators and handlers. When aeroplanes became the priority and the factory switched to their production, the Balloon Section RE became an Air Battalion in 1911 and the Royal Flying Corps in 1912. So, as this brief early history shows, Farnborough saw the very beginning of aviation and its military use.

I was very conscious of the weight of this history when I booked into the RAF Officers’ Mess at Farnborough, built during the First World War. As I walked across to RAE I passed Cody’s Tree, mounted on a plinth and with its skeletal form reminiscent of some modern sculpture. ‘Colonel’ Samuel Cody, first and most colourful of the early test pilots (indeed every pilot was a test pilot then), made the first aeroplane flight in Britain on 16 October 1908 from Laffan’s Plain, now part of RAE. He used the tree to tether his aeroplane during ground tests to measure the amount of

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propeller thrust. In the ‘black sheds’, the ancient hangars still in use, hung a tailless flying machine designed by J.W. Dunne in 1907.

As I became more familiar with RAE, I encountered many such reminders and mementoes of the early days of aviation; after all, these were less than fifty years before my arrival, which is in turn sixty years ago – one’s perspective of time alters with age. I had visited Farnborough once before, at the end of 1945 when I was detached from 7 Squadron for a short accident-prevention course at the Air Ministry. We were taken to RAE to be shown some of the work of the Accident Investigation Branch, but the highlight of the visit was the exhibition of German aircraft which the RAE had collected and evaluated at various stages of the war and after, including the Me 262 jet fighter-bomber and the Me 163 rocket-powered Komet, apparently a test pilot’s nightmare. It was amazing to see this collection of almost all the major types of German military aircraft, mostly in airworthy condition.

Now, five years later, I was struck by the apparently random assortment of architectural styles comprising the establishment, with modern buildings from the recent war and post-war periods cheek by jowl with pre-1918 hangars, workshops and offices (often of corrugated iron). All this was crammed into an area of some fifty to sixty acres between the modern airfield, with its 2,400 yd main runway and control tower, and the main road through Farnborough town, with the semi-urban area of Cove limiting any expansion to the north and west. As I remember it, the main administration building alone was of substantial size and moderately imposing appearance. No. 160 Building, in which I was to work, was one of the more modern brick and concrete structures, built in 1944. This, with its neighbour and contemporary 161 Building, housed both the Radio and Electrical Engineering Departments, and was close to the west gate.

Almost my first sight of the interior of 160 Building was of the large radio laboratory on the first floor, fitted with long benches on which was a bewildering array of radio equipment in various stages of assembly. A bespectacled man of about my own age was sitting gloomily in front of a cathode-ray oscilloscope, and I remember clearly feeling that I was going to be out of my technical depth. However, my spirits rose a little when I saw this my first boffin, muttering imprecations, strike his oscilloscope sharply with his fist, a remedial measure not unfamiliar to the average navigator.

At this point it might be useful to give some idea of how RAE was organized when I joined it at the end of 1950. What the accompanying table makes clear is that it was a very large organization employing thousands of people, including a fair proportion of the local population.

In very simple terms, there were research and development departments on the one hand, and all the supporting technical and administrative

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departments on the other. In addition, there were several ‘lodger units’, notably the Empire Test Pilots’ School and RAF Institute of Aviation Medicine. Then there was the RAE Technical College, in which young people served excellent technical apprenticeships to provide a continuous stream of skilled personnel for the establishment. Several outstations, such as the weapons ranges at Aberporth in Wales, were also run by RAE. The large bulk of RAE personnel was civilian; such service personnel as there were in the R & D departments were mostly technical officers, RAF or RN. I and one other Spec N in the Instrument and Photographic Department were the only General Duties (flying) officers, apart from the Experimental Flying Department, which was manned by RAF and RN pilots and aircrew with one or two civilian test pilots. EFD was organized in flights, each of which (normally commanded by a squadron leader) provided aircraft and flying facilities to the appropriate R & D department. Radio Flight (still occasionally referred to then as Wireless and Electrical Flight) worked with the Radio and Electrical Engineering Departments, and was the one with which I would be most concerned. My disciplinary boss was the Commanding Officer of EFD, an RAF group captain with whom I had only occasional contact, mostly social. My working boss was Caradoc Williams, a Principal Scientific Officer who headed the Radio Navigation Aids Group within the Radio Department.

In very general terms, my job was to provide the user’s point of view in the development of radio aids to air navigation. More specifically, I was required to work closely with the scientists involved in development projects, to organize and usually take part in flying test programmes, and to assist in the assessment and interpretation of test results. It was the sort of job that the RAF Specialist Navigation Course had been designed for – to be able to speak the language both of the service pilot or navigator and of the research and develoment teams.

I replaced Flight Lieutenant Paddy Carson, an Ulsterman who had obviously enjoyed his time at RAE and whose work was much appreciated in the Radio Department. We had a short handover, and I seem to recall that much of it was devoted to teaching me how to use a mechanical calculator essential to the analysis of results from one of the current test programmes – a laborious business I shall return to later.

I was to share an office with Major Al Shiely of the US Air Force, a pilot who was also a radio specialist, but he was not involved in the projects on which I would be working, although we became good friends before he moved on after a few months. My chief working partner throughout my time at RAE was Fred Stringer, an Experimental Officer about my own age, with whom I struck up an immediate rapport. He was an Army brat and so knew something of service life, and we shared a similar sense of humour, useful in some of the more frustrating test programmes we were to work on. Freddy worked hard: he was studying for an external BSc at

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Organization of the Royal Aircraft Establishment Farnborough 1950–51 Director 2 Deputy Directors

Secretary & Chief Accountant

R & D Departments:

Support Departments:

Aerodynamics Armaments Carrier Equipment Chemistry Electrical Engineering Experimental Flying (see below) Guided Weapons Instrument & Photographic Mechanical Engineering Metallurgy Naval Aircraft Radio Structures

Accounts Air Ministry Constabulary Air Ministry Works Department Central Administration Central Planning & Progress Designs Administration Experimental Aircraft Services Fire Brigade Heat, Light & Power Inspection (aircraft & workshops) Library & Info Services Joint Factory Committee Maths Services Medical Meteorological Office Patents Personnel Printing RAE News RAF Detachment Safety Stores Technical Facilities Transport Workshops Management

Experimental Flying Dept: CO (RAF Gp Capt) Adjutant Chief Test Pilot Senior Air Traffic Control Officer Aero Flight Armament Flight S & ME Flight Instrument Flight Radio Flight Transport Flight Naval Acft Flight Met Research Flight

‘Lodger’ Organizations: Empire Test Pilots’ School Clothing & Equipment Physiological Research Establishment RAF Institute of Aviation Medicine RAE Technical College

Main RAE Outstations: Aircraft Torpedo Development Unit, Gosport Armament & Instrument Experimental Unit, Martlesham Heath Guided Weapons Trials Wing, Aberporth National Aeronautical Establishment, Bedford Orfordness Research Station R & D Establishment, Cardington Rocket Propulsion Department, Westcott

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London University in his spare time, but was always enthusiastic about the job in hand. He was also particularly enthusiastic about flying, and I can remember many years later introducing him at an aero-systems seminar and saying that whatever the R & D programme Freddy was involved in, sooner or later there would be an aeroplane in it. He later qualified as a pilot, and has continued flying and instructing until an advanced age. The success of his notable career in the aviation world can be judged by the fact that he was Master of the Guild of Air Pilots and Air Navigators in 1989/90, and was later awarded the title Master Air Pilot.

The head of our group, Caradoc Williams, had long experience in the field of radio aids. He was one of the scientists who travelled to Spain during the war to inspect the German Sonne navigation beacon system; their work enabled British aircraft and ships to use this aid under the name Consol when navigating in the Atlantic (and also for some years after the war with beacons in the UK and elsewhere). His special field in the early 1950s was radio wave propagation and its application to navigation systems, in which he was a recognized authority. He was a quietly spoken, unfussy man who gave us adequate guidance and then let us get on with the job; however, he could deliver adverse criticism or a reproof when this was necessary, usually in a constructive spirit. In due course Joan and I exchanged visits with Caradoc, his wife Eileen and their young family, and found that we had much in common. * * * One of the first things I did when I arrived at Farnborough was to walk across the road from the RAE main gate and visit Johnson’s, the estate agents, in search of somewhere to live. I hadn’t long to wait: a groundfloor flat in a large house in Mytchett, a couple of miles across the Surrey border from Farnborough, was offered, and I went to have a look at it. It was – had been – an imposing late Victorian or Edwardian house in large grounds, now rather unkempt. The two upper floors were also flats, occupied by an Army and an RAF officer respectively, and with separate side entrances. The ground-floor flat was entered through the front door into a large tiled hall; there were two living-rooms (one obviously a former drawing-room of enormous proportions), and three bedrooms of varying sizes (but none small) which had been converted from other uses – one had evidently been a kitchen, and still had a row of bells for the staff to answer. There was an old-fashioned scullery kitchen, a small bathroom, and an impressive mahogany-throned lavatory. It was furnished with a not ungenerous selection of rather shabby pieces, some of which were of good quality: faded grandeur was the keynote. The rent was £5 a week, not including the charwoman whose services were available.