The wartime head of Bomber Command was a dab hand in the kitchen, remembers his grandson Tom Assheton
The Bomber Harris recipe book
T
he Namib desert, south-west Africa: a young Arthur Harris, a former farmer and now a bugler in the 1st Rhodesia Regiment, tips liquefied bully beef from his ration tin on to the sand in disgust. He vows to apply his practical mind to the problem of eating well in the military, once they have booted the Germans out of southern Africa. Victory duly came on 9th July 1915 at Khorab, after a gruelling desert trek. The campaign over, he decided to continue the fight in Europe, if he could achieve this from a seated position. There was no place for him in the cavalry – so he joined the fledgling Royal Flying Corps. Eighty years ago this year, Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris assumed his post as Commander-in-Chief at Bomber Command. For the next three years, he prosecuted, with the American 8th Airforce, the only direct action against the Nazi fatherland, until the Allies crossed the Rhine in March 1945. More than 57,200 of his 125,000 men were killed. The Germans lost a great deal more. How does a man take his mind off such matters, even for a few brief moments? Harris cooked. He chopped carrots, he constructed complicated sauces, he collected up his visitors’ ration books and co-opted the local butchers for the best ingredients. There were many famous visitors to Bomber Command throughout this period, from King George VI and Queen Elizabeth to politicians and military commanders (British, American and even Charles de Gaulle – although that didn’t go so well). Harris would show his guests the Blue Books, photographic evidence of the damage being inflicted on German cities 18 The Oldie May 2022
Bomber’s surprise: pages from the recipe book, recently rebound
and industrial sites. Many of them also dined at his table. Of course, Harris was too busy to cook himself, but his chefs were familiar with his interventions and direct action in the kitchen. He was at heart a practical man. Harris’s daughter, my mother, Jackie, also experienced his ‘direct action’ at Winkfield Place in the late ’50s, under the stern eye of Constance Spry and Rosemary Hume. Harris would turn up early at the college to collect Jackie, so that he could make a round of the kitchens where the girls were learning to cook. Spry and Hume adored him, and his interventions were enjoyed by all, except for my poor, embarrassed mother. They eventually awarded him his own Cordon Bleu certificate – after he posted them a cooked sausage. Harris’s recipe book, with additions from my grandmother and mother, has recently been rebound. This encouraged me to take a closer look. It is leather-bound, indexed and almost pocket-sized. Harris hated to
write and so most of his recipes are in his wife’s hand. He spent time between the wars in Africa, India and Palestine, which gave him a love for spicy dishes. He enjoyed messing about with complicated recipes. I have some of his cookbooks, too, and his margin notes are funny and sometimes quite rude. ‘Muck’ is a favoured term (as pictured above). My sisters and I knew him when he lived at Goring-on-Thames, from the ’60s to his death in 1984, aged 91. He was known to us as Pappy and we to him as ‘the Monkeys’. He liked snacks (although he loathed that word). On one occasion, he sent my sister and me on the train to buy all the Frazzles in Reading. He was a big man, with the same neck-collar size as his bull terrier. We would weigh him on the scales at the train station. There are far greater experts than me on the strategic bombing offensive of Germany in the Second World War. Listen to episode 28 from my podcast, Bloody Violent History, if you want it from the horse’s mouth. We knew Harris as
