Wings (17 page)

Trenchard set the tone in a typically interfering letter to the first Commandant, Air Commodore Charles Longcroft. ‘Who have you got up there who can train the boys in Rugby
Football?’ he wanted to know. ‘After all, this is the best game for making an officer and a gentleman out of any material. If
we want to do well in the Air Force,
I believe that rugby is the best game to help us.’
¹⁰

Longcroft himself was ex-Charterhouse, an early aviator who had transferred from the Welch Regiment and commanded No 4 Squadron on the Western Front. He rode to hounds and followed beagles.
Cranwell had its own pack and its first master was Charles Portal, another RFC veteran, who commanded the flying training wing and would be Chief of the Air Staff for most of the Second World
War.

But as Trenchard’s missive suggests, Cranwell existed not just to acquire gentlemen but to manufacture them. From the outset it had been understood that a modern force could not rely
exclusively on the traditional recruiting grounds of the military class. In 1919 a committee was set up under Lord Hugh Cecil – a Tory MP from the Salisbury dynasty who had served as a ground
officer with the RFC – to try and define the educational and human qualities needed for the officer corps. It was accepted that, in theory at least, it should be open to all talents. Cecil
decided that all officers must be able to fly, though this qualification was not so rigid as to exclude good technicians who were poor aviators. The RAF wanted boys who exhibited ‘the quality
of a gentleman’. It was careful, though, to emphasize that by this it meant ‘not a particular degree of wealth or a particular social position but a certain
character’.
¹¹

Ordinary boys from ordinary families were nonetheless unlikely to find the gates of Cranwell flung open to them. Air Ministry officials set out to recruit people like themselves,
writing to the headmasters of their old schools, selling the college’s virtues, playing down the perils of air-force life and seeking candidates. Eton had a dedicated liaison
officer.

Unlike the public schools, few state schools had the resources to provide coaching for the entrance exam. Fees were steep. Parents were expected to pay up to £75 a year, plus £35
before entry and £30 at the start of the second year towards uniform and books. This was at a time when a bank manager earned £500 a year.

So, despite the pious utterances of the Cecil committee, the young men who passed through Cranwell in the interwar years were drawn largely from the middle and upper middle classes. The stuffier
army and navy may have regarded them as arriviste, but to the less sophisticated air-force officers seemed rather polished and aloof. Their style was caught by the beady eye of Richmal Crompton,
creator of the Just William series of boys’ books and a reliable social observer. In one story William’s sister Ethel is taken to a dance by a stuck-up airman from the local base,
somewhere in the Home Counties.

The Wingco’s snooty demeanour does not sit easily with the notion of the flier as being intimately connected with the society he was defending, which would be promoted during the Battle of
Britain.

There was a backdoor route to Cranwell. It led from Halton, where every year the three best apprentices were offered a cadetship to the college with the expectation, frequently fulfilled, that
this would lead them to the highest reaches of the service. The first appeal for apprentices had received an overwhelming response. Five thousand boys applied for the first intake of 300 places.
They were mostly drawn from the lower-middle and upper-working classes, who saw the RAF as a way into the intoxicating world of aviation. The entrance exam tested them on mathematics, science and
English. The candidates were expected to be at school certificate standard, a tough exam taken at sixteen, which was the threshold to higher education (it was a requirement for Cranwell), so most
of the boys had parents who were prepared to keep them on after the normal school leaving age of
fourteen. The sacrifices this must have entailed in some cases are evident in
a 1924 magazine photograph of proto-apprentices as they set off from a London railway station to their new life. They are all cheering. Many wear shabby suits and flat caps. The caption noted that
‘the variety of class of boys was very striking, many of them having quite an imposing kit, whilst not the least pleased with the whole proceedings were those whose belongings were kept
within bounds in brown paper parcels’.
¹³

The apprentices were divided into trades. They were to become fitters, working on engines, and riggers, responsible for the airframes. The third, smaller, category of wireless technicians was
trained at a sub-unit of Cranwell. Many – maybe most – of these eager lads harboured an ambition to fly aeroplanes, rather than merely to service them. In 1921 a new class of airman
pilot was announced that offered flying training to outstanding candidates from the ranks. They served for five years before returning to their own trades, but retained the sergeant’s stripes
they gained for being in the air. This policy meant that by the time the next war started about a quarter of the pilots in RAF squadrons were NCOs – a tough, skilful, hard-to-impress elite
within an elite. Trenchard was as proud of Halton as he was of Cranwell. He understood that he was engineering a new class of educated other ranks – something that had never happened in
British military history.

Cranwell and Halton did not produce enough men to staff the new service – skeletal though it was. To create the
manpower needed Trenchard brought in a system of
short-service commissions. In 1924 the Air Ministry advertised for 400 officers for flying duties. They had to be British born and of pure European descent.
¹⁴
Once in, their contracts ran for six years with a further four on the reserve. The system was a godsend for many ex-wartime pilots who had caught the flying bug but were
unable to find work in the restricted world of commercial aviation.

In his search for a cheap supply of trained fliers available in case of emergency Trenchard had come up with the idea of an aerial equivalent to the territorial units that supplemented the army.
In 1925 the Auxiliary Air Force (AAF) was formed. The first four squadrons were No. 600 (City of London), No. 601 (County of London), No. 602 (City of Glasgow) and No. 603 (City of Edinburgh). The
pilots were amateurs who flew in their spare time. The machines and the mechanics who maintained them were supplied by the RAF. As with the territorial yeomanry regiments, the idea was that these
forces would have a strong local character. Trenchard also wanted them to have social cachet. They would succeed, he said, ‘if it was looked upon as as much of an honour to belong to one as
it is to belong to a good club or a good university.’
¹⁵

The AAF provided an institutional framework in which the attraction that ‘sportsmen’ had felt towards aeroplanes since the pioneering years could be formalized. Some of the units
gloried in their snobbery. No. 601, the ‘Millionaires’ Squadron’, was formed by Lord Edward Grosvenor who, after Eton and a stint in the Foreign Legion, had served as
an RNAS pilot in the war. He recruited from his own circle. According to the squadron historian, he ‘chose his officers from among gentlemen of sufficient presence not to be
overawed by him, and sufficient means not to be excluded from his favourite pastimes – eating, drinking and White’s [the exclusive St James’s Club]’.
¹⁶

The squadron had its headquarters at a townhouse at 54 Kensington Park Road in Notting Hill. Their gatherings echoed to the sound of broken glass. One after-dinner game involved trying to
circumnavigate the room without touching the floor, another ended with unsuspecting visitors having tankards of beer poured down their trousers. It was all good, high-spirited fun, but the
auxiliary squadrons took their flying seriously and the japes were mixed with a conscientious approach to training that would serve the RAF well later. Initially they were equipped with bombers,
but from 1934 gradually switched to fighters. During the Battle of Britain the AAF provided nearly a quarter of Fighter Command’s strength.

They were supplemented by the University Air Squadrons, which fulfilled a similar function. The inspiration for them came from RFC veterans who went to Cambridge to study engineering. With
Trenchard’s encouragement, others were set up at Oxford and London.

One section of the population from which cheap and diligent labour could be drawn was no longer available. Women had begun to infiltrate the British military organization in France in the latter
years of the First World War, when it was officially decided that they were fitted to do clerking and
support staff jobs that had previously been the province of males. In
January 1918 a Womens’ Auxiliary Air Force Corps was formed to work with the nascent RAF, which was then renamed the Women’s Royal Air Force (WRAF). By the end of the war it was about
25,000 strong. As well as clerical work they also did domestic duties: cleaning, cooking and laundering. But there was also a growing technical section engaged in working as welders, riggers,
electricians and mechanics, as well as drivers.

The path into the world of men was not easy. In a letter to the
Daily Telegraph
in January 1919 a WRAF told how she ‘joined up as a carpenter’, but instead of getting the
month’s training she had been promised she received ‘only a few drills’. She was eventually drafted to an aerodrome and put to work in the carpenter’s shop. She found she
was ‘tolerated by the men as another military nuisance. There I have been six weeks, spending eight hours a day (most days) in that shop, and have never yet done one single day’s work.
I should go on like the rest, enjoying my drills, physical and otherwise and my hockey and dances, but I have a conscience.’
¹⁷

In the post-war budget-slashing the WRAF was marked down for the chop. Throughout 1919 women who had operated wireless sets, ridden motorbikes and painted liquid cellulose ‘dope’ on
the fabric of wings and fuselages were laid off, leaving only a handful kept on to help run a hospital and the records department. Women would have to wait nearly twenty years before the demands of
war made them employable once again.

Even in its reduced state the RAF managed to keep its place in the popular imagination. It showed itself off at the annual air display at Hendon in north London, where
enormous crowds gathered to watch aerobatics.

The reluctance to entertain the dreadful thought of another world war hung over all decision-making. It was enshrined in the ‘ten-year rule’ covering all service planning – the
idea, based on little more than wishful thinking, that there would be no major conflict for a decade. The effect of this rule was felt most heavily in the quality of the equipment available to the
reduced RAF. Between 1919 and 1934 the squadrons flew aeroplanes that were little different from those they had flown in the First World War. The names of the types have a forlorn and redundant
air. For bombers they had Handley Page Hyderabads, Fairey Fawns, Vickers Virginias and Victorias, and Westland Wapitis. For fighters, Armstrong Whitley Siskins and Gloster Gamecocks. At a time when
monoplanes were starting to appear in the fleets of the civil airlines linking the great cities of Europe all the RAF’s models were biplanes. Little attempt was made to develop the science of
navigation – a disastrous omission that was to render the British bombing effort almost completely ineffective in the first years of the next war.

As it was, these primitive machines were more than capable of carrying out the tasks that fell to them in the years before German rearmament galvanized governments into action. For much of the
time they were engaged in police actions, quelling unrest in remote parts of the Empire. In January
1920 a dissident who became known as ‘The Mad Mullah’ rose up
against British rule in Somaliland. After the army failed to deal with him, Trenchard sent a squadron of De Havilland DH-9s to bomb the rebel forts and camps. The Mad Mullah surrendered and British
control was reestablished. By dropping a few bombs and loosing off their machine guns the RAF had shown it could achieve results for very little cost. A pattern was established. Thereafter the air
force was used to impose order in Palestine, Mesopotamia, Aden and the North-West Frontier. This activity resulted in an exotic and adventurous existence for service airmen, some of whom would go
on to the commanding heights of the RAF in the next big war. They included John Slessor who, in the spring of 1921, was sent to command a flight of 20 Squadron then stationed at Parachinar,
‘a delightful place’ just over the border with Afghanistan.

In many respects life was pleasant. ‘We enjoyed ourselves in India,’ he wrote. ‘In those days officers and airmen went overseas on a five-year tour and often remained with the
same squadron throughout. Squadrons changed stations as units. The aircraft, of course, flew to their new station, while the personnel, wives and children followed in slow, dusty troop trains
– with two or three trucks of polo ponies tacked on behind. We played a lot of not very high-class polo. We went on leave to Kashmir or down into Central India and shot or fished. We played a
bit of cricket.’
¹⁸