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The Combatants

The following letter was written by a young man to his parents in 1916:

Last night I was just getting into my bed when a sponge full of water came along the room. At once the place was in a fine mess. I threw a jug of water, but the same was returned with interest. Next the place got so full of water that I ran into the garden, falling into a big hole full of mud. I managed to obtain two onions on my way back, and with these attacked the mob. All our beds are wet through. However, at last all got right again and we got our sleep. It was great sport.

The young man was not a schoolboy but a fighter pilot. His name was Albert Ball, and within a year he would earn a Victoria Cross, a Military Cross and three Distinguished Service Orders as arguably the greatest British fighter ace of the war. His letter describes the adolescent horseplay common in the squadrons. Situated in comfortable chateaux and farmhouses behind the lines, these squadrons served as a refuge from the realities of life in the air. When a man was killed, the custom was to carry on as though nothing had happened, to drink and sing, to shed no tears. With their outward confidence, emotional reserve and ‘great sport’, these squadrons brought the world of the English public school to France. It is not surprising that so many letters home were childlike. Albert Ball again:

Am feeling very poo-poo today. Five of my best pals were done in yesterday, and I think it is so rotten.

In terms of background, if not of achievement, Ball was a typical British Great War pilot. Middle class, public school educated, and keen, the squadrons were full of men like him. Frederick Winterbotham was one:

I was born in the reign of Queen Victoria, in 1897, and I always remember my annoyance at the age of three, when I was given a prayer book with Queen Victoria on it, and she died, and I felt that I had been done down because I no longer had a queen. I grew up in a normal household in Stroud in Gloucestershire, where my father had a law business. I suppose my great love was always ponies and horses. It went on throughout my life. I went to an excellent school in Eastbourne and then I went on to Charterhouse, in that hot summer of 1911. I loved Charterhouse. It was the most gorgeous place and we played every sort of sport and game. My only trouble was that I was growing rather too fast and after I’d been there for a couple of years, I was well over six feet and I’d outgrown my strength. I was no longer fit to play games properly – so the medical people said that I should go for a sea voyage. I persuaded my father and mother to send me round the world and I was fortunate in that I had relations and friends in various places.

So it was that I set off in 1913, to Canada, where I helped a man to build a house and clear his land up in the Rockies. Then I went to Vancouver, during the Canadian real estate boom, where I was pestered to buy land. Strange gentlemen would ring me up and say, ‘I see you’ve come from Gloucestershire, you must know the Duke of Beaufort, I’d like to come and see you and sell you some land.’ Actually, I did know the Duke of Beaufort, but I didn’t tell them that.

Having seen Canada, I crossed the Pacific to China in a big new ship that was full of dead Chinese, going home to be buried, and American missionaries, going out to China. I loved Japan, I had a marvellous time. In those days, the Japanese loved the English, and all the women wore kimonos and walked in wooden sandals. The drains in the villages were all open, you rode in a rickshaw and you drank green tea.

Leaving Japan, I went down to Shanghai, to see the British colony down there. Unfortunately, a man came aboard the boat, and took the next cabin to myself, and he had a rash all over him. I mentioned this, and a doctor was brought, and of course, it was smallpox. I was rather lucky. I’d had measles before I left England, and I was well vaccinated, and I didn’t catch it. Then I went on to Hong Kong, where I had friends, and then down to Australia. And in Australia, I went to live on a sheep station that belonged to a friend of ours from Gloucestershire. I was a jackaroo, 180 miles north of the nearest railway line, right out in the desert. I loved it. If it hadn’t been for the coming war, I might have stayed there. I adored the life.

However, I did come home. I stopped in New Zealand to see where my grandfather had once owned what is now the great suburb of Remuera, outside Auckland. Unfortunately, he sold it a bit too soon. Then, I came home, via India, and on the way, I remember hearing news that the Kaiser had taken a very large percentage out of all the fortunes of the rich Germans. It was a wealth tax, and I remember discussing it with people on board the ship, asking why he wanted all this money, and we all came to the conclusion that there was trouble coming.

Back home, in England, in 1914, I went back to Charterhouse for a term, and took my entrance exam to Trinity, Cambridge. But then, of course, came the outbreak of war. I was in camp with the Charterhouse Officer Training Corps, in Staffordshire, at the time. I went back home in my uniform to Gloucestershire, and people were making a fuss of anybody in uniform, and a woman came up to me at Gloucester Station, and she asked me to hold her baby for a minute, while she went and got something, but she didn’t come back …

I wanted to join up. I’d always been keen on horses, and I thought I’d join the local Gloucestershire Yeomanry, which was one of the very good yeomanry regiments. So, at the age of seventeen, I became a subaltern in the Yeomanry, where I had a glorious two years, training men and horses. I was given a hundred butchers’ boys and grocers’ boys from Gloucester who’d ridden nothing but a bicycle, and a hundred Canadian horses that had never been ridden at all, and I had to put them together and make them into a squadron of cavalry. Which was quite an interesting job, actually. But before long, cavalry weren’t wanted any more and we had to get rid of our horses. I suppose it was one of the most traumatic days that I ever remember, because we all loved our horses, and we had to take them away and load them onto a train and send them off, goodness knows where, after having trained them up for two years. They then said that they were going to give us bicycles but I didn’t really fancy that very much.

I’d met a man quite recently, who’d been flying and he’d been explaining to me how he was cooperating with a new, very secret weapon, called a ‘tank’ and it was the greatest fun. So I went back and told my colonel that I was going to go flying. He was a little bit cross, but I said, no, it’s the thing for me, so off I went. I went to see some people in London, in the War Office. There was a very nice young cavalry officer who was interviewing possible candidates for the Royal Flying Corps. He noted my shoulder straps, and he said, ‘Ah, you’re Gloucester Yeomanry. You ride a horse?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I do.’ ‘Do you know where the pole star is?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I think I could find it.’ ‘You’ll do,’ he said.

British society in 1914, patriotic and obedient, was firmly ordered by class. Frederick Winterbotham represented the next generation of officers and empire builders. Young men like him, and those from every social class for that matter, knew their place. They were born with a role to fulfil, and, when war came, a new and appropriate role was assigned, and carried out unhesitatingly. For all that the new flying services attracted men of originality and disregard for military custom, their originality usually only extended to their immediate world. Larger moral and political conventions remained unchallenged. The structure of the flying services neatly reflected the social order; officers came from one background, the rank and file from another. In general, pilots were officers, while the riggers who tended the airframes, and the fitters who looked after the engines, were in the ranks. Occasionally, however, the social order blurred. Within the squadrons there were a number of sergeant pilots, from humble backgrounds, who lived and messed separately to the officers, but who experienced precisely the same dangers. Among these were men who had learnt to fly in the pre-war pioneering days. Donald Clappen was one of them:

I was always interested in flying. I used to take the aviation journals, Flight and Aeroplane. Then in July 1911, the Gordon Bennett Cup took place at Eastchurch. I was living at Westcliff-on-Sea at the time, and I took an excursion boat across to Sheerness and I saw all the famous pilots flying. The Gordon Bennett Cup was an international affair. Pilots represented their countries. I saw not only my first flying, but also my first crash.

It appears that Gustav Hamel, a famous British pilot, was flying practice laps in a Blériot, but found that his time was slightly slower than that of a rival Nieuport machine. Blériot himself was present, and he decided to cut about a foot off of each wing. This went well. Hamel was faster in his next practice circuit. But in the actual race, he got to the first pylon, overbanked and flew straight into the ground, with the engine running full on. He was thrown twenty-five or thirty yards, rolling over and over. The machine was a total wreck, but Hamel was only badly bruised, and didn’t even break a bone.

It was as big a crash as one could ever wish to see – yet he got up almost unhurt. That made me think that aviation was not quite as dangerous as I had believed. However, everyone thought I was quite mad to want to learn to fly. In fact, so much so, that I hardly told anyone of my interest – not even my own parents. That’s why I started off by getting myself apprenticed to the Chanter School of Flying at Hendon, just as a start. They had an advertisement in one of the aviation journals.

The Chanter School was rather a ropey concern. It had two Blériots and a machine which they were building themselves. They ceased to exist in October or November 1911, by which time I’d learnt to sweep the floor and push the machines about. I then got in touch with the Blériot Aviation Company, also at Hendon, and asked if I could join them as an apprentice, with a view to becoming a flying pupil at a later date.

I joined Blériot in November 1911, and I was just a general dogsbody at first, but I was allowed to fly. Learning was entirely a solo effort. There were no dual-control machines, nor were there any machines that could take up a passenger. At first, the aircraft was raised onto a pedestal, showing what it was like, and the view one would get as a pilot in the flying position. Then one was put into the machine, told to keep straight ahead, towards a tree or something like that on the other side of the aerodrome. One learnt to roll across the ground. From thence, one started by doing short hops, followed by longer hops, until one could fly straight across the other side of the aerodrome. After that, one was able to do half circuits, one to the left and then to the right, and so forth, until one was able to fly in a complete circuit around the aerodrome.

The first time I flew was quite by accident. I was in a machine which was not supposed to fly. It had been detuned. I was rolling across the ground, doing a straight, as I thought, when suddenly I found the ground receding under me. Of course, this was so unexpected that I pushed my stick down and landed with a bit of a crash and found myself with the undercarriage spread all around me and the prop broken. My instructor – Monsieur Salmet – came rushing up to me, ‘Why you fly? Why you fly?’ I had no answer. I didn’t know.

What had happened was that a gust of wind had caught my plane and it had taken off without my expecting it to. In those days, no one ever flew unless it was dead calm. My punishment was that I was not allowed to practise on an aircraft until I had participated in the repair of the machine, which took some months. That put me back quite a lot, but I still qualified for my pilot’s certificate when I turned eighteen. After that, I was made a sort of assistant instructor, but I was also expected to do absolutely everything connected with the running, repairing and mending of the aircraft, tuning up of the engines. I did everything concerned with the maintenance of the machines.

In general, the majority of pupils were army officers, who were learning to fly with a view to joining the Royal Flying Corps, which had started in 1912. There were a few others – some rich people who went on to buy their own aircraft. And most weekends, at Hendon, there were competitions and flying displays. It was quite a fashionable affair, almost like Ascot, with people flocking down to see the flying.

I was assistant instructor until April 1914, but then Blériot moved to Brooklands, and I became an instructor at the Hall School of Flying at Hendon, which consisted of two Blériots, a Deperdussin, a Caudron and an Avro. I received a pound a week, and we taught a few pupils.

I was on holiday in Scotland when the war broke out. It didn’t upset my holiday. I was thinking this war would be of the nature of the Boer War. But when I got back to Hendon, I found that the cry had gone out for pilots for the Flying Corps, and that a few of the instructors had actually become sergeant pilots. So I promptly put my name down. I signed the papers and waited. I continued instructing with the Hall School – but nothing happened. A lot of my friends were joining up, anxious to get into the war as quickly as possible, as everyone thought the war would be finished by Christmas. I found they were joining the London Scottish, so I spent all day queuing and found myself a perfectly good private in the London Scottish territorial battalion.

By April 1915, I was looking up with great envy from the trenches at the aircraft flying above, so I put in another application to join the Royal Flying Corps. I said that I’d already applied, but had had no reply. My colonel was not very keen because he was losing a lot of his personnel. So he instructed that he would pass on any application if the applicant could get somebody to apply for him from whatever regiment he wished to join. In my case, I knew nobody in the Royal Flying Corps.

Just a week before the Battle of Loos – we were resting behind the trenches – I went up to Auchel where I was watching the aircraft with envy. As I stood, watching the machines landing, a general emerged from the office. As he stepped into his car, acting on the spur of the moment, I said, ‘Please sir, may I speak?’ He looked round, astonished, and didn’t say anything. I pulled out my application papers and told him my story, the fact that I was a qualified pilot, that I wanted to join the Royal Flying Corps but had some difficulty getting anyone to apply for me, that I had replied and had heard nothing more about it. In a very deep voice, he told another officer, also a brass hat, ‘Make a note of that; make a note of that’ … and so on. He said, ‘I’ll see what we can do.’ In the meantime, he called to an airman and said ‘Is there a transport going back towards the trenches, to Béthune? If so, make sure this soldier gets a lift back.’ With that I saluted smartly and off he went. In the tender which took me back to Béthune, I asked the driver, ‘Who was I speaking to?’ ‘Blimey,’ he said, ‘You’ve got a nerve! That was General Trenchard. He’s in charge of the Royal Flying Corps!’

After that, I went through the Battle of Loos, twice over the top. We had a pretty bad time. Each time, I was lucky to get away with it. At one point, there was only one other fellow left in my section. On 9 October, as I was coming out of the trenches, I was greeted by a telegram which said, ‘Report at once to the War Office.’ That night, not having slept for days, dirty and filthy, I was given a first-class warrant and I found myself back in London on a Sunday morning. I wasn’t feeling too good, and I was sent to a specialist, who pronounced that I needed three weeks’ rest. After that, I was in the Royal Flying Corps.

Cecil King was a working-class boy who joined the Royal Flying Corps in 1913. He was to become a rigger and, ultimately, a flight sergeant:

Originally, I was an apprentice to a wheelwright and coach builder in the country, but after I’d come through my apprenticeship, I came to London. I did roughly a year’s work in a London workshop, which was partially underground, and very depressing, and I wanted to get into a more open-air life. I cast about to see what I would do and one day, when I was walking in Kingston, I met two soldiers. They had an unusual badge, with the letters RFC, on their shoulders. I got into a conversation with them and they told me they were members of a new unit called the Royal Flying Corps, which had just started – and why didn’t I join?

I’d never heard of the Royal Flying Corps, and I didn’t know there was a military regiment concerned with flying. Actually, I wasn’t bothered about that – I just knew it would be out in the open air and on big open fields. That’s what I wanted. I was interested in flying, though. In 1911, I’d seen Gustav Hamel flying at Hendon. I remember the announcer said, ‘This is Gustav Hamel on an aeroplane with a Gnome engine.’ The crowd thought he’d said, ‘No engine’ and there was quite a stir.

But after I’d met these two members of the Royal Flying Corps, I went to a recruiting sergeant and asked him about it, and he said, ‘Yes, I think something like that has started, and if you’d like to join, I’ll find out for you.’ I decided I would go a bit further with it. I went to Kingston Barracks and made my final decision. I was sworn into the army there, and I expressed a desire to go in the RFC, so I was given a railway warrant and sent down to Aldershot. When I got there, I asked the first serviceman I saw, ‘Where are the barracks of the Royal Flying Corps?’ and he said, ‘Never heard of it.’

But by inquiring once or twice more I finally found that the Royal Flying Corps shared barracks with the Black Watch so I reported there, and I was sent up to a small building on the aerodrome at Farnborough where all the further particulars of my enlistment were taken down. I was sent back to the barracks for my first night. And when I woke up in the morning I heard the trumpets from the South Camp – that was the cavalry – and the bugles from the North Camp; and I was delighted. I thought, ‘I’m really and truly in the army.’

When war was declared on 4 August 1914, many of the men who were to fly were scattered across the globe. Charles Chabot was living in Bangkok:

The European population of Bangkok at this time was absolutely minimal. A hundred would cover the entire European population of Siam. Nevertheless we had enough English people to rake up a rugby football team. The Germans had a rugby team as well. As the final game of the season, the Germans challenged us and this match was to be followed by dinner at the German club. So we played the game and we were beaten by the Germans and we congregated for the party after the match. We were all mixed up around the table – a German here, an Englishman here, next to him a German, next to him a Frenchman and so on. It began and it was like every other rugby football dinner since time immemorial. And then came a bang at the door and a runner came in from the French Embassy with the extraordinary news of the outbreak of war and he was quickly followed by another runner from the German Embassy. We’d never thought of other chaps in terms of war and we didn’t know what we ought to do, whether we ought to seize a knife off the table and plunge it into the next chap, or what. After a little bit of discussion, we decided that as far as we were concerned, the war was going to start tomorrow. The party proceeded and that was that.

In Britain, the prevailing mood in August 1914 was euphoric. Leslie Kemp remembers:

The war came and threw everything and everybody out of balance. The enthusiasm for the war was really fantastic. There were actresses singing, there were concerts in Trafalgar Square and, if you enlisted, you were given the ‘King’s Shilling’. It was entirely different to the atmosphere that prevailed at the start of the Second World War.

Young men with romantic dreams of flying seized their opportunity. Charles Burne:

When I went home and told my father that I wanted to join the Royal Naval Air Service, he signed the papers but he said, ‘Don’t start flying. It’s only damn fools and birds that fly.’

At the beginning of the war, a man with specialist knowledge was a welcome addition to the flying services. William Richards, self-taught and highly motivated, was such a man:

My father and my mother emigrated separately in the eighties, around 1884. My father was from Cornwall, at a time when the Cornish tin mines were in difficulty and closing down. And people concerned with that sort of work, at that time, were emigrating. At the age of twenty-one, he went to New Zealand. My mother’s was an agricultural family in Essex. When she was about fourteen, they moved to New Zealand. She was that much younger than my father.

They met at Dougville, eight or nine years after arrival in New Zealand, and they fell in love, married, and there’s no doubt about it, it was a very happy and romantic marriage. She was a lovely person. I was born a year after their marriage on St George’s Day in 1893. They’d set up home in Auckland, in Queen Street, at that time, scarcely developed. They set up home in a kind of colonial style, and there’s no question that they were very happy. I have the photographs of myself as a baby, and they go to show that’s what it was – a happy home.

My mother contracted some sort of tropical fever at the age of twenty-five, and when I was a year and ten months old, she was taken from us, leaving my father with me, more or less in arms, to cope with a tragic situation. Friends came to his help, and I was looked after for a time, but it was quite clear to him that he couldn’t carry on. It so happened that a relative in Cornwall had lost her first baby, and been told that she couldn’t have another, and she, knowing my father’s predicament, wrote to him, suggesting that if he cared to bring me to England, she would take care of me.

So she became, in a way, my foster mother. We lived on a farm, very isolated. I had no contact with any other children excepting when I later went to a village school at St Neot. So I was mixing very freely with grown-ups, all of them occupied in agricultural work. My only playmate, as a matter of fact, was a sporting dog. And I became rather self contained, independent, perhaps a little bit difficult, being alone in that way. I developed into rather an interesting child, in that I insisted that I would set my own way of life, and form my own ideas. I had quite strong ideas as a child. When I reached the age of ten, the dear lady who had been looking after me decided to go to America with her husband, and my father felt it necessary that a home should be provided for me, so he decided to marry. And he did. He just married, not for any romantic reason. Just to make a home.

I was independent minded and I refused to accept my stepmother. And it wasn’t long before, on the excuse of going to spend a holiday with some friends in another part of Cornwall, I left home and refused to return. And from then on, I continued from one thing to another, living in different places, lodging with different persons, being employed in different things. I worked in the tin mines, and because I’d developed an interest in machinery, I was given some responsibility, even at a very young age. I was looking after power equipment, and doing survey work along the valleys for tin.

In the meantime, I took an interest in politics. At the age of eighteen, I stood with Isaac Foot, the father of Michael Foot, on his platform in Bolventor. I wrote letters for people in the farms who were scarcely literate. I had educated myself entirely – I was never coached, assisted or guided. I don’t think I was helped at any time. I just pursued my own way. I was good tempered, bright, inquisitive and well inclined to learn anything and everything from observation and experience. I gained a lot of experience.

It started to appear to me that I had a purpose in life. I was at that age, in my later teens, when a teenager develops this disposition. And I thought that my purpose could well be served if I were to adopt a religious career. I came under the influence of a book that was published at that time by the minister of the City Temple, Archie Campbell, The New Theology, which suited my ideas of religion. I was old enough to draw certain conclusions about the difference between fundamental religion, evangelical religion, and the more liberal attitude to religious dogma and doctrine. In that connection, I spoke in public on many occasions. And the local stewards of the Church nominated me for the ministry.

I accepted the nomination and acted on it. I went to London, where I was examined by a committee with the purpose of going to theological college, but I was turned down because my self-education had only equipped me for certain things. For example, they asked what books I had read. I couldn’t answer. I just hadn’t had books, the classics, and that kind of thing. I was just so completely self-educated, in a rag-tag fashion, quite uncontrolled, without direction. The committee put me back for a year, as a result of my inability to quote Shakespeare. My attitude of mind was, whilst religious to a degree, critical of a number of things that I could not accept, and I decided that my future would be secular and not religious. I turned immediately to earning my living in a commercial or engineering way, and dropped any idea of pursuing a religious life.

So I went to London with £5 in my pocket, knowing nothing more than that the streets of London were paved with gold, and my future was what I could make of it. I booked in at the YMCA in Tottenham Court Road, and within twenty-four hours I had a job at the London County Council as a temporary assistant.

By then, I had studied electricity and magnetism in books, and I’d given myself a fairly good grounding. And at the time, the big trans-continental wireless stations, Poldhu, Eiffel Tower and Nauen, were operating, and it was possible with a simple piece of apparatus – a crystal and a pair of headphones – to pick up those signals, and if you knew Morse code, you could read what they were saying. So I learnt the Morse code, and followed these transmissions as a kind of hobby. And in that way, wireless became my forte.

At the outbreak of war, I was fired with the idea, and I walked into a recruiting station and offered myself. They examined me as to who I was, and what I could do, and it came out that I knew Morse, and I was booked as one of the very, very few wireless operators for the Royal Flying Corps. One thing followed another. I was sent to study under Professor Price at the London Polytechnic for two months, and then I was handed a New Testament, a revolver, and I was told to proceed to 4 Squadron in France.

Archibald James began the war as a well-connected young subaltern in the 3rd Hussars:

My primary recollection of the first winter of the war is of mud, Flanders clay, our wretched horses standing on long picket lines, hock-deep in mud, misery, living on bully beef and biscuit, and great discomfort. We were employed as dismounted cavalry to take over trench lines, usually for a short time before infantry became available. The British front had been extended to the north. And the line in the north of Flanders was held mainly by old French Territorials. The trenches were very sketchy. And we were quite ill-adapted to this sort of work and quite unsuitably clothed for it, as indeed, at that stage of the war, were the infantry for trench warfare.

The worst episode of this period was three miserable days when we stood to in the afternoon, then rode about ten miles. On the way it came on to pour with rain. And by the time we got to about a mile and a half from the trenches we were to take over, we were all absolutely soaked to the skin. My trench was an isolated length, with no idea how far away the German trenches were. In the night, it stopped raining and started to freeze hard. We had three days in these wretched little trenches, frozen miserable. And we had the greatest difficulty getting rations up because, from one flank, the Germans overlooked our rear. And when we got back to billets after three nights in these trenches, we had without exception what became known as trench feet. We had one-third of the regiment out of action for a week while their wretched feet thawed out. My feet were throbbing with pain for at least a week.

We were then sent to take over from another cavalry regiment who had been occupying a trench line in Sanctuary Wood for three days. Our period was to be three days also. The wood was still composed of young larch trees which had been fairly heavily knocked about by rifle fire. The trench had been constructed shortly before by French Territorials. It had been too wet to dig down and the parapet consisted largely of dead French bodies covered over with a superficial covering of earth. There was no wire in front of us. And the German trenches were about thirty yards away. It was here that I received my first utterly trivial wound.

Opposite my troop front – as I say at thirty yards’ range – were the German trenches. And I quickly noticed, looking through a loophole, that opposite me was a place where the German trenches, for some reason, were shallower. And when a man walked along them, he appeared up to about the middle of his upper arm. This seemed to me to offer an opportunity. So I took a rifle from one of my troopers and posted myself at a loophole waiting for the next German to come along.

In due course, the German appeared. I’m a good rifle shot and it was no question that I’d got him. But what I hadn’t realized was that a German was watching the end of my rifle and had a shot at me. And as our trench wall was in no way bulletproof, the bullet hit me under my left arm and merely grazed the skin. But it certainly discouraged me from any further sniping.

We were relieved by the 16th Lancers. I had been convinced from what I’d heard while I was listening in the watches of the night, that the Germans were sapping under our trenches and so I reported to my commanding officer. He reported to brigade and nothing happened. The night after we left, the Germans blew a mine under the very trenches we had been in. And it cost the lives of five or six 16th Lancer officers and about twenty men, partly in a futile counter-attack which ensued from this episode.

Shortly after this, a circular came round all cavalry divisions asking for lightweight – specified lightweight – officers to become observers in the Royal Flying Corps. It came at a very opportune moment for me.

For Walter Ostler, the flying services offered an alternative to the trenches:

I well remember, one night, I was in a very crowded tramcar, going home from Finsbury Park to Wood Green. This lady – if I may call her so – simply pushed up alongside me and stuck this white feather in my buttonhole, much to my embarrassment. It was time to think about service in one of the Forces. For me, it was the Royal Flying Corps because the thing I wanted to avoid most of all was the Army and trench life in France. I’d spoken to soldiers returning from France during the winter of 1914 and they had two words for life out there: ‘Bloody awful.’

T. E. Rogers was an officer who had spent too long in the trenches:

I knew what war was like. I had seen death – too much of it. When I left the trenches, my brother officers said ‘Good heavens, haven’t you seen enough planes come down in flames?’ I said, ‘Yes, but haven’t you seen enough death in trenches?’ With flying, it would soon be over if you’d come to the end of your life. You didn’t have to sleep in mud, night after night, day after day, in mud and water.

When R. J. Duce’s wounds prevented him from continuing in the infantry, he saw the Flying Corps as an opportunity to continue the fight. The path that led him to the RFC began many thousands of miles from France:

I had been in India with one of the merchant banks before the war, and during my five years there, I had joined the equivalent of the territorial force. We were fully trained, to the extent that we were better armed with the Lee Enfields rifle than the British army in England. When the war started, after a little while, a notice came in the clubs, from the Inns of Court Officers Training Corps, asking if we would come home and join, and be commissioned into the British army. I asked the bank if I could go, and they told me that there were other people, senior to me, who should have the choice before me. I pointed out that these people weren’t going. They said that I couldn’t go, but I was going to go, anyway.

I didn’t expect to come out of the war alive. I had been living on the North-West Frontier, up near the Khyber Pass, and I had a lot of nice books and various other things, and I gave them all away, I had the idea, as did a lot of my friends, that I shouldn’t come through it, but I was of a very religious turn of mind, so it didn’t bother me.

I went down to Karachi, and I shipped on board a Japanese boat as a purser. There were forty-nine Chinese crew, six Japanese officers, and an English captain. I paid the captain six shillings a day for my food, and I got one shilling pay when I got to England. The bank sent my resignation after me. Just after I arrived in England, I was stopped, and asked, ‘What about joining up, young man?’ I said, ‘I’ve just come six thousand miles! Give me a chance!’

In the end, I didn’t join the Inns of Court, I joined the Artists Rifles. I was fully trained, so myself and three others, one from India and two from South Africa, were put on as orderlies in the sergeants’ mess. We waited so well on the sergeants that they were delighted. But we wouldn’t take that on permanently. Next, I was made an officer’s servant. Considering that I’d come from India where I’d had eleven servants, it was rather amusing. But then, I was commissioned into the 20th London, Royal West Kent Regiment. In due course, I went out to France.

On my first day in the line, I was on duty – and I remember looking over and seeing that the Germans were shelling from an armoured train that ran along a track. I was so interested to watch the shells suddenly appear like a panther approaching. You could see the shells coming over the last five yards. There was a young fellow there, named Atkins, and I chatted to him for some time. He said to me, ‘Yes, sir, this is my first time in the line.’ And then I walked about twenty yards away from him, to our company dugout, and I looked round, and in that second, a shell came over right on top of him, and the blast blew me down into the dugout. It was quite a first experience.

A while later, we sent over a party of twenty men, their faces blacked, to do a raid. A couple were officers, a few were NCOs and the rest were Tommies. I was in the front line, and a heavy barrage opened up, from behind our second line. We had to keep our heads down in the trench. Then, suddenly the Germans started shelling as well, for all they were worth. Something came down and hit my tin helmet, knocking it off. I picked up the helmet, put it back on, and one second later, something else hit it, and knocked it off again. It showed the value of these helmets. Once the shelling had stopped, we found a strange thing in the back of the trench: one of our own shells had hit a German shell in mid-air, and come down straight behind us in the trench. It should have burst – but it hadn’t.

I don’t know that I ever felt frightened – because I was too dedicated a patriot. And the finest patriot you can get is the Englishman living abroad. Having said that, I remember one incident – we were in France and I was in billets. I had a room by myself, and I woke up in the night to find that I was half hanging out of a dormer window. In my sleep, with the nerves that I must have had, I had thought that I’d been climbing out of the dugout.

At the end of June 1916, we marched down to the Somme. We were detailed to go over the top, in an attack on High Wood. I had No. 5 Platoon, B Company, and we were detailed to go all the way through. I was darned annoyed because I was going over first. We were to go over at 3.15 on Sunday afternoon, and while I was waiting, there was nothing to do but go to sleep, and I found that I was able to sleep at the side of the trench. When we went over, I was quite fortunate. Of the three officers of my company, two were killed and I was only wounded. Out of 480 men, 160 were killed, 160 were wounded and 160 got through. It was rather extraordinary. As I was stepping over the wire, I was shot straight through the foot, which knocked me down. If I’d put my foot down before, I’d have got it right through the knee. I laid out there for some hours, and then as I started to crawl back, parallel to the German line, a German came over the top, and stood, looking out, holding his machine gun. I just had to freeze. I can tell you, it’s quite a nervous tension to lie there for ten minutes, without moving, so that he thinks you’re a dead body. Gradually, I turned my head round to look, and saw that he had gone, and I crawled back. As I was crawling back, I followed a small trench, in which I came across a dead man. All I could do was crawl straight over him. It wasn’t a pleasant thing.

When I got back to the UK, I was on crutches, and I realized that I would be lame for a while, so I went into the Royal Flying Corps headquarters, and saw them. I said that I wanted to transfer to the Royal Flying Corps, and I was abruptly told to clear off, and come back when I hadn’t got crutches. I was then offered a job with Motor Transport, but I said no. I’d come all the way from India, and I didn’t want to take on a non-combatant role. So I put in again for the Royal Flying Corps and this time, I was accepted pretty quickly. I was given instructions to report to Edin, near St Pol, and I was sent to 98 Squadron.

William Berry, some way down the social order, was so keen to join the Flying Corps, that he accepted the only job available:

I didn’t think about volunteering straight away when war broke out. I rather fancy my parents were against it. They didn’t want me going out and getting killed. There were lots of posters up. Kitchener with a finger pointing, Kitchener wants you. There were all the recruiting meetings in Trafalgar Square with Horatio Bottomley very much to the fore. There were also recruiting sergeants who stopped you in the street and I was quite frequently stopped: ‘A young fellow like you, why aren’t you in the army?’ sort of thing. That was the general line, which was quite true, and I resented it very much because I really wanted to volunteer, but my parents weren’t very amenable. They were very patriotic, but in those days you obeyed what your parents told you, and I wasn’t twenty-one years old.

Then one day, I happened to go to the cinema in Croydon, and one of the newsreels showed a house in Belgium. There were German soldiers knocking in all the windows with the butts of their rifles. They then set the house on fire because it was in the way of their guns. I was very upset at this. I sympathized, and I thought, ‘Right! I am going to do something about it!’ So I wrote to the Royal Flying Corps at Farnborough.

I had had a pre-war interest in going to Hendon and seeing all the early pioneers. If you saw an aeroplane in those days, it was quite something. Flying, I thought, was the coming thing, and the RFC was open again for recruits. Directly the Flying Corps was opened, in about five minutes, it was full up, as they’d got all the recruits they wanted. They had no difficulty getting recruits of a good calibre who knew their trades and knew what they were doing. I wrote and said I wanted to enlist and I got a letter back immediately, saying that they would welcome me as a wireless operator, and would I go to the recruiting centre in Farnborough?

So I went to the recruiting centre and they said, ‘I’m sorry, you can’t join the Royal Flying Corps, it’s closed.’ I said, ‘That’s impossible, I’ve got this letter from them!’ and they said, ‘It closed this morning! You’re too late! Why don’t you join the local regiment, the Seventh King’s Royal Rifles?’ As my father had been in the ‘Shiny 7th’, I thought, ‘Well, that’s an idea.’ So I got the recruiting form and got three-quarters of the way through it when I thought, ‘No! I’m going to join the Flying Corps!’ I tore up the form and put it in the wastepaper basket.

I told the Recruiting Major that I was very disappointed that I’d got his letter but that now I couldn’t join, and he was very much impressed with the trouble I’d taken to get all that way from London to Farnborough. He said, ‘We are short of cooks. Have you ever done any cooking?’ I said, ‘I really can’t say I’m a cook, but to get into the Flying Corps, I’m willing to take it on.’ He said, ‘Right! Hold up your hand!’ I was sworn in, and I was a recruit and I spent that night at the recruits’ barracks at Farnborough.

Leslie Murton joined out of a desire to exact revenge:

I was born in Magdalen Street, Norwich, in my grandfather’s shop. My father was one of the finest turned shoemakers there ever was. One of the fastest. My eldest brother was a printer at the Eastern Daily Press. The next brother to him, Bertie, was training to be a hotel manager in London. Another brother, Sidney, was a motor mechanic.

I left school at fourteen, in the year that war broke out. At the time, it didn’t mean much to me. But one day I came home from school, and my mum told me to read this letter. She could never read or write. It was from my brother in London. He said the girls were putting white feathers in his cap as he walked through the streets. He said he couldn’t stand it, so he’d enlisted in the King’s Royal Rifles. At the same time, my eldest brother had enlisted in the 7th Norfolks. Well, after a period, my brother in London said he couldn’t stand the London people, they were rough to him, and in those days, you could transfer from one regiment to another, provided you had relations in the new regiment. So he transferred to the 7th Norfolks to be with his brother.

A little later, Sidney was sent straight to France as a transport driver. When he was there, he was sent down to the docks, where he met the regiments coming in, and he ran into my two brothers in the 7th Norfolks. He told me later that he’d said to them, ‘Thing is, I won’t see either of you two again.’ And he was true to his word. On 13 October 1915, the two of them were killed side by side.

When we got the news from the War Office, I had to go to my father’s place of business. I told him. He took his apron off, threw it down. I can see him now. He’d been a teetotaller for years but he said, ‘I’ll never come back till I’ve spent every penny.’ And my dad never came back to work again, until he’d drank his money away. And after that, my poor old mother tried to do something to herself, but she was saved. You can understand it, can’t you, when you lose two young boys of that age? It affected me as well. When I was old enough, I was going to get my own back.

From the time my brothers died, my mother put a memorial, every year, in the Eastern Evening News, where my brother had been a printer. One day, a man came to my office, where I was working, and said, ‘Excuse me, Mr Murton. Could I ask you a question?’ ‘Certainly,’ I said. ‘I see in the paper, last night, there was a memorial to the Murton brothers.’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I would like to know whether you’re a relation,’ he asked. ‘Matter of fact,’ I said, ‘they’re my two brothers, who were killed.’ ‘What I want you to know,’ he said, ‘is that I buried one of them. I was a stretcher bearer at the time, in France, in the 7th Norfolks, and I buried him, but the other one, his brother, was blown to pieces.’ And that’s the tragedy of my two brothers.

In the later part of 1915, the Royal Flying Corps formed a boys’ section. I was sixteen, and I forged my mother’s signature, and went up to Britannia barracks, where I was sworn in, and they told me that a month before I was seventeen, I would hear from them. And I did.

When I got called up, one evening, two military policemen came to my house with a warrant and said, ‘Leslie Murton?’ and my mother said, ‘Yes!’ because I was out with the boys. They said that I had to catch such and such a train tomorrow to London and then another to Aldershot, for the Royal Flying Corps. Next day, I took the train to Liverpool Street Station. I’d never been further than Yarmouth in my lifetime!

So at Liverpool Street, I got off the train and there was a policeman, and I said, ‘Excuse me, old chap, how do I get on the Underground?’ So he told me where to go. I followed his directions, until I saw a dustman, who was sweeping up the horse manure. I said to him, ‘Excuse me, where’s the Underground?’ ‘Down there!’ he said, pointing down some steps. ‘Look, old chap,’ I said, ‘I may have just come from the country, but I’m not daft enough to go down there! You’re trying to send me down the toilet!’ I thought he was. I’d never seen the Underground before. So he took me down and I got the train and went off to Aldershot. When I got there, I was really hungry, so I went out into the street, to a fried fish shop. I got some fish and chips, and just as I opened the paper to eat some, I saw my fish and chips going up in the air. Two military police had kicked it out of my hands. ‘You don’t do that here!’ one of them said. I was in the services now.

Those who joined the other ranks of the Royal Flying Corps often considered themselves a cut above the humble infantryman. Cecil King:

Everyone who joined the Royal Flying Corps in the other ranks held some trade or other, whereas the men in the general regiments – they might be anyone. All us recruits in the RFC had some kind of training or apprenticeship; we actually had to pass a trade test before we got in. And therefore we considered ourselves a bit superior to the infantry and cavalry who may have come from any walk of life. We also got more pay than they did and when they found that out, they were a little bit jealous.

George Eddington was not a born soldier:

The Flying Corps interested me because the army was rather a brutal affair full of big hefty Irishmen and that type of person. I was neither that way disposed nor that way built. It didn’t attract me a bit. I was a tradesman rather than a soldier, so the Flying Corps sounded attractive.

The Great War was a time of intense patriotism in the British colonies. Frank Burslem was born and raised in Trinidad, but he considered himself as British as any man born in the British Isles:

I thought that any enemy of England was an enemy of mine and I wanted to be in the war. When I was sixteen years old in 1917, I was six foot two tall, and I knew that there was a ship going from Trinidad to England with eight vacant berths. Local merchants paid for the berths and sent eight young fellows who wanted to join the army over to England. My father allowed me to go, but when he gave me my birth certificate, he told me I was to do some kind of war work like munitions or working the land. But when I got to England, I never showed my birth certificate to anybody. I told them that I was three years older than I really was, and I joined the army. I had no difficulty going against my father’s wishes – I was a patriotic youth and I wanted to be in it.

When we arrived in England, the eight of us went to New Scotland Yard, where we saw a fatherly sergeant and told him we wanted to join the army – and he put us in. Being volunteers, we had a choice of what service or regiment to go for. As the other fellows were going into the Artists Rifles, that’s what I chose too.

I went to the basic training camp at Gidea Park, but I didn’t like it very much. The marching was so strenuous and I found it numbed and cramped the muscles in my thighs and calves. I stood it for a week, but after that I reported ill, and went before the doctor. He expected somebody ‘swinging the lead’. He asked what the matter was, and I said, ‘Anchhylostomiasis, sir.’ ‘Good God, what’s that?’ he asked. It was hookworm. I told him that just before leaving Trinidad, the Rockefeller Foundation had tested me and discovered that I had hookworm. I knew that I still had it. It meant that I wasn’t strong enough to do the strenuous work in the infantry. So they sent me to hospital and gave me the remedy. After that I was cured, and I went back to the regiment, where I could stand the drill. But by now, I’d seen what life in the infantry was like, and I thought it would be better for me if I didn’t do that kind of work. As they didn’t form fours, or anything like that, I changed my papers for a commission in the RFC.

Stanley Walters had problems reaching Britain from Rhodesia:

I did my damnedest to join the Royal Flying Corps, but I hadn’t got any money to get to England. Eventually, I persuaded somebody to let me go in and see the manager of the Union Castle Company. He asked what I wanted to see him about. I said, ‘I want to join the Royal Flying Corps!’ ‘How praiseworthy,’ he said, ‘how commendable, what have I got to do with that?’ ‘I can’t get to England!’ I said. ‘How disappointed you must be,’ he said. I slid off the chair and went away. Six weeks later, at three o’clock in the afternoon, I got a message. The Land Steffen Castle sails at six o’clock. I could go in her as an assistant purser. He didn’t call my bluff. I made it. I got to England with one golden sovereign so I was compelled to join the Royal Flying Corps immediately on my arrival.

Frederick Powell was stuck in an infantry regiment with no immediate prospect of joining the fight. He knew nothing of flying. He merely saw the Royal Flying Corps as a passport to France:

In November 1914, a circular came round to our battalion asking for volunteers to be an observer for the Royal Flying Corps. I didn’t know what I was volunteering for; my only interest was to get out to France. There was no sense of my wanting to fly, but my regiment seemed to have no chance of getting out to France before Christmas. One point is that, at the time, an observer’s weight had to be ten stone or less, so when I got down to ten stone, I was transferred to the Royal Flying Corps.

They had asked for one officer from each battalion, and there were two of us who wanted to volunteer; a man named Knowles was top of the list, and I was second. They only wanted one, but Knowles told me that he didn’t really want to volunteer because he was engaged to a girl. So if we were asked for one from each battalion, he would stand down. In point of fact, when the moment arrived, he did not stand down; he went. But by great good luck, they asked for another officer from our battalion, so I went too.

Even though I went as an observer, after I had been there two days, I was put down as an orderly officer, which meant that I had to go and report to the adjutant at six o’clock in the evening, and sleep in his office all night, in case the telephone went.

As I reported to the adjutant, the colonel called him into his office. The adjutant went, leaving the door ajar. I didn’t want to eavesdrop but I heard the adjutant say, ‘We’ve got another officer called Knowles, who’s been posted to us.’ The colonel said, ‘Is he an observer or a pilot?’ The adjutant said, ‘An observer.’ The colonel said, ‘Oh, we don’t want any more observers! We’ve got nothing but observers!’ The adjutant said, ‘Well, what shall I do with him?’ The colonel said, ‘Send him back to his regiment!’ And that was the end of Knowles. It frightened me, so that first thing in the morning, I reported to the adjutant and said, ‘Is there any chance, sir, of me being able to learn to fly, to become a pilot?’ I thought he was going to say, ‘Oh no, certainly not!’ but to my astonishment, he said, ‘Really? Do you want to become a pilot?’ ‘Yes sir,’ I said. ‘Oh, good lad! Then start away. We’ll put you down as a pilot!’

Arthur Harris, a man who was to achieve notoriety as commander-in-chief of Bomber Command during the Second World War, used his connections to jump the queue into the oversubscribed Royal Flying Corps:

I went round to the War Office where I was interviewed by a rather supercilious young man. When I said I would like to fly, he said, ‘So would six thousand other people. Would you like to be six thousand and one on the waiting list?’ So I retired rather disgruntled and when I got back, my father had just returned from India. When I told him what had happened, he said, ‘Why didn’t you go and see your Uncle Charlie?’ I had many uncles. I didn’t know who or what or where Uncle Charlie was but my father gave me a note and I went back to the War Office. When I handed the note addressed to Uncle Charlie to the same supercilious young fellow, he said, ‘Oh, please sit down a minute, sir!’ which was rather a change from the day before. He came back about ten minutes later and he said, ‘Colonel Elliot is in conference and unable to see you at the moment but if you will report to Number 2 Reserve Squadron at Brooklands this evening you can start flying.’

Ernest Tomkins, from a humble background, demonstrated that ambition and enthusiasm could defeat social disadvantage:

I asked how I could get into the Flying Corps. I was mad on flying. ‘Not a hope!’ said my brother, ‘You’d have to apply for a commission.’ ‘That’ll do’ I said. ‘Don’t be stupid,’ he said. ‘You haven’t got a certificate of education.’ But he had a word with our CO, who agreed to get in touch with a schoolmaster who’d give me a test. So I took this test – I did some arithmetic and I wrote an essay on a subject I liked. About a month afterwards, I was sent in front of an Air Commodore. I was only eighteen – no age – and he had his staff with him and he said, ‘You’re applying to become an officer. Do you think you’re old enough to become an officer and a gentleman of the British army?’ I said, ‘Yes, sir,’ and I was marched outside. After everyone had been interviewed, the sergeant called out, ‘3659 Private Tomkins’. I took three paces forward and the Air Commodore was very friendly. He said, ‘You’re very interested in flying?’ I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ He had the essay that I’d written in front of him, called ‘The use of aircraft in modern warfare’. He complimented me on it and asked me questions about flying and engines. He said, ‘What makes an aeroplane fly?’ I said, ‘Air has weight. It will resist motion. Flight is secured by driving through the air a plane inclined upwards and forwards of the direction of motion.’ He was surprised and started asking me about combustion engines. Then he asked me questions about my school and family. I knew what I was in for because there were a lot of public schoolboys going in for commissions. So I withdrew while they deliberated. And when I went back, they all agreed that my papers should be forwarded to the War Office.

The Royal Naval Air Service, as befitted the flying branch of the senior service, took a rather high-handed attitude to its entrants. Donald Bremner remembers:

I went up to London once a fortnight to sit on the selection board for candidates for the Royal Naval Air Service. The officer in charge was Commander Samson, known as Sammy. He was a well-known character. He said what he thought to anybody. If you got on well with him – as I did – you got on very well. If you didn’t, you got out. Sammy instituted a procedure where we each had a pencil and paper and all the time we were asking questions of the wretched candidate, we fiddled with our pencils. When we’d asked enough questions, we laid our pencils down. If we were satisfied with him, we held the pencil point upwards. If we wouldn’t have him at any price, we held it point downwards. If there was anyone who was reasonable but we didn’t like him enough, Sammy advised him to try the Royal Flying Corps. Our decision was really based on whether we liked the fellow. We wanted young people, about nineteen was the best. We always felt that someone who rode horses had the right kind of hands for flying and that somebody who rowed on the river could be useful. Social class counted because we were choosing officer pilots. I don’t think people from a working-class background came before us – they were filtered out at an earlier stage. We wouldn’t have turned down a really good candidate just because he didn’t come from the right school but the organization of the RNAS was very similar to the organization of the navy – there was a bit of snobbishness.

Once the interview was passed, the medical examination posed fresh challenges. Vernon Coombs was fortunate to meet a friendly fellow candidate:

I was shortsighted and when no one was looking I wore glasses. I worried how I was going to get through the eyesight test. So I asked one chap what I should do and he said, ‘It’s easy! The bottom two lines of the eye-test chart are UBHDN, HRDNA.’ So I passed with flying colours – and I’ve never forgotten those letters. When I was flying, I always slipped glasses on underneath my goggles. No one ever noticed and I never found it any disadvantage at all. I never wore my glasses on the ground. When my goggles came off, so did my glasses.

George Eddington took a gamble which paid off:

At Warley Barracks, I saw a medical officer who stripped me and gave me a very thorough examination. I was rather deaf in the right ear but I was fairly sharp-witted. In one of the tests, he whispered into each ear whilst plugging up the other one. First he plugged up my right ear and asked me my brother’s name. I answered him. Then, he went to the other side and whispered something I couldn’t hear. I took a guess and said, ‘I haven’t a sister.’ He gave me the all-clear.

The Royal Flying Corps was not a male preserve. Women served with the RFC in a variety of roles. The Zeppelin raids inspired Florence Parrott to join up:

I never knew my own mother. I was brought up by an uncle. He was an engine driver. I went to school in Bletchley, and I was very happy there. We used to have lovely little operettas – I loved singing and dancing. I left school when I turned fourteen, and the next day, I was in London, in service. As quickly as that. Lady Leon lived at Bletchley Park, and she always took Bletchley girls when they left school. I was in her London home. I wanted to be a children’s nurse, but I wasn’t old enough.

I had to get up first thing in the morning, get the stoves going, and wash the steps outside. I was lucky, really, because I received a good insight into cooking, because I’m sorry to say that our cook liked the bottle more than anything else. She’d get halfway through a dinner and then she’d hand it over to me to finish. I was only fifteen, but I managed. The family never knew I was doing the cooking. The family was only Sir Herbert and Lady Leon, and their son, but they used to give big parties. All the beautiful fresh stuff, fruit, vegetables, flowers, used to come from Bletchley to the London residence, by road every day.

I got on all right with Lady Leon, but there was one French maid, and she apparently didn’t like me from the first, and I certainly didn’t like her. But at the finish, I ran away because I wanted to be a children’s nurse. I ran away and I got myself a job with a Japanese family. He’d been the Japanese ambassador to London, and they were returning to Japan, and they wanted to take an English girl with them. I got the job – but somehow my aunt got to hear about it and she fetched me back. I was packed up and ready to go, but my aunt wouldn’t let me. In those days, people didn’t trust the foreigners like they do today.

So I went back to Lady Leon and tried to settle down again, but I couldn’t. I ran away again. This time, I got with an extremely nice family. He was a captain in the army, and she was a tall, beautiful lady, and they had a lovely little boy. That little boy idolized me, and I idolized him. The mother always used to go in to say goodnight to the little boy, before going in to dinner, and one night, she fell, from top of stairs to bottom. And it killed her. It was terrible. The captain asked me if I would carry on with the child. One Sunday night, the head nurse left me to see to the bathing of the boy, and to put him to bed. She told me how to do my sleeves, and what to do. I did everything as nanny told me, but the old Victorian grandmother came in, walked to one side of me, discovered I hadn’t been vaccinated, and she sacked me there and then.

So I came back to Bletchley, where my uncle, being on the railway, got me a job in the refreshment rooms at Euston Station. Then some of the girls from Liverpool Street Station came to see me, and they said that they were getting a pound more than I was, so I went off there, and was taken on as a wine waitress in the dining room. I lived in a hostel, with a housekeeper, and that was very nice.

On a particular day, in 1917, while I was working at Liverpool Street, we had to serve a troop train. We gave each soldier a little box, with sandwiches, cake, cigarettes and an apple. When we’d served them, we let the guard know, and they started pushing all the boys onto the train. When they were all in, there was a shrill whistle and a blast of steam, and the train was ready to move out. The wheels were just turning, when three or four Zeppelin bombs came down. One after the other. Before we knew where we were, the corner of the station was blown apart. I got hit in my arm, by glass from the roof overhead. I was taken to St Bartholomew’s Hospital, where they got the glass out of me. There weren’t enough beds and we had to lie on the floor, and I said to the girl next to me, ‘When I get out of here, I’m going to join up! If I’m going to get knocked about, I’ll go where I expect it!’ I’d never thought about joining up before. It was the air raid that did it. When I was out of the hospital, I went along Oxford Street, to the Connaught Club, and went in and joined the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps. I was interviewed by several officers, who asked me what I’d been doing, and when I said wine waitress, they said they didn’t have anything like that, but they put me down as a cook. And they sent me to Denham, to the Royal Flying Corps, where the boys were training to be pilots.

Raynor Taylor served with the Glamorgan Yeomanry. He cared nothing for aeroplanes, or for class:

William Spencer was a member of a very well-to-do family. We did our infantry training together and after a week or two, when we’d found out how to form fours and march in step, we were sent on a route march. Coming back into camp, we felt just like soldiers, with our full pack, and we watched a motor car drive through the gate. It was William Spencer’s mother and father. They’d come to visit him. I can see the mother now – a big blousy woman, very arrogant. She stood there and Billy was in the same four as I was, and he couldn’t say hello to them because he was marching at attention, so he acknowledged them as best he could and marched on. Well, his mother wasn’t having that, at all! Her Willy, carrying a pack! Unheard of! He became embarrassed because she started ranting and raving, playing hell. Anyway, she made such a noise that he got transferred to the Royal Flying Corps as a pilot and an officer. He was shot down and killed on his first flight over the lines in France. His memorial’s in the cemetery, and every time I pass it, I think, ‘Eh, Billy. Your mother put you there. Because she couldn’t abide to see you carrying a pack.’