we shall see ....................................
As I was saying:.
Memory being dimmed by time, I may have told some of these tales before, and differently. All I can say is that I tell no deliberate lies, some names are withheld to protect the guilty, and the good guys sometimes get a mention.
In the autumn of 1955 I was a bus-conductor in leafy Hove, an only child, an only grand-child, with ten ‘O’ Levels, Physics at ‘A’ Level and fails in Pure Maths and Applied Maths. Also a Scoutmaster and Queen’s Scout, probably the cause of my poor Upper Sixth performance. Like all boys I was air-mad, and had nearly joined the Royal Navy at Dartmouth, but slight-colour blindness vetoed that and thus the Fleet Air Arm. A further snag was health: a burst duodenal ulcer at about 16 hindered education and employability.
My father [who had served as RAFVR flying barrage balloons] found me an advertisement for Met. Assistants, but the Board wanted to turn me down as over-qualified and likely to become dissatisfied They relented and I was trained at the Met. School at Stanmore , passed out second in course [every professional course ended with me second] and posted to RAF Uxbridge. At that time I think it was Regiment and Central Band, and a Main Met. Office. The Station Commander probably lived off-station, drove an open-top sports car with a black Lab, and his arrivals at the gate were greeted by a Guard turn-out.
The standards demanded of a plotter were high, and I was wrapped on the knuckles [literally] for a 280 degree wind arrow which the supervisor measured as 270. It mattered, seemingly.
National Service beckoned ‘In the Trade of Met. Assistant’ but the Medical did not want me. I was thus spared the square bashing and scratchy trousers but, as carefree youth, I was not too upset by the prospect. A few years later I had six National Service airmen as assistants in Nicosia, the last of the many, and all of them nice highly-qualified blokes.
The Uxbridge Chief Met. Officer took me off shift-work [£28 per month, wealth even when living in digs] and, as a great kindness not appreciated, had me posted to the big office at Harrow Wealdstone. This was so that I could have day release to bag the missing ‘A’ Levels and thus apply for promotion to Assistant Experimental Officer. Such a move promised three week’s extra leave and a chance to be a forecaster. These days were the depths of the Cold War, and the Wealdstone Office had a big Civil Defence team. Being rufty-tufty I joined and, ridiculously, ended up as the Rescue Team Leader, white helmet, big R, and two black stripes, overalls, boots, respirator and a green vehicle stuffed with ladders, axes, ropes, stretchers and lifting gear. All this at age 20 with some very senior old-boys as the team. Unimaginable today.
‘A’ Levels duly hacked, my promotion board turned me down. I applied to join the Atomic Energy Commission, was accepted and about to resign from Met. when my old boss from Uxbridge came to see me, exceedingly wrathful, and demanded that I sit a second “special” Board sitting. This was a farce, a rubber stamp exercise, but my joy was tempered by a rule change in the interim: no longer three week’s extra leave, but three days, with the prospect of edging up to three weeks if I lived long enough.
Although young men not out of their teens were entrusted with Her Majesty’s aircraft, forecasters were not allowed to brief the RAF until they were 23 year’s old. There was thus a gap, the equivalent of Holding, in which I went to the Central Forecast Office at Dunstable. Somehow my Civil Defence boots followed me, neatly wrapped, posted and presented to me publicly by admin. For the next two years I was “Jim Boots”.
A new unit had been set up to use the first-generation programmable computer. This filled a wooden hut the size of a village hall, and was a direct descendant of Turing’s work at Manchester. Called the Ferranti Mercury, six were built, the first for Joe Lyon’s cafes’ pay rolls and stock control. Jim Boots was trained on the job as programmer and operator. He was not very good, but good enough to be assigned the role of PA, gopher, bag-carrier and fixer for the brilliant Chief Forecast Research Officer, J S Sawyer. He was the brain, with Fred Bushby, behind our first successful weather forecasting model. I believe your laptop has more computing power.
I had met and married a Met. Assistant during this time, the best thing that ever happened to me. She gave me four marvellous children, packed and unpacked about every three years from posting to posting until retirement, and still tolerates me.
Having reached 23, I was posted to an Ocean Weather Ship rather than a forecasting course. Only the intervention of Sawyer and my dodgy duodenum saved me.
And so the prospective weather-guesser went to College.