Yes, pre-AHRS was a shock to those of us brought up on "Heading and time - and put yer map away, Bloggs!". Fortunately, Viet-Taff has plenty of unique features to use as landmarks, so we just used those instead of maps.
The Chipmunk had a better compass than the pre-AHRS Hawk. IIRC, to resunch the poxing thing you were supposed to press the mysterious orange button, then fly straight and level for a minute. Useful idea in a TWU jet, that!
Some Air Wheel once wrote "The deficiencies of the Hawk compass system were well know before the aircraft entered service"...
So why wasn't it fixed
before the Hawk entered service?
We had a visiting Israeli assessment team at Valley who said that they couldn't believe that an aircraft manufacturer could come up with something as useless as that awful compass system.