We have another bash at Civvy St.
When the BEA Check flight was no more, we were given three months pay in lieu of notice and were let loose on a very overcrowded market. Luckily... and notice how many times in my life that word comes up... there were people in the Air Ministry that felt very badly about the treatment that we had been given. I, with one or two others of the late Check Flight were contacted and were put in touch with the newly emerging International sector of Air India. I sent them my c.v. and was offered an immediate job , based in Bombay, as it was still called. I was told that the job entailed training embryo Captains in flying the DC3's which the US Air Force had left all over India--and the world in fact-and also to train their senior pilots in the flying of the first British civil airliner to emerge after the war, the Vickers Viking. The fact that I had already flown the prototype whilst still at the EFS, had a lot to do with my successful application. At that time I remember being astonished at the plush seating... or so it seemed to me after years of flying warplanes... and the proper toilet instead of the old Elsan. I think that the lavish passenger layout impressed me more than the actual performance of the aircraft.
We had to leave our families to join us later and were due to leave the Uk in May 1948. This was just after the "partition" of India. I had been a fanatic supporter of Blackpool Football Club since my boyhood days , and had been lucky enough to form a very good friendship with several of the team that made Blackpool one of the strongest in the country,during the regionalised League Football in wartime Britain, due to Blackpool being the main centre of initial training for the RAF and thus able to call on many of the PT Instructors amongst whom were some of the biggest names in Football. Stanley Matthews had been a Corporal in my Father's Signal Centre and Stanley Mortenson, England's centre-forward, had been injured in a flying accident and was also in Blackpool. They and others, were always very kind when I met them whilst on leave and it was probably through them that I had actually been given two seats for the 1948 Cup Final between Blackpool and Manchester United but it was Dora and her brother-in-law who went to Wembley and saw Blackpool beaten by four goals to two in what was called the finest footballing Final to date. I was on my way, in a brand new Lockheed Constellation, to Bombay together with another ex-Check Pilot who had been taken on with me ,Jack Eshelby.
We had been promised free passage and good accommodation for our families but they would have to wait a short while before joining us. India was exciting. Apart from my training in the United States and passage through Canada , I had never been out of the UK before. India was exotic and totally different to anywhere that I had ever been. Jack and I had a week or two based in the Taj Mahal Hotel whilst we became acclimatised. I got on well with the Indian Pilots and
understood them when they referred to the "Wickers Wikings which were being delivered daily. In a very short time , Dora and our two children, Peter and Linda, together with Jack's wife, Hazel and their two children came to join us and examined the very nice accommodation that was being offered to us. Eventually we decided on a lovely, completely furnished, large bungalow, made of white marble, spacious and built for two families, practically on the beach at Juhu which was a tiny fishing village near to Santa Cruz, Bombay's airport. It looked wildly romantic but we were soon to be sadly disillusioned.
Our dining room overlooked the romantic beach, complete with coconut palms but when the tide went out, miles of smelly mud flats were revealed. Worse was to come as these mud flats served as the
communal toilets for the local villagers. First the men would come out and perform their toilets and ablutions and then it was the turn of the women. They each carried the obligatory circular Player's cigarette tin filled with water to use instead of toilet paper. All this was performed under our dining room windows.!
We had just about got used to this aspect of our daily lives when along came the saga of the pi-dogs. We had been pestered by these wretched half-wild packs of skeletal dogs rummaging into our waste bins so we called the local police to see if something could be done about it. This they certainly did ! I came back from the airport, one day and could smell a terrible odour from over a mile away. Our hysterical wives tried to explain that the police had been and had put lumps of raw meat down but did not tell them that the meat had been laced with strychnine. The pi-dogs had scoffed it and had promptly died a terrible death. The waiting kite hawks had swooped down to scavenge and had suffered the same fate. Then came the vultures.....The resulting carnage and smell was indescribable. I went post haste to the Police and, to give them their due, they immediately called the Sanitary services and three huge trucks filled with dozens of "coolies" were cleaning up as though it was a routine job...which it probably was.