The Reverend Hugh Lorimer Octavius Rees at RAF Yatesbury
The only Chaplain I was really aware of when I was in the RAF was at Yatesbury in 1956.
The main justification of Yatesbury was that it trained large numbers of radio tradesman, the majority of who were National Servicemen who were by definition the brightest and the best qualified. Many had either just left or were about to attend advanced learning institutions. Their long, poorly paid, haul through academia and apprenticeship was now to be followed by giving up another two years of their lives for poorly paid service for their country.
Their view was they had been snatched from their homes under duress, sent to a place called Cardington and been given a lot of smelly, ill-fitting clothes. Then they were shanghaied for eight weeks to a place where ignorant people shouted at them and made them carry guns round a tarmac patch. To compound these indignities they were sent to a remote place in Wiltshire which consisted of acres of temporary wooden huts sited on the dip slope of a scarp. The induction day was always Wednesdays when it was generally raining.
On the Wednesday they had to carry their blue cards around all of the check in places, this covered miles and the rain was normally fine enough to penetrate any clothing except the Desert Rats’ friend, the ground sheet.
This started the long weeks spent on various courses with little pay in an isolated area and with little chance of getting home at weekends (although some entrepreneurs sold seats in their cars, one aptly named Jock Stein ran a car to Glasgow).
Yatesbury was so large that it had six messes, various NAAFIs and one Malcolm Club. One of the sanctuaries for the broke and intellectually starved was the Church in Y Lines run by the above-mentioned gentlemen and his group of mature, twin-setted, lady volunteers. They dispensed free hot drinks and biscuits and showed movies by the American Dr Bob starring in a series about the wonders of nature. (This was before Hans and Lotte). They had a library, a book exchange and a Film Appreciation Society. I recall talks on John dos Passos, Studs Lonigan and Marcel Proust. It was also the first place I saw Nosferatu and the Jannings version of Blue Angel. All of this without pressure to become a full-time Christian.
I have read the obituary of Hugh Rees and note he was something of a clerical high flyer but he was anything but that with us. I recall a nice man dealing with literally thousands of bright young men, many with a chip on their shoulder, in a warm and friendly fashion. I am sure he was typical of his profession.
If Hugh had a vice it may have been pride, one of his grateful congregation had given him a bell which was big enough to join the ring at Salisbury Cathedral. He would joyfully have it tolled in the early hours of Sunday mornings, wakening poorly paid airmen in their freezing wooden huts after a night on the finest Wiltshire scrumpy. This was not a popular practice and it was noted that there were gaps of weeks when this did not happen. It transpired that graduating courses would remove the bell rope and either burn or bury it until someone else donated a new one.
As Yatesbury is now farmland I often gain comfort from the thought that future archaeologists searching in the Avebury/Silbury Hill area may discover a scattered cache of buried bell ropes and postulate a cult of bell worshippers.