Thank you old relique . .. . your Royal Vic reminiscences have brought back similar fond memories of salad days at the RAC of NSW. While Griffo who kicked all this off did say there are some stories better left unsaid, there is on the other hand the argument that once the subjects are with us no longer . . .. then social history is better served by describing what is recalled first hand. . . whether or not readers choose to regard such as 'nice' or scurrilous. Sanitised is simply not fair to the memory of red-blooded men who in one way or another made their mark. And deserve to be remembered as such.
We should not seek to to libel the dead . .. . . so much as put some metaphorical meat back on their bones.
When Bankstown still retained some of the flavour of it's formative years as primarily a military airfield, the clubhouse (long gone), hugging as it did the NW slopes of the aerodrome - all glass fronted with panoramic views across the field to Milperra Road - had nestling behind it a large hut. This was a wartime barrack building equipped with toilets and showers unchanged since the war. The rooms were tiny, fitted out with their no doubt original saggy iron framed beds, the mattresses stuffed with horse hair, the pillows filled with some stale smelling lumpy flocky stuff. Blankets - grey - troops for the use of. An evening of propping up the bar in company with some of the club's senior members was usually followed by wending a weavy way to the sack at closing time. A tricky little nav ex to be sure.
Much could be gleaned listening to these older members, most of whom flew in the RAAF - fighters, bombers or Tigershmitt trainers. As round followed round the stories became racier, raunchier, the laughter louder and longer. One night, well past the witching hour, I woke to the sound of singing coming from the other bed in the tiny room in the bunkhouse. The faint light from the passageway revealed one 'Blackjack' Walker lying there propped up on one elbow alternately swigging from his rum bottle and breaking into verse after verse of 'Eskimo Nell', followed by snatches of wartime ditties, songs of the Wirraway and the Beaufort. Maybe that was the same night on which earlier a young instructor who worked on the aerodrome was sitting outside the bar on the steps with his beer and a smoke. Blackjack walked up the steps from the dunnies underneath the building. 'Pardon me Brian' said the young blade - 'Could I get you to sign my logbook sometime?'
'What the f . . . for young fella. We've not flown together have we?'
'No sir. But one day when when I'm an old man, with what hair I have left as
white as snow like yours, I can look at your moniker and I'll say "Yep . . . he must have existed. He wasn't a figment, a legend, full of the most improbable stories I've ever heard." '.
Another Second World War veteran with a prediction for the rum was Chris Braund, a stammerer of
some distinction. It was he who introduced me to 'Inner Circle', a bottle of which he was never without on his many and varied sorties and peregrinations across Australia and New Guinea. We'd lobbed into
Roche's Albion Hotel in Parker Street Cootamundra at around one a.m.. 'See you in the morning Chris.'
'Ah . . ah . . d.d. don't turn in yet. We m.must have a l.little night cap.'
Among the more dedicated of drinkers (well pisspots - to be honest) frequenting the old aero club bar was a short tubby man with an incredible capacity for beer. Thomas A Long known to his intimates as 'Fat Cat'. The more he put away the more droll and scathing became his tongue. He put you in mind of John Norton, original proprietor of Sydney's TRUTH newpaper. A more lurid, lucid and locquacious man never made his mark in the old town. (He also excelled at alliteration.)
Stories Tom told of his chequered past sometimes beggared belief. Could he really piss out of the little side window of a 310 without injury or blow back? Was he really sacked by QF as a new SO for putting his dick through a hole he'd cut in his plastic lunch plate, then covering it with a lettuce leaf, then ringing for the hostie so as to ask her if she thought the meat was off?
Tom had the baleful eye of the lapsed catholic and the trenchant turn of phrase that goes with it. He claimed he'd been a novitiate at Saint Pat's at Manly, that imposing stone seminary occupying large grounds up the hill from the harbour. The story went they'd expelled him for pimping. He said that he was an agent for the night services of a prostitute who hawked the fork up in the bushes behind St Pat's.
That he was also a supplier of liquor and smokes to any of the young lads who were intent upon the road to purgatory. He said how else could he find the money to pay for his flying lessons.
Little wonder that further down the track, Tom's kidney's packed it in. At any rate he was down to one by the late sixties. Somehow he managed to retain his medical, being rarely deemed unfit by Farmy Joseph, his medico in Wagga. An indelible memory is that of seeing him pull up outside the hangar at Coota one morning in one of the company's 310s. Shutting down, he climbed out and walked with grim determination into our little flight office cum rest room. Obviously in extreme pain from renal cholic (kidney stones), he'd administer his own morphine.
In the Flight Service Unit at Wagga early one morning he'd collapsed at the table where he was filling in his flight plan. And he had such a morbid sense of humour too. If ever asked 'Is you father still alive?' he'd reply 'No! He's still dead.'
The RAC of NSW instructor who had the misfortune to have 'Fantome' as his pupil was the aforementioned Arthur Kell. Arthur had been a skipper on Lancs with 617 SQN. He'd missed the dams raid but he had won a gong for dropping a Tallboy on the Tirpitz up a Norwegian fiord one night. After the war he flew in Transport Command - Brittannias. Arthur's funeral service at St Phillips in Macquarie Street was conducted by the Rev Gordon Powell, a well known former RAAF padre who wrote a book on his wartime service in the RAAF in the Pacific attached to a Beaufighter squadron.
Poor Arthur and his pupil (Sorenson?) The loose coin had found it's way into the arse end of their Chippy, jamming in an elevator pully. The score marks on the coin proved that. And so it goes.
Afterthought on the club's really early days at Mascot. Among it's many notable members was Emile Mercier. He was one of Sydney and Australia's great cartoonists. His cover illustrations for the club's magazine FLYING in NSW were all very droll. Very artistic. It would be a pleasant exercise today to look over a set of those journals. When the club folded most of it's archive may well have gone to the tip.