Danny,
Your tales of derring do in India and Burma are fascinating, how you can remember all the details is beyond me and I am ashamed that we in blighty were mostly ignorant of what was taking place out there given that you were operating in such difficult circumstances. Just as well you have a sense of humour.
Having arrived at Bridgenorth we were joined by contingents from other ACRCs and from grading schools and became Course number --- comprising of u/t Pilots,Navigators and Bomb Aimers.
Bridgenorth in comparison to Scarborough was more akin to a real RAF station and was fairly large covering quite an area. There was als o an Air Gunners School of some sort there.
The accommodation was in wooden huts and the bunks were of the two story variety.
The camp itself was fairly dispersed and involved a good bit of marching between living accommodation,mess halls and lecture rooms
I certainly remember interminable lectures on such subjects as Theory of Flight,Navigation,Meteorology, Astro Navigation Aircraft Recognition, Morse Code etc,etc interspersed with the usual PT and sports.
All in all we were kept pretty busy.
One day we were told that we were going for dinghy drill so we we were all looking forward to a day at the seaside but the reality was a trip to a private estate on the road to Wolverhampton. There was an outdoor pool there and we all plunged into it. I was not a very good swimmer, truth to tell I could hardly swim at all and we were told that we had to be able to swim 100 yard or an aircrew future was in doubt. Necessity being the mother of invention I convinced the PTI that I could do it.
Some of the course fell by the wayside but I managed to get through and went on leave with an increase of pay to7/6 a day.
Previous posts indicated that you were promoted to LAC when you passed ITW but that did not happen in our case, so again there must have been changes to the system
Anyhow off we went on leave to await the next posting.