There is another thread going on about flying training in the sixties but if the Mods let me I will put it in Danny's empire to keep it going.
I was working for the Bulawayo Chronicle when I saw an advert in the Salisbury Herald for Royal Air Force pilots. I had always wanted to join but I left school in England just as Duncan Sandys had chopped it up. My father had just left the Royal Air Force and had gone to live in Rhodesia so I decided to follow them. I wrote off and then I hitchhiked up to Salisbury for the interview with the RAF Air Attaché. I was turned down as a pilot because of something called ocular divergence with my eyes but I was offered a navigator position. My father, a long time Air Force pilot advised me that if one was to be killed in an aeroplane then one just may as well be flying it. On this I wrote to them and said that I would try and get my eyes sorted and try again.
This I did. I used a card that was supposed to stop my eyes crossing an after a month I was OK. I then told Salisbury and I went up for another interview.
I signed the dotted line for a Direct Commission Scheme 'B' in April 1960 out there and was then flown to Nairobi courtesy of a Central African Airways Dakota. Soon after take off there was a mad rush as the cabin attendant carried luggage from the back of the aircraft to the front. On arrival at Nairobi I was met and then driven to Eastleigh and put up in the transit block for three days. Finally I was put aboard a British Commonwealth?? Britannia and flown to Gatwick.
Eastleigh had given me a railway warrant to Cirencester and eventually I arrived at South Cerney. I presented myself to the guardroom to be informed that everybody was away on Easter Grant seeing that it was Good Friday. They did not have transit accommodation for officer cadets so eventually I was given a railway warrant back to London where I would shack up with my grandparents.
I arrived at about 10.p.m. and I couldn't knock them up. Being in their eighties they had switched off their deaf aids when they went to bed. Another two mile hike and fortunately my aunt was up and I stayed there.
Tuesday came and back to Cirencester but this time there was a bus waiting for us at the station, a 32-seat flat-fronted Bedford one, which was only ever made for the British armed forces. I got in with the rest and as we negotiated the narrow streets of Cirencester I had a look at what were to be my companions for the next few months. Seventeen and a half was the minimum age, this allowed six months to enable them to get their basic training in before they reached the legal age to be killed. Most of them seemed to be about that age apart from a couple of older men who were NCOs who had been selected for commissioning. Some of them knew each other from the Aptitude and Selection Centre at Biggin Hill and they were comparing notes on who had passed and who had failed. I was lucky. When I joined the Air Force in Salisbury I was assessed by the Rhodesian Air Force and they didn’t go into crossing crocodile infested rivers with two oil drums and four planks. All I did apart from the basic intelligence test was to go through a book of instrument panel pictures and write down what the aircraft was doing. My father had given me loads of flying experience in my youth; I could synchronise four Hercules on a Halifax before I could ride a bike, so this was fairly straightforward. One youth was quieter than the rest. Apparently his elder brother had focussed his whole life on being a pilot in the air force. When his brother applied he had applied too just for the hell of it. His mad-keen brother failed and he had passed.
We left the town itself and I recognised the road to South Cerney. The same snowdrop was at the guardroom window; he was probably welded to the floor. The bus swept passed Station Headquarters and stopped outside No 1 Barrack Block. A sign outside solved one mystery, I was on No 154 Course. The door opened and everybody started to file into the building. This was different! When I did my Rhodesian national service we had to line up and get shouted at for at least five minutes before we could go inside anywhere. The two NCOs and I were last in. The barrack block was standard 1937 Expansion period. Two floors with one large barrack room either side with the washroom and toilets on the landing halfway up the stairs. This allowed half a floor, which was plenty, underneath for the central heating boilers. The ground floor room on the left was used as the admin centre. Sitting behind two desks were a couple of flight lieutenants and prowling behind them was a squadron leader with whom I took an instant dislike. It took about two minutes to establish that we were being called in alphabetical order so I had a long wait.
More to follow if anybody is interested.
Last edited by Fareastdriver; 19th Oct 2014 at 20:17.