Pete,
There have already been far too many good things said about me on this Thread (most of them undeserved !) to last me the (fag end of) a lifetime. But thanks all the same.
I'll take your first kind offer (to ask your Copier for an estimate for the lot), please, but don't be upset if I don't buy. For a start I am a devout skinflint, and in any case it's just idle curiosity on my part. I wrote most of the final year's entries myself, and also invented those relating to the last few months of my predecessor's incumbency ("Red" McInnis, RCAF), who'd gone home to Canada, leaving a few (?) loose ends for me to tidy up. It would be interesting to see what rubbish I'd written (for I've forgotten it all now).
As to "selection", after the first Board in the early years, I think there was little of it, and what little there was was mostly done with a pin. The basic problem is: there is no way of finding whether a young man is going to make a good military pilot other than putting him in an aircraft and seeing what happens.
Anybody with a good School Certificate in Maths should make a Navigator, a ground Fitter (Engines) is tailor-made for Flight Engineer, all small boys of my time were wizards on "wireless sets" from crystal and cat's whiskers upwards, Bombing and gunnery are just practice, practice and more practice.
Volunteers had poured in in the immediate aftermath of the BoB, and the Selection Boards were able to indulge their hunches. All applicants wanted to be pilots, of course, but I think only 2% of them would actually make it.
I lived in "Interesting Times" (old Chinese Curse).
Danny.