to stress than the successful rugger player or his equivalent…all the best pilots that I knew tended to be rather weedy, though there were exceptions. The best pilot were ones that hadn’t had much success in other spheres and were determined to succeed.’ Teaching a course to a class of wing commanders later in his career, he discovered that ‘out of a group of twelve…four had been thrown out of their school before they left. This was, I think, fairly typical.’39 Kingcome was to deliver the opinion later that, ‘Fortunately for us, and, I believe, for the RAF in that generation, there were [no]…psychological and aptitude tests, which would have failed a majority of candidates for short-service and permanent commissions and I suspect might have cost us the Battle of Britain.’40
Expansion increased the flow of men from the lower reaches of the RAF into the ranks of the fliers as candidates were selected from among the ground crews to serve as sergeant pilots. Of the 2,500 pilots originally sought to man the new aircraft and squadrons, 800 were found from among those already serving as aircraftmen or non-commissioned officers. The RAF apprentice schemes allowed a trickle of fitters, riggers and other tradesmen to receive flying training, on the understanding that they would return to their trades after five years. There were also two places set aside for the top performers at Halton to go on to Cranwell to take up a cadetship. Many, perhaps most, apprentices had dreams of flying. Realizing them was difficult. There was an obvious necessity to maintain the supply of highly skilled, expensively trained ground staff to keep the service flying and prevent apprenticeships from turning into a back-door route to a career as a pilot. None the less, in the pre-expansion years, some of the keenest and most talented felt themselves baulked by what was supposed to be a system that worked on merit. George Unwin was brought up in South Yorkshire, where his father was a miner. His mother encouraged his education and he won a scholarship to Wath Grammar School, and aged sixteen passed his Northern Universities matriculation exam. There was no money for him to take up a place. The only work on offer was down the pit. When, a month before he was due to leave, his headmaster showed him an RAF recruiting pamphlet, he decided to join up.
Unwin chose the Ruislip administrative apprentice school rather than the technical school at Halton, as the course there was two rather than three years. It was a spartan life. The food was horrible. They seemed to live on gristly mutton rissoles, and food parcels from the outside world were eagerly received. They shaved in cold water and lived twenty to a billet. Unwin initially had no thoughts of flying, but the sights and sounds of the aerodrome kindled his ambition. After passing out in 1931 as a leading aircraftman, the minimum rank to qualify for pilot training, he applied, but discovered that ‘only one per cent per six months was taken’.
He repeated the process twice a year without success. ‘I was getting a bit fed up at not being accepted. I had everything else. I was playing for the RAF at soccer, and that was one of the things you had to be, to be very good at sport. I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t being selected. You went through a very, very tedious process. First of all you saw your flight commander, then your CO, and then your station commander. If you got past him you saw the air officer commanding. I’d reached the point when I was going to see the AOC and I was getting desperate. At the time it was Air Vice-Marshal J. E. A. Baldwin, who loved polo and kept his own polo ponies.’ Unwin decided that when the inevitable question about hobbies came up at the interview, he would be prepared. ‘I said “horse riding”. He pricked up his ears and said, “Really?” I said, “Of course, I can’t afford it down here, but the local farmer at home has a pony and lets me ride it.” The only time I’d ridden a pony or anything on four legs was in the General Strike when the pit ponies were brought up and put in fields. I was thirteen and we used to catch them and jump on their bare backs and go haring down the field until we fell off.’41
It worked. He was on the next course. It was 1935, four years after he first applied. In August 1936 he was posted to 19 Squadron at Duxford as a sergeant pilot, where his flight commander was Flight Lieutenant Harry Broadhurst, an ex-army officer who had joined the RAF in 1926 and flew in the campaigns against unruly tribesmen on India’s North-West Frontier. Broadhurst had played a large part in building the squadron’s reputation for flying excellence, which had won it many trophies, and he was regarded as the best shot in the RAF.
Unwin, despite his background, fitted relatively easily into the squadron. His best friend was another ex-apprentice whom he had met on the flying course, Harry Steere, who had gone to Halton from his secondary school in Wallasey in 1930. The two were to fly together for six out of the next seven years. Unwin found that 19 Squadron’s competitive streak was compatible with a relaxed approach to duty. ‘You didn’t fly Saturdays, ever. You could take an aeroplane away for a weekend any time you liked. You used to fly away for lunch. You were encouraged to do this because it helped your map-reading. There were no aids at all, so you [navigated] visually. Radio telephony wouldn’t work more than three miles from the aerodrome and then the background noise was so terrific you couldn’t hear anything anyone was saying.’ On annual exercises at Catterick, Unwin would take his aircraft and buzz his home village of Bolton Upon Dearne.
Making the transition from ground to air was a hit-and-miss affair and required the patronage of an interested senior officer. Ronald Brown left Halton in 1932 to be posted to the RAF station attached to Cranwell, where he worked as a fitter overhauling the engines of the aircraft on which the cadets at the college were taught to fly. Every morning ‘the instructors would have a ten-minute flight to check the aircraft was safe for the cadets, and as they were dual-control aircraft we were able to jump in the back or the front. Inevitably that meant we were allowed to fly the plane with them, and long before I went on a pilot’s course I was looping and rolling aeroplanes to my heart’s delight every morning.’
Brown played football for the RAF and the group captain commanding him was a keen sportsman. ‘I had the opportunity of flying him around once or twice and I think that, plus my sporting activity, gave me the chance of being selected for pilot training.’42 Brown was one of only two airmen to be given the opportunity to fly in the three years he spent at the base. Before he could begin his flying training he was, to his disappointment, posted as a fitter to No. 10 Bomber Squadron at Boscombe Down. When he complained to the CO, he was told he could not start the course until the football season was over and the squadron had won the RAF cup. He was sent to 111 Fighter Squadron at Northolt in February 1937.
Sporting prowess got an airman applicant noticed and pushed his name further up the list. George Bennions, from Stoke-on-Trent, arrived at Halton in January 1929. He was a keen boxer and believed that ‘they preferred to recommend sportsmen to become sergeant pilots [as] one way of sorting out the wheat from the chaff because there were many, many people at Halton who could equally have done the job’. Bennions was put forward for a Cranwell cadetship, an offer that later fell through, though he did end up joining 41 Squadron as a sergeant pilot and was commissioned in the spring of 1940. Some of Halton’s most successful products were outstanding athletes. Don Finlay, who left in August 1928, became a world-class hurdler, winning a silver medal for Britain at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. He was to take command of 54 Squadron in August 1940, during some of the heaviest fighting of the summer.
As the situation worsened and the demand for pilots grew, the process of transformation became easier. George Johns arrived at Halton in January 1934 as an aircraft apprentice and by the end of 1939 was a sergeant pilot with 229 Squadron. ‘You immediately said to yourself: I’m working with these aeroplanes. I’m going to fly them some time. That was the attitude you found there.’43 Airmen who rose from the ranks to become pilots were to play an enormously important part in the air fighting of 1940. Often they had spent more time in the service than the officers and gained more flying experience. Unlike many of the officers, they also had a deep knowledge of the aircraft they were operating. Pre-war conventions created a certain distance between officer and NCO pilots, but this faded with the intimacy brought by shared danger and death.
Boosting the short-service commission system and intensifying internal recruitment ensured the supply of pilots needed to man the new squadrons. But men were also needed to fill the places of those who would be killed and badly wounded in the initial fighting. The Volunteer Reserve (VR) had been created to fill that gap, though this was not how it was presented to the men who turned up at the centres that sprang