Part 1
Training
1
Awakening interest.
Aircraft have fascinated me ever since, as a very small child, I saw biplanes and
autogyros flying over our garden at Upton, Wirral, when Cobham's Air Circus put
on a show in a field not far from home. That was probably in 1935. Three years later
I was taken to RAF Sealand to see the displays on Empire Air Day. I watched the
tied-together aerobatics with wonder, and was equally fascinated watching a
machine-gun firing through the propellor of an aircraft in the butts.
1 Memories of
the noise and smells remain with me.
I was at school during the war. Living close to Merseyside I saw and
experienced many air raids and became fairly competent at aircraft recognition. I
could certainly tell 'theirs' from 'ours'. I then became aware of radar as a result of
listening to news broadcasts on BBC radio and, just occasionally, seeing guarded
glimpses of it on newsreels at the Tatler News Theatre in Liverpool, one of the few
buildings that somehow survived the bombing of the city centre. I had no idea what
radar really was but guessed it was a series of radio rays of some sort which
frightened away enemy aircraft because we knew where they were. This, I
reasoned, was why the bombers stopped coming over to bomb the Liverpool and
Birkenhead docks, not far from where I lived.
Aerial activity diminished with the cessation of hostilities, but the matter of the
supposed all-seeing eye of radar intrigued me, as did the thought of my possibly
going up in an aeroplane some day. To actually fly one was just a pipe dream.
My first sight of radar masts was not until immediately after the war when on
holiday with my parents near Salcombe, South Devon. We stayed at the Bolt Head
Hotel, just up the hill from South Sands, on the side of a sort of bluff or promontory
and cosily sheltered by the lush vegetation of the area. Within a few miles of our
hotel I remember seeing several (I think there might have been four) tall wooden
towers with short side arms and with wires strung from and between them in a
geometrical fashion. These, I was told, were radar masts. There were some wooden
'army' huts close by, but I had seen so many military camps during the war that I
took very little notice of them.
2
From one of the rooms in the hotel I could see a dish, rather like an oversize
circular electric fire, which sometimes swivelled slowly on the top of what must have
been a tall lattice tower. The lower part of the tower was hidden from view, yet it
must have been within a mile or so away. My father asked Norman Long, the hotel
owner, what it was.
3 He said that "They (whomsoever "They" were) were looking
across the sea towards Start Point." Mother thought it looked spooky, so did I. More
than half a dozen years would pass before I discovered the truth.
___________________________
1 For many years one of the clips that held the belt of ammunition together during that demonstration was kept on
the mantelpiece at home.
2 Probably at either West Prawle or Start Point.
3 Norman Long had been a much loved BBC wartime radio entertainer and, on the cessation of hostilities, had
bought the hotel and ran it as his 'retirement' occupation.
1
