had previously been done by soldiers. Winston Churchill, who was both War and Air Minister, backed the idea, however, and henceforth the RAF would be engaged heavily in imperial policing.
The first success came early in 1920 when they crushed an uprising by the Dervish leader Mohammed Abdullah Hassan in Somaliland. The ‘Mad Mullah’ was defeated in a few weeks at a cost of £77,000 – ‘the cheapest war in history’ it was said.14
In one year, 1929, the RAF was in action in Iraq, Aden, Sudan, and the North-West Frontier. Its achievements were vaunted by the Air Minister Samuel Hoare in the House of Commons. In Iraq, it was ‘the encroachment of certain tribes many miles over the Iraq frontier and the butchery of large numbers of men, women and children’ that triggered operations. In Aden, it was ‘the kidnapping of two sheikhs friendly to Britain’. In Sudan, it was ‘the murder of a British Commissioner, a Greek trader and several natives’. The results were very satisfactory. ‘The operations were carried out successfully with scarcely any casualties amongst either the Air Force or the native population,’ Hoare reported. As a result of all this activity the RAF lost only one man. As for cost, the Aden mission came to £8,000, where ‘under the older conditions of warfare the expenditure would have run into perhaps £6 millions’.15
These operations were of little use in preparing aircrews for modern warfare. Few of the tribesmen they subdued had ever seen an aeroplane, let alone had the means to shoot one down. Nor did they provide much practice in Army–Air Force co-operation. They did, however, have the beneficial effect from the airmen’s point of view of keeping the RAF firmly in the public eye and in the minds of politicians.
At home Trenchard was anxious to establish and build up an institutional framework that would consolidate the Royal Air Force’s independence forever. He set out to form a new generation of officers and airmen by training them from the outset in Air Force thought and method.16 Cranwell – the first air academy in history – opened in February 1920. Alongside it was established the School of Technical Training to provide a pool of skilled ground crews.
The first Cranwell cadets were housed in a hutted camp formerly occupied by the RNAS planted on the windswept plain of south Lincolnshire. In time it would grow into a grand establishment that could hold its own with Sandhurst or Dartmouth. In October 1934, the Prince of Wales opened the new College Hall. The architect Sir James Wood had chosen the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, home to Army pensioners since 1692, for inspiration. The structure was a gigantic metaphor for Trenchard’s approach. The brick and stone elevations and large dome looked as if they had been there for centuries. In fact, the classical exterior was all façade and the building was held up by thoroughly modern steel beams.
Cranwell graduates were, as the founder intended, a small and exclusive clique, ‘the very heart and centre from which the RAF derives her vitality’, as an inter-war Air Secretary Lord Londonderry described it.17 This was the nucleus around which the service would grow. Trenchard made the ability to fly an aeroplane well a basic condition of entry to the RAF’s future elite. As well as being a flying school, the college taught aviation technology and aeronautics alongside a basic academic curriculum. The course lasted two years and at the end the graduates passed out as ‘General Duties Officers’ ready to take their place wherever the service required them and in time to rise to the summit of the RAF.
There were two entries a year, and in the period between the wars the total number of annual entrants never exceeded seventy-one.18 Entrance was by competitive examination, the same one sat by candidates for Dartmouth and Sandhurst, followed by interview. The college preferred candidates who came towards the top of the list (Sandhurst was prepared to consider anyone in the first hundred).19 Before the college opened an Air Ministry Committee under Lord Hugh Cecil was set up to consider what sort of boy they were looking for. It concluded that RAF officers required a higher technical ability than was needed in the Army. As to character, they were seeking those with ‘the quality of a gentleman’.20 By this they did not mean ‘a particular degree of wealth or a particular social position but a certain character’. This sounded egalitarian, a statement that the RAF was a modern service in tune with the democratic mood of the age. The problem was, as the Cecil report admitted, how to find candidates with the required education and qualities ‘without excluding from the service men of small and humble means’.
Cranwell cost money – a hundred pounds a term, which was the same as the fees to a good public school. Parents also had to find another hundred pounds for uniform and books. This was far beyond the means of most British households. Six full scholarships worth £105 were awarded each year. But even if a grammar school boy’s parents could scrape the funds together he was still at a disadvantage. Many public schools had separate, specialized curricula for boys trying for Sandhurst and Dartmouth and it was easy for them to extend the service to Cranwell aspirants.
In practice then, the selection process and entry requirements meant Cranwell was dominated by the sons of the affluent middle and upper classes and the products of the public school system. Of the 929 schoolboy entrants who passed through between 1920 and 1939, all but ninety-three went to fee-paying schools.21 The public schools represented at Cranwell ranged from Eton, which sent twenty cadets, to small, long-vanished colleges for the sons of the shabby genteel, which sent one or two. The biggest block came from the Victorian foundations which sprang up in the nineteenth century to raise the soldiers, sailors and administrators needed to run Britain and its empire. Wellington, built as a national monument to the Iron Duke, provided the most with fifty. Other schools with strong military traditions were well represented. Cheltenham sent twenty-eight, Tonbridge and Imperial Service College twenty-two, and Marlborough and Haileybury twenty. Of military-minded schools, only Harrow, with five entrants, was under-represented.
The Cranwell course was rigorous and for much of the period the conditions were spartan. The cadets were marooned in the back of beyond. Sleaford, the nearest town, offered few temptations; one reason Trenchard had chosen the site was its distance from the fleshpots of London. After the rigours of boarding school, most of the entrants found it easy to cope. Peter Townsend, son of a colonial civil servant, arrived at Cranwell in 1933 from Haileybury where life at the outset at least was ‘hard and sometimes cruel [and] there was no one to help us but ourselves … Survive your first two years at Haileybury and you could survive anything.’22 At Cranwell he ‘submitted, gladly for the most part, to the intensive and variegated process which was to mould me as a pilot, an officer and a gentleman’.
Brian Kingcome, another son of the empire, started in 1936 after leaving Bedford School, which had developed strong links with Cranwell. ‘The college schedule was very civilised,’ he remembered.23 ‘Each day, including Saturday, began with an early morning parade, and there was a church parade on Sunday. Parades were followed by classes, including an hour or so a day of flying instruction. Wednesday and Saturday afternoons were set aside for sport. We dined formally in mess each night from Monday to Friday. From Monday to Thursday we wore mess kit consisting of leg-hugging mess overalls strapped under half-Wellingtons, with black tie, blue waistcoat, stiff shirt and butterfly collar.’ Dining in mess at weekends was optional when the dress code was slightly more relaxed – a suit on Saturdays and tweed jacket and flannels on Sunday.
Smartness was something of a fetish for the authorities. Tim Vigors, from a family of Anglo-Irish landowners, set off in January 1939 for his first term at Cranwell with hair cropped considerably shorter than he had worn it at his old school, Eton. On the train he bumped into an acquaintance, also Cranwell-bound,
