his first morning he lined up on the parade ground in regulation suit and bowler hat for inspection by a large and fierce warrant officer, who, after prowling up and down the line, stopped menacingly in front of him. He then ‘bellowed at the top of his voice, for the whole of Cranwell to hear, “What do you think you are sir? A bloody woman! Go and have yer hair cut!” Vigors hurried off for his third visit to the barber in two days.24
The reverence for spit and polish, for parades and bull, was at odds with the reputation of the wartime RFC. On the ’dromes of the Western Front dress codes and discipline were relaxed and drilling and parading were not highly regarded. The emphasis on appearance was another instance of the determination of Trenchard and his followers to show that the RAF could match the other services in every department, down to the precision of their marching and the shine on their boots. The attitude rubbed off on some of the cadets, who, when the next war came, would frown on what they saw as the casual attitude of the greatly expanded service.
Soaked in the public school ethos, Cranwell offered a huge variety of sports and activities. There was rugby, football and cricket, of course, but also athletics, squash, tennis, badminton, fencing, hockey, swimming, boxing, basketball, rowing and water polo. The surrounding countryside offered shooting, fishing and above all riding to hounds. Lincolnshire was prime fox-hunting country and the Quorn and the Belvoir would sometimes meet at the college. Riding was voluntary but encouraged. The belief that a good horseman made a good pilot, dating from the first days of aviation, was still strong, ‘the thinking being that the sensitive hands which could coax the best from a horse would be those most suited to the delicate controls of a flying machine’.25 The same applied to yachtsmen, and a declared enthusiasm for sailing always went down well at interviews. The course included history, English, foreign languages, though as the college authorities admitted, in 1935 the officer responsible for organizing the academic programme faced a ‘difficult and sometimes ungrateful task’.26
The cadets were attracted principally by the thrill of flying. There was certainly plenty of theory on offer from the course lectures on engineering and aerodynamics. The practice, though, was something else. Townsend reckoned that in his two years at Cranwell he clocked up only 157 hours of flying time, the same as a Luftwaffe trainee amassed in nine months.27 One reason for not letting cadets get airborne too often was that flying, particularly for novices, was still a very dangerous business. They started off on the Avro Tutor, a small open-cockpit biplane with a 240hp engine which, according to Kingcome, was ‘completely vice-free’ and ‘stood up to the cruellest abuse with a happy smile’.28 Then in their second year they moved on to ‘service type’ aircraft. The Bristol Bulldog, which arrived in November 1933, was fine when flying straight and level, but, as Peter Townsend discovered, in a spin ‘she was a bitch’.29
Putting an aeroplane into a deliberate spin then getting out of it was a regular exercise. One day Townsend was aloft with his instructor Flying Officer A. F. McKenna, a ‘burly, smiling man with a rolling gait like a sailor’. They climbed to above 8,000 feet, which given the aircraft’s proclivities was set as the minimum height at which the manoeuvre should be attempted, then McKenna in the rear cockpit told his pupil through the Gosport speaking tube to ‘spin her to the left off a steep turn’. Townsend pushed the stick forward and the Bulldog spiralled briskly downwards. After three turns McKenna told him to ‘bring her out’. Townsend followed the prescribed counter-intuitive drill of shoving the stick forward again and applying opposite rudder but nothing happened. He wrote:
We were sinking rapidly and I was conscious of an eerie hush, of the clatter of the engine’s poppet valves and the reek of burning castor oil … of the propeller, in a slow tick-over, brushing the air, of the air rushing past my ears and through the bracing wires, making them whine, while the aircraft pitched and tossed in a sickening, circular movement, totally, hopelessly, out of control. ‘I’ve got her!’ yelled McKenna, now far from cheerful. Banging open the throttle lever, pumping the stick, kicking the rudder, he tried to rock the Bulldog back into flying position. In vain. ‘Get ready to jump,’ shouted McKenna and I moved my hand to the quick release of my … harness, praying to God that I should not have to pull it. With throttle, stick and rudder McKenna kept fighting the Bulldog. We were down to 2,000 feet when at last he brought her back to an even keel with just enough height left to dive and pick up flying speed. His voice, now very quiet, came through the speaking tube: ‘That was a near one. Now climb her up again and we’ll do another.’
Others were not so lucky. During Townsend’s time at Cranwell a mid-air collision killed two instructors and two cadets. Their dismembered bodies had to be collected from trees and fields for burial. The perils of flying training did not end there. Of the young men who passed through Cranwell between the wars, sixty-two were killed in flying accidents, many more than died in RAF operations in the same period.30
The Apprentice Schools were set up with the same devotion to excellence. Obviously, the RAF depended on a high level of mechanical expertise to function. Trenchard decided that the best way to create a dedicated workforce of career technicians was ‘to enlist the bulk of our skilled ranks as boys and train them ourselves’.31 The Apprentice Training Schemes started in April 1920. The Army and Navy tended to draw their recruits from the ranks of the young, poor and unskilled. The RAF, declared a 1934 article, was ‘different from any other Service. The aircraftmen are the elite of their class. All, by comparison with former days, are educated. A great many of them are well-educated … in no other Service is there closer association between all ranks.’32
Applicants had to have the School Certificate, an exam normally sat at the age of sixteen with papers in five subjects including English, mathematics, a foreign language and a science. Most British children left school at the first legal opportunity aged fourteen to find jobs and contribute to the family budget.
Candidates were nominated by local education authorities and sat a competitive exam which included papers in maths, experimental science and English. The intake was much bigger than Cranwell – upwards of three hundred a year. The great disparity in numbers reflected a basic fact about the nature of air forces. To function, the RAF needed a longer logistical and support tail than the Army or even the Navy and ground personnel greatly outnumbered fliers. By 1945, in an Air Force numbering more than a million, only 17.7 per cent flew aircraft. The function of the other 82.3 per cent was to project them into battle.33 Even so, the Apprentice Schools could not fill all technical manpower needs and qualified tradesmen had to be recruited directly from civilian life to make up the shortfall.34
Successful applicants for apprenticeships were expected to serve at least ten years with two on the reserve. Clothing, food and lodging was free and boys under eighteen got one shilling, then one and sixpence a day, the older ones three shillings. Those destined for the larger trades – the fitters who serviced the engines and the riggers who looked after the airframes – were trained at Halton, a former Rothschild mansion in Buckinghamshire which had been bought by the War Office at a knock-down price. Those specializing in wireless technology were housed in a school on the Cranwell complex.
Trenchard’s enthusiasm for the apprentice scheme was as great as his devotion to Cranwell. Those who passed through it would be known as ‘Trenchard’s Brats’. In some ways the Apprentice School mirrored the college. The boys lived a regimented life in which competition in everything was encouraged and smartness was enforced. Hubert Rawlinson, who arrived at Halton as a sixteen-year-old from Bolton in late August 1939, found himself plunged into an austere
