rules governed virtually all human activity. After a bone-shaking ride from Wendover station in three-ton lorries with solid rubber tyres the new boys were set down at Bulback Barracks.
‘We came to a halt by a huge parade ground and climbed down from the vehicles,’ he wrote.35 ‘A roll call was made and we were then taken to three gigantic barrack blocks, each having six large rooms with rows of beds either side. Each bed had a wooden locker alongside, a wooden box which could be padlocked underneath the bed, and a steel locker fastened to the wall above. Underneath the wall locker were three clothes pegs fastened to a frame. The beds were made in two halves, the front sliding into the rear; no springs but thin metal slats … upon the beds stood three square biscuit mattresses, five brown blankets, two calico sheets and a head bolster. Twenty of us were placed in each room …’ After this sobering beginning they were taken across to the dining hall for their first taste of service cuisine: rissole and chips followed by suet pudding and custard.
After three weeks of square bashing and PT they were assessed to determine which trade they would be trained in for the next three years. The order in which they were interviewed was set by their place in the entry exam results. The strong message the boys received was that they had entered a meritocracy and that success would be determined by talent and hard work. Rawlinson was selected as a metal rigger, the trade responsible for maintaining and repairing airframes. The archaic sounding term was justified in an era when many of the aircraft the RAF flew were still partly constructed of wood, canvas and wire and the pear-drop smell of the acetone used to ‘dope’ the canvas stretched over biplane wings permeated workshops and hangars.
The boys marched everywhere, back and forth every morning and evening to the workshops, twice a week to half a day of academic lessons in the school building, always to the tune of a band made up of older apprentices equipped with bagpipes, trumpets, fifes and drums. On Sundays, church parade was compulsory.
At weekends, after Saturday morning fatigues, the boys were allowed off the camp to visit Aylesbury, Tring and Wendover. They were on public display, representatives of the Royal Air Force, and correctness in behaviour and dress was essential. For these outings they had to wear ‘best blues’: breeches, puttees, boots and tunics with ‘dog-neck’ collars, set off with a swagger stick tucked under the arm. Only those over eighteen were allowed to smoke and then not in barracks.
After three years and several progress tests apprentices sat their passing-out examinations; one week for academic subjects and a second for their trade. Failures were re-mustered as aircraft hands, the dogsbodies of the RAF. The rest were then sent off to start their careers on a starting pay of twenty-six shillings and sixpence a week – good money for an eighteen-year-old in the 1930s.
Halton created something that had never been seen in the British armed forces: a body of educated NCOs and skilled technicians, confident in their abilities and well aware of their vital function in the organization. It showed in their attitude. T. E. Lawrence, writing to Air Vice Marshal Oliver Swann, noted that RAF officers ‘were treated by the men off parade as rather humorous things to have to pay respect to’.36 They tended to regard officers as ordinary humans, rather than, as Army and Navy other ranks were expected to, as more exalted and evolved members of the species. This relationship between commissioned and non-commissioned wearers of Air Force Blue was to be a defining characteristic of the new service, one that harmonized with the spirit of the times and the mood of the skilled lower classes on whom it would have to rely.
The gap between the two was slowly closing. Unlike the other services the RAF offered real opportunities for social mobility. When drawing up his strategy for the training of pilots who would be mostly officers, and ground crew who would be NCOs and other ranks, Trenchard had left a window open. It was decided that the best three apprentices from each entry would be awarded cadetships at Cranwell at the end of their time at Halton. The scheme also included Wireless School apprentices. Together they would send 124 boys to the college in the years between the wars, more than 10 per cent of the total intake.37
For Halton boys who had spent two years living twenty to a hut, Cranwell, where each cadet got a room of his own and had the services of a batman, must have seemed like luxury. The Brats, though, were unlikely to have been overawed by their surroundings or their classmates. They were already well versed in service ways and armoured with the confidence that came from hard-earned success. Two Halton boys won the Sword of Honour in the inter-war period, Patrick Coote in 1930 and John Badger in 1933. Both were killed in the war before they could achieve their full potential but, on the whole, apprentices who made it to Cranwell were destined for the top. The first Halton entrant, Walter Dawson, ended up an air chief marshal. Among the rest who passed through in the years between the wars were an air marshal, eleven air vice marshals, twenty air commodores and thirty group captains. Of the relatively small number who failed to make it beyond the rank of Flight Lieutenant, all but a handful attended at the end of the period and lost their lives in the war while still junior officers.38
The elite cadres that emerged from the college and training schools were far too small to satisfy even the limited manpower demands of the RAF in its shrunken post-war existence. Aviation was a young man’s game and the active life of a pilot was relatively short. If everyone who flew an aeroplane had a permanent commission, the service would soon fill up with underemployed and expensive officers whose flying days were over.
Several solutions emerged. One scheme was to create a new class of airman pilots, drawn from the ranks. The preference was for men with ‘a high standard of education and efficiency’, showing the qualities of ‘pluck, reliability, alertness, steadiness, keenness and energy’. Rather than lose their technical skills they would not receive commissions but were classed as sergeant pilots. They were expected to serve for five years then go back to their old trades.39 In 1939, about a quarter of the pilots in RAF squadrons were NCOs, giving a core of toughness and skill to every unit. They had won their wings the hard way and would be regarded with slightly nervous respect by the younger newcomers who flooded in later.
Most of the flying personnel needs were supplied by the invention of the Short Service Commission (SSC). In 1924 the Air Ministry advertised for 400 young officers for flying duties. They were to be British-born and of pure European descent who would serve up to six years and then move onto the Reserve of Air Force Officers (RAFO). According to the official RAF account in the interwar years these men ‘formed the bulk of officers … the Air Force was essentially a short service force and its flyers were birds of passage’.40
In 1925 Trenchard backed a scheme suggested by some RFC veterans who studied engineering at Cambridge after the war to start a university air squadron. The idea spread to Oxford, then London, then elsewhere. He also got government backing for an Auxiliary Air Force of weekend fliers, the RAF’s equivalent of the Army’s territorial units. The pilots were amateurs who flew in their own time in aeroplanes supplied and maintained by the RAF and the squadrons would have a marked local character. The Auxiliary Air Force provided a home for men from affluent homes to meet up in a patriotic cause and enjoy each other’s company. The atmosphere was clubby and exclusive and in some units the whiff of snobbery was strong.
These structures were bold and imaginative departures from contemporary military norms. The RAF’s top officers, and those rising behind them, hardly seemed like radicals. They almost all came from conventional military backgrounds and on paper differed little from their Army and Navy counterparts. Trenchard was succeeded as CAS in 1930 by John Salmond, the son of a major general who, after Wellington and Sandhurst, had fought in the Boer War before taking up flying and transferring to the RFC. On 1 April 1933 he handed over to his brother Geoffrey who lasted only twenty-seven days in the job before dying. His
