ear at angle which mocked gravity and was a mute testimony to the adhesiveness of Brylcreem’.3 However, the main point of it was that it allowed you to look like an up-to-the-minute civilian male while wearing military uniform.
Like many of the trends adopted by the youth of Britain in the 1930s, the trend for sculpted men’s hairdos was imported from America via Hollywood movies. The notion of glamour was a contemporary one. If any branch of the armed services had claim to it, it was the Air Force.
The RAF’s modern image gave it a marked advantage over the other services in the competition for human resources. Expansion required men as well as machines, to fly them and to service them. In 1933 the RAF needed only one recruiting depot to fill its manpower needs, and took on less than a thousand extra men in addition to the regular Halton and Cranwell intakes. By the spring of 1938 there were eleven depots and thirty-one sub-depots which over the next eighteen months scooped up 43,795 recruits. With the introduction of conscription and the outbreak of war the numbers exploded. Between September 1939 and January 1942, 789,773 joined the ranks. By the time recruiting was halted in 1944, nearly 1.2 million men and women were wearing Air Force Blue.4
Trenchard had identified the need for manpower structures that were light and simple yet strong enough to support a rapid increase in numbers when needed. Initially, the system worked very well. In peacetime, in addition to the small core of regulars, the RAF could rely on a steady throughput of short service commission officers to supply most of its aircrew requirements. After doing their time they then passed into the Reserve of Air Force Officers (RAFO). The front-line squadrons were backed up by the amateurs of the Auxiliary Air Force and University Air Squadrons.
By early 1936, with the likelihood of war growing by the month, it was clear that these sources would soon dry up once the fighting began and a much bigger reservoir of aircrew would be needed. The experience of the last war had taught that ‘casualties in air warfare are high and the replacement of wastage is an even greater problem for a personnel than an equipment department’.5 The need to make good the ‘wastage’ – the term must have struck some as inhumane even then – prompted the creation of a pool of airmen who had received at least a basic level of flying training. They would learn theory at evening classes in city schoolrooms and practise at civilian air schools at the weekend, in readiness to fill the gaps torn in the front line when hostilities commenced.
The RAF Volunteer Reserve (RAFVR) hastened the transformation of the Air Force from a tiny elite dominated by the comfortably off and privately educated into a mass organization drawn from every level of Britain’s sharply stratified society.
From the outset it was presented as a democratic endeavour. ‘The social and political setting of the time had considerable influence on [the] proposed scheme and there was strong popular feeling against any “caste” or “old school tie” attitude’, the RAF internal narrative recorded.6 It was ‘visualized as a collection of young men drawn from the middle class in its widest sense and with no suggestion in its organization of a pre-determined social hierarchy’. In time it would be hailed as a great RAF innovation but the credit for the initial concept belongs as much to the imagination of an Air Ministry bureaucrat as it does to the progressive instincts of the Air Staff.
W. L. Scott was working for Air Commodore Arthur Tedder in the Air Ministry’s training department when he was set the problem of finding pilot material from new sources. He had won a DSC with the Navy during the previous war and went on to be knighted for his labours in the Civil Service. Despite his conventional background, he seems to have had a sympathetic understanding of the contemporary mood. He realized that to get the numbers it needed the Air Force would have to reach beyond the social groups it felt comfortable with and embrace the young men growing up on the suburban streets of modern Britain.
Britain in the 1930s was changing shape. Towns that had not altered for centuries were being transformed by giant cinemas and blocks of flats. The surrounding fields filled up with new housing, arranged in ‘crescents’, ‘avenues’ and ‘drives’ lined with mock-Tudor houses. The people who lived in them often also owned them. They worked in modern jobs in offices and factories and when they wanted fun looked to America to entertain them. They watched American films at the Odeon and danced to American music at the local Palais, which they drove to in small cars mass-produced by Morris and Austin. They had little reason to regret the passing of old Britain. They were interested in the future, and determined to have a place in it, and not on terms of deference or inferiority.
It was to this generation that the RAF now turned, but with some caution.7 Scott’s initial memo warned that the sort of men they were looking for were unlikely to take kindly to strict military discipline. Instead, ‘the desire to fly, patriotism, and retaining fees large enough to count in a young man’s weekly budget will be the means of attracting our reservists’. In addition, he proposed, it was important that the whole experience was fun. ‘Socially the reserves must be a great success,’ he wrote. ‘The young men must enjoy their evening meetings and their weekends.’8
This concept was a major departure from conventional military structures and a lot for the Air Staff to swallow. Its members had spent their lives inside an institutional cocoon where they kept company with each other and followed traditional leisure pursuits: riding, shooting, fishing and sailing by day, dining and playing bridge together by night. They knew those below them on the social scale only as servants or other ranks. They were unfamiliar with the new world emerging beyond the gates of the base and were not sure how much they liked it. To them the growth of mass consumerism was an affront in a time of crisis. ‘If even a fraction of the energy, material and organizing capacity now being diverted to such non-essential channels as the production of unnecessary motor-cars, luxury cinemas and blocks of flats were directed … to the production of modern aircraft, we could overcome our present dangerous difficulties …’ complained an Air Staff paper in November 1937.9
Nonetheless, after a few initial queries, the Director of Training Arthur Tedder backed the scheme. Tedder came from a conventional establishment background. He was the son of a senior civil servant, went to Whitgift School, then Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he studied history. He entered the Colonial Service but volunteered for the Army when war broke out. An accident resulted in a serious knee injury which seemed likely to keep him out of the fighting. Desperate to escape the tedium and ignominy of a cushy rear echelon job, Tedder harassed the authorities until he was finally accepted for pilot training with the RFC. In the summer of 1916, while the Somme offensive was raging, he was a flight commander with 25 Squadron which was carrying out constant bombing raids and reconnaissance missions and suffering heavy losses. On 17 July they were inspected by the RFC commander Hugh Trenchard, whose policy of all-out aggression was driving the high casualty rate. In a letter to his wife Rosalinde, Tedder reported that he ‘had to go round with him while he looked at our machines. He asked a lot of questions, but made absolutely no comments, except “Yes.”’10 Trenchard had seen something he liked in the twenty-six-year-old officer. He would ‘foster many careers during the next 30 years’ among the men who served under him on the Western Front, wrote his biographer, Vincent Orange, but ‘none more so than Tedder’s’.11
With Tedder’s support the basic format was adopted. Putting the scheme to the Treasury, the Air Council proposed ‘to open the new force to the whole middle class in the widest sense of that term, namely the complete range of the output of the public and secondary schools’.
