initially graded as to whether or not they were officer material primarily on the grounds of their social class. In the new circumstances this was considered ‘inappropriate’. Instead entry was to be ‘on a common footing, airman pilot or observer and promotions to commissioned rank will be made at a later stage in accordance with the abilities actually displayed’.
It amounted to a near-revolutionary challenge to the assumptions that governed the closed world of the British military. In the previous war, death and injury had cleared a path for lower-class men to receive the King’s commission. In peacetime the old barriers were quickly re-erected. In principle at least, the RAFVR established a new universal criterion for officer selection: it meant that candidates would be chosen, not on the grounds of which school they went to and which accent they spoke with, but on the basis of whether they were any good or not.
Expansion also created a need for more short service officers. To attract the numbers needed, advertising campaigns were mounted and standards relaxed. The results were unwelcome to some career officers who preferred the old exclusivity.
The gentleman fliers of the Auxiliary Air Force had been similarly dismayed by the creation of the RAFVR which opened the club doors of weekend service aviation to Tom, Dick and Harry. All AAF Squadrons were exclusive to a certain extent, some ludicrously so. Outfits such as 601 (County of London) were founded in 1926 by Lord Edward Grosvenor who recruited the first members from the White’s club bar. Originally the Auxiliaries were all bomber squadrons and in the words of the RAF narrative ‘truth to tell, not very highly rated as such’.13 However ‘they had no inferiority complex: very much the opposite in fact. Indeed, some of the squadrons were inclined to look down on the regulars, as the cavalry in the army used to look down on the infantry.’
When planning for the RAFVR began it seemed that the AAF provided a natural nucleus around which to build an organization to train the newcomers. It resisted all pressure to do so, being ‘reluctant to sacrifice its exclusive character to serve wider interests’ as its ‘standard of expenditure and social rigidity were incompatible with a democratic reserve’.14 Frederick Bowhill, the Air Council member responsible for personnel, thought the Auxiliaries might be open to recruiting a reserve of accountant and stores officers ‘who might have been thought socially acceptable’. Instead opposition ‘was so violent that the suggestion was hastily dropped’.15
Some AAF members and some regular officers saw themselves as the paradigm of the upper-class warrior, bold and courageous but taciturn and emotionally restrained. These types populate the quasi-autobiographical stories of John Llewellyn Rhys, son of a Welsh rector who, after public school, in the early 1930s gave up a place at Oxford to join the RAF. He combined a love of flying with literary ambitions and began publishing short stories in 1936. In one, ‘Too Young to Live’, the narrator is in hospital recovering from an unspecified injury. In the neighbouring bed is a young pilot, dying slowly from the effects of a crash after only his second solo flight.
That afternoon he began to talk to me again, telling me about his people, who were in India, and how they hated him flying and how his mother had prophesied that his career as a pilot would end in disaster … it seemed they had a place in England, a house in Suffolk in the lovely wooded country on the Norfolk border. There was a lot of game there and he wanted me to promise to come up for some shooting … ‘The riding’s grand too; you could have Magpie, and there’s bags of hunting and we’d go into market on Wednesday and drink with the farmers …’16
England Is My Village, which appeared in 1940, describes the atmosphere in the officers’ mess as the Wing Commander briefs his men on the eve of a big operation.
Robert heard his instructions and memorized them with an ease born of practice, but the words seemed meaningless, rattling like hail on the roof of his mind.
‘Any questions?’
But they were all old hands and no naïve youngsters among them wanted to make themselves heard.
‘Well … good luck! I know you’ll put up a good show,’ his voice was suddenly shy, ‘I wish they’d let me come with you.’
They went back to the ante-room, went on talking, reading … Robert sat down by a friend. They had been together for years but were in different squadrons.
‘If anything,’ Robert’s voice was quiet as he flipped the pages of a magazine, ‘if anything were to happen to … slip up … tomorrow, would you attend to the odd detail?’
‘Of course, old boy.’ The other puffed his pipe alight, swung the match until it was extinguished.
‘Tomorrow?’
‘Yes.’
‘Tough show?’
‘Tough enough.’17
Robert does not return from the op. Rhys, a flight lieutenant in a bomber squadron, was killed on active service in August 1940.
This portrayal of an Air Force staffed by strong, silent men from good county families was more an expression of how some airmen liked to see themselves rather than a reflection of reality. The illusion was unsustainable. The social distinctions that marked the pre-war RAF soon became blurred when the fighting began. As the first clashes thinned their ranks and veterans were posted away, the AAF squadrons could no longer maintain their exclusivity and had to accept whoever they were sent as replacements. By the end of the Battle of Britain only five pilots remained from 601’s pre-war strength. The sixty-one men who washed through the squadron in the months of the Battle made up what was by then a typical Fighter Command motley of RAFVR sergeants, former SSC pilots and Czech and Polish airmen rejoining the fight.18
Even so, some important aspects of the pre-war style survived to become embedded in the Air Force ethos and form a salient part of its image. British airmen, whatever their origins, disliked show-offs and insouciance and understatement were the form. Air Ministry officials who during the war organized morale-boosting visits by veterans to aviation factories had to urge them to speak vividly about their experiences. An official account noted that ‘the reluctance of the aircrew personnel to “shoot a line” as they called it, had to be overcome’.19 Above all, pre-war professionals, auxiliary amateurs and the citizen fliers of the wartime service were united in an all-but-unquestioned willingness to face any odds and accept any risk.
Scott and Tedder identified the desire to fly as the most powerful inducement in attracting aircrew candidates. Nowadays it is quite hard to appreciate the fascination with aviation that gripped young men – and women – growing up in the 1920s and 1930s. The jeremiads preached by politicians about the huge potential for evil created by the invention of the aeroplane had little effect on the young. In their minds, it was the magic of flying that prevailed.
In the 1920s and 1930s aviators, male and female, enjoyed the celebrity and sometimes the rewards of film idols. The British couple Amy Johnson and Jim Mollison were world-famous. Amy was small, dark and gamine and looked as good in the severe fashions of the day as she did in leather helmet and sheepskin flying jacket – a paradigm of modern womanhood. She was born in Hull in 1903, where her father was a prosperous businessman, and studied economics at Sheffield University only to end up as a secretary in a solicitor’s office in London.
She found
