Boy Entrant; The Recollections of a Royal Air Force Brat (2 page)

Illustrations 2; 7; 11; and 12 are from the author’s personal files.

Illustration 17; this photograph was kindly provided by former 29th Entry Trumpet Major, Michael Williams.

Illustration 18; The No. 3 Squadron, 29th Entry Graduation group photograph was kindly provided by Tom Dee and restored by Roger Gatti.

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without help from a number of sources, including a few of my fellow ex-Boy Entrants - Richard Butterworth, Charlie Cunningham and Eugene Gilkes who filled in my memory gaps, the late David Williams for lending his copy of the December 1957 edition of the St. Athan Magazine, Michael Williams for specific information and photos relating to the Boy Entrant Trumpet Bands, Tom Dee for the group photograph (Illustration 17), and Norrie Hathaway for lending his Electrical Mechanic (Air) training notes.

Others also lent substantial help - Wing Commander David Orme, former Officer Commanding of No. 4 School of Technical Training, RAF St. Athan, and his staff Anne Dawson and Colin Bramley for extending warm hospitality to Charlie Cunningham and me during our visit to St. Athan in 2003, and for providing most of the photographs of Boy Entrant activities that appear in the book. Jane Bissett, RAF St. Athan Media Communications Officer, for providing excerpts from the 1958 edition of the St. Athan Magazine and a copy of the “early years” RAF St. Athan Station layout, and my nephew Brian Wisener, for tracking down the copyright ownership of the photograph, “Off On An RAF Career”.

I also wish to acknowledge the help and encouragement of Cheryl Leedom, Charlie Cunningham and my friend Judy Bowen, all of whom read over all or some of the first draft and provided constructive comments. I am deeply indebted to both Cheryl Leedom and Julie Claydon for proof-reading the second draft, and to my friend Dorothy Eilbeck and my daughter Michelle Carlin for their diligence, dedication and eye for detail in editing the final draft. My thanks also to Michelle for creating the front and back cover designs of the first (print) edition (which is also the product image for the second eBook edition), to Allan Knox for creating the Boy Entrant figure and Judy Bowen for her suggestions that helped give “him” the appearance of a teenage boy.

Finally, I would like to thank my wife Pam for being so patient with me as I burned the midnight oil nearly every night to record this formative period of my life.

INTRODUCTION

In pre-war and immediate post-war Britain it was considered normal for working class teenage boys to join the workforce after completing their basic secondary school education at the age of 14½ (later raised to 15½ circa 1950). At best, they became trade apprentices and at worst, manual labourers.

In 1934, the Royal Air Force instituted a training scheme that recruited suitable teenage boys between the ages of 15½ and 16½ to be trained in a limited number of trades. The teenagers were required to take the same oath of allegiance to the Crown as the regular servicemen, and were considered to have enlisted for a specified term of service following their training. But because they had entered the RAF before becoming adults in the eyes of the law, they were assigned the rank of Boy Entrant. As such, they were accorded special status within the service. Boy Entrants were subject to normal service discipline, with a few additional regulations thrown in, and could not voluntarily rescind their enlistment after having taken the oath of allegiance to the Sovereign.

Encouraged by the initial success of the Boy Entrant scheme, the RAF expanded it in 1938 to include training for several additional trades, only to suspend all training in 1939 at the outbreak of hostilities with Germany. Many of those Boy Entrants who had completed their training went on to serve during the war. Some became aircrew, some became ground crew, and several of them made the ultimate sacrifice for King and Country.

The Boy Entrant training scheme was resumed in May 1947 when the first post-war intake of young lads was designated the 1st Entry. It was at this significant milestone in Boy Entrant history that boys were first assigned service numbers beginning with the “19” prefix. Thereafter, this distinction was reserved exclusively for Boy Entrants.

Recruitment of boys intensified in the 1950s when manpower shortages anticipated by the approaching termination of National Service needed to be offset. By this time, training in virtually every trade was offered to prospective Boy Entrant recruits. RAF stations Cosford and Hereford became Boy Entrant training schools in 1950 with RAF St. Athan being added in 1955 when the training of several trades was moved there from Cosford.

Boy Entrants wore the standard “other ranks” RAF uniform, but with certain distinguishing marks. The most obvious was a two-colour chequered hatband worn around the service dress (SD) hat in lieu of the black hatband worn by adult servicemen. A brass “wheel badge” (actually a four-bladed propeller within a circle) was worn on the left upper sleeve and usually backed by a coloured disc. Other basic sleeve markings consisted of up to three miniature inverted chevrons worn as “proficiency badges” on the cuff of the left jacket sleeve. These were often supplemented by other badges signifying such distinctions as marksmanship, participation in the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme and band membership.

Discipline and organization were administered by a permanent staff of officers and non-commissioned officers (NCOs), who were ably assisted by the appointment of Boy NCOs who wore miniature NCO chevrons surmounted by a wheel badge on the upper sleeves of both arms.

The training period for Boy Entrants lasted for 18 months. The first three months were spent in the Initial Training Squadron (ITS) learning basic military drill, undergoing intensive physical training and being taught the fundamentals of ground combat training that included the safe handling and actual use of live firearms.

General education was not neglected during this initial period. Half of the boys’ time was spent in the classroom continuing their education in such subjects as citizenship, current affairs, mathematics, English, geography, mechanics and science—particularly as it related both to the Theory of Flight and fundamental principles associated with their trades. In addition
,
one period of “Padre’s Hour” was set aside each week for Religious Instruction.

At the conclusion of Initial Training, the boys commenced trade training at well equipped workshops-cum-classrooms. Basic workshop practice in the use of common hand tools and practical trade-related work on actual equipment shared equal time with theoretical instruction, whilst individual performance was closely monitored by weekly classroom testing and periodic end-of-term practical and written examinations. Training concluded with exhaustive written and oral tests independently administered by the RAF Trade Standards and Testing Section. Those who were successful—and much to the credit of the quality of instruction they were in the majority—passed out of Boy Entrant service into the regular Royal Air Force as qualified tradesmen, standing firmly on the first rung of a promising career. The few who failed to qualify on their first attempt were usually given a second chance, through relegation into the next upcoming entry. However, if these individuals failed to pass the exams a second time, their training was terminated.

The Boy Entrant training scheme gave many a young lad the basic trade skills and personal discipline necessary to pursue a successful career and rewarding life. But alas, all good things come to an end. The scheme was terminated in July of 1965 when the final entry, the 51st, passed out of training and into Royal Air Force history.

This book is the personal recollections of one who underwent the rigours of Boy Entrant training. Whilst being subjective in nature, the story is representative of the experience of thousands of other youngsters who chose to allow their future lives, characters and careers to be moulded by the training they would receive as Boy Entrants.

Former Boy Entrants, many of whom reside overseas, keep in touch with each other through the Royal Air Force Boy Entrant Association (RAFBEA), which maintains an interesting and informative website at http://www.rafbea.org that was the main source of the information included in this introduction.

Brian Carlin

Former Boy Entrant, 29th Entry at No. 4 School of Technical Training, Royal Air Force Station St. Athan, South Wales

CHAPTER 1

Achieving Escape Velocity

W
hen I look back, life has been good to me—all things considered. And I think I’ve handled it with some degree of success, even if I say so myself. But it could have turned out so much differently and probably less successfully, if I had failed to make a certain fateful decision at a critical time in my early life.

Many of us make decisions that set the course of our futures—for good or ill—whilst we’re still only youngsters. For some it might be a decision to do nothing: the easiest of all to make, just allowing ourselves to be tossed around like corks on the sea of life, washing up on any shore, or maybe never seeing shore at all. For others, it might be a decision to take a path in a new direction that, if followed unwaveringly, will yield benefits in our adult years. I’m happy to say that I made the latter kind of decision at the tender age of 15. It was a very good decision, as things turned out, although I didn’t realize that at the time. I’d like to tell you about it.

It was summer of 1956 and I was desperate to escape from what I realized was a dead-end existence. This was Northern Ireland before the Troubles, but not before the trouble that caused the Troubles. I’d just left St. Malachy’s Public Elementary School. The school leaving age at that time was 14½, but my father made me stay on for another six months to give him more time to get me apprenticed into a good trade. I really loved working with wood and was good at it, so he tried to get me placed as an apprentice carpenter. But a Catholic lad had little chance of landing something like that in the Ulster of those days, unless his family had exceptionally good contacts. Sadly, mine didn’t. So I finally left school at 15 and worked full-time as a message boy for a local grocer by the name of Paddy Corning. My job was to go on errands, mostly delivering large grocery orders to Paddy’s customers. A battered bicycle operated by boy pedal power was the means by which I delivered the groceries to our valued customers. The bike came equipped with a large tubular metal pannier mounted in front of the handlebars and supported over the front wheel, which held a wicker basket containing the groceries. Typically, an errand meant pedalling for several miles to deliver a grocery order to the customer’s home. The freedom was wonderful after having had to sit in a single classroom all day, especially for six months longer than I needed to. I knew, however, that I couldn’t stay in this job forever, not even for very long and so I kept looking for an opportunity that might bring something better. Although, for the life of me, I didn’t know what that might be.

That wasn’t the only thing troubling me. To put it in the language of today’s family psychologists, my family was chronically dysfunctional. I was the eldest of four children, two sisters and two brothers, whose mother had passed away eight years previously. For the first two years after her death my father paid a succession of women to look after us, so that he could go out to work. Some were good and some weren’t so good, but not one of them could replace our mother, whom we missed desperately. My father then married again. His new wife was in her forties and had never been married before. Her desperation to find a husband was matched only by my father’s desperation to get someone to look after his kids for free, cook him a meal when he came home and share his bed. Maybe it worked out for him, but it sure as hell didn’t work out for us. She was a mean-spirited bitch, who did everything she could to make life miserable for my sisters and me. But our brother, the youngest in the family, was a little luckier. Because he was still a toddler, he seemed to kindle her maternal instincts and she adopted him as her own. But as for the rest of us, we were just someone else’s brats and she treated us as such. To make matters worse, I didn’t really hit it off too well with my father. He believed that I favoured my mother’s side of the family and, since he didn’t get along with them, any of my personal characteristics that reminded him of them made me a target of his scorn. Young as I was, I realized I just had to get out of that miserably unhappy situation as soon as possible; all I needed was a good opportunity. Then one day, just out of the blue, came the break I’d been looking for.

Leafing through a boys’ magazine—probably
The Wizard
or
The Hotspur
—that early summer day in 1956, I noticed a picture of a boy around my own age of 15 looking back at me from an advertisement. He was wearing a round military-style peaked hat with a badge prominently displayed at the front bearing the familiar initials RAF, which anyone would have recognized as the insignia of the Royal Air Force. There was an unusual chequered pattern around the outer hatband that I’d never seen before and I’d seen plenty of air force servicemen around and about, since the RAF station at Ballykelly was near my home town. The young man’s uniform looked familiar and yet it was different somehow.