Saturday 12th July 1986

All By Myself

It’s the Winter Solstice, so time for another bonus post for my paid subscribers, one to take us back to the summer - the summer of 1986.

I had seven hours and twenty minutes of flying time on the Piper PA-38 Tomahawk before I flew solo and I now have seven hours and thirty minutes having spent a whole ten minutes in the sky all by myself. Wow, how lucky am I?

The answer, in case you were in any doubt, is very.

I’ve been here at Cardiff for less than a week, five of us arrived last Sunday evening for a four week stay during which Her Majesty the Queen would pay for our board, lodgings, groundschool and thirty hours of flying. I mean, not personally, she’s not popping in with her cheque book, but the government are paying for us to be here. We are all seventeen years old, we all want to be pilots.

Our journey here started in February with a trip to the Officer and Aircrew Selection Centre at Royal Air Force Biggin Hill in Kent. As an air cadet I had applied for a Flying Scholarship and was heading to Biggin Hill to be tested to see if I might be made of the right stuff. Just the trip to Kent was amazing to me. As a young Northerner with a passion for all things air force and all things aviation, this was brilliant. I’d only ever heard of Kent in the books and films of the Battle of Britain, now I was on a train from St. Annes-on-Sea to Bromley South Railway Station where I can then get a bus to the famous Biggin on the bump.

On Weald of Kent I watched once more

Again I heard that grumbling roar

Of fighter planes; yet none were near

And all around the sky was clear

Borne on the wind a whisper came

‘Though men grow old, they stay the same’

And then I knew, unseen to eye

The ageless Few were sweeping by

Lord Balfour of Inchyre

The Royal Flying Corps started flying from here in 1917 to defend London against attack from German Zeppelins and Gotha bombers. Just after the end of the first war, Biggin Hill was the scene of a mutiny by airmen who were sick of freezing half to death in tents amid a sea of mud. One evening in early January 1919 a group of airmen met in their mess tent which was little more than a canvas hangar with holes in the roof and walls. The meal had, apparently, been at least as bad, if not worse, than the awful rations they’d been living on for many weeks. They sang the Red Flag and decided to mutiny. The next morning no-one reported for duty and the orderly officer discovered that the magnetos had been removed from every vehicle on camp. You should never, ever piss off people who know more than you do about anything important.

The striking men, many of whom had homes, wives, children and jobs to return to and were now just awaiting demob after the war’s end, complained to the Commanding Officer, Colonel Blanchy, about the unsanitary conditions in which they were living. Not only was the food bad and the accommodation poor, they had no baths and only one washbasin for every one hundred men. Colonel Blanchy did not send them away or tell them to take it up with Area HQ, as some commanding officers may have done, he actually accompanied them to Area HQ at Covent Garden (in vehicles with miraculously re-appearing magnetos) and supported their case. Everyone was sent on ten days leave, the camp was improved and most of their other demands regarding time-off, leave and use of facilities on camp were met. I do like a bit of mutiny, especially when the little man wins and nobody gets shot or thrown overboard or cast adrift in a lifeboat only to colonise Tristan de Cunha.