Digby reflects on the Empire Air Training Scheme in Bulawayo
The Empire Air Training Scheme in Bulawayo and other memories of World War II
Second World War veterans are fading away. Meanwhile, fewer and fewer of the rest of us can say we even remember “The War”. And most younger people, so the alarmists say, aren’t clear about which war was which, because they learn on smartphones via social media and rely on predigested knowledge and don’t use books. So here may I point to the literary discernment of one erudite infant: I delighted in Roald Dahl’s first story book, The Gremlins, a morale-booster about Spitfires and the air war, written by him as a product of his job as an Intelligence Officer and published by Walt Disney. I was also given a book about Gladiators and Swordfishes and Defiants and Rocs and Skuas and Lysanders and Hampdens and Whitleys and Wellingtons and suchlike, which selection dates it to the middle years of the war. You see, aircraft were topical, because when my mother and I stayed with the Milne family in Grey Street, Bulawayo, North American Harvard trainers of the Empire Air Training Scheme were zooming overhead – noisy, clattery machines. Then I recall being lifted into the cockpit of a Spitfire or a Hurricane, and being disappointed that I couldn’t see forward over the scuttle. This most likely took place during the VE-Day celebrations, and the plane probably stood in a vacant plot off Grey Street, somewhere around Twelfth Avenue. A patriotic exercise? a thank-you gesture? My mother remembered (I don’t) the huge procession through the streets of Bulawayo that marked VE-Day, children travelling in trucks, waving flags. And cakes and lemonade on offer to all.
Now, as a specialist electrician Bill Milne was exempted from the call up but, at a time of “make-do”, of shortages and consignments lost to enemy action, he came into his own by bringing back to life, on a veritable production line, defunct apparatuses and appliances. And as an old man he was needed again during UDI. The ingenuity employed by old hands in rejuvenating equipment that this modern world deems disposable was an uplifting aspect of life during these eras in landlocked or foreign-currency-strapped Rhodesia. If we’re lucky, we’ll see it in Britain….
And, by coincidence, when we emigrated to Australia it was to Wagga Wagga, right by Uranquinty, the RAAF training base that had been chosen for their Empire Air Training Scheme.
My uncle happened to serve in some earthbound capacity in the Rhodesian Empire Air Training Scheme. Much later he became a very senior officer at Internal Affairs, but in the mid-’forties he’d been training as a “native commissioner”. I’m afraid his wartime experience made him virulently anti-British, for he characterised his English superiors as upper class twits, sent there only because they’d be a danger in the field. Later my parents and I fell out with him over politics; he supported the Rhodesian Front. But just how prejudiced was he? A South African military historian, talking about the British establishment in Egypt, has commented wryly that they began by ranking their own countrymen and then white colonials very precisely: Canadians and New Zealanders outranked Australians, who outranked South Africans – and then came Rhodesians. (Until they fought beside us, of course, when they were only too happy to profit mightily from the veld-schooled finest.)
This cameo reminds me that British training units persisted for some years after 1945: we went when I was about six to an airshow, and I wandered off course; desperately in need, I asked an Englishman in uniform to direct me to the PK and he was utterly perplexed, if kind, until demystified by my mother. PK=WC, the beginning of an Only Connect sequence.
Meanwhile, at 70 years of age my grandfather Alec bought a Model T Ford and taught himself to drive, though he never got round to the chore of applying for licences. He owned a small farm near Essexvale (Esigodini) and his eldest brother John lived with him. He was to lose everything. My mother said that one night, while Alec was away, a disastrous fire burned down the shack and gutted the car in the lean-to beside it. Uncle John escaped to the outdoor toilet, the PK, and squatted there for the rest of the night. He would always say that he’d been dive-bombed by a rogue aeroplane. And his claim was followed up: a trainee airman came forward to say he’d been building up his hours of night-flying and, worried about a fellow pilot, had indeed flown low over an isolated fire. The researches of an old colleague, Ian Johnstone, confirm the general outline of the tale: a report made to the Police by JH Bedford, dated 26 October 1944, claimed that the previous night between 11 pm and 2 am he had heard a plane flying very low: “A bomb was dropped on the house… and set it alight.” The building had been completely burnt down, including a garage with an old car. Police investigations, however, didn’t corroborate John’s charge. He’d been alone in the house at the time; Alec was in another house a quarter of a mile away, where they neither saw nor heard anything; and John didn’t come to wake Alec up. The Police concluded: “It seems possible that the fire was started accidentally and JH Bedford is afraid to admit his negligence.” It is not irrelevant that Great-Uncle John was a chain smoker and spent most of the day in a chair, surrounded by newspapers. Anyway, in the blaze Alec lost his house and its contents and his car, none of it insured. Gone, too, was his library and, tragically, the meticulous diary of his years in Texas and Canada. His son Gerry remembered reading the diary and being entranced: it was beautifully written and full of telling detail. All lost.
Digby is the author of the biography of Sir John Christopher Willoughby.
