1966 - 1973
RAF Waddington
I was sent to work in the Maintenance Hangar and I immediately found out that I was not popular on account of the amount of hockey that I played. Things really went downhill when the section refused to let me play for Bomber Command. After I rang up to tell the Bomber Command Secretary that I was not available, there was a considerable amount of pressure applied at a high level, resulting in me being allowed to play but being even more unpopular. At this time, the junior ranks took it in turns to do a week’s hangar guard; this was to make sure that no one got into the hangar that shouldn’t have been there. I did a week of this duty on a day shift and it was a horrible job with everyone hating being stopped. For me, who had only recently been posted into the section and who didn’t know the hangar staff, it was especially difficult. The following week I was on the evening shift and lo and behold, who was on hangar guard but me. Even worse, I was also on the following week, which proved to me that I was being picked on. Regrettably for me, I left a window open in the toilets when I went off shift and a policeman found it and I ended up being charged, for dereliction of duty or something similar. I was given five days ‘Restrictions‘ or ‘Jankers’ as it was better known to us, which meant that I had to report to the guardroom at certain times of the day to be inspected. The last inspection in the evening was at 22.00, so I didn’t get much time at home for that week.
On 1st April 1966, my promotion to Corporal came through and with some reluctance the Flight Commander signed his agreement and I was promoted and posted from the hangar to the Armament Electrical Section, which was based in the Armoury. This was a good job, involving all aspects of the Vulcan weapons systems. We could be repairing equipment in the Bay, testing in the Hangar or diagnosing faults on the Line. I have a couple of anecdotal stories of one of the lads in the Armoury. His name was Eddie VOBE and he was a Trade Assistant General, which meant that he was employed to do odd jobs around the section. His job could take him to any of the sites over which the Armament Section had control. One day, an officer asked Eddie to give him a lift to the Supplementary Storage flight (SSF) so Eddie picked him up, put him over his shoulder and marched out of the front door of the Armoury to the Land Rover. As I have said, Eddie could be anywhere on the Station at any given time so he used to take advantage. One day he had been down to Lincoln when he should have been at work. He had a very distinctive post war Riley and whilst out he spotted an officer who he thought might have also seen him so quickly got himself back to Waddington. The officer subsequently arrived back and called Eddie into his office and asked him what he was doing in Lincoln. Eddie denied all knowledge and said that he had been nowhere off the Station. He then proceeded to take the officer around to where his car was parked and asked him to feel the radiator, which was cold. Apparently he had come back, drained the cooling system and flushed it through several times so that it felt cold to the touch, thus proving that it had not recently been anywhere.
In October 1966, I was sent on detachment to Malta to support a Live Bombing exercise. Whilst this was a great opportunity for me, for Maria it was entirely different. She went home to stay whilst I was away, and during that time her Dad died, so she had to cope with that trauma plus her pregnancy without my support.
About the same time that Andrew was born, I was transferred to the SSF at Waddington. This was the area that stored Waddington’s supply of Nuclear Weapons. As electricians we had a number of specific jobs to do. Firstly there was the electrical detonation system in the nose of the 7000lb. weapon; secondly there were the radiation monitors that had to be checked and calibrated; thirdly, there were meteorological instruments to be calibrated. The latter, Hygrographs and Thermographs, were situated in each individual storage building and had to be checked daily to ensure that the buildings were controlled at the correct temperature and humidity. The job was not arduous except when we had exercises, and there were many of those. When an exercise ended, the weapons were recovered, checked and put away, which meant that after most people finished work we were still hard at it.
The memory of the SSF reminds me of a work colleague whose name was Bob HEALEY who had a number of mishaps. Bob rode a Motor Bike with sidecar and lived in Grantham. One day he arrived into work with a ‘pot’ on one arm. Apparently he had gone off the road on the bike and broken an arm or wrist. Before he had recovered from that he arrived at work with the other arm also in plaster! This time he had put out his hand to turn right and it had been hit by a car, breaking yet another bone! The sight of a motor cycle rider with two broken arms was quite alarming. Our Chief Technician had a habit of doing strange things at work and from a standing position would leap up onto the work bench. Bob decided to try this one day but didn’t quite make it and took the skin off both shins as they slid down the sharp edge of the bench. The last memory was not painful for him but seemed very funny at the time. In the SSF, we had several static water tanks for use if we ever had a fire. One winter they had frozen solid but on this particular day the ice, which was about three inches thick had started to melt at the edges. This meant that there was a block of floating ice in the tank. On our morning check of the buildings, Bob, who was bored as usual, decided to test his theory that if he repeatedly pushed down on the ice at one corner and then released the pressure, he could get the whole block to move until it gradually broke right across the middle. He tried this using one of his feet. It broke OK but instead of the middle, it broke just a little in front of his foot and his leg disappeared under the water whilst the rest of him lay on the ice with a silly look on his face.
I cannot remember the exact dates but at some stage there was a requirement to carry out Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) on Vulcan engines using a 30 Curie radioactive source. The work had to be done in one of the hangars in the evenings and at night because of the dangers associated with radioactivity. The radioactive source was contained in a very secure container and after films had been applied to the relevant parts of the engines, a tube and winding mechanism were attached to the container and one person was required to wind out the source as quickly as possible before dashing out of the hangar into a safe area. After a defined time, the reverse was required. One of the problems with the radioactive source used was that it had a ‘half-life’ of 30 days and so had to be replaced every month. To do this, two people would be selected to drive the source to the Atomic Research Establishment at Harwell, Oxfordshire. When I look back I realise that security for that job was not great and it was not uncommon to stop for lunch and leave the source, unguarded, in the back of a J2 van. Anyone who remembers the J2 would know that it was not the most secure of vehicles anyway.
Now that I had been promoted, I had to undertake the duties of Orderly Corporal. This was a twenty four hour duty in the Guardroom, a job that I always thought would be much better done by the RAF Police. When I arrived for my first duty, I was told that I had a prisoner in the cells for whom I was responsible. What was more, he had only just been recaptured having hit a previous Orderly Corporal over the head and escaped. This was not what I wanted to hear for a first duty, however, he must have decided that he had done enough to get himself discharged so was very well behaved. As a follow up to Orderly Corporal, I will mention here and for the only time, Orderly Sergeant. The duties varied from Station to Station and included raising the RAF Ensign in the morning and lowering it in the evening, but the job that I detested, and in fact never did properly was sitting in the Airman’s Mess selling meal tickets and taking names to ensure that no-one was stealing a meal.
Between April and August 1969 I had a change of jobs for four months. The job was to service the Rapid Blooming Window/Infra Red Decoy (RBW/IRD) dispensers, which were used to confuse enemy aircraft radar and heat seeking missiles. These were serviced in the Conventional Storage Area (CSA). I loved this job and became quite an expert on the system. After I was taken off the job, a colleague took over from me and was subsequently given an award for the work that he had done in setting up the maintenance procedures. I was somewhat miffed to say the least. I was sent back to the SSF to service Radiation Monitors. By this time the 7000lb. weapons had been replaced by a smaller weapon that required no work by electricians.
1970 was quite a significant year for a couple of reasons. Up until now my trade was EFA, but in a review of trades, the RAF decided to get rid of the Instrument Fitter, General, trade. Those persons in that trade were given the choice of becoming Instrument Fitter, Navigation or Aircraft Fitter (Electrical) (AFE), the latter trade taking over much of the work carried out by the defunct trade. As a result of this policy change, those of us who were EFAs, were required to do a conversion course to AFE at R.A.F. Newton. I started my course on 1st April 1970, a date which was significant in two other ways. My promotion to Sergeant had come through for that day and the Military Salary started. The combination of these two events meant that my pay jumped from about £20 to £35 a week. The only problem was that I now needed to have a Bank Account into which my pay would be paid automatically on a monthly basis in arrears. This instead of being paid cash in hand fortnightly in advance.
As far as that promotion was concerned, I left Waddington on the 31st March as a Corporal and arrived at Newton the following day as a Sergeant. I arrived to book in at the Sergeant’s Mess but wasn’t expected. It is common practice when promoted to Sergeant, to be ‘introduced’ to the Mess. This involves a current member taking you along and explaining some of the general rules that apply. This didn’t happen for me so I had to ‘wing it’ as the expression goes. I got through OK, despite being told off for wearing my beret inside the front door. I passed the conversion course on 1st July 1970.
I continued in the SSF until March 1973 when I was asked to join a special team that had been set up to review all the technical instructions that had been issued against the Vulcan fleet since its acceptance into service. This may be a particularly boring part of my story so feel free to give it a miss. Let me start by saying that in addition to official Ministry of Defence modifications, which were centrally recorded, there were lots of other instructions, which were not.
The list includes:
PWIs - Preliminary Warning Instructions. These usually had to be carried out before the aircraft next flew.
SIs - Servicing Instructions. These usually, but not always, were temporary instructions eventually incorporated into the maintenance schedules.
STIs - Special Technical Instructions. These were ‘one-off’ instructions and when they had been carried out on all aircraft they were usually cancelled.
The authority for all these instructions came from the RAF. In addition there were some instructions issued specifically by Bomber or Strike Command (STC).
These instructions had never been recorded properly and there were many that should have been cancelled. Our job was to go through them all and cancel as necessary. To give some scale of the job, there were about 120 each of PWIs and SIs and 325 STIs. In addition there were the STCSIs and STCSTIs. I forget the number of aircraft in the Vulcan Fleet at the time but it must have been in excess of 30. We were located in a large room with very large boards on the walls with a list of instructions along the top and a list of aircraft down the side. We first searched through all the individual instructions to see what their applicability was. Any for instance that were only applicable to Mk. 1 or 1A aircraft, or for ‘Blue Steel’ systems, both of which were out of service by then, were cancelled straight away. The Avro ‘Blue Steel’ was a British air-launched, rocket-propelled nuclear stand off missile. It was superseded by the Royal Navy’s Polaris missile. With the SIs, we had to check the maintenance schedules to ensure that the instruction had been incorporated. With the PWIs and STIs we went through all the aircraft maintenance records to ensure that the appropriate instructions had been carried out. When every aircraft had a tick against it, that instruction was cancelled. Whilst carrying out this last job, I found out that I needed to wear spectacles which was a bit of a blow at the age of 32. When we could not find a record of satisfaction or incorporation, we had to get the squadron responsible for that aircraft to raise the appropriate paperwork so that it could be checked. They just loved us!! I spent four months on this job and, when I left, they were still trying to tie up many loose ends.
On 20th July 1973, having served a total of 11 years and 4 months at Waddington, I was on the move to the RAF Armament Support Unit at RAF Wittering.
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