I was given just eight days leave after square bashing at Bridgnorth. I left home again on 28 October 1953, this time en route to the No 1 Radio School at RAF Locking. Wireless training had started as early as 1916 at Farnborough – two years before the RAF was formed. Initially, the school was known as the Wireless Operators’ Training School, which seems quite an apt name since wireless operators for the Royal Flying Corps were trained there. More advanced wireless training, under various names and at several different locations, continued until, in January 1950, No 1 Radio School was formed at Locking, near Weston-super-Mare.
I had a trouble-free journey on the 'Devonian' express train from Leeds to Bristol. We pulled into the magnificent Temple Meads station, with its very long curving platforms, 21 minutes early. I then took a local train to Weston-super-Mare. On the platform at Weston I met up with three other airmen with kit bags who were obviously just out of recruit training, each wearing a gleaming new uniform and glancing around warily looking for drill instructors or ‘Snowdrops’, aka RAF policemen. They had done their square-bashing at other recruit training schools which is why I didn’t know any of them. A ticket collector at the barrier volunteered the information that the RAF station was about four miles away and the next bus was not for several hours so we agreed to share a taxi. It cost us two shillings each. On arrival we reported first to the Guard Room just inside the main gate to announce our arrival, then we collected bedding from an elderly corporal who had apparently been sleeping on a bed in a cell at the rear, and finally we set out to find, and move into, the Transit Hut.
Transit huts were, by and large, fairly depressing places, usually cold and uninviting. In the 1950s they were almost always the same type of long wooden huts on stilts that we had met at Cardington and Bridgnorth: 22 beds, one coal-fired stove at each end, a corporal’s single room (always known as a bunk), a tiny storeroom for floor bumpers and cleaning materials, and two doors, one to the outside world and the other to a corridor linking several huts together. The stoves were usually only lit when the temperature was really low because lighting them created problems as well as warmth. Firstly, you had to find some fuel and secondly, every morning before start of work the stove had to be completely emptied and cleaned out, the coal scuttle had to be emptied and polished, and any other implements had to be cleaned. Because the occupants of transit huts came and went each day, usually without warning, there was never anyone around willing to do the cleaning. Thus the permanent corporal in charge of the hut would grab the first airman he could and order him to do it. It’s no wonder, therefore, that corporals in charge of transit huts were usually ill-tempered, humourless individuals, often wearing World War 2 medal ribbons on their uniforms, and nearing the end of their RAF service. Every day they probably asked themselves, “What did I do to deserve this?”
Next morning a bunch of us made our way to the Education Centre where I was told that I was one of the 16 u/t (under training or untrained) wireless mechanics whose course was not due to start for another week. We sixteen were, therefore, allocated to Pool Flight – another RAF euphemism for any group of airmen who were available for odd jobs, called fatigues, around the station. Pool Flight was large enough to require several transit huts but with just one middle-aged corporal in charge. There were several dozen airmen already in Pool Flight when we arrived and new arrivals joined us every day while others left to do we knew not what. My week in Pool Flight was frustrating rather than fatiguing because I was keen to get stuck into the wireless training. There was a kind of hierarchy amongst us: those who had already been in Pool Flight a few days were looked upon by those who had just joined as the fount of all knowledge. It took but a few days for newcomers to reach that pinnacle.
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