Playing Away! - Tony Cunnane's Life and Times

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Playing Away!

In 1965 I was the personnel officer at 3 Group HQ located at RAF Mildenhall In Suffolk. I had custody of a large number of blue ‘Staff-in-Confidence’ personal files. These files often contained very personal details of the subject officer’s indiscretions, either to do with money or sexual peccadillos. I was astonished to read, in the course of my duties preparing notes for the two-star Air Officer Commanding, the troubles some of the married officers got into by ‘playing away’. Even now, more than 40 years later, I would not dream of revealing any names but the offending officer, and it was always the officer not the lady who got the blame, often had his career ruined either temporarily or permanently. At best he was posted to some remote station, either in some far-off overseas place such as Aden or El Adem, or to one of the Scottish outer islands; at worst he was required to resign his commission.

It was not only playing away whilst married that the RAF would not tolerate in the 1960s. Officers under the age of 26 could not get married without the written permission of their Station Commander – which was not always given. Like most of my single colleagues at that time, marriage was also out of the question because we were not paid enough to meet an officer’s commitments and to run a family but, like them, I was never without a current girl friend. However, there was always a problem of what to do, and where, after weekend parties. My beautiful BRG MG Midget was not entirely suitable.

One station commander I had in the early 1960s had a weird way of dealing with girlfriends. For formal functions, such as the Annual Summer Ball or the Christmas Draw, he would invite a small number of single girls of his or his wife’s acquaintance to his official residence for cocktails, and then detail an equal number of bachelor officers to host them! We had no choice, unless we wanted to risk jeopardising our careers, so it meant that our current girlfriends could not be invited to those functions. We did not meet our ’selected’ girl until we were introduced in the Station Commander’s residence where they had presumably been dropped off by parents. On arrival we would find that we had already been paired off, like it or not. At the end of the evening we had to drive the girls home – often quite a considerable distance. No chance of any ‘hanky-panky’ on those occasions!!

One of my girlfriends while I was stationed at Mildenhall was a newly-commissioned officer at RAF Spitalgate in Lincolnshire. She lived in the WRAF Quarters, a segregated area of the Officers’ Mess strictly out of bounds to male officers. One night, well after midnight when I was creeping along the upstairs corridor of the WRAF Quarters on my way out before the long drive back to Suffolk, I heard a door open behind me and a female stage-whisper: “Good night, Tony, drive carefully if you’ve been drinking!” It was the Queen Bee, the euphemism for the senior WRAF officer. “Good night, ma’am”, I mumbled. I was quite convinced that she would report the matter to my AOC, that I would then become the subject of a new entry on my own blue file, and that my short career would be over. I worried myself sick for days on end but I never heard any more of the matter.

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