Press Relations at RAF Finningley - Tony Cunnane's Life and Times

Shortly after arriving on 18 Squadron at RAF Finningley near Doncaster in the rank of Pilot Officer, I was appointed Press Liaison Officer for the station. There are always dozens of miscellaneous jobs that need to be done on stations and squadrons; these are allocated mostly to junior officers and are known as secondary duties. Station and squadron commanders frequently handed out secondary duties without any regard for the individuals’ particular interests or skills. It was deemed good for your career to be given a job that had no appeal and for which you had no aptitude. One’s performance in carrying out secondary duties was always assessed on annual confidential reports and so those officers who wished to get on in the Service usually tried their best. In the good old days the really keen officers, who were considered by their colleagues to be sucking-up to the Boss, would volunteer for up to half a dozen secondary duties and this often left us ordinary mortals wondering how they found time to carry out their primary duties. When I arrived at Finningley in the summer of 1960 I was still far too junior to think of volunteering for any secondary duty but I was delighted to be made Press Liaison Officer. I never did find out whether I was given the job because my Station Commander thought I had a talent for media work or simply because mine was the first name that came to his mind.

‘Your main job, Cunnane, is to keep me and my station out of the press unless I tell you otherwise,’ said the Station Commander sternly. ‘I don’t want you bringing any reporters onto my station - is that clear?’

Those were the days when the Cold War was at its most icy and station commanders at their most xenophobic. Finningley, with its 9,000 feet (2,700m) long runway straddling the boundary between south Yorkshire and north Nottinghamshire, was one of about a dozen V Force stations. It was home for the Vulcans of 101 Squadron and the Valiants of 18 Squadron. The entire V Bomber force of Valiants, Victors and Vulcans, Britain’s nuclear deterrent, painted white all over for very high altitude operations, was inevitably and irreverently known by its detractors as the ‘great white detergent’ after a contemporary television advertisement for a soap powder. Less dedicated aircrew were often heard to refer to Britain’s finest as the V Farce.

The force was kept on permanent states of readiness requiring crews to get airborne in times ranging from a fairly relaxed four hours, known variously as ‘normal readiness’ and ‘peacetime preparedness’, down to a frenetic four minutes, depending on the politicians’ perception of the threat at any given time. There used to be a joke that the best time for the Soviets to spring a surprise attack would be either on Christmas Day, when there was hardly anyone left on RAF stations, or any Friday evening from about 5pm when most aircrew would be at Happy Hour in the various Officers’ Mess bars.

Secrecy was, quite rightly, all important within the V Force. Operational knowledge was imparted on the strict ‘need-to-know’ basis: if you did not need to know, you had no right to know. Station commanders in that era tended to think that any mention of their station or personnel in the newspapers was a serious breach of security and so I was rarely called upon to write any press releases. There were some interesting exceptions. The need-to-know principle did not, for example, discourage station commanders from occasionally inviting visiting VIPs to give the signal to simulate the four-minute warning and then watch four mighty Vulcans roar into the skies. These semi-public practice scrambles were presumably designed to reassure the British public that they were safe from the Red hoards and at the same time warn the enemy that the RAF was ready and waiting for them.

Vulcans were used in preference to Valiants for these demonstrations at Finningley because they were so much more powerful and, therefore, more impressive. Furthermore the Vulcans had a system that enabled all four engines to be started simultaneously whereas the Valiant engines had to be started one after the other. If a Valiant crew stuck rigidly to the Check List procedures it took all of the 4 minutes just start the four engines. For those simulated scrambles the Vulcans were always positioned on the Operational Readiness Platform (ORP) at the beginning of the runway, a large concrete area where four Vulcans could park as close as possible to the runway without impeding other aircraft wishing to take off or land. For displays and practice scrambles, aircraft had light fuel loads and no weapons in the bomb bay so the take offs were always awe-inspiring however often you saw them. Usually the Vulcans climbed steeply away, often quickly disappearing into the overcast. One such scramble I watched with a press party was different from all the others. The first two aircraft turned sharply to the left and right almost as soon as their wheels were off the ground, the third aircraft stayed very low and accelerated away at tree-top height towards nearby Bawtry, while the final aircraft pulled up into a half loop and rolled off the top at about 5,000 feet above the ground.

I cannot recall that I was able to do anything really productive as Press Relations Officer until the date of the first large-scale RAF Finningley Battle of Britain Open Day loomed. Once again I was summoned to the Station Commander.

‘I want you to go, in person, to every newspaper office within 40 miles of Finningley and get the editors to print stories about our At Home Day,’ said the group captain. ‘I want it to be the biggest and best air show of all time.’

This was a complete change of attitude towards PR but who was I to question the ways of a group captain – after all, it was his station. Most towns and villages had a newspaper office where advertisers could hand in their small ads and where readers could order copies of pictures from recent editions. I cannot remember the exact number but I must have lobbied the staff of a couple of dozen newspapers. I did not get to see many editors, or even news editors, but I was able to hand over my carefully crafted press release, which I had typed onto a stencil and duplicated, messily, on the Roneo machine myself.

Most, if not all, of the newspapers printed the story but that was not because my release was riveting but because any news at all about the RAF was news.

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