My First Day at Scampton

My cobwebby office window was protected by a grimy, fixed mesh security screen, one of many hangovers left at Scampton from the Vulcan days

I reported for duty at RAF Scampton at 0800 on 4 September 1989 to find that I was first in, apart from the key orderly who was busily occupied switching on the water heaters in various offices so that the staff could have their early morning fix of caffeine as soon as they arrived. The Central Flying School Headquarters and its Ground Training Squadron occupied a single-story, prefabricated building that had been built originally as the Station Operations Centre in V Bomber days when it was one of the most secret places on the station. To be truthful, the whole building was a bit of an eyesore and completely out of keeping with the rest of the station.

I made my way through the maze of tatty corridors. I knew where my new office was because a few days earlier I had called in to see the officer who would be my immediate superior, Wing Commander Mike Hall. He held the post then called Wing Commander Air, the senior staff officer working for the CFS Commandant, Air Commodore Bruce Latton. My office was in one corner of the building at the end of a corridor leading to a fire exit. I later discovered that this office had, until a couple of days before my arrival, been a storeroom. No-one had wanted to use it as an office because it was at the end of the central heating distribution pipery and in winter it was the coldest room in the building. It was a tiny affair just large enough to hold a cupboard, an upright chair, a desk on which stood a telephone and two empty document trays, one labelled In and the other Out, and two rather faded easy chairs. That was, in fact, all the office did contain. There was a small wooden plaque on the door bearing my name: at least I was expected. I made a note of my telephone number and gazed out of the window over the deserted airfield.

My cobwebby office window was protected by a grimy, fixed mesh security screen, one of many hangovers left at Scampton from the Vulcan days. The screen prevented me from poking my head outside but, by craning my neck, I could look towards the north and see the ‘Waterfront’. The CFS flight lines at Little Rissington had been called the Waterfront when I had been a student flying instructor there over 20 years earlier. No-one seems to know the derivation of the name, possibly something to do with the fact that the very first CFS Commandant in 1912 had been a Captain RN, but the name stuck when CFS moved to Scampton in September 1984. I could see the four large aircraft hangars that had been built in the mid-thirties, 1 Hangar the nearest and 4 Hangar, current home of the Red Arrows, the most distant. The hangars had been laid out on a gentle curve, as they had been at the many airfields constructed with commendable prescience in preparation for World War 2. The idea was to make it more difficult for enemy aircraft to destroy the entire line in a single pass with a stick of bombs.

I knew that 2 Hangar had housed the Dam Busters for about 10 weeks in 1943 and I also knew that the grave of Wing Commander Guy Gibson’s black Labrador dog was located in front of that hangar. The dog had been called Nigger, which in those pre-political correctness days had no racist connotations and was a very common name for black cats and dogs. Poor Nigger had been killed when he was struck by a car just outside the Guardroom on the A15 a few hours before his master led the Lancasters into the air on Operation Chastise on 16 May 1943. Beyond the hangars, out on the airfield proper, was the modern Air Traffic Control tower built after the main runway had been extended in the mid-1950s to accommodate the needs of the Vulcans. The original ATC tower between 2 and 3 Hangars had been replaced because the controllers could see neither end of the lengthened runway from that position.

Immediately in front of 4 Hangar I could see the Red Arrows’ flight line, a huge expanse of concrete constructed especially for the Team when they moved to Scampton in 1983. The distinctive red British Aerospace Hawk aircraft were being towed out, one by one, from the hangar onto the line ready for the day’s activities. My gaze roamed anti-clockwise past another vast aircraft parking area in front of 1 and 2 Hangars known as Echo Dispersal, allegedly haunted by Gibson’s black Labrador dog or a close relative depending upon which story you listened to. Jet Provost aircraft were being readied on Echo Dispersal for the day’s flying programme. Across the airfield straight ahead beyond Echo was the escarpment known as the Lincoln Cliff, invisible from ground level. That was the direction the bombers of 617 Squadron had taken on that fateful night of 15 May 1943 and there right in front of me was the very grass from which they had taken off – long before the concrete runways had been constructed. In fact Scampton airfield goes back almost 30 years before the Dam Busters were formed.

Back to the top