Retirement looms - Tony Cunnane's Life and Times

Written in September 1999

As my 64th birthday was approaching, I started reminding the Red Arrows' Team Leader and my Line Manager that the time was fast approaching when they ought to start considering my replacement. I'd not anticipated they would have any difficulty in replacing me, I wasn't that indispensable, but I thought they should be made aware of the various options and have time to consider them. I could, of course, have been replaced by another RAF Retired Officer (RO) and, had I done nothing to prompt consideration of who my successor should be, I imagine that an RO would have been appointed. I knew of a couple of officers, one still serving but about to become an RO and another already an RO, who were keen on taking over from me.

Retired Officers like me, were administered by a special department at the MoD and the standing instructions were that ROs approaching final retirement, were supposed to protect their appointments by ensuring that job specifications were written, and if necessary re-written, in such a way that the posts could only be filled by retired officers. A bit of a closed shop really! I had always been clear in my own mind that I would not get involved in such a restrictive practice. It may sound pompous and sanctimonious but throughout my long RAF career I had always believed that if job specifications were to be of any value they should be properly drawn up. The right and proper way of going about it was to decide what the job entailed, then write the specification to reflect the requirements and only then decide what manner of person would be best fitted for the job. That was something else that Wing Commander Clutcher Sutton had taught me back in 1962 when I was Adjutant on his squadron.

I may be thought ungrateful, and I often felt rather ungrateful when considering other options, but I had gradually come around to the view that the best sort of person to be the Red Arrows’ PRO in the new millennium, which of course really starts not on 1 January 2000 but on 1 January 2001 as we had been taught at school 50 years earlier, was someone who was professionally qualified in media work. Regularly I used to joke with Team members that my replacement should be young, pretty and female. The fact is that in my last couple of years or so the had job changed out of all recognition and I, even I, found it difficult to accept the changes. Instead of simply getting on with issuing a news release telling the media what we wanted to tell them, now before writing the release or offering a facility to the media we first had to define the message that we were trying to put across. Is it a ‘force for good’, or is it ‘aid to the community’, or the ‘RAF defending UK interests’ or some other esoteric objective? I was no longer a Public Relations Officer (PRO): I was a Corporate Communications Officer (CCO) and everything we CCOs planned to do had to be ‘on message’ and capable of slotting into a neat pigeon hole. If I wanted to invite my local media to come and meet the new pilots, as I had done at the start of every new training season for 11 years, I was supposed to consider what the message was that I was endeavouring to put across.  To my simple mind the message was that I was introducing the new pilots to the public – and the media certainly never needed any further inducement to turn up.

Continued here