Tony Cunnane's RAF Years

The official badge of RAF Scampton incorporates the diversion of the A15 Roman Road, Ermine Street, in heraldic form. The arrow denotes the direction of the main runway (approximately North East-South West); the bowstring denotes the old A15 road, once dead straight from the City of Lincoln northwards to the Humber Estuary, while the curved bow denotes the new curve in the A15 constructed in the mid-1950s. The motto Armatus non Lacessitur is translated as "An armed man is not attacked" and was very appropriate for the squadrons of Vulcan V Bombers which were based at Scampton from the late 1950s until the last day of 1981.

Only a few days after taking up my appointment as Public Relations Officer for RAF Scampton and the Red Arrows in September 1989 I came across a rusty, battered filing cabinet that had been put outside the building ready to be taken to the tip as rubbish. The cabinet drawers were badly damaged and the hinges broken but being a curious person I looked inside and found a collection of loose and decidedly grotty papers at the bottom which I liberated and took to my new office. Many of the papers comprised notes on the station's history compiled by Flight Lieutenant C G Jefford but I have never been able to locate him to ask him about the papers. There was even a complete but badly-faded Roneo'd and unsigned copy of the Top Secret Operation Order for the Dam Busters' Raid of 1943: HQ No 5 Group Operation Order B.976. The typist had classified it MOST SECRET but the pages had been over-stamped TOP SECRET (see the top image on the right) because about this time the RAF had adopted the US classification nomenclature to avoid confusing our Allies! It seemed to me that the cabinet and contents were probably leftovers from when the Vulcans departed from Scampton at the start of 1983 and the station temporarily went into Care and Maintenance (aka closed down).

Click on the image below to pop up a readable version of part of the first page of the Operation Order.

Click here to pop up part of the page used by the Scampton operations staff to record the crews as they returned (or failed to return) from the raid

In subsequent weeks I compiled a brief history of Scampton from the station's earliest days making use of some of the material I had found in the old filing cabinet. In 1990 I visited the RAF's Air Historical Branch (AHB) in London but I was really surprised how very little information there was about RAF Scampton - indeed the staff there were most grateful to accept a copy of the history I had written. During my time at Scampton I gathered historical material from many other sources and wrote several Scampton history publicity articles for a variety of events - including the Save Our Scampton Campaign waged by the Lincolnshire Echo in the mid-1990s. I also sent copies of the history to any member of the public who wrote in asking about the Station's history (and that was a lot).

I find parts of my many articles about Scampton and the Red Arrows keep cropping up in a wide variety of media outlets, even Wikipedia. I know they are my words because often they have been copied word for word, but I don't mind that.