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Part one of an edited oral history interview with Mr. Robert Charles Stevens about his wartime experiences in the RAF. The interview was conducted by Jenny Ford on behalf of Bedford Museum.

“I was 17 when war was declared in 1939 and I lived in a little village called Redford near Midhurst in Sussex. I worked for a firm of seedsmen, nurserymen, fruiters and florists, Goldring and Sons. I was van driving and my job was to deliver to the different customers and they were very, very busy, especially with wreaths. They used to make a lot of wreaths, yes the daughter of the firm used to make a lot of wreaths. I understand that they were training a man up to assist Mr. Churchill with his responsibilities, his name was Captain Ewing Wallace and he had brain trouble and died - I’ve never seen so many beautiful wreaths in my life.

Before that I was making chestnut fencing, barrel hoops and cutting walking sticks at 6d a gross, oh all sorts of things — spars for thatching. But as I say I gave that up because it was ‘Reserved’ and I couldn’t join up unless I changed my job. I wanted to join up so I volunteered and they sent me all the way from Sussex to Cardington and they said, ‘Be prepared to stay, they might want you for immediate service’. But anyway they didn’t and they sent me all the way back home and then they called me up in July 1941 and I went to Arbroath in Scotland to do my initial training. It was so cold on the coast and in July we were doing our square bashing in our greatcoats.

Six weeks later they asked us where we’d like to go and I said, ‘Well, Ford, near to my home I’d like to go back to Ford in Sussex’. When we got back to Ford we were in Nissen huts. They sent me back there and that’s where I volunteered to go abroad. Because I volunteered almost straight away to go abroad and it wasn’t long, well I was very quickly put on a draught and sent back home — I’m trying to think where I went from. It was up north again - I did a lot of travelling for nothing! I had some embarkation leave. And I had a letter from a mate of mine who has since died, he never got my reply letter - saying how he remembers me going on leave and getting blind drunk before falling into a ditch of water and blacking my eye! They got me back home at 2 o’clock in the morning. That was my embarkation leave!

You get together as a crowd and I don’t know somehow you make friends differently — under the circumstances and you just take things as they come. You don’t think of what’s going on in advance. We embarked and the voyage wasn’t all that long. Well actually we had to go round the Cape of Good Hope and it was very rough, I know. It looked as if, if you looked at the rest of the convoy, it looked as though the ships were slipping back off the waves. Then we went up the Suez to Palestine and that’s where we re-formed. Actually we went up the Canal on the New Amsterdam, the Dutch Blue Ribbon liner but that only went from Durban because our ship that took us out dropped us at Durban and then we changed over and that was doing the trip up and down the Canal.

We stayed there and re-formed the Squadron. It was the old ‘Faith, Hope and Charity’ Squadron and it had been disbanded and the only thing that there was left of the old Squadron were the Pilots. They had the wartime boys that went in on - they brought - I don’t know where they brought the Pilots in from and they closed No.4 Flying Training School at Abanya and together the whole lot re-formed as 261 Squadron.

I don’t know what happened to the Pilots. And as I say I didn’t even go on the aircraft carrier, HMS Indomitable, they put the aeroplanes on in crates. I went on an ordinary ship but apparently - well they must have been on I suppose because they would have to be on there to fly them off or otherwise they were winched on and flew them off and in. But the tradesmen went on and assembled them because they were all brand new in crates and flew them off the other end at Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).

We were still land based near Haifa and then they sent up a ship to take us over, quite an old one actually. We were just there long enough to get the amount of personnel they needed to form the Squadron and once they’d got them together, I can’t remember how many, couple or three weeks at the most. We got off at Colombo and then went up by rail to Trincomalee, to the base called China Bay. We had our tropical gear but it’s not always hot out there I mean you do have cold periods but as far as I can remember but you haven’t got time to think really. I mean we got there and they put us on the train and we went from one place to the other and we just got settled in. That was in March 1942 when we got there. We’d got bamboo what we used to call Bashas out there but they are like huts, bamboo huts. We’d had several injections and of course we were all on quinine tables for malaria when we got out there. And they used to tell you out there, whatever you do when you do your boots up do them up over and over. Because if you go anywhere near where the Gurkhas where they used crawl around low down and they’d feel your boots, the Japanese did them cross and if you didn’t do over and over they might just as likely cut your head off, they don’t ask questions!

We were settled in at the base in China Bay, 261 Squadron, Hurricanes. We had 110 aeroplanes and they were split into two flights - ‘A’ and ‘B’ Flights. It was Easter weekend, April 1942, we were on Stand-By waiting because they knew the Japanese were coming and so we were just on Stand-By waiting for them to come. I was just coming back from breakfast in the morning (5th April 1942) when they eventually got there and I did the most stupid thing, I jumped into a concrete ditch. If a bomb had gone in a concrete ditch I would have had the blast, wouldn’t I? But I never thought at the time. There’d be more than 50 planes because the others were at Colombo. We hadn’t been there really long enough to know what was going on. The higher ups would know of course but no, I didn’t even know the RAF Regiment was there at China Bay, that was what Fred (a neighbour) was in. I rang him up when the aeroplanes went into the Twin Towers and I said, ‘Fred, where did your mind go this morning?’ and he said, ‘China Bay!’ and I said, ‘yes, so did mine!’ because very few people had seen kamikaze Pilots.

It was all over very quickly. We still carried on at ‘Readiness’ and waiting in case anything happened and they came back again. But as I say since I read that article they were waiting for them and he gave up and just back home with the fleet. But we didn’t know that, we knew we’d done our job and stopped them from coming in because apparently their idea was to come in and get a foothold in Ceylon and then go up through India and meet up with the other troops in Burma. Good job we got there when we - we only just made it!

I was actually working on the planes all the time to keep them up 100%. And you’ve got at least half the Squadron on Immediate Stand-By, they can get off in seconds, the Pilots are sleeping there under the planes or whatever they are doing and the others can get there in minutes. But they did actually take us by surprise and they did cause quite a bit of damage, we did lose some planes and Pilots. One was a very silly man but I suppose you don’t think at the time. He was the Flight Commander and he came down to re-fuel his plane, jumped out and left it to be re-fuelled and went across the airfield and as the Japanese came over he pulled out his revolver and fired at them. Well of course he couldn’t have done anything worse, they just turned round and shot him. I don’t know how many people we lost or how many planes we lost. (The RAF suffered 50% losses against the Japanese. From ‘Atlas of World War II’ by David Jordan and Andrew Wiest, p.189). But I don’t think we lost many Pilots at all.�

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