From Jamaica to Britain; fighting for the mother country in the Second World War

As part of my continued research (i.e. academic reading) I have come across several accounts detailing the experiences of civilians and soldiers fighting on both sides during the Second World War. In a book I have previously mentioned, Forgotten Voices of the Blitz and the Battle for Britain edited by Joshua Levine and taken from the oral archive at the Imperial War Museum, I have come across the following account of one Jamaican’s trip across the Atlantic to fight for Britain, the ‘mother country’, in the RAF. I think this is such an amazing story, it almost reads as the plot outline for a film.

The Jamaican RAF pilot in question is one Flight Lieutenant William Strachan of the 99 Squadron, and here is his story. I hope you enjoy.

We had heard these requests on the radio in Jamaica, coming from Britain, speaking to their large family overseas that they should help to defend the Crown against the German invaders. I’m an 18-year-old, just left school and I had the ambition of getting into the RAF – but it was difficult. The British army were still in Jamaica so I went down with a friend to see them and I told them they I wanted to join the air force. We had difficulty getting past the guard but they sent us for a medical and we were both passed fit. ‘Right, we want to join’, we said, ‘will you send us to England?’ We were laughed out. ‘You find your own way there!’ they said.

I knew if I’d gone to my father and said, ‘I want to go to England’, he’d have completely squashed the idea. As conservative as he was, he inherently suspected Britain and I knew he wouldn’t support the idea.

Wartime rules had been brought in that nobody could leave the island unless they had didn’t owe the government any income tax and didn’t have a criminal record. Because I was 18, just left school, I had no income and no criminal record so that was no problem. Still, how was I going to travel? I had no money so I went round all the shipping companies -  they were all run by Englishmen, white men – and I said, ‘Can you give me free passage to England?’ I’d been listening to the propaganda on the radio sating how everybody was loyal to the crown but none of them were interested until I went to Jamaica Fruit Shipping Company, major shippers of bananas to Britain. They had a number of boars coming out from Britain with middle-class white people who were fleeing from the war to the colonies for safe haven and I was able to persuade the management to take me. Nobody was going from the Caribbean to Britain but they told me that I might have to pay for it. The full price was about £45 and i paid £15. I didn’t have that so I had to sell my bicycle and my saxophone and I got about £17 for them. So I got on a ship and left Jamaica with £2 10s in my possession and a small case with one change of clothes. That’s how I came to Britain.

On this ship – a vast luxury passenger ship – I was the only passenger. I was given a first-class cabin which was rather fortunate, right next to the captain, but that was for their convenience, to save opening up lot of the cabins and having cleaners and things. I ate with the captain which was regarded as quite an honour in those days. Normally those ships would have deck quoits and swimming pools, but those facilities weren’t opened up so I spent my time smashing tin cans, saving metal for the war effort. The trip usually took just over two weeks in those days but it took a month because they had to do the zigzag route because of the U-boats in the Atlantic. We arrived at Bristol. I remember the train station. A porter came towards me in his uniform. ‘Your case, sir,’ he said and I saluted him. I thought he was a bloody admiral in his uniform. I didn’t dare thing that he would take my case. ‘No, sir!’ I said.

I got on the train to Paddington. The ticket was about thirty shillings and wartime England was dark. There was a blackout. The only place I’d heard of to stay was the YMCA on Tottenham Court Road – every West Indian that I’d ever met seemed to go there – so I took a taxi from Paddington, spending six shillings out of my fifteen. It was Saturday night, wartime, places were boarded up, wardens and Local Defence Volunteers walking round the place. I was so tired I went to bed. Come the Sunday morning, I went across to the YWCA to meet some people there. I met a lady there who was a Jewish refugee. It was the first I’d heard about these things from Germany. I went out with her for the Sunday evening and she told me what she was fleeing from and all that sort of thing.

On Monday morning, how do I get into the RAF? I’ve got no money, no connections, nobody. After great difficulty I found that the Air Ministry was at a place called Adastral House which was at the foot of Aldwych. So I went along to Adastral House and I spoke to the guard who I now know was a corporal. I said to him, ‘I want to join the air force.’ I’ll never forget this. He said to me, ‘Piss off.’ Here am I dressed in rather lightweight colonial stuff in March – I think he thought I was drunk or a lunatic. I persisted and as he tried to get away, a sergeant came along, and asked what was going on and I tried to tell him. He said ‘You don’t join the air force here, you’re trying to take the mickey out of us! This is the head office of the Air Ministry!’ But in my logic at that period, where else do you join the air force but at the Air Ministry? I didn’t even know about recruiting stations. So I persisted in my arguments with this sergeant and he said, ‘Where do you come from?’ and I  said, ‘Kingston.’ He said, ‘There’s a recruiting station at Kingston down in Surrey,’ and I said, ‘I don’t come from Surrey! I come from Jamaica!’ He didn’t know where Jamaica was. As he stood there quite mystified, a Hooray Henry type young officer came past and heard the argument. He said, ‘Oh you’re from Jamaica. One of our colonial friends. Welcome! I did geography at university and I’ve always been impressed with you West Africans. Come in!’ And this to his supreme ignorance I was dragged in. This bloke was a pilot officer, the lowest officer but he was above the sergeant. And thanks to his intervention, he took me in and I was taken up and saw a much higher rank, a flight lieutenant. I had to go through this story in much more detail and he really satisfied himself of its truth. And then they sent me for a medical at Euston.

I went there in the afternoon. I was told to stand in a room, ‘Get all your clothes off because you’re going to be medically examined.’ I was shivering and freezing. I’d only been in England for 48 hours. They examined me and found me fully fit. The doctor said, ‘Right now you can go home and we’ll call you up when we can take you in.’ I had to explain that I had no money and going home was very difficult. That took another period of argument but by about nine or ten o’clock I was on the train to Blackpool recruiting unit. I’d managed to break all regulations – to get recruited after 48 hours in this bloody country. I was joined up in 4 Elementary Flying Training School. On the Tuesday morning, I was in the RAF, in uniform, kitted out, in a group of 50 strange Englishmen. I was the only coloured person from the colonies. I was very proud of what I’d achieved.

And then these English people said, ‘You’re mad! You’re a bloody fool! If we’d been in Jamaica, we’d still be there now! What an idiot!’ It destroyed all my ideals of what I believed the whole thing was about. I was so proud of what I’d achieved and they said, ‘We’d do anything to get away from the bloody war and you say you come all this way and you tell us that story.’ They thought it was completely weird.

The corporal in charge of us was an ex-Bertram Mills clown. He was extremely gymnastic and fit and he looked at us in the traditional way a corporal looks at a bunch of new recruits and he said, ‘Now I want you all running on the spot.’ These blokes creaked into action. And then he looked at me and said, ‘Right, I’m making  you my deputy. Darkie, come over here!’ I’d never been called ‘darkie’ in my life before. I was shattered because it was a term of contempt. He said, ‘Darkie, you are in charge of the squad!’ I had conflict in my minds. I was annoyed I was called ‘darkie’ but my chest swelled out because I was regarded as a man fit to be promoted, second airman in the RAF.

We should never forget all those who fought against and died as a result of fascism during the first half of the twentifth century and we should never forget what they were fighting against and what they were fighting for. Remember to support the troops even if you don’t support the war.

Is that a cow?

So today I gowned a green paper suit, put around 5 bucket loads of disinfectant on my boots and was told that I should behave because I am representing the government. That’s right. I went on a farm visit.

I could talk about my professional feelings towards the visit- but that is best kept for when I am at work behind my desk. Instead I would just like to say a few things from my own personal standpoint. [Note, these are not the views of RPA, Defra or HM Government :@].

I firstly would like to say I really enjoyed the trip. I gained valuable insights into agriculture that you just can not appreciate when you are stuck behind a desk reading about EU subsidies!

Part of the trip meant we were able to see the lifecycle of the milking process (the farming side of the farm we went to had a rather large daily element). We started off by viewing some Heifers and other pregnant cows. Before I carry on I would like to say that the farm manager who was showing us around explained to us that everything is consumer driven, he also explained that for the majority of farms in the UK, animal health and wellbeing is of utmost importance, firstly because the supermarkets have strict standards (consumer demand…) and secondly because of regulations placed upon farms to abide by strict animal health procedures with the penalty of non-compliance a reduction in subsidy payment.

Anyway, back to the pregnant Heifers. As the farm primarily dealt with producing milk as this was most profitable for them (but not very) then females cows were important to them. The life of a female cow ranges from growing up (year) to pregnancy (artificial insemination or from a suitable bull if AI is unsuccessful), then when the calf is born after a few weeks it is taken away, this female cow then goes into producing milk- which is collected, after a few months the female is impregnated again, starting the whole cycle over again. One cycle occurs between every 1 and a half to 2 years and each female cow goes through around 3 or 4 cycles (depending on the cow and this is specific to this farm) through it’s life (even though cows can live to around 15).

When the Heifer/female cow has given birth the fate of the calf is dependant upon its sex (and if there are any diseases).  Female calves are obviously starting life in the milking cycle. Male calves are dependent on two things. The first is whether there is enough meat on them at birth. If it is possible to tell in the early stages of life that this calf will grow big and strong then it is sold on in market for consideration for the dinner plate. Weaker looking calves essentially have no purpose in the milk or food chain. In some circumstances they are put down because economically they have no use. However, this farm does note that there is a moral side and it is not all about economics. They are therefore more reluctant to kill the calf straight off and are likely to try and sell these calves on albeit at a very low price. Within this context we were taken to see such calves, some of which were only 4 days old, others 10 weeks old. We were told that this is the side of things consumers tend to miss when they buy or demand cheap milk. If you want your milk cheap then only the most productive animal is of economic use, those with no economic benefit are essentially useless.

We were taken to the main housing shed for the cows. This was a large open area, regularly cleaned- in fact it was being cleaned while we were there. It was not overcrowded and there was plenty of room for the cows to move and over the course of an hour I watched as cows had the freedom of movement of the length of the shed.

Finally on our trip we were taken to two different fields so we could assess things such as set-aside land, arable land, environmental stewardship and cross compliance (good agricultural and environmental condition). It should be pointed out that farmers only get subsidy payments without penalty if they keep their land in good environmental condition; there are also extra subsidy payments available for farmers who take part in environmental schemes such as countryside stewardship and planting hedgerows (for example). One of the amazing things that occurred to me was that the first field we were taken to was around 5 and a half hectares. Everyday at work I come across farmers who have fields about 5 times the size of this (and this is only one of their fields/parcels!).  But I thought this field I was in was huge. It made me appreciate how much land some farmers had (this is not the case when it comes to tenant farmers of course). Anyway, the farm manager explained that a lot of the field around Berkshire is of poor soil quality but one of the most popular crops to grow in this soil is corn. This is not the kind of corn that you have a dash of butter on top for dinner. No. The main purpose of this corn was to feed animals- such as those cows on his farm. Now I have heard of the statistic that around 60% of grown food crops in America go towards feeding animals involved in diary/meat farming,but you don’t appreciate how many crops are grown just for animal feed. I only started appreciating this whilst standing in the middle of a 5 hectare field.

I have to admit that despite being a vegetarian on moral and ethical grounds I now feel even guiltier for not being a vegan. It appears that it is pointless to say you will become vegetarian because you disagree with treatment of animals or the effect upon the environment that animal farming causes. If you were really serious about these issues then you’d become a vegan. But can I make this step? Vegetarianism is really easy for me; I have not been tempted to try meat once in over 2 years. But soya milk? I don’t know :-S

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There are two other points I picked up from the visit. Apparently, there are farms (rather big ones) who are still being screwed over by the larger supermarkets. This is because a contract can be made between the farmer and supermarket, the farmer will then fulfil his side of the agreement but then the supermarket turn around and say “Great, but we are going to pay you £15,000 less”. The farmer has no power in these circumstances. Of course what the supermarket is doing is illegal and of course the farmer does have the National Farmers Union to go to, but then that farmer will lose that supermarket’s contract. Therefore the farmer has no choice but to accept the new terms imposed by the supermarket.

This is not the first time I have seen this kind of undercutting. When I worked on building sites the way things are generally done is that the main builders will contract out jobs to other companies’ i.e. electrical work, plumbing etc. These companies will bid for the work; the lowest price for the quickest work plan will win. However, for a few of the electrical companies I have worked for after they had won the contract and signed the deal the builder has turned around and have said that the electrical company will need to cut their price by 5%. The electrical company (depending on its size) will not walk away because it needs that contract. Therefore two things happen. The first is that the quality of materials used will fall because money is tighter. This may not sound like a lot but the quality of the material can severely affect the quality and speed of the work. Secondly, and most importantly, the wages on offer falls. Most companies do things on price. This means that there is no fixed wage but the amount you take home at the end of the week depends on the work you do. The theory is that the incentive to you is to work quicker and faster in order to make more money. However if after you start working for the builders they ask you to lower your price then you can see situations where a first fix (putting in all the wires and cables whilst the house is being built- a second fix is when the walls and ceilings are up and you put the covers on switches etc) originally was say £500 and took 3 days to do, would now be £450 but still take 3 days to do, or because the quality of the materials falls can take 3 and a half days.

I’m digressing.

The final point I was pondering from my visit was the future of farming in England. We were told that the average age of a farmer was 59/60. We were told that there is a high illiteracy rate amongst farmers and many still didn’t (and refused) to have the internet. Some farms apparently are still running without electricity. Regardless of all this there are enormous pressures placed upon the farming community when it comes to inspections and paper work. A lot of farmers who went into farming straight from school years ago went into an industry that was purely manually based. Now because of the pressures imposed by the capitalist model and especially supermarkets, many farmers are hardly making a profit. The more efficient farms turn out to be those that are bigger. These bigger farms are able to claim bigger subsidy as well (SPS is based on potential land that can be used- the more you have the more money you get).

In the context of the average age of farmers, their illiteracy and the idea of it being purely manual labour, the pressures placed upon smaller farms in terms of the bureaucracy involved with farming (not all bad in terms of environmental care, animal health and food quality) means that many of these farmers may not get the full subsidy they are entitled to because they don’t fill out the relevant forms or make a mistake. On top of all this you have to remember that for a variety of reasons there is not an influx of younger farmers in the industry. Younger farmers would be more open to technology and bureaucracy because that is what the more recent generations have grown up with. But farming is not attractive to a huge majority of youngsters, even to those from a farming background because there is not enough money in it for the amount of work you have to put in.

Therefore could the future of farming be a few large companies? This would be of serious detriment to tradition and raise the entry levels for new farmers, but on the flipside larger farms can employ people to deal with the bureaucracy and then employ people to work on the farm. Could this help save farming? It would provide well paid farming jobs, but then what would be the result of this? Would animal health go down? Well larger farms would be able to experiment with new techniques and use the newest technology. They would also continue to be at the mercy of government regulation which ensures quality. The bad taste left in the mouths of the ethical consumer when it comes to market dominance of companies such as Tescos and Primark may not necessarily reflect if the same was to happen to farming. With Primark for example, they buy their clothes from a producer, they do not operate at the bottom of the chain, only buy from it. Farming would essentially be at the bottom of the chain- control this and you control the quality of the chain (in theory).

The idea of a larger more monopolised farming industry would still create problems. If one company was to collapse this would have a huge impact upon food prices and supply- this would be the same if these companies started demanding more for their product (because there is less competition)- food prices would go up. Finally there is still the problem of entry into the farming industry being higher and those small independent farmers whose families have been farming for generations will be wiped out- do we really want to do this?

The Battle of Britain (1940)

The Battle of Britain was ‘won’ by Britain due to a few interdependable factors.

The first was Britain’s eye in the sky, RDF (Radio Direction Finding), or what the Americanised English language describes as Radar. RDF was a fantastic defensive weapon during the war as it allowed Britain to keep an eye on what Luftwaffe squadrons were doing over the sea and what direction they were taking (once German planes made it mainland RDF was less effective and instead the British eye in the sky relied people on the ground to report enemy movements) this help Britain plan for enemy attack and mobilise a more effective defence.

The second was the coupling of the Spitfire and the Hurricane planes. The Spitfire was used primarily as a nimble fighter plane against the Luftwaffe’s other fighter planes. The Hurricane was used effectively against the German bombers as it wasn’t as effective as the Spitfire at fighting German fighters.

These two factors were at the route of Goering’s two biggest mistakes when tactically planning the German attack.

One; Goering was encouraged to attack the RDF stations- it should be noted that although the German’s had a vague idea of the existence of RDF and it’s use, there existence was still not wholly accepted as plausible by German leaders. For a short period in 1940 the Luftwaffe attacked these stations however, destroying some such as the one on Ventnor (Isle of Wight) and putting them out of commission for days, weeks at a time. To counter this in some cases, such as at Angmering  Park, where a RDF was completely wiped out a MB1 transmitter was set up that sent the same signal as the RDF into the air leading the Germans to think that hadn’t knocked the RDF out.

As Goering felt that it was pointless attacking what he saw as small defensive units and with the apparent ineffectiveness of knocking many of these of the map, it was decided to ignore these RDF stations (not fully understanding their importance to Britain) and again fully focus on the destruction of the RAF.

Two; Goering wanted the German fighter planes (such as the Messerschmitt 109 and Messerschmitt 110) to protect the bombers (Heinkel 111’s and Junkers 88 for example). To do this the aim was to reduce the fighter’s speeds to that of the bombers to keep them as one tight unit. Bombers were susceptible to British attacks because of the Hurricane’s greater speed and manoeuvrability over them. This limited the effectiveness of the German fighters who were themselves more susceptible to attacks from Spitfires because they were told to fly at reduced speeds and which gave the Spitfire the edge in ambushing them.

There are of course other factors leading to the British ‘victory’. For example, the aim of the German attack was to wipe out Fighter Command and the RAF. If this was done then invasion would be made possible as the Germans would have had a clear path (baring the Royal Navy) across the Channel. However, instead of putting hundreds of RAF planes into the air at a time, it was decided by Hugh Dowding, commander of RAF Fighter Command, to only send small batches of planes in the air. Thus situations occurred where there were 4-20 British planes against 200+ German planes.  This allowed a continuous flow of British planes to be able to take off into the air at any one time- aiding defense. It also helped lower the number of downed British planes and allowed a more robust yet jagged machine line flow of new planes to come out of manufacture to easily replace the downed planes.

Regardless, towards the end of the Battle of Britain the RAF was in dire straits. The Luftwaffe attack on the airfields made many redundant and the inexperience of new fighter pilots was taking its toll. If the Germans continued the war in the air then they would had wiped out the RAF. However- and there are several stories as to why this occurred ranging from Churchill becoming more ruthless and sacrificing huge chunks of the population in major British cities, to a lone Junker 88 dropping a few desperate bombs on London – the Battle of Britain ended the moment the RAF bombed Berlin. This led Hitler to counter attack by moving the focus of Luftwaffe attack from the airfields and to the major population centres- like London. What followed had such a huge cost and effect upon the civilian population and city infrastructure, but in reality it saved Britain from what seemed inevitable invasion.

Historical readings from today… and the death penalty

Today I started my preliminary reading for my Master’s dissertation, my chosen topic; to what extent did the Second World War help develop a notion of Britishness (throw into that the question of race during early 1940’s Britain). So the first book I pick up to read is: Forgotten Voices, stories of the Blitz and Battle of Britain. The Forgotten Voice’s series is a fantastic couple of books that take oral testimonies of those who fought or lived in the war and put’s them into chronological order without historical analysis (well, this point can be debated as only extracts of oral testimonies are selected and it could be argued that the author only selected those testimonies that can be moulded around his own view point).

The point of my reading (not just out of interest) was to try to piece together some ideas of what British people during the war thought of their country and some common characteristics of national culture during the war. I have already done some reading into this- Paul Ward and Britishness since 1860 where he claims many West Indians who fought in the British army called their post-war children Winston out of patriotic support. Also Tom Harrisson’s Mass Observation archive has bought up such classics as ‘I don’t consider myself British, [I consider the Scots and Welsh as a different race] but I would die to defend Britain [and my Scottish, Welsh neighbours]‘.

From my brief reading I have discovered that the whole British identity could be summarised by two things: tea (that old Chinese import) and common decency. One story talks about how during the blitz a father lost his child through decapitation, he held his child’s body stroking it and saying ‘So this is how you went, Jimmy’, he then got up and thanked a stranger on the street for handing him a mug of tea. More obscure forms of common decency came during the vacation of Dunkirk. One example is that many French and British soldiers were shot by their own side, without hesitation, because they tried to barge into the queues for the boats (that’s right, during the evacuation of Dunkirk when the German’s were bombarding the troops you were expected to form an orderly queue while waiting to get onto a boat and in some cases wear full clean uniform and have a shave).

Digressing from my reading, some thoughts on the death penalty came into my mind today. I would like to point out first that I do lose a lot of respect for people when they make the uneducated statement that we should bring back the death penalty, even if it were for only the most serious of crimes. These thoughts centred around the obvious- if the death penalty were a deterrent then why are crimes still committed in places that still have the death penalty. Then onto the notion that if the death penalty were the most righteous form of justice, then why do some killers kill themselves before they are caught? As a matter of fact- why did Hitler kill himself before he was caught, even though the Allies would had killed him in the end anyway? Are the majority of these people acting through the will of remorse, regret and justice? I think not.