A View from the Wings E-Book

Colin Cruddas

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Many books have been produced which detail the lives and thoughts of famous individuals. A View from the Wings is unique, recalling a wartime boyhood in which aircraft flying constantly overhead played a large part. This experience led to a lifetime career in the aviation industry both in the UK and overseas such as the US and South Africa. Mixed with events of a more personal nature often coated with whimsical humour, the author has evocatively captured the rise and demise of Britain's aircraft industry in the post-war period. In setting out to be non-technical, A View from the Wings will appeal to those whose memories embrace the sound barrier-breaking years and the leap of faith and technology that saw Concorde defeat the Americans in the race to produce a practical supersonic airliner. All too often political procurement and technical failures have made for dramatic headlines and these too are subjected to much critical comments. Think of the critically acclaimed Empire of the Clouds (Faber and Faber, 2010), but instead of a boyhood observer, the author was an active part of the British aviation industry in its former prime and eventual implosion.

Leseprobe

The author’s arrival at the Fairey Company coincided with this style of early 1950s advertising. (Fairey Archive)

CONTENTS

Title Page

Foreword

Acknowledgements & Dedication

Introduction

1 ‘Brid Kid’ Beginnings

2 Youthful Pursuits

3 Fairey Tales

4 ‘Eyes Right That Airman’

5 Post-National Service: Reality Awaits

6 Brough Encounter

7 ‘Where You Folks Awl From – Austroylia?’

8 Welcome to the Golden State

9 The Supersonic Dream Machine

10 Needed But Not Wanted

11 ‘Flights’

12 Life in the Old Dog Yet

Postscript

Appendix I

Appendix II

Author’s Note

Copyright

FOREWORD

By Sir Michael Knight KCB AFC FRAeS

This is a very readable and remarkably detailed account of the author’s life and career in the aerospace industry, where he plied his trade in the UK, USA, South Africa and, from time to time, even further afield. A proud Yorkshire lad, he was born and brought up in Bridlington – not a place generally associated with aviation but which certainly saw its share of the action, both ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’, during the Second World War; and which, clearly, was then a happy hunting ground for a young and enquiring adolescent. And it was this which, perhaps inevitably, played a key part in inspiring the young Cruddas to embark on what was to become a lifetime in and around his chosen profession. Entering the aircraft industrial scene as an 18-year-old trainee draughtsman with the Fairey Aviation Company, his burgeoning career later took him to the Blackburn (Hawker Siddeley), Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, British Aircraft Corporation and Atlas companies, before his final return to the UK with Flight Refuelling Limited. It was in the latter post that a major health problem brought an early retirement but also, in due course, a second career as the successful author of a range of books on the history and development of aviation in Britain. His long and varied engineering and administrative experience on a wide variety of aircraft, from Gannet to Concorde and beyond, makes this a fascinating volume – particularly for those with an interest in the last sixty or so turbulent years of a great British industry.

In this, his first autobiographical work, the author writes well in a style which manages to balance a wealth of technical detail with many humorous and engagingly self-deprecating anecdotes. A very good read indeed!

Michael Knight

Fairey Aviation displays its latest asset at the Society of British Aircraft Constructors exhibition at Farnborough in 1952. The Firefly looks pretty good as well!

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS & DEDICATION

What follows required an energetic spring clean of my memory department, along with a fair amount of supporting research. There have, however, been many areas where I have needed to sharpen up on detail and I have been extremely fortunate in being able to call up ‘air support’ from several long-term and new-found friends. Accordingly, my most sincere thanks go to Aimee and Harry Alexander (Poole Flying Boats Celebration), Ken Baillie (ex-Fairey Aviation and British Aircraft Corporation colleague), Roger Bellamy (ex-RAF Old Sarum colleague), Paul Bright (Yorkshire aviation author), Dudley Dobson (ex-East Lancashire Coachbuilding Company and contemporary apprentice), Brian Gardner (aviation author and historian), Colin van Geffen (aviation author, artist and Fawley historian), David Gibbings (ex-Fairey Aviation and AgustaWestland archivist and author), Bryan Hope (ex-Fairey Aviation and drawing office school colleague), Squadron Leader Tony Iveson DFC (ex–617 Squadron and vice president of the Bomber Command Association), David Neave (University of Hull and Bridlington historian and author), Norman Parker (ex-Vickers Armstrong, Fairey Aviation and aviation historian), Mike Phipp (Bournemouth Airport historian and aviation author), Ted Talbot (ex-British Aircraft Corporation colleague and aviation author), the late Terry Waddington (ex-Blackburn Aircraft, McDonnell Douglas Aircraft historian, aviation author and Bridlington boyhood pal) and David Wright (ex-RAF 1104 Marine Craft Unit and Bridlington boyhood pal). Whew! It’s quite a list. I wouldn’t have got far without them.

The BAE Systems Heritage Centres at both Brough (Eric Barker, Paul Lawson and Peter Hotham) and Warton (Keith Spong and Tom Clayton) have willingly provided keen co-operation in supplying photographs, for which I am most grateful.

Bridlington’s ever enthusiastic and knowledgeable historian David Mooney has played a key part in this work and deserves a very special mention for providing local material and facts that had either slipped my memory or, in many cases, I simply wasn’t aware of.

I also wish to include at this point Air Chief Marshal Sir Michael Knight KBE AFC FRAeS, who, in responding to my appeal as an ex-Cobham plc and Buccaneer Aircrew Association colleague, instantly and kindly agreed to provide a foreword to this book. (I doubt I would have made such a presumptuous request to a high-ranking officer in my National Service days, but time has now, fortunately, eased some of the protocol boundaries.)

One of the pleasures of putting together a book of this nature is the making of new contacts and friendships. Rick Phillips, incidentally the only man ever to fly a Buccaneer, XV 168, (now the gate guardian) into Brough, who kindly checked over my Fairey and Blackburn references for service accuracy, and Dave Herriot, both of the Buccaneer Aircrew Association, certainly fall into this category. So, too, do Sarah Hutchinson and her colleagues at the Bridlington Public Library and the East Riding of Yorkshire County Council for having made available pictures of The Spa in Bridlington and those showing wartime damage in the town.

In some instances I have been unable to track down the original sources of illustration material, so I do ask those people for their forgiveness. I realise how annoying and seemingly ungrateful it can be when one’s work appears elsewhere without proper accreditation, so I thank you. It almost goes without saying that The History Press, with Abbie Wood leading the production team, has done its usual highly professional job and, as on so many earlier projects, it has been my great pleasure to work with them on this volume.

Finally, hoping that I haven’t left any key contributors out, I must express deep gratitude to my wife Thelma, who has contributed to the onerous task of proofreading, and, to use her chilling phrase, ‘tightened things up’ when far higher priorities (e.g. the garden or meal preparations) arose. Our younger daughter Sally has shown immense patience when frequently bailing me out of computer glitches, mainly of my own making, and I can’t thank her enough for that.

Having now produced over a dozen or so works on specialist aviation topics, this one, I believe, is best suited for dedication to ‘the family’. So to Thelma, Helen and Sally, along with their families – Jennifer, Jonathan, Angus, Giles and Robert – and not forgetting our mothers, both called May, who after all placed us on life’s path, this is for you.

INTRODUCTION

This book is the result of persistent persuasion by our elder daughter Helen, who thinks that after a long life of largely undetected crime, mine might be a tale worth telling. Hopefully, both she and her sister Sally will be proved right, but you, dear reader, will have to be the final judge of that.

Life, we know, is full of challenges and frustrations, a fact quickly affirmed when I began searching for a suitable title. Dr Stanley Hooker, after retiring in 1984 as Rolls-Royce’s technical director, published his autobiography with the tongue-in-cheek title of Not Much of an Engineer. Everyone in the aerospace world knew that this hardly accorded with his reputation as one of Britain’s best aeronautical engineers. I, on the other hand, while admiring the cleverness of his choice, felt I could have claimed his self-effacing title with far more justification and with no false modesty whatsoever.

Thus forestalled, it was back to the drawing board for a title which adequately described my involvement with so many aerospace projects over the last half of the twentieth century. My lifetime’s technical contribution made, I admit, little serious impact on aviation’s progress, but it has been my great privilege to work alongside some highly talented engineers, designers and aircrew whose efforts certainly did provide a way forward. So, perhaps my choice of A View from the Wings best describes these career recollections, which, seasoned with some of a more general nature, should spark memories of the days when Britain had an industry that actually produced complete aeroplanes. Cricket, being my other love, has also somehow forced its way into my story.

1

‘BRID KID’ BEGINNINGS

More than sixty years ago (when this tale begins), on a grey Saturday morning in late March 1951, I set out just days after my eighteenth birthday in a belted raincoat, trilby hat perched jauntily on my head, with a student-sized T-square strapped to the side of my canvas suitcase. I was going on a steam train journey south, from Bridlington on the Yorkshire coast to Hayes in Middlesex. Here, a new life as a trainee draughtsman at the Fairey Aviation Company beckoned. A quick backward glance confirmed that my mother was watching my departure, no doubt with a misty eye from behind a barely parted curtain in the bay window of 9 St John’s Walk. Spurred on by youthful enthusiasm, my main concern at that moment was not so much with leaving home as possibly missing the train. What, one might ask, had brought about such an adventurous move?

In the post-war period, life in my home town was much dictated by one’s social circumstances; in other words, the local ‘well-to-do’ continued to do what they had always done regarding the management of local affairs. Bridlington’s town council and the trading community, ever mindful of the competition offered by Scarborough just 18 miles up the coast, were strongly determined to rebuild the town’s pre-war reputation as a wholesome family holiday resort and ideal seaside retirement centre. ‘Scarborough? Much colder up there and far too hilly for older folk’ might well have underlined ‘Bright, Breezy, Bridlington’ as the town’s favourite advertising slogan. This approach, though understandable, resulted in worthwhile employment opportunities remaining limited. An attempt in 1947 to introduce light industry appeared promising when the East Lancashire Coachbuilding Company, albeit with its major factory and headquarters over the Pennines in Blackburn, established an assembly plant on the new Bessingby Industrial Estate. But despite this progressive move, local people instinctively knew their place in what was, until the sixties, generally accepted as ‘the British way of life’. At that time, Bridlington’s fishing industry and the provision of visitor accommodation and entertainment sat comfortably alongside an agricultural community that did not want to see the town become an industrial extension of the West Riding. Most people with ‘professional’ aspirations were to be found in the same seat in the same carriage on the same early morning train to either Beverley or Hull – in all probability, much like those of today.

Goodbye to all that. St John’s Walk in Bridlington today, showing sixty years of wear and tear since I last lived there. No 9 is the fifth house from the left.

My mother, May, while possessing an amiable but reserved personality, always ensured she was suitably deferential to the ladies who patronised The Lounge restaurant and cake shop on Bridlington’s Promenade. It was there, in what was still the town’s highest-class watering hole, though struggling to recover its genteel pre-war Palm Court ambience, that she was employed as manageress and cashier for the adjoining cinema in the evening.

My mother, Edna May, c. 1950.

With grandma on Bridlington’s Esplanade in 1938.

Prior to her engagement at The Lounge she had worked at the Oberon cake shop in Queen Street, and before that at Wade’s Chapel Street shoe shop. However, it was after returning home from the Wade family’s Selby store in 1932 that May discovered she was pregnant. Not a good situation; not good at all. Marriage, she told me in a rare confiding moment years later, was not an option, though she did add that the contributing gentleman’s name was Norman Featherstone and that he was much younger. Armed with only this minimal amount of information regarding my father, I found subsequent attempts to gain further clarification either from her or from other relatives always ended with a shake of the head.

In those pre-war days, and indeed for many years after the war, a single parent condition, though by no means uncommon, was almost regarded as a hanging offence and I’m certain the guilt and sense of shame it incurred remained with my mother to the end of her days. At the time, this social impediment had little impact on me for until my early teens I was brought up to believe that May was my sister, who simply went out to work every day, and that my grandmother Alice, who looked after me with great affection, was my mother. In later years I was most surprised to find that even the famous Hollywood actor Jack Nicholson had laboured under an almost identical delusion until his adulthood. Although this caused me no emotional hang-ups, I must admit it did come as something of a shock to find at age 14, just after my grandmother’s death in 1947, that my family’s relationships were not as I had always believed. I then found it impossible – until much later in life – to call my ‘newly appointed’ birth mother anything but May. My efforts at calling her Mum always seemed awkward and I have little doubt that she had similar difficulties adjusting to her changed role.

Grandad Robert, a private in the Army Service Corps during the First World War, and grandma Alice caught in thoughtful mood.

My great-grandmother Elizabeth Anne, who died, aged 84, in 1937. She lost three sons in the First World War and her husband, Thomas Cruddas, in the influenza pandemic just after the war ended.

I might add that this arrangement would have been impossible to maintain had my grandfather, Robert, been alive. Tragically, after serving in the First World War in France, Egypt, Palestine and then France again, he, along with five others, was killed while attached to the 231st Field Ambulance Unit when a German shell struck their dugout on 30 October 1918. With the end of the war less than two weeks away, his death, following that of two of his brothers, must have been an unimaginable loss for my great-grandmother, who saw her husband die in the Spanish influenza pandemic less than a year later. The net result of this family decimation was that Alice, then living at 36 Brookland Road, was left to bring up four children – Catherine, Bobby, Harold and May – throughout the 1920s. And to complicate matters further, I arrived.

I was born on 28 February 1933 at St Oswald’s Nursing Home in Bridlington, which incidentally took place within a few hours of the burning down of the Reichstag in Berlin. Though both events were clearly momentous, my impact on the world has hardly matched that of Adolf Hitler, but I can at least boast that I have lasted considerably longer. Besides that, I think I turned out to be a much more approachable sort of chap, not given to pulling my hair out (despite constant provocation by my computer), biting the carpet or indulging in any other irritating tantrums attributed to the German leader.

My pre-war boyhood was pleasantly unremarkable with no school-related traumas that I can recall. Being a seaside resort, Bridlington had its fair share of gala events, often featuring the orchestras of Herman Darewski and Lionel Johns, whose concert nights at The Spa and the Floral Hall on the Esplanade, along with firework displays over The Spa boating lake, I can still faintly remember. Also within my pre-war recall is what I regard as my first aeronautical memory, but being only 4½ years old at the time the significance of the event literally passed over me. I had caught a very brief glimpse of the Imperial Airways Short S.23 C-Class flying boat G-ADHM Caledonia as it flew over the town as part of a Round Britain tour on 30 August 1937. My view of this aerial wonder as it flitted between the chimney pots can have lasted but a few seconds, but it formed the first never-to-be-forgotten aviation image in my young, impressionable mind.

Herman Darewski, who first appeared in Bridlington in 1936, was the first bandleader to introduce dances at The Spa that went beyond 9 p.m. It was later alleged that the Luftwaffe pilot who accurately bombed Bridlington’s railway station had been a member of Darewski’s pre-war orchestra and knew the town well. There’s gratitude for you! (The Spa: Bridlington, 2008)

Imperial Airways quickly lost a number of its Empire C Class flying boats following their introduction into service. Caledonia made a round-Britain tour, flying over Bridlington in 1937, to encourage public confidence. (Poole Flying Boat Celebration)

When war was declared in September 1939, it wasn’t long before lads of my tender vintage became aware that exciting times were now upon us. At least that was what our parents told us. Despite the issue of gas masks to everyone, public shelters appearing and walls of sandbags being formed in front of local buildings such as the schools and the town hall, life just carried on as normal. It all seemed a bit of an anticlimax and even our elders wondered what all the fuss was about. It was not until after the German advance into Western Europe in May 1940, after a truly cold winter, that things really started to heat up. Now aged 7, I made my contribution to Britain’s wartime effort by following the Wehrmacht’s advances in the Daily Express; with a bit of adult assistance I would plot the changes in the Allies’ front line with small paper flags, bearing either the swastika or a Union Jack, on a large map supplied by the newspaper. Each evening, the Ekco Bakelite-encased radio would slowly crackle into life, just in time for Alvar Liddell to sonorously announce, through the usual atmospheric crackle: ‘This is the BBC Home Service. Here is the news. Today saw German forces moving forward on a wide front …’ Such, however, was the daily rate of the Nazi advance and the British retreat to Dunkirk, that I soon became adept at moving both lines of flags back towards the French coast, just like the opening graphics of Dad’s Army.

Though usually hustled off to bed soon afterwards, I always left the bedroom door open in order to hear snatches of Tommy Handley in ITMA (It’s That Man Again) or the droll Liverpudlian comedian Rob Wilton, recounting: ‘The day war broke out, my missus said to me, what are you going to do about it?’ Another favourite was Big Bill Campbell and his Rocky Mountaineers, who were forever having their Canadian bunkhouse door blown open and then slammed shut against a snowy blizzard by some wandering artiste keen to render a song. ‘Mighty fine, mighty fine!’ Big Bill would invariably intone after each number, just before the door swooshed open again to admit the next performer who just happened to be passing by. There must have been a queue a mile long of ice-encrusted ‘strangers’ waiting to ‘jus’ drop in’. Well, at that age it all seemed real enough. However, I now imagine that Peggy, the ‘Bunkhouse Sweetheart’, raised morale as the troops let their sex-starved imaginations run riot.

As the Battle of Britain later began to rage, I patriotically ranged my Dinky Toy air force of less than a dozen Spitfires, Hurricanes and Gladiators against a handful of Whitley, Battle and Blenheim bombers, which in the absence of any corresponding German types had to serve as the enemy. My model Cierva Rota autogyro sat awkwardly in the midst of these confronting forces and then was cast aside for the remainder of the hostilities. Although at a loss to know how to accommodate this unconventional and ungainly bird into my imagined war scenarios, I later learned that a number were used to calibrate radar stations, such as those located on the nearby Bempton Cliffs and further up the coast at Staxton Wolds. Had I known this, I would willingly have included it in my air battle line-ups. Another addition to my Dinky Toy range was a Short Singapore Mk III biplane flying boat. Two of my friends, Bobby Mouncer and Lenny Aires, had the same model in their collections, so it was not unusual for the three of us to parade our silver flying boats in close formation up and down the street. It too, however, was not a type that fitted into the Britain versus Germany war game and had to be sidelined for the duration of the war. I hate to think of the price those Dinky Toy box wonders would bring today. Clearly, ‘the air’ was already beginning to occupy a large part of my imagination, further emphasised by my sitting huddled under a chair turned through 90° so that, with the chair legs parallel to the ground, I had a good approximation of a bomber’s rear four-gun turret. Not many enemy fighters escaped my withering bursts, I can tell you!

Unaware of the deeper implications of the war news, I spent many happy hours in what we called Stabler’s field behind our house with my immediate neighbouring pals, Dave Wright and Brian Berkeley, and other kids like Fatty Snowden who lived nearby. When we weren’t in the fields we were most likely playing cricket in the street, which with Victorian terraced houses on each side was very narrow. Play was interrupted every twenty minutes or so by the East Yorkshire double-decker bus passing by, but other road traffic was minimal and didn’t affect the simple ‘field placings’ of ‘get down’t street as far as thee can’. What a contrast to today’s congestion, with cars parked on both sides of the road; no room these days to swing a cat, let alone a cricket bat. Great reliance was placed on the pull shot, which supposedly despatched the ball to square leg, but in many cases catapulted it into somebody’s prized front garden. All too often it went into Miss Lester’s, a lady not noted for her tolerance of youthful behaviour, and we had to be in and out like greased lightning to retrieve the ball before she appeared, threatening to confiscate the ball.

The width of the road required anyone trying to bowl fast to run along the opposing pavement at right angles to the ‘wicket’, then stop and turn (all momentum lost, of course) to deliver a tennis ball to the batsman facing him some 12yd away. A well-delivered ‘yorker’ would often hit the facing edge of the kerb under the batsman’s feet and bounce right back across the road, to provide a dubious ‘caught and bowled’. This would be accompanied by expletives not entirely in keeping with the religious training I received each weekend at the Gospel Hall down the street. Such was the innocence of youth, I truly believed that my sawn-off relic of a bat, with the inscription ‘Len Hutton, 364, The Oval, 1938’ carved on the back, was indeed the one the Master had used to achieve his world test record score. It was one of life’s first reality checks to discover that my cherished bat, with its ‘three-springer’ handle, was just a piece of lost property found on the beach by my Uncle Harold, its late owner most probably having been a day tripper from the West Riding. (Note: a ‘three-springer’ handle was supposed to imply that if turned upside down and dropped on to a hard surface – i.e. the pavement – the bat would bounce up and down three times. Mine never made it beyond one, but back then I had a simple belief in what I was told.)

‘Bomber’ was another St John’s Walk pastime, wherein one of the kids hanging about was chosen to be a ‘pilot’ and told to run along the frontages of two adjacent houses while being pelted with tennis balls from the opposite pavement. It sounds innocuous enough, but we all had ferociously strong and accurate throws which guaranteed bruises galore on short-trousered boys’ legs. Two hits and you were considered shot down, whereupon you thankfully retired to wreak equally painful revenge on the next brave soul. True to real life, running the first stage successfully only got one to the target; it was still necessary to do the return trip back to base. Oh, what painful fun!

Mention of the Gospel Hall brings to mind the tedious recitation of endless tracts of the Good Word, which meant little to me then and, I have to admit, even less to me now. Such perseverance was, however, rewarded with a Bible which might not have been so enthusiastically given had the preacher, ‘Pop’ Turner, realised that to relieve the sheer boredom of Sunday School I had earlier, and most surreptitiously, unscrewed the mushroom-shaped control wheels on the Hall’s radiator valves for rolling down the road later on. With hindsight, this was a stupid thing to do, for apart from the inconvenience caused, wartime shortages meant that no replacements could be obtained. However, as no recriminations followed, I became emboldened enough to embark on another venture which certainly did cause me a bit of serious heart-searching. It all seems a non-event now, but I had taken up stamp collecting and found that a certain Mr Pinder’s bric-a-brac stall in the town’s Saturday market featured albums containing wonderful triangular stamps featuring aeroplanes, from exotic-sounding places like Liberia and Mozambique. Not that such places would be deemed particularly exotic today. These proved to be a temptation too far and while my grandma busied herself looking at Victorian knick-knacks, my furtive little hand was engaged in denuding album pages, well hidden so I thought under the one I was apparently studying. This seemingly easy way of enhancing one’s own collection continued without mishap for a couple of weeks, until the dreaded day when the pork pie-hatted Mr Pinder grasped my arm.

‘What have you got in your hand, son?’ he enquired.

‘Nothing,’ said I, which was true, because in sheer fright I had dropped the goods enclosed in my fist. Seeing his wares fluttering to the ground, Mr Pinder released his grip to retrieve what he could before it floated away into the gutter. I floated away too, pretty damn fast, in the opposite direction, only to run into the arms of my grandma coming round the corner. Pleading instant illness and the urgent need for the toilet, an immediate confrontation was averted. But for weeks afterwards, as I lay each night in our Morrison steel-caged air-raid shelter, I suffered agonies, not at the thought of being bombed, but of being tracked down and placed behind more substantial bars to answer for my deed. Perhaps the most difficult part was passing, head down and keeping a very low and guilty profile, through ‘enemy territory’ – i.e. ‘Pinderland’ – each subsequent weekend as grandma ritually examined the stall’s offerings. My ‘See you in Woollies [Woolworths] in ten minutes, Mam’ was fortunately good enough to allay any suspicions as to my real motive for keeping well out of sight. As has often been suggested, a fatherly influence might, in those early years, have made a difference, but luckily for me this encounter brought sufficient distress to redirect me on to a more virtuous path.

‘Pinderland’ in Prince Street – not too different today, although the police car appears to have arrived seventy years too late!

Compared to the Luftwaffe raids on Hull, an hour’s drive away, the thirty air attacks both during the day and night on Bridlington were relatively light. Most able-bodied folk were, nevertheless, required to ‘do their bit’, and by late 1940 my grandma was wearing a white-painted steel helmet when she went out at night on Air Raid Precautions duty. When I tried wearing it, I found I could turn nearly 90° without the helmet moving. May, too, put in a stint on the Auxiliary Fire Service telephone switchboard on her return from earning the daily bread, thus confirming Noel Coward’s observation that ‘They also serve, who only stand and faint – sorry, wait’.

For those unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end of a bomb, the consequences were, of course, devastating. Two of the main areas to suffer in Bridlington were Hilderthorpe Road and Prince Street, where the Cosy Corner Hotel, the Britannia Hotel, Woolworths and Foley’s Cafe were either demolished or badly damaged. The pre-war pleasure steamer Royal Sovereign also received a direct hit at this time while moored in the harbour. As is often the case, there is always the ‘first-hand’ witness who saw the bomb ‘go straight down the funnel’ and I suppose I believed this to be true for many years, until I learnt the meaning of ‘dramatic licence’. Bridlington’s pleasure steamers certainly saw wartime life at the sharp end, for the original Yorkshire Belle also met a tragic end when it struck a magnetic mine in the Humber and was lost with all on board.

The intersection of Springfield Avenue and Hilderthorpe Road suffered damage that could have been intended for either the harbour or the railway station. The tall building in the background was the Cosy Corner Hotel (now The Coachman). (East Riding of Yorkshire County Council)

Prince Street saw Woolworths, Foley’s Cafe and the Britannia Hotel blasted by enemy bombs within days of the attack on Driffield aerodrome. (Bridlington Public Library)

I didn’t think too deeply at the time of my mother’s fanciful ‘combat account’ in which she claimed to have seen a German bomber flying so low over the main Quay Road railway crossing that she could see the pilot waving. Sadly, she is no longer with us for me to better establish the facts, but I have no doubt that, stripped of any embellishments, she certainly did witness a low-level attack on the railway station.