David talks about his career in the RAF, being posted to RAF Neatishead and his working life from then on. He is a trustee of the Air Defence Radar Museum at Neatishead and active in many other organisations including Advanced Motorists.
I was born in Liverpool and lived there until I was in my twenties. After completing my education I worked for ICI as a chemist and then joined the navy. I did a short service of five years and when that came to an end I went into the nearest RAF recruiting office in Plymouth.
I started my initial training at RAF Bawdsey in Suffolk, my wife joined me in the married quarters there before moving to RAF West Drayton near Heathrow to do my advanced training. I was then posted here to Neatishead, in 1974, 75.
RAF Coltishall was our parent unit but the married quarters were at Horsham St Faiths. My wife was in the Wrens when we met and she left just after I joined the air force. The Wrens were very good as they tended to match their postings with mine.
The interesting part about coming here was that my two daughters were both born in Norfolk, one just after we arrived and one just before we left. So Norwich and Norfolk has a very special family association, it was a happy place.
Starting as a junior intercept controller
I was a very junior intercept controller and this was one of the most difficult stations to work at mainly because the airspace here is very, very busy; the area included Heathrow and the south of England. It was a demanding place to work and I’ll admit that I did find it quite difficult. But from those early days I went to RAF Boulmer as an intercept controller and chief controller before heading up to RAF Buchan in Scotland where I was a master controller. After that I was posted to RSRE Malvern where I stayed for four years, although that was interrupted by the Falklands War. I was posted to the Falklands in 1982.
And actually here at the museum we have the radar that I took down there by sea.
David standing next to the Marconi S600 radar that he escorted to The Falklands from RAF Wattisham, which is now on display at Neatishead Radar Museum’
Neatishead
We were here for about 18 months and as I mentioned previously we lived in the married quarters in Horsham St Faiths.
You asked if we had a typical working day, we absolutely did not! There was day work but it was a 24/7 system and of course that could be interrupted at any time by Russian reconnaissance and we would have to scramble, so no two days were very much the same.
Day to day work tended to include taking fighters from Wattisham or Billingsby and then they would go and do practise interceptions to keep themselves current, up to date. Of course the whole thing in those days, fighters couldn’t see very far on the radar and we had radars that had a long range so our job was to get them in the right place at the right time, when they could pick it up with their own radars and take it from there.
The job divides into two and the other side was, as well as controlling the airwaves, we had people watching the radars and surveying the whole air space so that we could detect any intruders coming in. That was quite a big organisation linked to Air Traffic Control and we were producing what was called the recognised air picture. We identified everything so knew what was in our airspace and we could see if there was anything unusual and decide what to do about it.
There were some moments when unidentified aircraft came in, but they were mainly civilian light planes that had failed to file a flight plan properly. But, at times the Russian Bear planes, big four engine planes did get into this area.
On Quick Reaction Alert [QRA] operations there was more action in the north and in a real war time (and thank goodness this didn’t occur) this would have been the premier sector operation centre. There were an awful lot of resources in this area and I’m sure the opposition would have tried to knock it out.
On a watch there would be eight or nine controllers, but also 20 or 30 airmen and airwomen, aerospace operators, or scopies which was the nickname for them; they would all be supporting us fighter controllers and we couldn’t have managed without them to be honest. The operators got the nickname scopies because they were the aero systems operators who looked at radar scopes – so they got the name scopies!
It all looked quite impressive because in those days it was dark and the radars were old fashioned tubes and it all looked a little bit Star Trekkish, a bit science fictionish, but there was a good atmosphere there. Nowadays in the modern ops rooms it’s full lighting, flat screen displays, computerised pictures, quite different.
I would think that the number of people working here would be in the hundreds. As well as the fighter controllers we had the scopies and also engineers doing maintenance on the radar, and they would liaise with the fighter controllers.
Just across the way is the R12, a massive building full of radar equipment, this doesn’t belong to the museum. I would not like to guess at how many people worked there maintaining and running it, let’s say that there’d be a couple of hundred people there.
Equality of jobs
We would have certainly had a revolution if women had been given menial jobs and quite rightly too. We had lady fighter controllers, one of whom, Hilary Whiteway, is chairman of the Fighter Control Association, which I belong to. I trained with Hilary at Bawdsey. We also had the well known Joan Hopkins who was station commander here. At one stage during my time here she was head of our branch as an air commodore. So certainly menial jobs were not given to women and I would never have dared say that to Joan Hopkins.
The site and the bunker fire
Initially this site was operational in World War Two but it changed dramatically and became a radar station in the mid to late 50s and of course we did have the underground bunker here that had that rather terrible fire, not long before I arrived. The bunker was eventually renovated and moved back down there, but now of course it’s the museum so not operational any more.
That bunker is not part of the actual museum and we are not allowed to go in, however sometimes the owners let us go down there, it’s quite different than in the days before the fire.
When I first arrived here, it still belonged to the RAF, and it was policy that all new controllers were taken down there; it was still burnt out and we could see just how horrific it could be.
I know a fair bit about the story of the fire as I have met one of the firemen who is obviously well and truly retired now. I think that one of the problems was as we were so secret about things the firemen didn’t know much about the building. There were vents above the ground with fire coming out and according to this chap, who at that time was a trainee fireman, they thought that it was a shed fire. But of course it was a two, three story building underground.
Things changed and whilst I was there operational firemen would visit and be taken round so that they would know the layout. A communications system was put in so that in the smoke firemen could plug in and talk to people outside, above ground, to say where they were and give situation reports.
So a lot of lessons were learnt from the fire, sadly we lost a couple of firemen, and the story goes that it was not an accident, it was started by a disgruntled serviceman, a bit of sabotage.
The whole site closed down after I’d left the air force in the early 90s. Things of course changed, in my day it was big radars as you can see around here now. But now it’s more transportable and moveable radars and less operations centres, so that’s why this place was no longer an operational centre.
In general we all got on well, of course service people are humans and there would be disagreements. At times I admit there were tensions, you know, we were dealing with people’s lives, you were dealing with other aircraft. But in general everybody got on well together, you had to, it was teamwork.
The one thing I missed when I left the forces was the spirit of the people and the camaraderie. We had a difficult job to do, although I say it myself, but we all worked together quite well.
And we still meet to this day, fifty years later.
The Dowding system
I think that things are a lot more transparent nowadays. I think too that the secrecy thing built up because of the Second World War with the Dowding system. This system was the forerunner of the Chain Home radars which actually won us the Battle of Britain.
The first radars were very different to these and were developed after some experiments in Daventry. They found that the radar waves couldn’t be used as a death ray as some people were hoping, but the scientists realised that they could be used to detect aircraft.
Now one of the problems with fighters is, if you don’t know the target is there you’ve got to keep fighters airborne and on patrol all the time. With the radar we could hold them on the ground, fully fuelled, rested, not being worn out and breaking down. Then when the raid was detected a hundred odd miles away they could be scrambled and you had maximum effect. We wouldn’t have won the Battle of Britain without that.
Of course to an extent although the technology’s changed the principles are exactly the same today.
This is what we called the sector operation centre here and there was another in the north, Boulmer was a standby and we were all working as a team.
In my day there were satellite stations at Staxton Wold, feeding into Boulmer which was a bigger base. Then up in Buchan we had Benbecula, Bishop’s Court in Northern Ireland. We had Saxa Vord and with us being in NATO the Danes came under us. We had links to Norway too, and actually one of my postings was as an exchange officer in the Norwegian air force for a couple of years which was very nice. We were all able to talk to each other.
A couple of unexpected incidents
There were funny unexpected incidents, one which happened to myself, a stupid incident. We used to have a gate guardian, that’s when you see a disused aeroplane there just by the gate. We had a meteor F8 fighter, twin engine jet, produced in the late 40s, it was just a shell, no engines, nothing. But it did have four gun ports, it was a summer’s evening and I was waiting for the bus to take me back to Horsham St Faiths.
I knew that there was nothing in this aeroplane, but I looked in the gun port. What I didn’t know was that there was a bird nested in there and it flew out straight at me.
Well psychologically that was devastating to look down a gun port and see something coming at you! I think that I did a backwards somersault much to the amusement of the people around me.
Referring back to the links that we had with other stations and talking by telephone I can tell a funny anecdote, this one didn’t happen to me, but to a colleague.
We used to have American exchange officers, this one chap was told that he was going to be posted to Hawaii, and oh he and his wife were so pleased. It must have been about six months later and I picked up the phone to talk to the Americans in Iceland and his voice came on. I said, ‘Oh hello Chico, wrong island mate’ he came back with, ‘I don’t want to talk about it!’ so things do go wrong at times.
Social life
We did have a social life but not very much on this station because we didn’t have the facilities. Our parent unit was RAF Coltishall, which of course was a big air base in those days with a big officers’ mess. So we had a lot of functions there, ladies’ guest nights, mess dinners, summer and Christmas balls, so in those days it was quite a good social life.
And of course there were sporting facilities as well, squash courts, tennis courts; all that side of it was very good. I was a keen squash player in those days.
It was a good atmosphere in the married quarters too, people got on very well and we had a good social life, gatherings and barbecues. Some of my neighbours I am still in touch with. I belong to the Fighter Control Association and a number of those do too,
You know in the forces you meet a lot of people, you have a lot of acquaintances and a few friends, but you often meet in different ways.
I mainly meet ex colleagues through the Fighter Control Association. For example we had our summer AGM at RAF Cosford a couple of months ago and we have got our Christmas lunch in the RAF club in November, so we all get together then. The committee has zoom meetings at fairly regular intervals, when it works.
Retirement
I retired in 1990 and I volunteered to retire. The Cold War was ending and I got an offer to do an MBA in business administration and then went into business, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.
I like driving and that’s why I’m a national observer for the Advanced Motorists. I’m working in that continually and at times do radio broadcasts for them.
Being a trustee at Neatishead
I joined the Fighter Control Association, joined here as a friend and then a slot became available as a fighter control representative on the board here and I have been on that for about 10 or 11 years.
My role currently involves health and safety, which is sometimes difficult as health and safety has a bad name. What I have tried to do is keep everybody safe, but not interfere with the job any more than is absolutely necessary. We had a bit of resistance at first shall I say, but as people get used to ideas, it’s like when anything new comes in it’s a big thing until people get used to it.
Not only do we have a wealth of visitors here, we also have 70 volunteers and one paid manager and of course they’re doing a lot of maintenance work. A lot of the construction work you see around is being done by volunteers so we have to keep a very good health and safety set of procedures up to date and quite rightly too.
The museum is a charitable incorporated organisation [CIO] so in fact we’re a company, totally separate from the RAF and just like a company we have got to survive on our own business. So that’s why we have to follow all the rules and regulations.
My original work before I became a serviceman was actually as I mentioned earlier in the chemical industries, those were the days before health and safety and I saw the impact of that not being followed so it is needed.
I get up here probably once every two months or so, it’s quite a distance to come. Being a trustee I don’t have to be here you know, nine to five or anything like that. We really couldn’t exist without our volunteers, they do a grand job, they really do, they run it really.
I think I’ll reiterate, being posted here, it was a community, a way of life as well as a place to work, the whole family was included in the life here and to still be in contact with old friends, yep, I am glad that I did it.
David Lowry talking to WISEArchive on 9th October 2023 at Neatishead. © 2024 WISEArchive. All rights reserved.
