Now for something completely different...

I recently sent an article to RAF St Eval Friends Reunited Association, which I am also posting here. The picture is not of the plane concerned, but I have used a picture of that earlier.

Bermudan Weekend

During 1956/7 there were overseas detachments from at least two of St Eval’s squadrons. 42 Squadron had several planes in Khormaksar, Aden and 206 Squadron the same in Christmas Island, where the atom bomb tests were being carried out. Shackletons were always flying backwards and forwards to these places and sometimes to other destinations. What was suspiciously surprising was the number of them that had various accidents and became u/s in exotic places.

Just before Easter ’57 a plane returning from Christmas Island damaged a tail fin while taxiing at the American Air Force base in Bermuda. There was nothing for it but to send another out with a spare fin while the crew kicked their heels in that idyllic spot! The day before Good Friday a Shack from 42 Squadron took off from St Eval with the needed spare. In addition to the aircrew a full complement of ground crew for routine checks and servicing travelled on it. I went as the wireless mechanic and Bob, who slept in the next bed to me in the billet, was the radar mechanic.

We were only airborne for about half an hour before a message came through that another plane, this time from St Mawgan, had damaged a wheel on landing on the island of Terceira in the Azores and we needed to turn back and pick up a new one. But first we flew back and forth for another three and a half hours using up fuel before we landed at St Mawgan – four hours to travel a couple of miles! We spent the night there and next morning set off once again, taking most of the day, I think, to get to Terceira, where we enjoyed the hospitality of the US Air Force.

The flight to Bermuda on the Saturday took nearly twelve hours – Shackletons didn’t fly very fast. We took off early and arrived with quite a lot of the day left due to the time difference. It was a hot, tedious journey and the Shack lived up to its nicknames of ‘Growler’ and ‘ten thousand rivets flying in close formation’. I sat in the gun turret for a little while but it was far too hot with the sun blazing down. For a while I also lay flat in the rear with my head in the Perspex end. This was a queer sensation, I felt like a bird flying backwards. After a while that too began to pall; the Atlantic looks much the same wherever you are, and there’s an awful lot of it.

On Easter Sunday Bob and I and two aircrew sergeants hired mopeds in Hamilton, the capital, and set off to explore. Most people in Bermuda seemed to get about on these, and we ended up on a glorious beach at one end of the island. Temperature in the middle seventies Fahrenheit scarcely varies there all year round. In the evening I went to the service in the church on the American Air Base. The hymns were right up to date, but the singing uninspiring, and the civilian preacher was speaking at his fifth service that day. In some ways it was disappointing, but it was right to go and I am glad I did.

From what I remember, facilities on the American base were superior to St Eval, and the PX better than the NAAFI, but there was one exception. The toilet cubicles had no doors on them, presumably to prevent anyone from having a quiet read in one. On Monday we were back at the Azores, but this time as guests of the Portuguese Air Force. We were housed overnight in a corrugated Nissan hut. On either side of the central aisle stood ten three-tiered bunks; fortunately there weren’t many of us, how sixty men would get on in the height of summer doesn’t bear thinking about – and the toilets didn’t even have cubicles, let alone doors! On Tuesday we touched down back at Eval and passed through Customs, whose officers came out for the purpose. We had no problem, but it is possibly as well that they didn’t go through the plane with a fine toothcomb. Once in a while when a plane returned they did so, undoing panels and taking things apart wherever they could. It was almost inevitable that a certain amount of smuggling would go on, just as it is not altogether surprising that a few days holiday in some beauty spot was an attractive proposition. For those of us who went to Bermuda it proved an interesting weekend and a break in the normal routine.