My name is Rod Pickles and I am a volunteer. Feels like we should all be sitting in a circle!
I joined the RAF in 1961 as a Boy Entrant. I left in 1985 having completed my last five years in the RAF Careers Information Office in Plymouth. That is a lot of interviews!
Not surprisingly when I volunteered, I expressed an interest in joining the interview team. My eighteenth interview took place on Friday 31 January.
I had received a phone call some two weeks earlier when a familiar voice said ‘Hello Rod.’ I had heard the voice before but could not place it. To my delight it was Peter Jones! He had retired about a year earlier and had been my contact at the IBCC. My last interview had taken place some eighteen months earlier but for the saddest of reasons there are not many people left to interview. Peter had one for me. It was a 97-year-old ex-Air Gunner. His niece was the contact. I arranged the date and time with her and waited for the interview day to come around.
31 January – Do my last bit of research. The niece has not passed on any information about what squadron my interviewee was on. However, I know he flew in the Douglas Boston out of Sicily and I had narrowed it down to four squadrons. Time to do one last check on the TASCAM (If you have never used one it is the sound card recording device). Make sure the spare batteries are in the case. Check I have all the relevant documentation and a pen! Then it is a shower and I get dressed in my interview attire which consists of the white shirt, RAF tie, grey trousers and blue blazer. Makes a change from Chinos and a sweatshirt! Pin my IBCC badge on and I am ready to go.
The weather on the drive to Honiton got worse by the minute as the mist and drizzle descended on the A38. Only when I came onto the Honiton bypass did the weather start to clear. This time around I was not bypassing Honiton but heading for an address in the town. My interview was at 2pm and I always aim to be twenty minutes early to give myself time to park and find the address. At one forty pm I arrive at the address and unlike some places I have visited there is no problem with parking! It so happens that the niece arrives in the car park at the same time and recognises my RAF tie and asks if I am there to interview her uncle. Indeed I am!
The man I have to interview looks in good health and if I make it to 97, I hope I am in the same condition. There are a few minutes of conversation while he outlines his story. It sounds quite remarkable. Time to begin!
We arrange the chairs and the small table for the recorder. I ask him to recite his name and address while I do a sound check on the TASCAM. There are volume indicators on the machine. I mention to him that if he wishes to take a break during the interview, he just has to raise a hand and I will pause the TASCAM. This makes for a seamless restart and saves on editing if he asks me to stop! I have already briefed the niece and mentioned that she should resist the temptation to prompt if her uncle is having trouble recalling an event. I think most of us would pause at some point if they had to think back 77 years!
My role in the process is to say as little as possible and I have found the ideal interviewee. During the course of the interview I rarely have to speak. Part way through he raises his hand and we pause. The niece makes her first intervention which I could have scripted! ‘Coffee anyone?’
After a coffee and a nice piece of shortbread off we go once more. And what an amazing tale he had to tell. He was a member of 18 Squadron, one of the squadrons I had researched. One night he was asked to stand in for someone on another crew. They flew north to Italy. Bombed a bridge near Capua and headed home. On the way back they had to fly through an electrical storm which took all their comms out and drove the Boston off course. Running out of fuel the crew opted to ditch rather than bail out. Neither option was a good one as it was a stormy night and a very rough sea. My interviewee was knocked unconscious as the plane ditched. His only memory is being dragged out of the sea and thinking that rubber dingy had hard sides. Unfortunately, it was not a rubber dingy from the plane but a Sicilian fishing boat. He was pulled out by two fishermen. He lapsed into an unconscious state for ten days. On the eleventh day he came round and was taken off the critical list. He was told that the bodies of his three colleagues had not been found. (The pilot’s body was found and is buried in the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery in Catania. The other two members of the crew have their names on the war memorial in Malta)
That is very short précis of the interview which lasted almost an hour. I brought the interview to a conclusion when he told me about leaving the RAF and returning to civvy street. As most of my interviewees are, he was close to tears remembering his lost colleagues, but he kept on going. Amazing man.
I check the TASCAM has recorded and take the required photographs with my phone. The interviewee on his own, and then with his niece, and then one for my album with the interviewee. There is always a third person present at the interviews. It helps to put the person being interviewed at ease
I start to pack up. Then comes the most amazing part of the visit. My interviewee is visited occasionally by a Roman Catholic priest. Not particularly religious but he enjoys having a chat and he told the priest the story he had just told me. The priest made use of the worldwide RC network. Two weeks before Christmas my downed Air Gunner received a letter written on behalf of the sons of the two fishermen who had pulled him to safety! They are now 81 but both remember their fathers telling them about dragging a British airman from the sea. You really could not make it up!
Time to say goodbye and head for home. The weather gets worse by the minute as I near Plymouth. Heavy rain, mist and spray. I pass Lee Mill at 5:02 and know I am nearly home. Just after I arrive an app on my phone tells me that at 5:10 there was a 3 car pile-up at Lee Mill! Sometimes you just get lucky!
After eating and changing back to the chinos and sweatshirt I check the documentation once more. Download and print the photos and put them in the C5 envelope. I play the recording and listen to part of the interview. Then the sound card is removed from the TASCAM and put into a small poly bag and then in the envelope. The envelope is sealed and ready to post to Peter Jones the following morning. I email the niece and ask her to pass on my thanks to her Uncle for telling his amazing story. Her Uncle will be 98* in two weeks’ time. I will send a card.
The day is done!
*The middle name of the gentleman in question is ‘Valentine.’ Needless to say his birthday is on the 14th of February!!!
You can listen to Rod’s interview with Owen Cox here: https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/22526
*********************************
Over 1200 interviews have been carried out on behalf of the IBCC. All of them by volunteers like me. They are edited for presentation (More volunteers!) and loaded onto the Digital Archive. This can be accessed on the IBCC website. Key in my name and the interviews of mine that have been edited will be available for you to listen to. There are some amazing stories. The one thread that runs through all the aircrew interviews is this, ‘It was just another day at the office,’ as their description of a bombing raid over Germany. There is no triumphalism. At the end of one interview after I had switched off the recorder one man said to me with tears in his eyes, ‘I feel guilty.’ Why would he say that? Because he had survived and so many of his friends had not. I told him his friends would have wished him a happy life and he had nothing to feel guilty about. As I left his wife whispered to me, ‘He is always saying that, thankyou for what you said.’
Those who survived and those who did not deserved to be remembered.