Issue Number 2

February 2005

'39 Years(all but 20 days) as an Armourer'

by Maurice Russell

The previous authors are a difficult act to follow and 39 years is a long time so I will try to do a thumbnail sketch of a full career to show people like Bob Longhurst that they might have had a lucky escape rather than doing "the bundle"!! Since attending a few of the recent reunions it has brought it home to me that those of you who left after 12 years or 22 to find pastures new were lucky in the sense that you opened avenues to a whole new exciting world. Nonetheless I enjoyed every minute of my time as a plumber and would probably do it all over again.

Like Bob, I found myself at Nicosia after the 2 day trip in a DC 4 from Southend via Luqa, my first time outside the UK. The Tech Wing Armoury was the second line support for the Hastings, Hunters, various transit aircraft of many types and I was entrusted with the servicing of Type C hoists. Duty armourer was always an adventure and I did turn-rounds on Meteor, Vampire, Venom, Mystere, Crusader - besides the routine "mag drop on No 3" of the resident 70 Sqn Hastings which invariably resulted in a Lindholme gear change (search and rescue kit). Even helped Terry Fleet doing a plug change on a commercial Constellation to earn a few quid for the RAF Benevolent Fund.

Half-way through the tour I went to 103 MU at Akrotiri as No 11 Bofors Servicing Team was formed on the L40/70 weapon system. Bob Lucas (81st electrician) was already there and we were later joined by Bert Hall, Pete (Drag) Storrow, Ginge Stebbings, and Bryan Spencer - what a handful for the flight sergeant! Ed White worked in another section of the MU and Jack Squires was in the Tech Wing Armoury down the road. After this I rarely saw any of our entry except as ships that pass in the night.

First UK posting was 229 OCU Chivenor which was the best thing that could have ever happened - 30 mm Aden and Hunter pack servicing, air firing from dawn till dusk - an armourers' paradise. Also worked in the seat bay and had a couple of successful ejections - formative years indeed. Also got married there to my lovely wife Maureen who has patiently dragged around the world with me ever since. Eric Stone's 1929 London cabriolet taxi was much in evidence at the stag do and the wedding although I missed Eric in postings then and again in later years.

Off to 389 MU 9X Site, at Seletar, married accompanied, where I became an expert on the king-pins of Type F bomb trolleys, cleaning verdigris from the necks of 107712 rounds of .303" Mk 7Z ammo (which we then promptly gave to the Malays!!) and a bit of demolition amongst the palm trees. Our job was to teach jungle rescue teams how to make a clearing to lift out casualties by helicopter. Then the Sukarno incident that Kris Penny mentioned. I traveled to Kuantan with WO Ken Rice and FS Geoff Milestone (deceased), both ex-brats from earlier times - with a load of vehicles, bombs, tails, etc under sealed orders which had to be opened at midnight just like in the novels, to make a landing next day in the town of Kuantan. Ken laid out the bomb dump, Geoff commandeered a low loader and I supervised the RE stevedores to get it all off-loaded. We had to shift the dump later into the site which the Imperial Japanese Army had left all those years before …. And then along came Kris Penny's UK ReFors.

Promoted to Sgt and posted to RAF Seletar and then did week and week about with Colin Gillick at RAF China Rock - to run the bombing range on the SE coast of Johore Bahru - for the rest of my tour of just over a year.

Back to Chivenor to continue where I had left off, our son was born in Barnstaple, spent far more time on seats (several more successful ejections), Hunter gun bay, ammunition trains at Wrafton station, plenty of courses on Bomb Disposal, Valiant and Victor aircraft, etc and all too soon a posting to Gutersloh.

Bomb dump at Gutersloh, 24 ton trucks of 30 mm ammo for Hunters and Lightnings to be off-loaded, demolition with a gathering of plumbers sent from Wildenrath, Bruggen, Geilenkirchen and Laarbruch to at the ranges at RAF Nordhorn at regular intervals. Our daughter was born at BMH Rinteln and has suffered ever since with her dual nationality, especially when she renews her passport. Promotion to Chief Tech (Jul 30th 1970), a couple of bomb disposal jobs - a P38 Lightning in a gravel pit, a Wessex trip to Diepholz where a Lightning Mk 6 of 92 Sqn had just pranged and cooked off a lot of its HE ammo while we waited for the fuss to die down…. Happy days!!

RAF Binbrook on the hill to take over the Lightning seat bay - one of the really satisfying jobs of my career. IRA were becoming a nuisance with their threats to "do" fuel delivery tankers, routine demolition of explosives on the beach at RAF Theddlethorpe and the odd No 36 grenade amongst the bushes from time to time but otherwise good, solid, engineering management. Buccaneer management course at Honington...

Laarbruch as a member of the training team on strike (special) and attack (conventional) weapon load teams on 15 and 16 Sqns and also OTR training on 2 Sqn Phantoms and later, Jaguars. An interesting part of the job was NATO cross-training in loading our weapons to French, Dutch, Belgian, German, Canadian and American aircraft and then vice versa when we loaded Buccs, Jags and Phantoms with theirs at different stations across Germany and Belgium.

Acting promotion to FS with a short-toured posting to the MoD Weapons Standardisation Team at Wittering (cost me £268 in duty to import my new Renault 12 Estate!!). Travelled around UK and Europe for 10 days in every month on inspection tours of places we don't talk about and then 10 days in the office to write it up and then 10 days to prepare for the next one - managed to get away after a year! There is a God!! - Episkopi - as an engineering staff officer covering airframes, engines, armament and safety equipment in the rank of FS but only because of my specialist bomb disposal qualification which I only used once for an uneventful 750 lb M 117 UXB from a Turkish Super Sabre in the Green Line at Nicosia. Super tour but I had to work on two different nights for exercises during the 3 years! Most of the work was dealing with Avon problems at Luqa, windscreen wiper blades falling off our 84 Sqn Whirlwinds and prop failures on visiting Hercules at Akrotiri.

Now for a posting to UK - Kinloss!! After the shock, another terrific tour on second line Nimrod work, plenty of flying to do airborne trials of retro launcher mods, promotion to WO, weapon load team work, etc and then after 2 years, a posting to Brawdy. A couple more junior officers to train as armament officers.

This was part of a 3-way deal with Innsworth so that I would end up in Germany and then serve a last tour at Chivenor. Once again a magnificent tour on Hawks which were almost as good as the Hunters I always loved. A very busy time with a whole series of junior armament officers to train, one of whom now holds a very senior position with Boeing at Seattle. Back to the bomb disposal on a weekly basis at my satellite of RAF Pembrey Sands. My claim to fame was in seeing the 9L Sidewinder into Hawk front-line service. And then the posting to Germany...

Bruggen - behind the wire (looking after those things we can't talk about) for nearly 6 years in the same windowless office - regular cold war exercises for several days each couple of months, CMC of one of the largest messes in the air force, living in quarters on base (Snob's Row) for the first time in all those years. This completed a total of nearly 12 years in Germany which gave us so many opportunities to travel widely across Europe and leave us with so many happy memories.

A certain amount of wrangling with PMC at Innsworth but got the Last Tour of Duty at Chivenor for those last 2 years, again on the Hawk, so no midnight oil, and surprise, surprise, I took delivery of my same Winders which came down from Brawdy! I was CMC once again but living in and commuting as we had bought an ex-MQ once belonging to RAF Mountbatten on the outskirts of Plymouth.

A year off but then 9 years at the University of Plymouth, first as a print technician and then for 18 months as a "library lady" before finally retiring. Still in uniform and carrying a F 1250 in the rank of WO with the ATC for the past 10 years and currently the Commanding Officer of 1876 (Kingsbridge) Sqn. This gets me around many RAF stations on cadet summer camps, to Bisley annual cadet competitions as a range safety officer and to other stations following my continuing passion for model aircraft as a life member of the RAF Model Aircraft Association. Have often met the Commandant Air Cadets, Air Cdre Jon Chitty who was my first trainee flight commander after getting my "gallopers"! (Counting my first year as an ATC cadet, I have recently completed 50 years of continuous uniformed service.)

Maureen and I are still closely connected to the Royal Air Force as our son Philip is a FS loadie on 30 Sqn, daughter-in-law Tracy is a FS loadie on 24 Sqn and our son-in-law Clifford is a Sgt Supplier working as an instructor at Halton. Between us we have around 103 years of uniformed service. We both take great delight in our 2 granddaughters at Halton and our grandson at Lyneham.

Lasting memories The spirit of comradeship developed at Halton; April(s) in Paris; pre-dawn stand-to behind the Bren in the grounds of Kollossi Castle in the full knowledge that the radio still isn't working; the troop train to Woodvale; Dachau; three generations of my family snorkelling together at Protaras; our Tornadoes in a row at Nellis with row upon row for more than a mile behind them up to the Buffs in the distance; Colditz Castle in the dead of winter; flying the C130J sim single-handedly; Christmas time in Jerusalem and Bethlehem; the view of the palms along the beach from my bungalow's verandah at Sungei Ringgit (and the writhing mass of sea-snakes under the pier a few yards away); the angry complaints from the nearby residents when we blew that thousand pounder at Sheerness; the setting sun over the Grand Canyon; the view across Land's End on a summer day from a Grob 103 soarer; home videoing the 30+ Hinds passing the airfield close to Buchenwald; the lad from our youth club who we buried at Dhekelia; mistakenly abandoning the drunken SWO at the top of the Eiffel Tower; mile after mile of the Route 66 across the desert to Flagstaff; all the machine pistols levelling at us as one when I got my Volvo in the wrong lane at Checkpoint Charlie; Maureen's outfit (and hat) at the Tamil wedding in Johore; the family of Griffon vultures joining up to formate on my model sailplane at Episkopi; the couple of beers(?) after unloading that ammunition train; Mosel Weinfest(s); the frozen North Sea at Husum; my friends of the Afrika Korps veterans in Moenchen Gladbach; hot, crispy bacon sarnies on the flight deck of a Nimrod over the Faroes Gap (and the Arctic Roll to follow).

Thankfully mainly happy memories but we must also remember the sad ones equally.

Lofty Russell