RAF Transport Command pics

It has been suggested elsewhere that the Skymaster in post #99 is at RAF Northolt photographed from the northeast corner looking southwest….the only thing that casts doubt for me is the presence of a Baltimore but perhaps 1 or 2 made it to the UK by 1945. It looks like a VIP is departing and a parade of airmen have seen him off. Churchill’s EW999 had no nose code and KL980 in which Eden went to Potsdam had nose code HB, I don’t have a serial for ‘HA’. Skymasters KL979 and KL982 are candidates.

A powerful piece of writing. I wonder if this is the same Nigel Tangye entered on Wikipedia? The timing of his involvement in aviation looks about right:

“Born in Kensington, Nigel Tangye started his career in the Royal Navy, spending three years in the Mediterranean having graduated at the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth. He then left the Navy and devoted himself to learning to fly. He soon earned a Professional Pilot’s ‘B’ Licence, the Navigator’s Licence and the Air Ministry Instructor’s Licence. After that he performed aerobatic demonstrations and worked as a flying instructor at the London Aeroplane Club.[citation needed]

As the aviation correspondent for the London Evening News, Tangye covered the Spanish Civil War.[2] His 1937 account of the war, Red, White and Spain, provided a strongly pro-Nationalist viewpoint.[3] However, Tangye later recorded that it had been ″written by the author as a cover to his assignment by MI5 as a secret agent in the Spanish War″ seeking information on German military involvement.[4] There is independent evidence that he worked in MI5’s press department, later acting briefly as its director.[5]

In 1938 [Tangye] wrote Teach Yourself to Fly, a book designed to help flying students with the basics before entering an aeroplane. The book was sufficiently well-regarded that it became recommended by the British Air Ministry for pilots in the run up to and during the Second World War, and Tangye was asked to train prospective RAF pilots. In later life he became a hotelier at Newquay.”

Apologies for thread creep, but a light is shone into failings of post-war Transport Command which makes for gripping reading.

I can’t I.D. the particular Skymaster, but the medium bomber is a Martin Baltimore. Lots of Daks and some Spits in the background too.

Looks like a Martin Maryland. Maybe ex-French.

Where’s this RAF Transport Command Skymaster? It has nose code HA so NOT Churchills EW999 or Anthony Edens KL980.What is the medium bomber under it’s wing? Photo was in the Google LIFE digitization in a rag-bag album of agency pictures called ‘Air-Aero’ and I think it was a British photo and not taken by LIFE [ATTACH=CONFIG]260818[/ATTACH]

Taken at Bodø Norway.
A strange way to disembark.:very_drunk:

“Oh Mama, can this really be the end?” [popular music reference]

Surely from that end it would be proctologist rather than a dentist.

As the dentist says, “Open wide, please”:

The most beautiful airliner colour scheme ever?

David Lean’s interest in making “The Sound Barrier” was, in part at least, prompted by Geoffrey de Havilland’s death, so, in an attempt to return to the main thrust of the thread, here’s a De Havilland publicity photo of a Transport Command Comet:

In 1945, Tangye married the actress Ann Todd; she was in ‘The Seventh Veil”, a successful film that year. You may recall James Mason bringing his cane down on her fingers as she played the piano, a scene not easily forgotten. She later married the film maker David Lean and, more relevant to this website, appeared in his film ‘The Sound Barrier’, as the daughter of the factory owner and wife of the test pilot.

There had been a couple of bad Liberator crashes in Southern England in 1945 with more than 20 passengers each, a converted Coastal Command aircraft near Blackbushe and a brand new single fin C Mk IX (RY-3) near Poole…I read Tangye was a pilot and in the MI5

This article is from 1945 and concerns Transport Command’s safety record then and what it said, in particular, about the experience and attitudes of the senior staff in the ministry. It was published in THE SPECTATOR in its 14 December issue that year.

It is quite long but some here may, perhaps, find it of historical interest:

AIR TRANSPORT AND R.A.F. By NIGEL TANGYE

CONSIDERABLE alarm is being expressed in all quarters at the shocking number of fatal accidents involving R.A.F. Transport Command and that section of Bomber Command which has been detailed by the Air Ministry to assist in the transport of passengers. Having, slowly through the years, come to regard flying as a safe mode of travel, the public has been pulled up sharp in its progressive air education by the impact of one fatal accident after another. The damage that has been done to potential public support to aviation, essential to Empire development, by the recent record of R.A.F. Transport Command will take a long time to repair. Furthermore, the aspersion that is cast on the gallant R.A.F. air-crews ordered to carry out tasks for which they are not properly equipped is something that no one can fail to deplore. It is therefore necessary to insist that the existing state of affairs is due to errors in Air Ministry policy, and that anxiety for the future can, by appreciation of what has happened, be dispelled.

As one looks back on the composition of the R.A.F. in September, 1939, it is almost incredible that there was no air transport organisation within it. At the outbreak of war the only transport aircraft that were available for furnishing communications between England and the Continent, and between England and the Dominions, were forty civil machines, in varying degree of modernity and obsolescence, belonging to British Airways and Imperial Airways. Admittedly, the Air Ministry had not been helped by the meagre allocations from the public purse that were voted from time to time by an ignorant and unimaginative Parliament; but that does not excuse the total lack of appreciation by the Government’s military air advisers of the necessity for a military air transport cadre organisation. They had only to look to Germany for instruction on this point. The Lufthansa Company was liberally equipped with the redoubtable Junkers 52, and within a flash they were serving in their hundreds the voracious appetite of the armed forces. We know now, and knew at the time, how much they were responsible for those lightning conquests that shook the very foundations of the world.

With the fall of Singapore we found ourselves with no swift means of communication to Australia, a stultifying state of affairs that might not have come about if the R.A.F. had been equipped with long-range aircraft to serve Empire communications in a way commensurate with its responsibilities. With the development of the North African campaign, the need for an air transport organisation in that area was seen, and a group formed to endeavour to supply the demand. It was not, however, until 1943 that the Directorate of Air Transport was appointed in the Air Ministry. From that moment the Air Ministry became alive to the urgency of the requirements, but also from that moment showed a dismal lack of reality in application. The Director of Air Transport was unversed in the intricacies of his subject, or, indeed, in its fundamentals. His small staff were likewise quite inexperienced and ill-equipped to deal with the brief. One of the first papers, for consideration by the Air Staff, that emerged from the Directorate was an appreciation of the role air transport could play in the projected supply of R.A.F. squadrons to be deployed against the Japanese. Needless to say, its recommendations revealed a deplorable lack of knowledge of the subject, and, to anyone with even elementary experience of the matter, was a source of alarm and despondency in view of the anxiety its puerility evoked.

There were a number of experienced air-transport men who could have been put in charge, but at that time – and ever since so far as the highest posts in R.A.F. air transport were concerned – the Ministry showed a stubborn reluctance to appoint anyone but a regular officer completely new to the subject. Lest this generality should be held against me as a weakness, I would have suggested, as more appropriate, a man who holds exceptional qualifications as an air transport executive, a courageous pilot, and who was, incidentally, the very capable A.O.C. of the transport group in Egypt to which I have already referred. His name is Whitney Straight. The first Director of Air Transport was moved on and another officer nominated to take his place. This officer likewise had no experience of the specialised subject which he was called upon to direct.

The first Commander-in-Chief of the new R.A.F. Transport Command (formed in 1943) was Sir Frederick Bowhill. He was beloved by all who served under him and, though having only limited knowledge of his new task, had that essential prerequisite, an open mind. Sir Frederick had done magnificent work in organising the ferrying of aircraft across the North Atlantic, and there was every reason for confidence that he would be successful in building up R.A.F. Transport Command by combining his own talents and sense of leadership with a disposition which allowed him to ask for, and taker advice without imagining it was infradig to do so. Early this year Sir Frederick was retired, having reached the age limit.

In war a commander, inevitably and rightly, so long as it is within reason, regards the loss of his men and women by killing as a normal price which has to be paid for the conduct of the operation. With the coming of peace the life of the individual is once more sacrosanct, and a Commander’s outlook must be reorientated into thinking in terms of men and women first and the operation second. Transport Command, in endeavouring to carry out a trooping programme formulated by the Cabinet as far back as March, has killed in the last seven weeks more than one hundred people, all of whom were ordered to fly to their destination. I am aware that that is a brutal way of putting it. I am conscious of the fact that people who are not pilots, who have no knowledge of the Service, who have had no experience of air transport, and who, like all of us, think the world of the R.A.F., argue that the aircrews of Transport Command have a big job to do and they are only carrying out their duty; it is therefore unfair to criticise. I am aware of all that. But I ‘would ask these people to think of the luckless corporals and sergeants and lieutenants and captains, and, indeed, the aircrews, who are ordered to fly in old aircraft of a Command which has a record of safety worse than any airline probably since the beginning of time. I would refer them to a contemporary safety record achieved by the British Overseas Airway Corporation, which, in spite of tremendous difficulties, has flown 250,000p00 passenger-miles in the last twelve months without a single fatality.

There are many reasons for the fatalities for which Transport Command are responsible. Aircraft and engines are getting old, maintenance is not what it was, owing to lack of spare parts and to discontent among ground crews awaiting demobilisation, the trooping programme is a tremendous one, a number of the best pilots are already demobilised, others may be resentful at being posted to Transport Command from one of the Operational Commands, training can only be short, owing to the urgency to get pilots, and so on. There is, however, not one reason why the accidents should not be stopped instantly by Transport Command Headquarters, through the Air Ministry, admitting that it is flying where angels fear to fly and without the experience of a cherub. Only Service pride is involved, and this appalling price will continue to be paid so long as the Air Ministry fails to face up to the admission that it has taken on more than it can manage. It need not admit that expert advice has very rarely been sought, if at all.

Transport Command Headquarters, and the Air Ministry, are sheltering under the goodwill of the public to the R.A.F. The Command’s protection from public scrutiny should be in no way similar to that of Bomber, Fighter and Coastal Commands, whose detailed activities, for security reasons, must be enveloped in secrecy. Transport Command is performing a civilian function (it even takes fare-paying passengers) and its control should be open to the public view – particularly and urgently so, since it has revealed itself so costly to the nation. It is too late for civil aviation to take on its immediate task. The programme must therefore be cancelled or reduced to within limits which the Command can perform with safety. The future must be planned afresh, with the Command limited to a cadre force. Until public opinion forces this issue, the fair name of the R.A.F. will be besmirched, and increasing multitudes will resolve never to fly British; for the multitudes do not discriminate between the misplaced amateur efforts of Service direction and the safe efficiency of experienced civil enterprise.

Here’s XP443 in its Transport Command days:

More pictures taken at Abingdon together with an aerial view of Brize Norton, all taken in the late sixties by which time Transport Command had become Air Support Command.

The Andover image was taken exactly 50 years ago on 11/12 May, 1968 which was the weekend of the Biggin Hill Air Fair. Argosy XP443 alongside was the drop platform for the Falcons on both days, it was at the end of one of those displays that the team leader’s canopy got wrapped around the spinning propeller blades of Sir Charles Masefield’s P-51D Mustang and he had to be cut free. He was fortunate to escape serious injury, largely thanks to the swift action of the pilot in quickly shutting down the engine.

Thank you for the information, Supermarine305. Coincidentally, I lived for a number of years in north Cumbria and passed the site of the Kirkbride airfield on a number of occasions (but this was in my long ‘fallow’ period regarding aviation).

Here’s another photograph of a Valetta. From the size, paper and printing standard of the original. I’d suggest it was taken at or around the same time as the Hastings photo in Post # 55, above – maybe even the same place and date.

For the Valetta C1 VX513:
d/d 17/03/1950, scr. 09/12/1959 at No.12 MU Kirkbride to Enfield Rolling Mills.
Going by the trees and grass, sometime in summer ’59 at RAF Kirkbride, Cumberland (now in Cumbria)?

And a Hastings. Again, I can’t date or locate it but it looks like a newsworthy occasion. Any thoughts?

I was just recently looking through a box of photographs that date back at least 55 years and came across this one – a rather sad photo. I certainly can’t date it or locate it (perhaps someone can help there).