RAF Morpeth 60 years on (article)

The following article has been taken from the Morpeth Herald website and was written by local historian Ian Tapster.

The original article can be found here: http://www.morpethherald.co.uk/CustomPages/CustomPage.aspx?PageID=34330&SectionIDs=6262

A DISTANT water tower on the South Western skyline and rows of war graves in a corner of St Mary’s churchyard. For the townspeople of Morpeth these are the only tangible reminders of their busy wartime airfield which opened 60 years ago in the Spring of 1942.
 RAF Station Morpeth was operational from April 1942 until July 1945 and for most of that time was the home of No 4 Air Gunnery School at which some 4,000 young men were trained to join the squadrons of Bomber Coastal Commands.
 Nowadays known as Tranwell Airfield, it was typical of many wartime aerodromes with its facilities widely dispersed in surrounding fields to avoid enemy air attack.
 In 1941 three runways were constructed on Cockhill Moor together with three large hangars (one abutting the Saltwick Road, another backing on to the Ponteland road and the third at the North end of the airfield near the present communications mast) and 17 smaller ‘blister’ hangars.
 One of these, latterly used for agricultural purposes, survives alongside the public footpath which crosses the airfield from Tranwell Woods to the Ponteland road. Aircraft dispersal bays were spread around the perimeter and also extended into the woodland West of that road. The rest of the camp was distributed around the surrounding countryside.
 Seven domestic sites provided accommodation for servicemen of all ranks. These sites, scattered over an area a mile square, ranged in size from five to 15 barrack huts with associated ablution huts and air raid shelters.
 Heated by a solitary coke stove, the wartime huts would have been bleak and comfortless places in the hard Northumberland winters of the 1940s. If you were lucky enough to have a bedspace near the stove it was tolerable, but at either end of the hut near Arctic conditions prevailed. That was where the newcomers to the camp usually found themselves!
 The ‘communal site’, 500 yards west of Glororum, was roughly in the centre of the arc of dispersed living quarters.
 The existing water tower stands at the Northern boundary of this site which comprised officers’, sergeants’ and airmen’s messes, the indispensable NAAFI, an education hut and a gymnasium. There were also essential services such as the camp post office, barber and cobbler and four Nissen huts to accommodate airwomen, presumably the girls working shifts in the various messes.
 The remainder of the WAAF officers and airwomen were segregated on two sites close to the Whalton Road. There they had their own messes and NAAFI, a single sex medical section and — vital to morale — the hairdresser’s hut. Today, with women flying as front-line aircrew in the RAF, it is hard to imagine the extent to which the sexes were segregated 60 years ago.
 Station Sick Quarters was across the road from the WAAF sites. Its huts housed the RAF medical staff, medical inspection rooms, wards, the ambulance garage and a mortuary which was to see more than enough use when flying accidents began to take their toll.
 As a training unit, the camp also had an instructional site which was quite close to the communal domestic site.
 It was in the large field alongside what is now Woodside Cottage. Its buildings housed an instructional block, projection and lecture rooms, the cine camera gun workshops and the turret instructional building. Here the students would do the ‘ground school’ which laid the basis for their later airborne training.
 Finally, the woods East of the Saltwick road housed the Technical Site comprising the main workshops and stores, armoury, parachute section and ammunition bunkers. These were to be in constant use: when gunnery training was at its height in 1943 more than 325,000 rounds of machine gun ammunition were expended in a single month.
 The camp at Morpeth owed its existence to the urgent need to expand the number of specialised air gunners in the RAF.
 At the outbreak of the Second World War, as in 1914-18, air gunners were ground tradesmen who volunteered to fly on operations and who wore the coveted ‘winged bullet’ on the sleeves of their tunics.
 But by 1939 the increased speeds of bombers and opposing fighters, more complicated weapons and the need to master power operated turrets pointed to the need for better training leading to specialisation.
 It was acknowledged that air gunner should be a full time aircrew category and, in December 1939, the half-wing ‘AG’ brevet was introduced to replace the ‘winged bullet’ and air gunners were granted the rank of sergeant.
 Air Gunnery Schools were to be set up in various parts of the country but this took time as resources were scarce. For example, more than two years elapsed before No 4 AGS (one of 12 such units in the UK) became operational at Morpeth.
 In the meantime, ground crew volunteers continued to be misused, many displaying great bravery, until the output from the Air Gunnery Schools was sufficient to meet the needs of the squadrons.
 Against that background a small advance party arrived at Morpeth in January 1942 with the task of opening up the camp.
 Initially, conditions were extremely primitive but by April the airfield was ready to receive its first aircraft (although, in fact, there had been an unscheduled arrival on January 31 when a Canadian pilot had force landed a Hurricane on the South West corner of the aerodrome!)
 The unit was to be equipped with Blackburn Bothas and Westland Lysanders.
 The Botha was one of the RAF’s disasters. Intended as a torpedo bomber, it had been ordered in large numbers off the drawing board. But when the first Bothas entered service with Coastal Command they proved to be hopelessly underpowered and within weeks were relegated to a training role. That is how No 4 AGS came to finish up with them as training aircraft.
 The Lysander had a more respectable background and is better remembered for its more glamorous role with No 161 Squadron, landing SOE agents by night in fields in occupied Europe. At Morpeth, however, it was used as a stop-gap target tug until it was replaced by a specialist aircraft, the Miles Martinet.
 The first Lysanders arrived at Morpeth on April 13 1942 and some of the Bothas by April 17, the official opening date of No 4 AGS.
 It then took about five weeks to get the new unit up and running and the flying training programme eventually started on May 31.

Ian Tapster is the author of this work. It was published in the Morpeth Herald in March 2002.

A CORNER of Morpeth churchyard is a poignant and permanent reminder of an almost forgotten chapter of the town’s wartime history. It is the last resting place of many Polish flyers who were killed while training at Tranwell airfield on the outskirts of the town.
They had escaped to Britain when their country was occupied by Germany and had much to avenge, so it is not hard to imagine their frustration on being posted to RAF Morpeth where they flew Lysanders and the unpopular Blackburn Botha.
Flying trainee gunners up and down the Northumberland coast was a tedious business and the pilots sometimes let off steam with low flying and by putting the wind up their passengers (and local populace) by beating up the countryside.
My brother-in-law recalls how, as a lad of 12, he was raking hay in a hollow on his father’s farm on Alnwick Moor when a Botha roared in from the coast below treetop height.
The trainee air gunners were young men in their early twenties or late teens. What lay ahead of them when they arrived at Morpeth Station with their packs and kitbags and waited for the transport which would take them out to their new posting?
The standard course lasted six weeks, starting with ground instruction and culminating with about 15 training flights.
The usual flightpath took the aircraft over the coast at Blyth, out to sea for gunnery practice and back inland over the Aln estuary. Three or four students were carried on each flight, usually with an instructor.
They did live firing at a drogue towed by the target tug or used a camera gun whilst another aircraft made simulated attacks on them. These attacks were often made by pilots flying Miles Masters, a nippy little advanced trainer in service with some of the fighter Operation Training Units in Northumberland. At low altitudes, where the training took place, the Master had a performance comparable to some of the fighters of the day.
The volume of training at Morpeth can be judged by the fact that in August 1943, 240 men were under training and that 2,000 air gunners had already passed through the unit bound for the Operation Conversion Units where they crewed-up before joining front line squadrons.
The demand for air gunners reflected the expansion of Bomber Command and the casualty rate. Air gunners formed a significant percentage of the 55,000 casualties suffered by Bomber Command.
Not only were there at least two gunners in each heavy bomber crew, but the very proficient Luftwaffe night-fighter crews knew if they could knock out the rear turret, the British bombers had no defence against attacks from below. The tail gunner was therefore a prime target.
In his book ‘Right of the Line’, historian John Terraine wrote: ‘The air gunner’s task, especially at the rear, was essentially solitary, calling for both deep moral reserves and great physical fitness. Sitting almost immobile in the cramped panoly of a metal and perspex cupla for six, eight, ten, or even more hours, constantly vigilant yet unable to relieve cramped legs, arms or back, called for extraordinary feats of physical endurance. The air gunner’s prospects were a comfortless life and lonely death, a combination calling for amazing fortitude.’ These were the young men who trained here at Morpeth.
They faced danger even before they reached their squadrons because there were frequent accidents involving the training aircraft.
The worst incident occurred on March 29, 1943, when nine airman, British, Polish, Dutch and a New Zealander were killed in a mid-air collision.
In all, a dozen of the accidents involved the much disliked Bothas, eight of them in four months preceding their replacement by Avro Ansons in July 1943.
In contrast to the Botha, the faithful Anson was a reliable workhorse for the RAF. Introduced into service for maritime reconnaissance in 1935, it remained in production until 1952 as a training and communications aircraft. I last flew in one in 1961 and it remained in RAF service for several years after that.
At Morpeth, it not only proved more reliable than the Botha, but was also more suitable for its task. In particular, the ‘glasshouse’ cabin gave the instructor a good view of his pupils in action as they sought to pepper the target drogue with bullets.
Significantly, there was only one Anson accident in the type’s 16 months service with No 4 AGS. I am told that there was one snag from the trainee gunner’s point of view. In the early Ansons the undercarriage had to be cranked up and down by hand, a task which fell to the students guided by gesticulations from the Polish pilots who often spoke little English.
On occasions the gunnery school had to share its Morpeth airfield with other units. These included a Spitfire Squadron (No 72 Sqn) which stayed briefly in August 1942, No 1614 Anti-Aircraft Co-operation Flight, consisting of a Tiger Moth and an antique Fairy Hendon bomber, and the Austers of the Army’s 652 Air Observation Post Squadron in 1943.
The camp was also familiar to local ATC cadets who were given flights in the Bothas and Ansons and got a glimpse of the Service life to come.
Eventually, demand for air gunners contracted and in December 1944 the Air Ministry decided to close No 4 AGS. By then, the unit had establishment of nearly 1,700 personnel, including 440 WAAFs. Sixty nine air gunners’ courses had been completed and the remaining 73 trainees on No 70 course were transferred to No 3 AGS at Castle Kennedy to complete their training.
But the wartime role of Morpeth’s airfield was not quite over. After a few months on a care and maintenance basis, it reopened to welcome No 80 Operational Training Unit. This unit, which was training Free French pilots to fly Spitfires, stayed for three months until moving in July 1945 to RAF Ouston (now Albemarle Barracks), a pre-war station with better facilities.
Although the site then remained in RAF hands as a storage unit (No 261 Maintenance Unit) until July 1948, Morpeth’s local aerodrome was consigned to history.
Unlike those in many other parts of the country, our local authorities have never seen fit to commemorate the County’s wartime airfields. Yet, just like our medieval battlefields and castles which are graced by signs and interpretation boards for the benefit of visitors, they too are part of Northumberland’s historical military heritage.
Nevertheless, we as individuals can commemorate our local airfield and the men and women who served there. Go to the North West corner of the old churchyard of St Mary’s and gaze upon the serried ranks of headstones marking the last resting place of the young airmen who plunged to earth from the skies around Morpeth, many of them far from their homeland.
Or, one Summer evening, drive up to Tranwell Woods and park near the fingerpost and stile at the end of the public footpath which crosses the old airfield. Climb over the stile and, with the peaceful Northumberland countryside around you, picture the groups of young men with parachute packs slung over their shoulders, chatting in many languages as they headed out towards and the aircraft dispersals where the engines were already ticking over. Can you hear them, or is it just the wind in the trees?
Think of those who made their final fatal flight from that very field and of the many more, hundreds probably, who left Morpeth to die in the cold lonely night skies over Occupied Europe. Think of them and of the freedom which we enjoy and which, in the intervening 60 years, later generations have come to take for granted.
In conclusion I should like to thank ex-air gunners and others who shared with me their memories of No 4 AGS, also Jim Mackay for the valuable material he provided and fellow RAFA members in London who visited the Public Record Office on my behalf.