J W Booth AUTOBIOGRAPHY C4

Chapter 4-INTERREGNUM.
Having turned my back on the Navy, I found myself at home for an indefinite period for the first time since I was eight. Our family consisted of my mother who still eked out her pension with domestic work, my Aunt Ada who had lost an office job when the business closed after many years and was now a sort of housekeeper to an invalid lady, my sister Ada who had just started work as a Clerical Officer in the Admiralty and myself. For a while I felt rather as I did when I went to Swanley, out of my depth in a hostile environment.
The Civil Service examination was held in Central London and I was in my usual fever of anxiety about bus strikes, accidents or earthquakes which might make me late getting there. Once I was in my seat I was quite at ease, however, and it all went pretty well. I am lucky in exams in that they seem to ask questions on parts of the syllabus on which I am best prepared. In the dreaded English Literature paper there was a question about Sheridan's play 'The Rivals'. This had been the set-play for 6 U.N. and I knew it far better than any other play in the language. The Higher Maths paper, which I was banking on, was
a stinker and I was in despair, but I actually scored about 90% on it so the marks must have been weighted to compensate for the severity of the questions.
While awaiting the results I had to make some small contribution to the household budget and got a job as a junior costing clerk with a firm of confectionery manufacturers. They specialised in chocolate coated raisins etc. and roasted peanuts. Their trademark was 'Sunpat' and their packaging and advertising conjured up a picture of sun-drenched vineyards. Actually they had a rather drab factory in a backstreet in Camberwell, but their products were delicious. I was paid 25/- (£1.25.) for a fifty-hour week and we were expected to work late one week a month without any extra pay. Anyone who objected to this was sacked.
The exam results came out in April, being posted from the Civil Service Commission at teatime and delivered about 9 pm in Peckham the same night. Because of the large number of candidates, some 8000, we each got only one page of the list of results. There were 100 names to a page and I was on page 1, just.
I was asked to name three Departments in order of preference and put the Admiralty first and the Customs and Excise second.I don't remember my third choice but it certainly wasn't the Air Ministry to which I was appointed on the 16th May, 1938.The minimum of the Clerical Officer pay scale was £85 per annumand it took 20 years to reach the maximum of £320. I started in Kingsway and remained at the same desk until the outbreak of war having no formal training and performing minor clericalwork in the Directorate of Equipment. The functions of a Clerical Officer were not nearly as important as the title might suggest. I only remember one job which was of some importance. As the war clouds gathered new aircraft were being delivered by the hundred, many of them short of important items particularly gun turrets. The Air Council required a monthly report of progress in making good this deficiency and I had to collect and collate the figures. I think I had signed an Official Secrets Act form but I had never heard of vetting. This was the only time in 45 years in the Civil Service that I was concerned with a real spy-type secret and it never occurred to anyone that I might flog it to the German Embassy. Not having had the benefit of a university education, I didn't think of it either.
We only worked about 40 hours a week and the conditions were so reasonable that when I joined the Civil Service Clerical Association I regarded it as the merest formality. I must have been naive to the point of feeble mindedness. Then along came the war and I was whipped off to Harrogate and my sister to Bath leaving our household impoverished in London and Ada and I practically destitute in Bath and Harrogate respectively.
The General Secretary of the C.S.C.A. had political ambitions and actually became an M.P. after the war and there was no way he was going to take up the cudgels on behalf of a few thousand youngsters who would mostly be called up into the armed forces over the next couple of years anyway. Up to then I had thought that the government would give its employees a square deal because it was the right thing to do, but as soon as war conditions enabled it to do us down with impunity it hastened to do just that.
We were compulsorily billeted on the startled inhabitants who received 21/- a week for our bed and two meals a day for 7 daysa week. Most of this was stopped out of salaries and if you were on a gross 32/6 a week this did not leave much for one meal a day and all other expenses. As I had been allowing my mother 22/6 a week in London I was granted an allowance of 1/6,the difference between this and the billeting figure, a piece of bureaucratic meanness which I shall never forgive.
I approached my boss with a view to resigning my post and joining up. He talked me out of this because it was a serious step with no guarantee that I could get back in after the war. In the event he kept me going with what overtime he could find for me, at about 4p an hour, until I was called up at the beginning of 1942 and had my second chance to join the Navy. This was a case where the helpful action of an individual mitigated hardship imposed by an uncaring system. Having been at the mercy of such systems all my life I can only thank goodness for this, and the many other similar incidents, which have helped to smooth the way. Years later when it was my turn to try to help people who had got caught in the machinery, I remembered these cases.
The two years while I struggled along in Harrogate, Ada did the same in Bath, my mother and aunt were bombed in London and the country seemed to be well on the way to losing the war, should have been thoroughly miserable, but they weren't. In the first place, our common exile brought the junior staff together in camaraderie almost like school and in the second I had been put in to share a room with a lad named Pat who had befriended me in London.
Like me he was a junior Clerical Officer in the Directorateof Equipment, but there the resemblance ended. He was everything that I was not. He was big and tough and excelled at swimming, boxing and rugby football. Son of an ex-officer from the First World War living in Dover, he had been to a good school and had been better brought up than I had. Not more strictly but better. His father insisted on good manners and correct behaviour. Pat told me that he had once been reprimanded for being out on a date later than his father allowed. He said the picture had run late and his Dad replied that he should have left before the end. Pat got in on time from his next date, not by leaving the cinema early but by merely seeing his girl on to her bus to the other side of town and then coming straight home himself. When his father heard of this he said "You did what?. You took a lady out and didn't see her home?". Pat finished up in deep disgrace, cycling to her home in the middle of the night to see that she had got in safely and to apologise to her father for not having seen her home in the first place.
Pat had an easy courtesy which I envied but never quite managed to emulate. If we were at lunch and anyone, male or female, said "do you mind if I join you", he would rise to his feet and say "Please do". We remained firm friends until he joined the Tank Corps in 1941. He was commissioned and posted to India and thence to the Middle East where he died of meningitis in 1945. Always the best.
In 1940 I had my first real girl friend. I had fallen in love regularly since about 1936 but this was the first time I got any response from the object of my passion. As most of her predecessors were people like Ginger Rogers this was not surprising. The very severe winters of 1939/40 and 1940/41 were each followed by beautiful summers and we hiked around all over Yorkshire, went to the pictures and theatres together and indulged in what would now be called heavy petting and was then termed 'snogging'. She was the only girl I ever dated who made heads turn in the street and other fellows wonder what the hell she could see in me. I sometimes wondered myself, as my monastic adolescence had made me pretty much of an outsider in the romance stakes. The affair died a natural death towards the end of the war but it was lovely while it lasted and so was she. I wonder where she is now. She must be pushing 70.
The war produced one interesting job which was laid to our Branch. At the outbreak of hostilities private civil flying was totally prohibited over and around the United Kingdom and various light aircraft were requisitioned for the use of the R.A.F. The most common type was the Tiger Moth and variants of it and a number of these were actually used to patrol over home waters and look for U-boats. As they were unarmed and had no radios I don't know what they did if they sighted one. Flew home and told someone I suppose.
Having been brought up to regard car-owners as rich, I naturally supposed that the owners of private aeroplanes were millionaires. In fact, most light aircraft were owned by people of moderate means who were buying them on hire purchase. Requisitioning, far from being a hardship, was the best that they could hope for and we were inundated with offers.
I was only concerned with the paperwork, of course, and the legwork was done by a First War flyer named Sqn. Ldr. Reid. He was permitted to travel the country in a 'plane of his own choosing and actually used a civil version of the German Messchersmidt which had belonged to the German Air Attache and been seized as enemy property. He didn't even bother have it given R.A.F. markings until he was forced down near Oxford by 'some damned puppy in a Hurricane'. Apparently the Group Captain commanding the fighter station was an old buddy of Reid's and it turned into quite a party.
We got many abusive letters from finance companies who were in a hurry for their money and thought they could bully the Government the way they did defaulting customers. We used to acknowledge their letters on a formal printed postcard which inflamed them to the point of madness.
Reid's best catch was a thing called the Cunliffe-Owen FlyingWing. As the name implies, this was an experimental aircraftof revolutionary design with the minimum of fuselage and the maximum of wing. Designed to carry passengers, the cabins, and practically everything else, were in the wings. In 1941 theAir Ministry was under political pressure to provide a transport aircraft for the Free French in West Africa and the R.A.F. chiefs were pleading a general shortage. Someone thought of the Flying Wing and the Air Member for Supply and Organisation brusquely minuted "If the French want this damn thing they can have it".
Reid did a splendid deal with Sir Hugo Cunliffe-Owen and bought the aircraft and all available spares for about a quarter of its assessed value and was then left to get it out to Africa as best he could. As this involved flying a totally untested and unarmed aeroplane through the war zone there was an understandable shortage of volunteers. Finally one Jim Mollison agreed to do it. Mollison was a famous air pioneer and had attracted enormous publicity between the wars as a daredevil, general hell-raiser and husband of Amy Johnson.
Sqn.Ldr. Reid paid him a fee of £250 with his own cheque which Mollison endorsed and handed back for the R.A.F. Benevolent Fund. Prior to this I thought of Mollison as a publicity hunter rather than a top pilot. How wrong can you be?
Most of our gang had been called up by the end of 1941 and several of them had already been killed. The billeting problem had eased as most of those who didn't really want us had managed to get out of it and others had come to terms with the system.Moreover, when the Ministry of Aircraft Production was formed early in 1940 under Lord Beaverbrook many of the staff of theAir Ministry became part of it and those in Harrogate were transferred back to London in good time for the blitz.
At the beginning of February, 1942 I left Harrogate with some regrets and went to join H.M.S. Royal Arthur, Butlin's Navyat Skegness.

Chapter Four: Interregnum– My comments

I commented to my dad much later in life that he had a “monkey on his back” that his family would never go short if he could help it – in this chapter we see that as soon as he was out of school he looked to support his mother first by working in the Sunpat factory then with part of his salary from the Air Ministry. I cannot claim to understand his arithmetic regarding his lodgings and the amount he paid his mother but it is notable that he didn’t even think of cutting her off until he had more means to support her.

Also he displays his ability to understate his successes – by my simple calculations he was in the top 100 out of 8000 in the Civil service entrance exam but he has to add the word just as in” I was on page 1, just.”. His achievement was massive given that many of his competitors had better schools and a purpose made coaching course to equip them for the exam.

It is also vaguely worrying that someone in the top 1.25% did not get one of their top three choices – perhaps other factors - like which school the candidates had attended were allowed to influence the allocation of jobs.