Latest news with #FleetAirArm
Yahoo
6 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Marguerite Weyer, air mechanic with the WRNS who worked on the Seafire and Bristol Beaufighter
Marguerite Weyer, who has died aged 96, was a Wren air mechanic who helped keep the Fleet Air Arm flying from remote coastal stations in the postwar years. Many young women who volunteered for the Women's Royal Naval Service towards the end of the Second World War and afterwards were assigned as air mechanics, specialising in engines, airframes, electrical or ordnance. Marguerite Warden (as she was before marriage) was an art student in Hull in 1946 when she spent an 18th-birthday present of £5 from her father on a train ticket to Newcastle, where she signed on at a naval recruiting office – and told her parents afterwards. Trained to service the Merlin (and later Griffon) engine of the Supermarine Seafire – an adaptation of the Spitfire fighter for use on aircraft carriers – she was posted first to RNAS Dale, also known as HMS Goldcrest, facing the Celtic Sea on the Pembrokeshire coast. Self-made entertainment on the base included amateur dramatics, with productions of Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit and Hay Fever; as their leading man, the Wrens co-opted 'a pink-faced schoolie [education officer] fresh from Cambridge' with theatrical connections – the young David Attenborough on National Service. After her eyesight faded in old age, Marguerite invariably greeted television's most unmistakable voice with: 'Ah, my old friend David…' In her four years as an air mechanic she also worked on the heavier Bristol Beaufighter, occasionally taxied aircraft between apron and hangar, and was promoted to Leading Wren. At HMS Nuthatch, a 'receipt and dispatch unit' which prepared new aircraft for operational use at Anthorn on the Solway Firth, and at Evanton (HMS Fieldfare) on the Cromarty Firth, winter was harsh and quarters were spartan; a bout of pneumonia and pleurisy in early 1949 gave Marguerite welcome respite in a warm sickbay. She left to marry the following year but the camaraderie of service remained a vivid memory, and her gang of Wren friends, of whom she was the last survivor, were in touch for the rest of their lives. Marguerite Warden was born on June 19 1928 at Hornsea on Yorkshire's east coast and was brought up in Bridlington. She was the fourth child of Laurence Warden, an insurance manager in Hull and a noted watercolour painter, and his wife Daisy, née Jobson, whose antecedents were Danish. When German bombs began falling on Bridlington, Marguerite spent an idyllic summer of 1940 evacuated to Kirkbymoorside in the North Riding with her mother and sister, their father joining at weekends for painting expeditions on the North York Moors. She returned to complete her school certificate at Bridlington High School for Girls, and towards the end of the war she was allowed to join Saturday dances at the Spa Ballroom, with servicemen billeted around the town. She recalled the heel-clicking gallantry of a Polish cadet called Zbicek and the frisson of teenage romance with William Franklyn, a Parachute Regiment soldier later famous as the velvet-voiced actor of the 1970s Schweppes tonic water adverts ('Schhh… you know who'). A promising artist, she enrolled in 1945 at Hull College of Arts and Crafts but found its old-fashioned focus on still-life drawing too staid; she would have preferred the more avant-garde Leeds school, but her mother would not let her go into lodgings. Instead Marguerite opted for the adventure of the Wrens until her marriage in 1950 to Deryk Vander Weyer – a Bridlington neighbour, wartime Green Howards officer, and at that time a junior bank official. When he asked for her hand in the traditional way, her father was sufficiently impressed to remark that 'this young man could be a branch manager one day.' In fact Deryk rose to be deputy chairman of Barclays and British Telecom and a director of the Bank of England. Their 40-year marriage involved 10 house moves and, in later years, a full diary of receptions, City banquets and global travel. Marguerite rose with style to every occasion, but was always happiest amid friends, flowers and dogs, and absorbed in her love of art history. Deryk Vander Weyer died in 1990. In a widowhood of almost 35 years, Marguerite made a new life as an elegant grand dame of the town of Helmsley in North Yorkshire, where she made a lovely memorial garden (within the public Helmsley Walled Garden) for their daughter Linda, an artist and teacher who died in 2006. She is survived by their son, the Spectator columnist Martin Vander Weyer. Marguerite Weyer, born June 19 1928, died May 12 2025 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Yahoo
20-04-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Ronnie Scott, Anglo-Argentine who volunteered for the Fleet Air Arm in 1942 and flew Spitfires
Ronnie Scott, who has died aged 107, volunteered from Buenos Aires in the Second World War for the Fleet Air Arm, was one of the last living pilots to have flown Spitfires during the war, and believed to be the oldest Royal Navy veteran in the Americas. As soon as he could, in mid-1942, Scott volunteered as a British Latin American Volunteer or BLAV, one of a few thousand from Argentina. Much of the remainder of the year was spent in travel by sea with a contingent of 32 Argentine volunteers via the United States to Britain. Arriving in Liverpool in April 1943, as a BLAV he was marked down for the Army, and he had to talk his way into the Fleet Air Arm, which was his only specific ambition other than a general determination to fight Hitler. Joining No 53 Course, Scott was sent to Canada to learn to fly and, on return to Britain, he was commissioned as sub-lieutenant RNVR (Air). He first joined 794 Naval Air Squadron, part of No.1 Naval Air Firing Unit, where he flew target tugs, but then joined 761 Naval Air Squadron at the Naval Air Fighter School. On November 17 1944 he flew his first solo in a Spitfire. He told the Argentine historian, Claudio Meunier, who wrote his biography: 'I took off with the canopy open … it was 55 unforgettable minutes ... when accelerating, the nose went down and you could see ahead perfectly. 'Adrenaline took over my body. Flying a Spitfire was touching the sky with your hands, it was the most exciting plane I could have flown up to that moment. 'I tried a tight turn, and I was surprised. My god! This was something else, the body was crushed against the seat and the aircraft took you wherever you wanted. Impressed. She was alive, it was incomparable.' Later, Scott also flew the Sea Hurricane and the Seafire, navalised versions of aircraft made famous in the Battle of Britain. Modestly he claimed to have had a 'comfortable war' as a flying instructor rather than in combat. Nevertheless, he came close to death, once when he suffered an engine failure and crashed into the sea off the southwest coast and also in London during the flying bomb blitz. Scott was demobilised in 1946, and enlisted in the Argentine Navy as a reserve officer. After working in a textile company, he joined the national airline Aeroposta Argentina as a commercial pilot along with other wartime pilots, flying the Dakota DC-3 on the routes over Patagonia. When Aerolíneas Argentinas was founded in 1950, he flew the Douglas DC-4, the de Havilland Comet 4, and finished his flying career in the Boeing 737. He was a founder of the Air Line Pilots Association, and he retired in 1978 with more than 23,000 flying hours as a commercial pilot. During the Falklands War he admired the skills of the aviators of both the Argentine Air Force and his successors in the Fleet Air Arm. Ronald David Scott was born on October 20 1917 in Buenos Aires, the son of a Scots veteran of the Boer War and an English nurse. Argentina was then one of the largest economies in the world, with around 60,000 Anglo-Argentines in Buenos Aires, served by a branch of Harrods in the Calle Florida and a Hurlingham's sports club. His father was one of the first referees of Argentine rugby. Young Scott was educated at Belgrano day school and Hurlingham's Oates Sollege (which merged with St George's in 1935). One of his earliest memories was the British Industries Exhibition in Buenos Aires and the visit of the aircraft carrier HMS Eagle, when Edward, Prince of Wales, playing polo at the Hurlingham, asked him to fetch a glass of tonic. After the prince and the 14-year-old fell into conversation, Edward asked his private secretary to arrange for the boy to visit Eagle, which inspired him to want to fly in the Royal Navy. Prewar, Scott had started a typical Anglo-Argentine career as a junior clerk in Swift meatpackers. When war broke out, he raised money for the Spitfire Fund in the Argentine, and once he could place his widowed, ailing mother in a hospice, in May 1942, he volunteered for service in Britain. Scott was an active sportsman, favouring rugby and cricket but also finding time for hockey, bowls, badminton and cycling. In quieter moments he played bridge. He was always cheerful, very respectful and had many friends. A mainstay of veterans' organisations, he never missed a Poppy Day. In March 2021, he became a screen star, when the documentary Buena Onda ('Good Vibes') was made about him during the pandemic. In 2018 the Argentine Navy made him doyen of their naval aviation arm; in 2021 he was made a life member of the Fleet Air Arm Officer's Association; and in 2022 was granted the Condecoración de la Armada Argentina. He died at the British-American Benevolent Society retirement home, in the Buenos Aires suburb of Villa Devoto, where he was born. The secret of old age, he said, was: 'Keep moving, and a daily glass of tinto.' Scott married Marion Groyne in 1950. She predeceased him in 2014, and he is survived by their two sons. Ronnie Scott, born October 20 1917, died April 17 2025 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
13-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Critics called this wartime novelist a ‘lightweight'. Nonsense
Half a century ago, Nevil Shute was one of the best-known English novelists. He had a huge following, one that would persist for a while after he died, just before his 61st birthday, in 1960. But Shute was a novelist for different times, and that popularity has since waned. Only a few of his works have maintained their high reputation, most notably A Town Like Alice (1950) and On the Beach (1957). Both were made into highly successful films, in 1956 and 1959 respectively, sealing Shute's fame – at least for a time. He had been writing novels since the 1920s, while pursuing a career as an aeronautical engineer. He practised his profession under his real name, Nevil Norway, fearing he would not be taken seriously if it were known he wrote fiction in his spare time. Aeronautics and scientific knowledge generally play a large part in many of his novels, but particularly those related to the Second World War. Beyond A Town Like Alice, there are three further such novels, yet they are largely forgotten, and borne down by their author's reputation as a lightweight. Re-reading them today, one realises both why he was popular and that he was not lightweight at all. What Happened to the Corbetts, the first of these, was written in 1938, and published in 1939, days after Neville Chamberlain had told Hitler that a German invasion of Poland would provoke all-out war. The novel describes, with remarkable accuracy and foresight, the effect of mass aerial bombing on a British city. Shute chose Southampton, to whose inhabitants he apologised. He was keen to use a real and not a fictional town to bring home the realities of such an assault. Shute later said that he had not properly appreciated the extent to which firestorms would spread after bombing; but otherwise the destruction, the disruption, the fear are all vividly depicted. Shute's characters are usually people such as him: from the professional middle classes, with a good grasp of practicalities, and called upon to solve problems. In What Happened to the Corbetts, the problems are no water, no food and the threat of cholera. Corbett himself is a lawyer and has a small boat, and there is a sense that in parts of the city less fortunate than where they live, things are even worse. He manages to sail his boat along England's southern coast, taking his wife and their three small children with him, and rescues two Fleet Air Arm men who have been shot down. The Navy thanks them by giving them assistance to sail to northern France, whereupon the wife and children are put on a boat to Canada, and Corbett does his duty by joining the Navy. In a final successful prophecy, Shute has a Frenchman say that Britain will win the war because the Dominions will come in and the Americans will provide aid. Landfall: A Channel Story was written in 1940 and set in the Phoney War. A young pilot is thrilled to have bombed and sunk a U-boat; but it then seems that he has in fact sunk a British submarine. The book is devoted to the pilot's redemption – he bravely volunteers to fly a plane testing a new missile, in the course of which he crashes into the sea – but it transpires later that he had no need to be redeemed: the British submarine that was sunk had in fact been hit by the U-boat (which the pilot had sunk subsequently). The key part of the story is how the pilot's girlfriend – a barmaid – picks up information that leads to the discovery of the U-boat's responsibility, careless talk on this occasion not costing lives. Pastoral (1944) is another tale of aerial heroics, about the crew of a bomber whose commander suffers from combat fatigue and is distracted by an unsatisfactory love affair with a woman from the WAAF. Shute focuses on relations between fighting men, but sets the story against a backdrop of English rural life, and especially the men's shared interest in angling. Critics also detected a theme of continuity: of nature and human relationships being more powerful than conflict. All these war-related novels, along with much else written by Shute, display not only his genius as a storyteller but also how he reflected the world around him. Eighty years after the war's conclusion, he richly deserves rediscovery.
Telegraph
02-04-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
It's the 1930s again. Let's do what we did then and let the Royal Navy own its carrier planes
Comparisons between now and the 1930s are rife these days. There's economic anxiety and global instability. There's a threat of war. There's hesitant rearmament here in Britain. And, as in the 1930s, the planes which fly from the Royal Navy's aircraft carriers belong to the RAF – with disastrous consequences for the ships' effectiveness. Back then, the Fleet Air Arm was not a priority for the RAF, and the FAA had the unenviable distinction of being one of the few air forces still equipped with biplanes at the start of WWII. Today the F-35B jump jet, the only plane which can fly from our carriers, is Britain's only modern fifth-generation fighter. As a result it is difficult to get the RAF to release any aircraft for carrier operations. Though the ships are designed for 36 planes, neither carrier has ever had more than eight British jets aboard. Usually they don't have any: in 2022, for instance, there were jets aboard ship just 5 per cent of the time. In theory things will improve temporarily this year. HMS Prince of Wales will deploy to the Far East, apparently at least some of the time with an air group including 24 British jets – still only two-thirds of what she was built to carry, but better than eight as on the last real carrier deployment in 2021. And the Navy might get another go with the train set, why, as soon as 2029. Even this year there are signs of trouble. An RAF source told me recently that plans are being put together to deploy five Voyager tanker aircraft in order to fly the F-35Bs off the Prince of Wales as she transits the Suez Canal, Red Sea and Gulf of Aden – apparently because the RAF is worried about the danger to the precious jets. Britain only has 34 of them altogether, and four are test planes kept in America. The Navy has not heard of these plans, and this may be just a case of RAF staff officers putting something together informally at a low level in case it later gets asked for at short notice. But even the fact that such plans are being considered shows how inappropriate it is that the RAF owns the carrier planes. A carrier without aircraft is in hugely more danger than one with its air wing. The fighters are, in fact, the outer layer of defence for the entire carrier group. Removing the jets because of danger to the ship is madness. But at least some people in the RAF either don't know this, or perhaps worse, don't care. This was belatedly realised in the 1930s. In 1937 Sir Thomas Inskip, Minister for the Coordination of Defence, carried out a Defence review. His review said: 'When so much that concerns the air units depends upon the Naval element in the ship and in the Fleet, the Admiralty should be responsible for selecting and training the personnel, and generally for the organisation of the Fleet Air Arm.' The Fleet Air Arm was duly moved into the Navy in 1939, and stayed there largely un-meddled-with until the year 2000. That year the RAF persuaded the RN that it would make sense to combine the Navy's Harrier jump jets with the RAF's land-based ones under a single organisation, Joint Force Harrier, later to be known as the Joint Strike Wing. This would be under the RAF, but a position for an admiral would be placed high above it in the RAF's upper echelons. Senior officers are always pleased at the idea of another high-ranking job slot, and the plan went through. A few years later there was another RAF reorganisation and the admiral slot disappeared. Today, the jointly manned RN/RAF organisation which operates the F-35B still belongs firmly to the RAF: and I would suggest that this is why our aircraft carriers have never so far had more than a handful of jets aboard and usually have none. This is why at least some people in the carrier planes' parent service think it would be reasonable to take them off the ship if the ship is in any danger. I would also say that the answer is the same as in the 1930s: simply hand ownership of the carrier jet force to the RN. Managing personnel and training would be tricky but over time an enduring issue would be dealt with: that of RAF people who don't want to go to sea. This is not to blame them at all, rather to point out the fundamental reasons people join a particular service. The sort of person who wants to be a Royal Marine is different from someone who wants to be an aircraft technician. This sort of thing is often overlooked by those who wish to merge services, even all three of them, in the name of efficiency. In this case, very few join the RAF because they have a longing for the sea. Switch the F-35B fleet to RN-only (including RMs of course – as it happens one of the joint force's two squadron commanders is a Marine at the moment) and this source of long-term friction disappears. And I would say an essential part of the scheme is that the F-35Bs are not just taken away from the RAF without replacement. Some argue that the reason Inskip's decision worked out in 1939 is because the rate of expansion of the RAF at that time gave them the mass and confidence to allow it. In 1939 a European war was looming and most Americans could see no reason to get involved. Today there's a war underway in Europe and a threat that it will widen beyond Ukraine. America is reorienting towards the threat from China – and China is a threat to us too. It is time for us to rearm and reorganise, and do so at pace and scale. The RN needs control of its carrier planes, yes: but we need a much stronger RAF too. If we are to have a decent chance of deterring a war we must have a decent chance of fighting one and winning. The planned increase to 2.5 per cent of GDP on Defence simply will not be enough.
