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ome time in the winter of 1956/57 I was driving my company car, the unattractive Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire (at that time my United Steels top boss, Gerald Steel, refused to let me have a Mk II Jaguar on the grounds that no self-respecting steelmaker would be seen dead in any Jaguar) along the straight stretch of road between Wigton and Penrith with Jack Laird as my passenger. I was at the time Deputy General Manager of the Workington Iron and Steel Company branch of United Steels, waiting to take over from the General Manager at the beginning of 1958 and I had contrived to have Jack Laird, a young member of our staff in Sheffield, appointed to my old job as Commercial Director in Cumberland. The road had a surface of compacted snow and ice. The going was tricky and I was driving as carefully as I could on this long, straight stretch when, quite without warning, the Sapphire went into a nasty sideways skid. ‘I’ve got her!’ I cried, as we straightened up without difficulty. ‘I hope so,’ replied Jack. ‘There’s no steering wheel on this side!’ That cry of ‘I’ve got her!’ was an interesting throw-back to my instructing


years. It was the cry of the instructor who has quickly to take over the controls when a pupil is making a mistake which has to be corrected immediately, as on trying to land twenty feet off the ground, or getting near to a collision with another aircraft in formation. The point is that the instructor has to be able not only to tell the pupil what to do, but to show him what to do, expertly and, at times, rapidly. And to be able to do that, the instructor has to be more than averagely competent in handling his aircraft himself


So, on my arrival at Gwelo in October 1941 I had to make myself competent to fly a new type, a single-engined type requiring new skills which flying the twin Oxford had not demanded – aerobatic skills in particular, for apart from a stalled turn or so the Oxford was not amenable to aerobatic manoeuvres. Looking back, it now seems astounding that all the official instruction


I got on the Harvard was a single flight of 1 hour 15 minutes with Flight Lieutenant Tollemache. I was sent solo on the Harvard after that flight and thereafter flew some eight and a half hours either solo or with passengers, which included quite a few hours of cross-country flying which was, after all, straight and level stuff. I then had a recategorisation test with the Chief Flying Instructor, Squadron Leader Mills, and was recategorised as Q(SE), meaning that I was qualified to instruct on single-engined aircraft. I now found myself as a fully-fledged instructor with four pupils, Wrench, Cousens, Archer and Whitfield, serving in ‘A’ Flight under F/Lt Denis Tollemache. I did have, after beginning to instruct, a further forty five minutes dual from Tolly, as everyone called him, solely on aerobatics. Tolly was quite a character. In the air he was skilled and competent and I was lucky to have him as my tutor in those first hours of Harvard flying. As a personality he was charming and a good friend. He was a regular RAF officer


57


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