[news cutting. Sunday Times, 29 Feb 1976 - with permission]
[thankfully my Grandmother's knickers have not survived for posterity]
[Although David trained as an Air Gunner he was actually the Wireless Operator. It was Len Such, my Great-Uncle, who was the Rear Gunner]
[The story about the dog is true, Pathfinder Alec Panton Cranswick did take his dog, Kluva, on many operations (see Cumming, M. Pathfinder Cranswick (London, William Kimber 1962) p108-111)]

Atticus
Path Masters

Dave “Shag” Cleary’s was an odd superstition. Most of Pathfinder Force had their own private good luck charms to protect them against the special danger of their task, and Dave Cleary always flew on missions with a pair of his girl friend’s knickers in his pocket. It was his only comfort in the rear turret of the Halifax during the cold black hours before they reached the target, staring at blackness around and above him and, most of all, below him, where the fighters came from as the bombers lumbered in front of the moon. Pathfinder Force was the nucleus of RAF squadrons, formed in 1942 to lead and direct with flares the previously haphazard night bombing of German cities. For 30 years it has been commemorated by a small downstairs club in Mount Street, Mayfair. But now these premises are to be vacated. The Pathfinder Club merges this week with the Sesame Club, which is devoted to the Arts. The economic blizzard brings odd bedfellows indeed.

Few of the original Pathfinders are now left. In later years, Membership was made available to anyone who had served in the RAF. But this was the last night in the old club. It brought together a collection of the men who still call themselves “master bombers”, largely ex-NCO’s with, here and there, a Pathfinder albatross badge or the relic of a handlebar moustache. The walls around were covered with empty hooks, all the Pathfinder squadron badges having wisely been removed before the celebration. To Dave Cleary, it is a source of wonder that he could ever have been so young. He was only 17 when he flew the first of his 30 missions with 35 Squadron. In his double-breasted blazer, small, quick to upset or to laugh, his chaotic adolescence is oddly preserved. He has always kept the knickers which accompanied him and which were decorated by a fellow prisoner of war after he was shot down. He remains, at the same time, fiercely misogynistic. Women in Pathfinder Force were a jinx. “Our Flight Engineer got married. That’s why we went down.”

Jimmy Hughes now with the investment department of Coutt’s and Co, flew with Cleary in 35 Squadron. They were discussing their various superstitions with Alex Thorne from 635 Squadron, a public relations officer. I knew someone who always flew in his pyjamas, Jimmy Hughes said. Pyjama Joe we use to call him. Another one always went on missions with a French letter in his pocket. He used to say, you never know.

See Bill Potter over there. His whole crew baled out but the pilot – he put the aircraft into a dive, put the fire out, flew home alone, and Bill and the others went into the bag.

I knew someone who always took his dog up with him, Dave Cleary said. Cranswick did, when he flew with McRobbie.

Tommy Blair used to take his boxer up with him. He had an oxygen mask made to fit it.

What are you having Alex? Port, thank you.

Robin Richardson, the club chairman had brought his wife Bunny to the party. He met her when she was a WAAF driver and could siphon petrol to put into his old Morris car. Remember we used to sleep in that little 2ft 6in bed? She said, nudging him. We weren’t married. Remember that night when two bombers collided on the circuit and they thought it was a raid? He had to hide me in the bathroom. She looked again, fondly at him. Marriage can be built on worse foundations.

[programme]

Official Programme of the Victory Celebrations 8 June 1946

[news cutting]

1 
[circa 1968]
Extra travel cash refused to Pathfinders
Air Cdre E M Donaldson – Air Correspondent

Only 13 of the 14 members of a party from the RAF Pathfinders’ Association were able to leave London last night on the association’s 21st anniversary visit to West Germany. Their chairman, Mr Dennis Wooley, a famous wartime bomber pilot had to stay behind because the Bank of England had refused to waive the £50 currency limit for foreign travel. Mr Wooley, who works for the Bank himself, had already spent £50 abroad this year.


Repaying hospitality

Mr Alex Thorne, the Pathfinder’s President, said before the party left to spend five days as guests of their wartime adversaries, members of the Luftwaffe Pilots’ Association, that he had applied for the extra money because the Pathfinders wanted to repay hospitality even though the visit was “on the Germans”


“I filled up all sorts of forms giving the reason for the application but my bank informed me that the Bank of England had turned it down flat.”

The Pathfinders were formed 25 years ago to guide the big bombers of the Allies to particularly difficult to find and heavily-defended targets.

2 [early 1970s]
Town remembers the courage of a bomber pilot
Sunday Express Reporters
The people of Boston, Lincolnshire, did not even know the name of the pilot who saved their town from devastation during the last war. Over the years stories of his bravery and skill made him almost a legend but his identity remained a mystery. Now, however, they are to be given the chance to express their gratitude to former Wing Commander Ernest “Rod” Rodley. For it was Mr Rodley who, 33 years ago, steered his Lancaster bomber clear of the town to make a crash landing on the marshes beyond. Struggling with the controls of the aircraft which carried six 1,500lb sea mines and 2,000 gallons of high octane fuel he realised if he crashed on the town there would be a holocaust.

Wartime security meant that the incident was hushed up, and when Mr Rodley and his crew were posted from the area, local people despaired of ever finding out who had saved them. But they had not reckoned with the persistence of a few men, most of them now members of the Probus Club of Boston, a group of retired professional and business men. Mr Stewart Payn was a retired duty fire officer in the town on the day of the incident and over the years spent.

Traced
But even he was beginning to despair until he borrowed a book on the wartime exploits of Lancaster bomber crews and there was the whole story exactly as he remembered it – plus the pilot’s name. After more research he traced Mr Rodley to Athens where he was a senior pilot with Olympic Airways, and now Boston’s unknown hero is to be guest of honour at a special luncheon given by the Probus Club. Mr Rodley, who left the RAF with a DSO a DFC and Bar and the AFC is now retired and living in Esher, Surrey.

Mr Rodley said “I remember the incident vividly and I am looking forward to meeting the townspeople and seeing Boston again.”

[News cutting continued]

[news cutting]
The Daily Telegraph, Monday October 9, 1967
Pathfinders meet old foes
Memories of “old, unhappy far-off things, and battles long ago” were revived in a spirit of good-will in a German Air Force officers’ mess at Sobernheim, West Germany, at the week-end. Members of the RAF Pathfinder Force, now in jobs ranging from company director to postmaster, were guests of the Luftwaffe Fighter Pilots’ Association at the headquarters of 42 Fighter Bomber Wing. Many pilots who flew against the Pathfinders when they dropped their flares to lead the bombers to their targets were present to exchange reminiscences and pledge comradeship. 
Pathfinders, who did not wish to state their wartime ranks, and their German hosts in the picture, include:

(1) Mr W Gordon, now a BOAC captain;
(2) Herr Karl Allsturn, former Luftwaffe night fighter ace;
(3) Mr J B Hughes, bank official;
(4) Oberst, Maretzke commanding 42 Fighter Bomber Wing;
(5) Mr H T Ansell, postmaster;
(6) Mr W Porter, store manager;
(7) Mr J Finding, sales manager;
(8) Mr L G Johnson; deputy general secretary, RAF Association;
(9) Mr G A Thorne, company director, and
(10) Oberst, Werner Andres, former leading German fighter pilot.

Above right: Gen Adolf Galland (left), Hitler’s fighter chief: Major Wilhelm Herger, night fighter pilot, and Mr Alan Ball, a Pathfinder who was shot down over Berlin, meeting at a fighter pilots’ reunion at Furstenfeldbruck.

[News cutting continued]


… had it that bad’. “I agreed” Cleary continued “and when the new lot came it was just as bad. By this time the Sales Manager and the other chap were beginning to get interested and I was more than just beginning to get worried, so I went back to the galley and watched the steward at work. He filled the cup from one flask and then added a fair dollop of cream. I took over. He had been mixing his cream with turtle soup.”


In 1955, David Cleary left the BOAC and joined East African Airways in its Dakota days, flying the one haul down to the Union and Portuguese East. Those were the days of the charcoal burners in the cabin when some Asian gentlemen, unused to petrol driven transport would think to brew up when no one was looking. It was on this service that David Cleary had the job of feeding bottles of brandy to an Arab sheik’s son in coffee cups so that ‘Dad’, who sat further forward surrounded by his ladies, would not see his Muslim son imbibing the hard stuff.


It was also with EAA, this time on a Comet IV, that a certain well known East African lady summoned Cleary at two in the morning and ordered a half bottle of white wine in which to clean her teeth.

David Cleary has few good words to say for some of Kenya’s Nationalists who traipse around the world, making demands on the cabin staff in the belief that they are, in some manner of their own making, people above and beyond other travellers.  “But a nicer lot of passengers than a group of African leaders from the Union and the Federation, I have yet to meet” Cleary said. “The trouble with some of these other types is that they don’t know the difference between civility and servility. My cabin staff are paid to be civil, but never servile.”


“It’s a good life” Cleary said “and as good a way of making a living as any. But when it’s all over, it’s going to be more than many of us can manage, to get down to a nine to five job again. We work difficult and awkward hours, and our home lives are far from settled, but it has so many compensation and it does seem to be a job worth doing. We may travel the world, but we never lose our friends and our contacts. Next week I’m off to London, and I’ll be meeting David Bland, a Director of Faber and Faber … he was one of our crew shot down over Berlin. We’ll be having a drink with our bomb aimer too, he’s a stockbroker in Town now. Then of course our old CO is out here running an insurance company, Group Captain Dixie Dean and ‘Dickie’ Bird, who told you his story last week, he was in Luft 3 with the rest of my crew.

“When you spend your life flying, you find that you live in a very very small world.”

[News cutting]

The Sunday Post [Nairobi]

5 February 1961 
(Pg 14)
EAA Profile No. 5
‘We’re paid to be civil, not servile’

It may seem a long haul from bombing Berlin in a Halifax to dishing out dinner in a Dsk, but that is in fact the journey taken by David Cleary Senior Check Steward serving with East Africa Airways.


To make good its claim of being ‘a friendly airline’, EAA flying crews must work as a friendly team. Just as the pilot must put you down at your point of destination with the best of skills, so also must the men and women in the cabin treat you to all the comforts of modern air travel.


That is David Cleary’s job, and the job of the other stewards and stewardesses that work with him. They are all part of the essential team. David Cleary started his serious flying career as a Wireless Operator in No. 35 (Pathfinder) Squadron RAF in the Halifaxes “Fine aircraft that” he said “took twice the punishment of a Lanc” but for all that it couldn’t stand up to the hammering it got one night in August 1943 over Berlin, from a JU 88.

“That was my thirtieth, the last trip of the tour” Cleary said “and we blew up just South of the city and had to bale out.”

Like so many others in Bomber Command, David Cleary spent the rest of the war in the bag, in Stalag Luft 4b, before, in 1946 he joined BOAC cabin staff.


For eight years David flew across the trunk routes of the world. The North and South Atlantic routes, India, Australia, and Africa, until in the early fifties he was transferred to Comet J’s and the Far East Service.


Stewards see a great deal more of an airline’s passengers than any other member of the flying world. They see them at their best and their worst, at their most charming and their most insufferable.

To a steward most men are alike at 5 in the morning after a long night flight, bleary eyed, stubble chinned and rumpled. To the steward the sick bag is a great leveller. “There was one old dear” David Cleary said “who flew with me to New York. She was plum nuts, or so her young companion told me, though she seemed as sweet as pie as far as I could tell. Sweet as pie, that is, until about two in the morning when she started howling that she was late for her bus. She grabbed her seat belt and started smashing at the window of the pressurised Stratocruiser with the metal buckle. Her companion tried to stop her and got her little finger broken for her trouble.


“I ran up to help and eventually got her strapped in and safe but the whole time the poor old thing was whimpering away that she would miss her bus and be late for the week end shopping.”


Another of Cleary’s passengers was George Raft, the actor. He was crossing over to the States in the same aircraft as the senior sales manager of BOAC and BOAC’s head caterer and he called up for some coffee. “He neither smoked nor drank” Cleary said “but swallowed coffee by the gallon. I had a new junior steward on board and I sent him off for the coffee. I saw him return with it and hand it to Mr Raft who took a sip and nearly spat the lot on the floor. I hurried up and tasted some myself. It was indescribable and I sent the chap for more. Raft saying “I know you Limeys can’t make cawfee, but I’ve never …

[Photo of David in later life]

[German leaflet]

[German leaflet]

[menu]

The Air Gunner’s Association Dinner commemorating the 30th anniversary of VE day at The Royal Air Force Club Piccadilly London. Saturday 10 May 1975.

[menu]

The Air Gunner’s Association Dinner commemorating the 30th anniversary of VE day at The Royal Air Force Club Piccadilly London. Saturday 10 May 1975.

[Miscellaneous]

[A piece of “window”, a piece of burnt parachute.]

[Magazine picture]

[News cutting]

[news cutting]

There is a symbolic touch in this Battle of Britain anniversary fly-past picture of bombers over the ruins around St Paul’s Cathedral. The planes are Lancasters of the famous 35th Squadron.

[News cutting]

Goodwill flyers (after touring America) touch down on home field
Village roars a welcome

Evening Standard Reporter: Graveley Airfield, Thursday
Britain’s flying ambassadors – the 35th Squadron of the RAF – landed at their airfield in this little Cambridgeshire village in a gale today, after their good will tour of America. And they were given a great welcome home by the RAF officers of high rank, by diplomats and statesmen, and by most of the people of Graveley (pop 381). On the way to their airfield they staged a fly past over and then turned North for Graveley.

Here the Lancasters appeared flying in close formation at 500ft. Assembled on the airfield to meet them were Air-Marshal Sir Norman Bottomley C-in-C Bomber Command, Major-general CE Bissell, US military and air attaché. Mr Cabot Coville, first secretary to the American embassy, Air chief Marshal Sir Philip Joubert, Lord Henderson, representing the Secretary for Air Sir William Brown, permanent under Secretary and Mr K Vellodi, deputy High Commissioner for India.

‘I congratulate you’
There were loud cheers as the airplanes landed on the long runway. The air crews – 13 men were carried in each aircraft – marched smartly up to the parade ground in their blue and white overalls with Wing Commander A Craig, who led the goodwill flight, at their head. Welcoming the men home, Sir Norman Bottomley said: I feel that the squadron have succeeded in their mission. I would like to congratulate you on your high standard of formation flying and fine discipline. Three hundred thousand miles were covered by the squadron without any technical failing. This is the equivalent of going 22 times round the world. It speaks a great deal for our equipment and our heavy aircraft industry. I am sure this was due to the very good maintenance of our ground crews.

Wonderful time
Before the squadron landed I spoke to Flight Lieutenant Spann, who accompanied Group Captain RMC Collard Station Commander during the tour. We came back earlier than the rest, he told me, I was in the Azores a few hours ago, America is wonderful. This tour has done a tremendous amount of good. The British Ambassador in Washington told us jokingly that he would retire for the duration of our visit. Everywhere we went we met ex-members of the 8th US Army Air Force who said: You fellows gave us a good time in England, and we are going to do the same for you over here. We had such a wonderful time in St Louis that we had to ask them for a quiet time when we visited the next town.

Meeting the stars
To Warrant-Officer Wilkes of Wartling Avenue, Edgware. Flight Sergeant Angel of Great South West Road, Hounslow and Warrant Office Thompson of Kersey Gardens, Mottingham SE the highlight of the whole show was the six day visit to Hollywood. Warrant Officer Wilkes said of it; Film stars came out in their motor cars to see us on the airfield and we met people like Bob Hope, Nelson Eddy, Merle Oberon, Herbert Marshall and many of the starlets. Aubrey Smith got up a cricket team against us and we won. We went to dances and parties and had a wonderful time. One aircraft is completely smothered with the autographs of Hollywood stars.

Fourteen of the sixteen Lancasters which set off on the tour landed for the “welcome home”. The 15th was delayed at St Mawgan because of a slight defect but landed at Graveley within an hour of the others. The 16th Lancaster is still detained at Gander because of an accident.

[News cuttings]

Gong famine
There is trouble in Room 507 at the Air Ministry, Kingsway. They are running out of medals because of the shortage {yes – labour and materials again}, only five Royal Air Force DSOs will be able to attend the next investiture to collect their gongs. And the supply of DFCs has completely dried up. A few weeks ago I told the story of a DFC winner who, after waiting two years for his medal, went to Kingsway and collected it – from a drawerful of them. Since then dozens of young officers have been along to Room 507 to collect. Now the bottom of ther drawer is plainly visible, and the AM are anxious to stop the flow.

Still waiting
They sent an SOS to the Pathfinder Association to ask them not to send any more members on the gong hunt. The secretary Flight Lieutenant G A Thorne, listened with an interested ear. He was awarded the DFC in 1944 and the DSO a year later. And he is still waiting for them. He was told that the Air Ministry has only caught up with the middle of 1944 – and that there were hundreds ahead of him. Flight Lieutenant Thorne estimates that less than 3 per cent of the Pathfinders 3,000 members have received their medals.

Fairy Godfather
I believe Dr J C MacGowran is the only eye specialist who has won a DFC. He won it flying “for professional reasons” on operations with the PFF spearhead over Germany. Now I hear, he is playing Fairy Godfather to the Pathfinders’ Association, of which he is one of the founders. He has offered them as headquarters the whole of the ground floor of a block of service flats he has just bought in Whitehorse Street, off Piccadilly. With it goes the use of a basement restaurant. Moving in will be held up for a month or two while war damage is repaired.

Proving its point
The Pathfinder Association has already self helped 400 of its ex-aircrew members into civilian jobs at salaries between £250 and £1,000 a year during its short existence, I am told. Its appointments bureau is now handling more than 1,000 letters a month, plus innumerable telephone calls. Dr JC MacGowan DFC, its chairman tells me the PA is proving the point that courage and determination are qualities equally useful to a civilian boss as to a bomber force.

[news cutting]

Britain’s new giant of the skies.
The Brabazon, the Bristol Aeroplane Company’s new transatlantic air liner, now “on the stocks”, is shown in the composite picture above in contrast to an Avro Tudor (left) and a Lancaster Bomber. All are reproduced on the same scale. The Brabazon being built at Bristol is expected to take the …