‘What can we do with air-to-air refuelling?’ he asked Hayr. It was abundantly clear that extending range through in-flight refuelling was the key to the RAF’s contribution. It was fortunate that few people in the RAF had greater knowledge or experience of the possibilities it offered than the Chief of the Air Staff himself. After all, he’d practically written the book on it.
‘VALIANT BREAKS LONDON TO CAPE RECORD BY 54 MINS’, led the 9 July 1959 edition of the Cape Argus. It followed with daily updates and looked back with pride to an earlier record set by two South Africans, Sir Pierre van Ryneveld and Sir Quentin Brand. ‘Congratulations to the RAF,’ wrote ‘Loyalist’ of Cape Town, ‘and hats off to the memories of our own pioneers too.’ That historic 1921 journey had taken the two South African adventurers over four and a half days to complete. Four years later, van Ryneveld arranged an airborne escort for the arrival of the aviator whose name became most closely identified with the iconic London–Cape Town route: Sir Alan Cobham. Cobham had flown south through Africa pioneering the route for the planned Imperial Airways service.
As Cobham had thirty-three years earlier, the latest British arrival attracted large crowds. This time, though, access was strictly controlled because much about the sleek, white-painted bomber was still classified – no civilians would be allowed on board and only a handful of press photographers were escorted anywhere near her. Still new in service, she represented the cutting edge of Britain’s new airborne nuclear deterrent. During the week Beetham and his crew made their record-breaking flight, British newspapers reported ‘200 US H-bombers Coming to Britain’, ‘France to Explode H-bomb’ and ‘Russians Claim 2 Dogs and a Rabbit Have Gone to Space’. The two sides were squaring up to each other across the Iron Curtain.
On the face of it, the day their Valiant left its Norfolk base for Cape Town wasn’t a good one for the RAF. Three airmen were killed when their Canberra bomber crashed in a wheatfield near Cambridgeshire and two others narrowly escaped when their Javelin fighter, flying through the storms that brought an end to Britain’s eleven-day heatwave, was struck by lightning and exploded.
But despite the PR opportunity offered by the record-breaking flight to Cape Town, Beetham and his crew sounded measured in their reaction to their achievement.
‘I’m very happy about it,’ Beetham told the South African press, ‘but the real object was the non-stop flight and we beat the record incidentally.’
The flight to Cape Town was no stunt. Instead it was part of a continuing RAF experimental programme into air-to-air refuelling. The man whose company was supplying the equipment to make it possible was Sir Alan Cobham, an evangelical advocate of the potential of the new technology. Beetham worked closely with Cobham on the Air Force trials and eventually came to share the same conviction. But the Operational Record Book for 1956 of 214 Valiant Squadron, Main Force, Bomber Command, records what a ‘gloomy and unpopular prospect’ refuelling trials were thought to be by the unfortunates assigned the role. The Squadron CO, Wing Commander Michael Beetham, stung with the same indignation. I’m a bomber man, he thought, and I want to be in a bomber role.
But the flying was good. While other V-bomber crews were stuck on the ground on QRA, the Quick Reaction Alert (at five minutes’ readiness to get airborne in response to a nuclear attack on the UK), 214 Squadron were in the air, allowed to get on with it because no one on the Air Staff seemed to have the slightest understanding of what they were up to. Beetham began to enjoy the new role and relish the independence it offered. It meant 214’s crews were free to explore doing things their own way, refining and adapting the techniques passed on by the test pilots, making the new role their own.
And in an environment eager for broken records and tales of derring-do they were quick to realize the publicity value it might hold. Without refuelling, the Valiant could fly for seven hours at a pinch. Soon the squadron was regularly undertaking flights of twice that duration around the UK, but it was the long-range flights to Africa that caught the public’s imagination. Flying from RAF Marham, their Norfolk base, refuelling over Kano in northern Nigeria, Luqa on Malta, or El Adam in Libya, each non-stop flight to Nairobi, Salisbury or Johannesburg would capture the speed record for 214.
In October 1959, one of the Marham Valiants refuelled another of the RAF’s trio of V-bombers, the Avro Vulcan, for the first time. Two years later, a Vulcan B1 flew non-stop to Sydney, refuelled all the way by 214 Squadron’s Valiants.
Now Beetham remembered that twenty-hour flight. If a Vulcan could reach Sydney, it should be able to get to the Falklands and back. It wasn’t quite as simple as that, however. For Sydney, tankers had been stationed along the route in Cyprus, Karachi and Singapore. Flying from Ascension, they didn’t have that luxury. On top of that, the remaining Vulcans were nuclear bombers. No one was seriously counting that as an option, but it meant that their crews hadn’t practised dropping conventional bombs for ten years. The last, and potentially most serious, problem was that the Vulcan force hadn’t practised air-to-air refuelling for twenty years. They’d be lucky to find anyone still flying the old bombers who’d even tried it before.
There was no plan beyond seeing if it could be done – no consideration yet of possible targets on either the Falklands or the Argentine mainland. But by converting the Vulcans back to the conventional role and advertising the fact, Beetham wanted to send a message to the junta: You are not out of range and we mean business.
‘Make some publicity out of it,’ he told Hayr. ‘Pass the word!’
Beetham wanted to use the V-force.
In the Operations Room at Waddington, the flying schedules for the month ahead were mapped out on a large chinagraph board fixed to the wall. On Monday morning, the day the fleet sailed from Portsmouth, crews gathered underneath and discussed the invasion, unaware of developments at the MoD. Jim Vinales was sure, at least, that Vulcans wouldn’t be involved. Martin Withers agreed; he just couldn’t take the whole thing seriously. Even watching the tearful scenes as sailors embarked, he thought, well, it won’t come to anything. In an office just around the corner, a different picture was emerging.
‘We’re going to have to do something,’ Air Vice-Marshal Mike Knight told Group Captain John Laycock, RAF Waddington’s affable Station Commander. ‘I don’t know what’s likely to happen, but if there’s going to be action in South America, the Vulcans may be involved. By all means stand your station down over the bank holiday weekend. But’, Knight added, ‘don’t let too many people go too far away.’
At this point in the Vulcan’s long career, it was an unlikely turn of events. Four months earlier, Knight had phoned Laycock, then barely a month into a two-year tour as the bomber station’s Commanding Officer.
‘You’re not going to like this,’ Knight had told him, ‘but we’re going to close the whole operation down on the 1st of July.’
In her current guise at least, Waddo, as she was known to all her crews, was a station preparing for extinction, not war. With the Tornado’s introduction to service it had been on the cards, but a date had not been mentioned. Now the rush seemed indecent. Laycock knew he’d be unlikely to get command of another station. The RAF’s V-force had been his life for a quarter of a century. A promising club rugby career for Leicester had been abandoned because of the inflexible demands of the QRA, that dominated the lives of the RAF bomber crews throughout the 1960s. The camaraderie and rivalry that had existed throughout the V-force was coming to an end. A tall, bearish man who’d inevitably attracted the epithet ‘Big John’, Laycock was an approachable, steady and popular figure at Waddington; the least he could do was to make sure that the passing of the last four remaining Vulcan squadrons was marked with the pomp and ceremony that the station’s rich history deserved.