Tony Cunnane's RAF Years

Being the press officer whilst serving on 18 Squadron at RAF Finningley in 1960 clearly did not tax me too greatly and so I was given two more secondary duties. For six months I was the squadron’s Winter Sports Officer. I knew absolutely nothing about winter sports and had no interest in them so I kept a very low profile during the long hot summer of 1960. I was also appointed Custodian of the Squadron Standard and Deputy Standard Bearer in preparation for the presentation of the Squadron Standard by HRH The Princess Margaret. The official presentation was then delayed for a year when Princess Margaret fell pregnant so in the meantime I had the onerous task of safeguarding the Standard in a locked temperature-controlled room adjacent to mine in the Officers’ mess. No-one, but no-one, was allowed to touch the Standard apart from me (wearing white silk gloves) and the Standard Bearer, Flying Officer David Lee, who was the co-pilot on our crew.

Obviously the efficiency with which I carried out my secondary duties must have pleased both my Squadron Commander and the Station Commander because early in 1961 I was appointed to one of the few highly prestigious and much sought after General List Permanent Commissions. I was now guaranteed a career to at least age 43 if I were a flight lieutenant, or to 47 if I gained promotion to squadron leader and beyond. I was thereafter considered far too useful an officer to be given trivial secondary duties so I was relieved of my duties as Winter Sports’ Officer and made Squadron Adjutant instead with my own small but private office immediately next to the Squadron Commander’s.

It was much more fun being the Adjutant because it meant I had unrestricted access to all the squadron files and correspondence. That was when I first discovered that individuals’ personal files, kept in distinctive blue folders stamped top, bottom, front and back, ‘Staff in Confidence’, were far more interesting than the dark red, Top Secret files. I also soon learned that there is little real satisfaction in having access to all manner of confidential and often titillating personal information about your work colleagues if you cannot tell anyone what you know.

Wing Commander Denys Sutton was the squadron commander. He was always known as ‘Clutcher’ because whenever he saw you going towards the squadron coffee bar the shortest way via the path outside his window, he was likely to call you into his office and give you a job. To avoid being ‘clutched’ most of the squadron personnel used to take the long route to the coffee bar, around the four outside walls of the huge aircraft hangar that housed our squadron. It could be quite lonely in the Adjutant’s office!

Clutcher was a very conscientious and well-meaning officer and he gave me good advice from time to time.

‘Tony, when you’re a squadron commander you can do things your way,’ he told me solemnly on one occasion when I had been trying to persuade him to do something he did not want to do. ‘Right now I’m the squadron commander and so you’ll do things my way.’

Above:
Here I am having just taken custody of No 18 Squadron's brand new Standard (1960)

Below:
Practising with the armed escorts 1961

He was, of course, absolutely right and I used that very phrase myself several times later in my career when I was a squadron commander. It was Clutcher Sutton who one day got me to type a letter for his signature from the Officer Commanding Number 18 Squadron to the President of the Officers’ Mess asking for permission to use the Mess facilities for a Squadron function.

‘But you are President of the Officers’ Mess,’ I said, rather impertinently. ‘Why do you need to write to yourself?’

‘Because we must have decisions recorded on the files in the proper way,’ he replied patiently and without a hint of reproach. Thinking it over afterwards, I felt sure that he had been hoping I would ask that question.

A couple of days later I passed through to Wing Commander Sutton, on file of course, a handwritten memo from himself as President of the Mess to himself as Squadron Commander in which he regretted that permission could not be granted for the squadron function because the Mess staff were fully committed with other duties on the date in question.

‘I guessed what the answer would be,’ he told me sadly. He initialled his own letter, closed the file, and placed it in the out tray.

When I first joined 18 Squadron we were a training squadron and didn’t have a war role so we were always the poor relations to 101 Squadron in the next hangar, but at least we could relax in the knowledge that we didn't have to react to most of the many call-outs and alert exercises that plagued their lives. I think it is true to say that the majority of the aircrew on our squadron thought that 18 Squadron's peacetime training role was rather specious - and boring! We spent most of our flying time coming in at high level (above 40,000 feet) from the near Continent towards the UK's east coast, which is what, presumably the planners of the day thought the Soviet Air Force would do in the event of a pre-emptive strike. At various points we would switch on our ancient jamming equipments with the object of 'blinding' the UK air defence radars and rendering their voice frequencies useless due to loud noises. Each of our equipments operated on a single frequency so the ground crew had to programme each jamming transmitter in advance and all the AEO had to do was switch the equipment on and off. Having a fairly high-power output fed into rather primitive wide-angle antennae, our transmitters did tend to have what were known in the trade as side-lobes, where energy went out on frequencies well away from the intended one. We did, on a number of occasions, manage to blot out the domestic television transmitters in large parts of the UK but that was accidental not deliberate. After that had happened, the inevitable stories in the newspapers and on TV merely blamed the loss of pictures on 'abnormal atmospheric conditions.'

Our efforts didn't really affect the capability of the UK air defence radars much because of the one major flaw in electronic countermeasures (ECM) of the day. If you switched the jammers on too early the ground radars would see the jamming as a single rather narrow spoke on their screens. That not only warned the radar station that the 'enemy' was coming but also enabled them to get an accurate bearing on the jamming aircraft and so alert the defending fighters. If two of the air defence radars got narrow spokes at the same time, they could triangulate the information to provide a fairly accurate fix. On the other hand, switching on the jammers too late would usually mean that the air defence radars had already identified the incoming aircraft and were tracking them; switching on the jammers then merely confirmed that you were the enemy. In the days of the ‘four minute warning’ that would have been all that was needed for war plans to be implemented.

Our voice jamming equipment also operated on specific frequencies but we could listen in on the frequencies that the ground controllers were using to control the fighter aircraft. For reasons of flight safety, both military and civilian, we had to ensure that we didn't jam any operational frequencies. The fighters were allowed to ask their ground controller to switch channel if our jamming affected their reception - which sort of negated the purpose of the exercise especially if we heard the request and the new frequency was one that we could jam. Quite often it happened that some fighters changed to the new frequency whilst others did not because they had not heard the order. Thus, on many occasions mayhem resulted but not for long - our jamming runs rarely exceed about 20 minutes. In any case, there was a master safety frequency which ground controllers could use to order us to switch off all our jamming transmitters.

We were, therefore, rather surprised when our Squadron Commander informed us one day that he had asked Bomber Command HQ to give the squadron a formal war role. We were dismayed when he told us that Command had agreed! From then on, 18 Squadron became part of what was known as the ‘main force’ and we had to react to all Bomber Command’s frequent alert and readiness exercises. When 101 Squadron heard of this, which took quite a time because it was supposed to be secret, they gloated. Not only did we on 18 Squadron not have a proper job but now we had to react to the same alerts they they did.

When 18 Squadron disbanded in 1963, its specialist electronic warfare role having been taken over by the new Mark 2 Vulcans, I was posted from Finningley to Gaydon near Leamington Spa as an instructor on the Valiant ground school and not long after arriving there I was appointed editor of the station newspaper, ‘The Gaydon Gazette’. There was a new openness in the official attitude towards the media. Gaydon was a V Bomber training unit not a front-line bomber station and so security was rather less of an issue. My métier was obviously known to my new station commander when he gave me the job. As often happens with station and in-house magazines even today, I had to write most of the stories myself.

Postcript January 2009. I had an email from the son of Denys Sutton in January 2009 - a family friend had pointed the son to this page on my website. The son told me that he did not know his father had been called Clutcher but he did recognise the reason. He added: 'Obviously by the time he commanded 18 Squadron it had acquired metaphorical significance but its origins were apparently literal. John advises that it dates from times he wished to attract attention on noisy flight decks and would grab the other pilot's upper arm. This technique for attracting or retaining attention continued. Probably because I was a victim of it from an early age, I was never conscious of it, but my wife and daughter enthusiastically confirm that it was a frequent accompaniment to chat's, particularly on walks which were often the occasions for friend and family one-to-ones.'

Denys Sutton died early in 2004 and his charming wife Eve in 2007.