WRAF veteran's memories of the plotting room

Yvonne Holmes, who is originally from Fulham but now lives in the Borough, joined the Women’s Royal Air Force in the summer of 1940. France had surrendered, British troops had been evacuated from Dunkirk and shipping in the English Channel as well as ports in southern England were coming under sustained attack.

After just two weeks’ training, Yvonne was assigned to an operations room attached to the Middle Wallop airfield in Hampshire.

“I signed up because my brother was killed. Fulham was very badly bombed. Battersea power station was just across the river - they tried and tried to hit it, never succeeded, but they hit everything else that was around. We had a 1,000lb torpedo through the house, which killed my brother and injured my mother and father - I just had a few bangs and scratches,” she recalled.

“He was due to go into the Marines - he was already accepted for a commission. He was killed on the Sunday when he was due to report on the Tuesday. There were just the two of us in the family.

My father was too old to serve, although he tried, so at 19 I thought I ought to. Everybody was doing their bit - prior to that, I had been doing my office job in the civil service and serving in the evenings and at weekends with the London fire brigade.”

Yvonne began her WRAF service on the plotting table, familiar from many war films, and encountered many of the RAF’s most famous fighter aces, including the night fighter John ‘Cat’s Eyes’ Cunningham - but the job was not all glamour.

“They didn’t even have uniforms for us, the women’s service was so new, so we got navy blue overalls and a beret, then later we were issued with our proper uniforms. We were terribly busy right away. We had Beaufighters and Spitfires in about six squadrons. Night duties were particularly busy. You worked from midnight until eight the next morning, then you were on at five that afternoon until midnight, then you came off and had 24 hours on standby.

“Going onto the five to midnight shift, there was so much going on that sometimes the watch that should have come off was still madly busy and couldn’t leave the piloting positions, particularly if fighters were going out.”

From the plotting table, Yvonne moved on to DR (dead reckoning) piloting, taking the place of a navigator on board a single seater aircraft through radio communication, before a spell setting up ops rooms to train new recruits. A year and a half after enlisting, a new post beckoned - involving a perilous trip by sea to Egypt.

“We shipped from Liverpool to Egypt. It was pretty hairy going at the time, because we had to get through the Straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean.

“The Spaniards were not in the war, but they allowed the Germans to be along their coastline, especially their subs. They would come out and have a go at us before we got to the Straits, then after we got through we were bothered by the Italians in the Med.

“Sunday mornings were church service and we all sang ‘For those in peril on the sea’ with the greatest feeling, I can tell you.”

Initially based in Port Said, Yvonne recalls considering the Italian air force “a bit of a joke” compared to the threat of the Luftwaffe - although there was less to smile about following a transfer to an outpost in the Western Desert with no electricity and therefore no refrigerators and no fresh food.

The final months of the war were spent in India, where she worked in transport command and married her fianc, whom she had known since school but who had been serving in Burma.

“In those days you couldn’t normally change commands from Middle East to Far East without returning to the UK. I was due to go back to the UK and I didn’t want to; I wanted to get on to India to be with my fianc. I managed, after many interviews, to persuade the queen bee at the time, Lady Felicity Hanbury, who was head of the WRAF, to allow me to go to India. I was married there and served the rest of my service there until the end of 1945,” she explained.

“When I went on to India it was early in 1945 and of course the war ended in July, so the main trouble and the main work had moved on. My husband and I had been trying to get together, but he was in the army, went through Dunkirk and then was fighting in Burma and all over the place. We managed to catch up with one another finally when I got to India.”

Yvonne’s service officially ended back in the UK on Christmas Day 1945, after which she lived in South Africa before finally settling in Carrickfergus.

The Borough’s annual Battle of Britain parade takes place on Sunday (September 12).