Avre Friday Briefing #74

The pub that was a wardroom

There is a pub about three miles from us where the Royal Navy used to hold its officers' mess and not in a brass-plaque, we-once-had-a-visit sort of way. The Cornish Arms at St Merryn actually was the wardroom for HMS Vulture, and there is an honour roll on the wall to prove it.

We drink there most weeks. Took me an embarrassingly long time to look up what the airfield up the road had been.

HMS Vulture

St Merryn opened in October 1937 as a 52-acre civilian aerodrome. In December 1939 the Admiralty came down, had a look at it, and took it. It was commissioned into the Royal Navy on 10 August 1940 as HMS Vulture.

Two things about the build that I like.

The stone for the runways was quarried at Stepper Point, at the mouth of the Camel, and brought round the coast by sea. And the runways were deliberately built short. If you are going to put a 21-year-old down on a moving deck somewhere off Malta, there is no sense teaching him on half a mile of Cornish tarmac.

The Luftwaffe found it quickly. Raids on 9 and 11 October 1940, damage to the airfield and to houses in the village, more through the spring of 1941. The place was rebuilt and extended in 1942 and came back as the School of Air Combat. By the end of the war it was the School of Naval Air Warfare, running the fighter combat school, the ground attack school, and the air firing courses.

Its gunnery range was up at Treligga, near Delabole, which had its own name: HMS Vulture II. Aircraft towed drogue targets over it and shot at them. The Wrens then retrieved the drogues, laid them out on long tables, and counted the holes by hand to work out who could actually shoot. Five shillings was offered to any member of the public who found one that had gone missing. There were dummy tanks on the ground, a bridge, a fake road convoy, and a small railway built to drag targets along so they moved.

The station was paid off as Vulture in October 1953, recommissioned the next day as HMS Curlew, and shut for good in 1956. It is farmland and light industry now.

Then a fulmar went past

I was walking the coast path thinking about all this when fulmars started working the cliffs. Stiff wings, no flapping, just riding the updraught along the rock and back again.

Which is the whole reason the aeroplane is called what it is.

Fairey named the Fulmar after the seabird. And the seabird's name comes from Old Norse, fúll már, meaning foul gull, because its defence against anything that gets near the nest is to projectile vomit a stinking orange stomach oil at it. The oil mats the feathers of whatever it hits. On a seabird that is often fatal, because it can no longer fly.

So the Royal Navy went into the war with a fighter named after a bird that wins fights by being sick on people.

The Fulmar first flew on 4 January 1940 and reached 806 Naval Air Squadron that summer, aboard Illustrious. Two seats, eight Browning machine guns, a Merlin, and enough fuel to stay up a long time. On paper it was embarrassing. It was slower than almost every land-based fighter it met, and the Navy had insisted on carrying a second man purely so somebody could navigate back to a ship that had moved since breakfast.

Six hundred were built. They flew over Malta, through Operation Pedestal, at Matapan, in the hunt for the Bismarck, off North Africa and into the Indian Ocean. They were credited with 112 enemy aircraft destroyed, which made the Fulmar the highest-scoring Fleet Air Arm fighter of the entire war, more than the Corsair or the Hellcat. Most FAA aces got at least some of their score in one.

By 1943 the Seafires and the Martlets had taken the job. The Fulmar went to training and night work and was pulled from the front line in February 1945.

One survives. N1854, the first one ever built, sits in the Fleet Air Arm Museum at Yeovilton with its wings folded.

Meanwhile, in a much hotter place

It's been 30 degrees here this week and we have all been very brave about it.

USS Intrepid was commissioned on 16 August 1943 and was at Kwajalein by the end of January. Below decks on an Essex-class carrier in the Pacific there was no air conditioning in the living compartments. Air was pulled from topside and blown down through ducts. Men slept in it and sweated into their mattresses, then covered them in the morning with a fireproof cover that was more or less airtight, so after a few weeks your bunk had a personality. Sailors cut holes in the ducting next to their racks and fitted bits of tin can to steer some air onto themselves.

She took a torpedo at Truk in February 1944 that jammed her rudder hard over. She was hit by kamikazes off the Philippines on 25 November 1944, more than 60 men killed, and again off Okinawa in 1945. The crew called her the Dry I and the Decrepit Intrepid and kept flying her.

What those men worked in was denim. Dungaree trousers and a chambray shirt, issued because it was cheap and it did not fall apart, and because you could sweat through it, wash it in a bucket, and put it back on.

Batch No. 3

Which is roughly where our denim shawl shirt comes from. 

If you are ever near Padstow, the Cornish Arms does a decent pint and the honour roll is worth two minutes of your time on the way to the bar. Give me a shout, I might be around.