Britain's Flyers Of The Future

Auckland Star, Volume LXXII, Issue 247, 18 October 1941, Page 11

Britain's Flyers Of The Future

gRITAIN, after Belgium, the most densely populated country in Europe, with 502 inhabitants to every square mile (France has 197, Germany 347 and Italy 343) can only live and breathe through her contacts with the world outside. Not only crowded, she is also small. The sea is never more than a few hours away by car.

By Elliseva Sayers

These twin influences, pressure of population and the call of the sea, nave led generation after generation of her young people to seek their living beyond the sea or upon it. They were, for all their numbers, a small proportion of British youth, but their letters home and the tale of their experiences have fired each succeeding age with a wistful longing after the dangers and the adventures that only a few ever had the chance to undergo. The longing has Deen met. bv those countless story books retailing the adventures of youthful heroes that are so conspicuous in Britain's bookshops. Their bright jackets picture boys at grips with an octupus, storming a breastwork (in seventeenth century dress), galloping through a prairie fire (in cowboy costume) or engaging overwhelming odds in a fighter plane. The longing is given expression by the papers specially got up for boys, which almost every bookstall displays youthful

heroes knocking out master criminals. escaping from sea monsters or dodging death rays. Ranging from these strings of incredible adventures to real masterpieces of narrative and style, like Stevenson's "Treasure Island," and John Masefield's "Lost Endeavour," the boys' literature of adventure has a vital influence on the education of every Englishman, and on the shaping of his outlook. Its appeal goes out to all classes of a crowded, adventure-loving race. It has distracted the minds, and often the attention, of boys who ought to be running errands between offices, boys who should be pushing truckloads of coal from pit-face to pitshaft, and boys supposed to be learning Greek verbs, utterly unobtainable yet infinitely desirable object of all ambition, adventure, enterprise and daring, it has aroused the envious appreciation of generation upon generation of young Britons, who felt it tragically unlikely they could ever be called upon to display these characteristics. Now Has An Outlet Then on a spring morning in 1940, a German army went into Norway— and everybody s life was drastically changed. In that world turned topsy-turvy, the boy readers of adventure books suddenly discovered their dream world all around them. They were really handling machineguns, were on merchant ships, were putting out flaming bombs, piloting motor boats over the Channel ana patrolling remote lanes with fixed bayonets on the lookout for German parachute troops.

If they ever wondered whether, in fact, they would uphold the standard of high courage that the English boy in fiction never fails to display it can not have been for long. Soon their newspapers told them about the 16-year-old deckhand decorated by the King for beating off an enemv"aeroplane that tried to hinder die embarkation of British soldiers at Dunkirk. They read about a 17-vear-old Home Guard who saved three people from a burning building, and two 14-year-old runaways on a cargo steamer who manned her gun and actually shot down a Dornier. To the young people who were too young for military service, the war had already provided heaven-sent opportunities when the Air Minister, Sir Archibald Sinclair, called for volunteers to join a preparatory Air Training Corps. He wanted * boys between the ages of 16 and 18. Within seven days of that appeal, one boy out of every ten in Great Britain had answered it. There was not a village, a school, or a college— there was scarcely a district—without its section, its squadron, or its flight. One may meet them any evening in Britain now. They run out of docks and factories, offices and

schools, buttoning their sky blue uniforms and adjusting their forage caps (which, along with their training, are all the reward they get) as soon as work is over for the day. And far into the night you will discover them at home, the adventure story laid aside to make way for tables of altitudes, text books and model a<?roplane.s. Seldom has an appeal been so widely welcomed. Never was one more swiftly answered. And while the young recruits come streaming on, more and more of them, Mr. Wolfenden, the 34-year-old headmaster of Uppingham, one of England's principal public schools, sits up on the eighth floor of a London building interviewing schoolmasters, parents, tutors, officers and accountants, from 9 a.m. until long after dark. Thoroughly, meticulously, convincingly, the scheme has been worked out. Allowing for a few failures, reckoning on the many months of necessary training, yet by a certain date Britain should possess a large number of qualified pilots, observers and air gunners. The cost, about 30/ a year for each boy's training; uniform expenses grant, 25/; total cost, say, £300,000 (sterling) every year.