I’m acutely aware that it’s been some time since my last blog, but I haven’t been inactive and the – much interrupted – book continues to progress. Having written around 120,000 words I now have to cover Fairey’s private life in the 1930s and I shall at last have reached the Second World War. Given that I have undertaken a reasonable amount of research on CRF and his work in wartime Washingon with the British Air Commission, I hope I can crack on with this after Easter, by which time the two lengthy chapters on the 1930s will be complete (I have asked friends to read the section on the fascinating topic of CRF and the Russians, and thankfully the response has been universally complimentary). Whereas I originally planned for publication in 2017 I now anticipate completion in the second half of the year. I shall write a chapter on the 1940s, and then research/write a chapter on Fairey’s final decade and his rich hinterland, notably sailing, before drafting a conclusion. I envisage the text will total somewhere between 160 and 170,000.
Last Friday night in Sheerness I gave a lecture on local boy James McCudden, the content of which is available below. The audience questions and contributions at the end produced more information, and subsequent photographs, regarding Fairey’s experience with Short Brothers at Eastchurch – my thanks especially to Martin Hawkins, not least for his terrific portrait photograph of the suave, swashbuckling, but exceedingly intelligent Charles Samson, de facto founding father with Murray Sueter of the RNAS, and thus of the Fleet Air Arm.
McCudden VC: Sheppey’s own air ace
Sheppey Little Theatre, 19 February 2016
Introduction
This talk is deliberately ruminative, and not simply a succinct no-frills biography of Major James McCudden, son of Sheppey, scion of Swale. Key information will emerge in the talk, and gaps can be filled in the course of questions afterwards, for which I hope to leave plenty of time. This evening there are essentially five stages in a reconnaissance mission that will take us far beyond the enemy front line, withstanding the bitter cold and oxygen deprivation of flying for long periods at high altitude, before, having flown the flag of the Sheppey Little Theatre in the face of the Red Baron, we turn for home and land in time to knock back a stiff brandy and soda – or three – in the saloon bar of The Napier (or should that be The Aviator at Queenborough)?
• James McCudden – Man of Kent and man of the military
• McCudden on the Western Front – from mechanic to major
• ‘A working-class hero is something to be’ – especially when flying in the RFC
• Surviving the air war – understanding tactics and technology
• Conclusion
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that amidst the nation’s centenary commemorations of the First World War, McCudden’s star has risen high in the firmament. Already the subject of a BBC Timewatch documentary, he features prominently in the RAF Museum’s new gallery dedicated to 1914-18. With biographies published as long ago as 1967 and 1987, I can’t believe that someone is not presently writing a thoroughly researched life of McCudden VC. Hopefully it will be of a higher academic standard than most biographies of Great War air aces which, at the risk of sounding arrogant and snobbish, can be dismissed as ‘anorak literature’. One of the reasons I wrote my life of McCuddden’s great contemporary and fellow man of Kent, Edward ‘ Mick’ Mannock, was the poor quality of earlier biographies – although I was interested in why and when they were written, for example, veteran fliers resurrecting Mannock’s achievements as a mid-1930s warning against German rearmament. Too often these books lack depth because they fail to contextualise; in other words, they focus so much upon the minutiae of their subject’s life that they ignore the bigger picture. Hopefully this evening I can strike a balance between biographical narrative and due explanation of why the air war fought so ferociously above the trenches in the second half of the First World War gives us an insight into how Britain mobilised for ‘industrial war’ – many would argue, ‘total war’.
James McCudden – Man of Kent and man of the military
So why should the Sheppey Little Theatre be staging a talk on a man known to his mates and comrades as ‘Jimmy’ McCudden? The simple answer is that, while born in Gillingham, in 1909 at the age of 14 McCudden came to live in Sheerness, which became the family’s adopted home town. The estuaries of the Medway and the Thames – for the Royal Navy, the Nore – housed several military garrisons and were home waters for a major element of the Home Fleet. The McCuddens were an army family with a long tradition of service, and James’s father, William, was a senior non-commissioned officer in the Royal Engineers. All four of his sons joined up, and all flew – the three eldest died in the course of the First World War. It’s worth noting at this point that James’s younger brother, John McCudden, also rose from the ranks to become an officer in the Royal Flying Corps. The younger McCudden was shot down twice early in 1918, the second time – on 18 March – with fatal consequences. The eldest son, William, had been killed in a training accident three years earlier. As we shall see, James died four months after John, in the summer of 1918. Youngest brother Maurice served with the peacetime RAF before dying prematurely of colitis in 1934. The two daughters lived into old age, as did Mrs McCudden, but Warrant Officer McCudden died at Clapham Junction in 1920 as a consequence of a bizarre train accident. Notwithstanding the huge sense of loss felt in so many homes a century ago, it’s no exaggeration to describe the McCuddens of Sheerness as a truly tragic family.
Young James briefly attended the island’s garrison school but soon left to join the GPO as a messenger boy. He was still too young to enlist, and the Army depended on successive generations of service families joining up as this was a time when taking the King’s shilling was seen by many as a last resort. Remember your Kipling:
For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an` Chuck him out, the brute! ”
But it’s ” Saviour of ‘is country ” when the guns begin to shoot;
An’ it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ anything you please;
An ‘Tommy ain’t a bloomin’ fool – you bet that Tommy sees!
While waiting to join the Army James honed his boxing and shooting skills, and took a keen interest in what was going on down the far end of the island, at Leysdown and Eastchurch. Sheppey played a vital role in the development of manned flight in Edwardian England, and the three lasting consequences of the experimentation and tuition that took place in the pioneer years of British aviation were:
• the establishment of Short Brothers as the manufacturer of sophisticated seaplanes capable of attacking the enemy from the onset of war;
• the establishment of the Royal Naval Air Service, merged with the RAF in 1918 but the forerunner of the Fleet Air Arm;
• and the establishment of Fairey Aviation as a consequence of Richard Fairey’s technical and managerial experience with Shorts.
This was not some low profile development, witness the large numbers which before the First World War travelled to Sheerness, and then to Eastchurch on the Sheppey Light Railway, to participate in the summer air displays. The McCudden brothers found themselves in the right place at the right time, and James became obsessed with flying. He read magazines like Flight and The Aeroplane, and he took every opportunity to cross the island and absorb all that was going on around the Eastchurch airfield and aero club.
Direct acquaintance with the mechanics at Shorts and the other smaller enterprises at Eastchurch, plus a readiness to absorb and comprehend dense literature re the theory of flight, complemented the hands-on mechanical experience McCudden gained after joining the Royal Engineers in 1910. He spent two years stationed in Gibraltar so he had plenty of spare time to deepen his knowledge of the mechanics of flying. While young Jimmy was away the Royal Flying Corps was established, and when he returned home he quickly transferred to the RFC. As a qualified air mechanic he secured the ideal posting, being sent in May 1913 to the Royal Aircraft Factory, later the Royal Aircraft Establishment – if McCudden wanted to acquaint himself with cutting edge technology then, other than on the shop floor at Shorts, Farnborough was the place to be. Yet almost immediately he found himself transferred to an RFC squadron, and at last he began to fly on a regular basis, as a passenger in monoplanes built by Louis Blériot’s company. Skilled mechanics needed to fly in the aeroplanes they were maintaining, and men like McCudden were seen by pilots as vital to staying alive.
McCudden on the Western Front – from mechanic to major
In August 1914 Air Mechanic First Class McCudden and his squadron left for France, where they flew repeated reconnaissance missions as the British Expeditionary Force held the line at Mons and then began its costly retreat. From the skies above McCudden, flying as an observer and armed only with a rifle, reported on enemy troop movements throughout the great battles in the autumn of 1914. He maintained this role after a previously fluid conflict turned into the fixed trench warfare with which the Western Front is most closely associated.
By the summer of 1915, with a brother and brother-in-law already dead, McCudden was a sergeant with specific responsibility for engine reliability. He knew how to maximise the performance of his flight’s French spotter aircraft, and this ability to fine-tune aero-engines was a huge asset shared during the war by precious few pilots – Mick Mannock being one such technologically savvy airman. Bizarrely, throughout the autumn and winter of 1915-16 McCudden continued to fly as an observer, and then as an aerial gunner. Yet his initial application for pilot training had been turned down on the grounds that he was too valuable an engineer to risk losing. On several occasions he narrowly escaped death and his courage as a machine gunner eventually earned him his first awards for gallantry, the Military Medal and the Croix de Guerre. Recognition by the French secured McCudden’s promotion to flight sergeant, and a subsequent posting home to commence pilot training.
Between February and June 1916 McCudden passed both the basic and advanced flying courses, gained his pilot’s certificate, was formally graded a First Class Flier , and served as an instructor pending his return to France. He had flown vastly more hours than any of his peers. It was while instructing fresh trainees that he first came across the then Edward Mannock – if at this stage the fledgling pilot failed to make a deep impression upon McCudden, it’s clear the younger man seriously impressed Second Lieutenant Mannock. McCudden was by all accounts a brilliant teacher and after only seven months in France he was back in Blighty passing on the fruits of his apprenticeship in the skies above the Western Front. Lucky to have escaped with his life – some believe that in December 1916 he almost fell prey to von Richthoften himself – McCudden scored five victories during his first posting to France. The fifth and final victory earned the freshly commissioned McCudden the Military Cross.
McCudden was in England during the RFC and RNAS’s most costly phase of the air war, the spring of 1917: the notorious ‘Bloody April’. The Germans again enjoyed air superiority, but British air frames – and finally British aero-engines – were about to gain the initiative. An early sign was the small but potent Sopwith Pup, which McCudden gained vast experience flying before and after his return to France. Even while an instructor McCudden was flying the Pup on air defence duties against the large Gotha bombers attacking London.
Crucially, at this time he became acquainted with Britain’s most famous air ace, then and now – Albert Ball. Ball schooled McCudden in the most effective means of attacking an enemy aircraft without being spotted or exposing oneself for too long to counter-attack – unlike Mannock who invariably attacked at short range from above, McCudden often copied Ball and came in close to his target from below.
Back in France flying the Pup, McCudden enjoyed only modest success, but then in August 1917 he was posted to the RFC’s top squadron in France. 56 Squadron had been home to Albert Ball, and still boasted several much admired fighter pilots. It flew the newly acquired scout – or fighter – the SE5, which when re-tooled and re-engined became the mighty SE5a, of which more a little later. Scoring early ‘kills’ and displaying obvious leadership qualities, McCudden was soon made a flight commander. He used his new authority to raise significantly the standard of maintenance, not least with regard to his own machine: riggers, fitters, and armourers were all coaxed and/or berated to ensure engines, airframes, and guns were all consistently reliable. His evident success was primarily because he had done all these jobs himself, and was not averse to getting his hands dirty in order to instruct or make a point. 56 Squadron’s machines enjoyed a unique level of airworthiness, with consequent saving of lives. For McCudden the aeronautical engineer the SE5a was a testbed for ensuring maximum performance when cruising at high altitude – he re-engineered the Hispano-Suiza power unit to a specification far beyond that envisaged by its designer.
Meanwhile the number of victories rose and rose, such that by the time he was posted home in March 1918 a now exhausted McCudden had shot down no less than 57 aircraft, earning himself a bar to his MC, as well as the DSO and bar. As a role model he was exemplar: 56 Squadron had shot down 175 aircraft with the loss of only 14 pilots killed or missing and 7 captured. No other front-line squadron came anywhere near this performance.
McCudden was famous even before he arrived home, and an appointment at Buckingham Palace to receive the Victoria Cross. The RFC had finally reversed its policy of not highlighting individual officers, and in consequence ace of aces Jimmy McCudden was the hero of Fleet Street. To his immense relief McCudden was despatched to a training depot in Scotland, having spent time partying in London with Mannock while the latter impatiently awaited a further front-line posting. Not that McCudden was the sort of chap to get up to very much mischief, and indeed it was at this point in his life that he became engaged.
As his love life flourished, he began work with the editor of The Aeroplane, Charles Grey, on the manuscript of his memoirs. Flying Fury: Five Years in the Royal Flying Corps was published posthumously and with Air Ministry approval as McCudden’s views on the war were in no way contentious and controversial. He was always a very nice and polite young man, with his autobiography suggesting a surprising degree of deference to his elders and supposedly betters.
Over three months of rest and recuperation ended with the now Major McCudden’s posting as c-in-c 60 Squadron. Having said goodbye to his fiancée and sister, on 9 July 1918 McCudden took delivery of his new and as yet unmodified SE5a and set off across the Channel. In heavy mist he stopped at the Auxi-le-Chateau airfield to seek directions. On resuming his flight McCudden’s engine stalled following a sharp manoeuvre, leaving his aircraft to roll out of control and crash into a neighbouring wood. James McCudden died instantly of a fractured skull, and his body lies today in the Vavannes cemetery, in the Pas de Calais.
‘A working-class hero is something to be’ – especially when flying in the RFC
My first acquaintance with the mythology surrounding air aces like Jimmy McCudden and Albert Ball was in 1963 as a small boy in Coventry listening to BBC Schools Radio: the programme was about Mick Mannock, ‘the ace with one eye’ – nearly forty years later I was able to debunk that particular myth. Back in the early 1960s even pre-adolescent history obsessives like me knew precious little about the Great War other than that this was a terrible tragedy which only really came to the forefront of the national consciousness every Armistice Day. The principal source of our knowledge was of course Biggles. Despite the fact that his creator, Captain W.E. Johns, had actually flown with the Royal Flying Corps, Biggles was every bit the chivalric knight of the air which morale-sensitive propagandists on both sides had projected to war-weary civilians from late 1915 through to the end of the war three years later. Squadron Leader James Bigglesworth reinforced a remarkably resilient image of the men who made up the Royal Flying Corps – these were chaps straight out of varsity or public school, who were dashing, brave, honourable…and doomed. Unless of course they were Biggles, Algy, and Ginger, who for the next forty years lived charmed lives. That image was of course memorably revived and parodied by Rick Mayall as Lord Flashheart in Blackadder.
Ironically, Edmund Blackadder’s misunderstanding about only serving three weeks with a front-line squadron was based on fact, in that most virgin pilots were so unprepared for what was going to hit them once they were in action that the average life span really was just a matter of weeks. The survivors – the veterans, albeit in relative terms – were those who realised that tactics and technology were the secret of survival. That a softly softly approach was the only way to keep alive – even if keeping out of trouble while learning on the job risked mess room accusations of cowardice, as was the case when the inexperienced Mick Mannock joined 40 Squadron in the spring of 1917. McCudden was similarly canny as a tyro pilot, but given his service record since August 1914 no-one would question his courage, just his rank. When I became interested in the social composition of the hundreds of Allied pilots who fought the air war of 1917-18 the first thing I realised was that, contrary to popular assumption, the Royal Flying Corps was anything but homogenous. Yes, there were golden-haired sons of the Edwardian landed classes, but from 1916 they were outnumbered by horny-handed sons of the Empire eager to defend the mother country; or if from Britain so-called ‘temporary gentlemen’ whose commissions were awarded as a consequence of successfully securing a transfer out of their original regiments in order to join the RFC – McCudden was unusual in that he rose from the ranks and was already serving in the Royal Flying Corps. Unusual, but not unprecedented – within such a new corps, devoid of regimental tradition and convention, there was greater opportunity for men to rise from the ranks and be commissioned as pilots. Thus, while class prejudice remained all too apparent, McCudden’s and Mannock’s proletarian credentials were by no means unique. Yet acute snobbery still survived – 85 Squadron became notorious after its officers refused to accept the much decorated McCudden as their CO simply because he had risen through the ranks.
Nevertheless, the RFC, and then from 1 April the Royal Air Force, created for itself a distinct, and distinctively modern, image – ironically, much of the RAF’s image as a genuinely new state-of-the-art military force was thanks to the parallel wing which went to war in August 1914, the Royal Naval Air Service. Indisputably, at the start of the First World War – and arguably for the next four years – the RNAS was ahead of its military counterpart in aircraft design and technological development: pre-war Admiralty commissions were still flying in 1918, which would have been inconceivable for any aeroplane ordered by the War Office.
With such a high attrition rate the RFC could scarcely afford to be sniffy, snobbish, and super-selective. It had to train pilots to keep with up with the astonishing output of Britain’s established or temporary aircraft factories: production rose exponentially in every year of the war, so that in 1918 no less than 30,000 aircraft rolled off the ad hoc assembly lines.
By the time Germany’s shattering assault across the Western Front ground to a halt on 29 April 1918, after five weeks of fierce fighting, the RFC and RNAS, by now unified as the Royal Air Force, had lost over 1000 aircraft. With continuous sorties from dusk to dawn, exhausted front-line squadrons had suffered up to 30% casualties daily – the equivalent of a complete change of personnel every four days. The Germans had launched no less than 76 divisions against British and imperial troops, and their continental allies – the failure of the offensive marked a turning point in the war on the ground, and the same was true in the air.
Sir Hugh Trenchard, one of if not the founding father of the Royal Air Force, had maintained a strategy throughout the war of his squadrons taking the battle to the enemy, even at the RFC and the RNAS’s darkest hour in ‘Bloody April’ 1917. The summer and autumn of 1918 saw this aggressive, offensive strategy ruthlessly applied. In 1914 pilots, and observers like Corporal McCudden, did little more than carry out reconnaissance; but by 1918 that role was being carried out in a far more sophisticated fashion. In addition, aircraft were involved in strategic bombing and strafing ground forces on the grand scale. Crucially, in the air, the Allied air forces were fighting the final rounds of an epic struggle with the jastas of the German Air Service.
Surviving the air war – understanding tactics and technology
The armistice of 11 November 1918 marked the end of an air war waged ruthlessly above the trenches throughout the preceding two years. Early dogfights had changed beyond all recognition. Now aerial confrontations between Allied and German fighter aircraft were far less crude, and fought on a much greater scale than in the early part of the war. Why? Because the air war demanded a revolution in tactics; and crucially, a revolution in technology. The Germans could boast tactical geniuses like Immelman, then Boelcke, and finally von Richthofen.
For the British a key figure in the emergence of this new form of air fighting was Albert Ball, flying as we have seen with the elite 56 Squadron. Prior to his death on 7 May 1917 Ball shot down 43 aircraft and one balloon. He bridged the transition in tactics and technology from the early dogfights, where scout pilots frantically sought to gain the best position from which to fire their wing-mounted machine guns, to the formation flying of 1917-18, where their successors endeavoured to gain the edge in speed, manoeuvrability, and weaponry.
Ball’s service just overlapped with Mick Mannock, who transferred into the RFC largely because he was so inspired by Britain’s first publicly acclaimed air ace. As if passing the baton, Mannock’s first success, downing a balloon, took place the day Albert Ball died. Mannock had already discovered another inspiring figure – James McCudden, himself much influenced by Ball. Unlike Albert Ball, McCudden was someone Mannock could readily identify with – although he was younger and with a service not a civilian background, McCudden shared Mannock’s Irish working-class roots, his Kentish origins, and his relaxed approach to Catholicism.
For all his emotional intensity re waging war in the air, McCudden’s personality and approach to fighting the air war contrasted with the singleminded – and increasingly psychologically disturbed – Mannock. An emotionally ravaged Mannock would realise his worst nightmare, defying his own edict never to fly low and crashing in flames on 26 July 1918 – he still hadn’t come to terms with McCudden’s death earlier in the month.
Neither did McCudden have much in common with the top Canadian air ace William ‘Billy’ Bishop, always a loner. The single-minded ‘Bishop was no team member, let alone team leader. McCudden, ever the tactician, was a more suitable squadron commander, assuming he could circumvent or suppress any surviving class prejudice.
Yet it was Bishop’s successor as commander of 80 Squadron, Mick Mannock, who by mid-1918 could lay claim to be the Allied fliers’ master strategist; in the first half of 1918 his ideas and influence became a powerful influence on the newly established RAF’s front-line squadrons. As an active member of the Wellingborough branch of the Independent Labour Party – the ILP – Mannock insisted that socialism offered a model for waging aerial warfare. Trust, collaboration, innovation, mutual responsibility, and above all, team spirit, when combined together were key elements in the new tactics hammered out 20,000 feet above the trenches.
Like Albert Ball and James McCudden, Edward Mannock enthusiastically embraced technological innovation, pushing his scout – his fighter aircraft – the SE5a and its potent weaponry to the limits. The eighteen months following the RFC’s reverses of ‘Bloody April’ 1917 saw the emergence of new ideas and new leaders. Unusually, Mannock was a technocrat and an ideologue, the latter fuelling interwar speculation as to what role he would have assumed within the Labour Party had he survived. McCudden, in contrast, was of a more conservative hue, assuming upward social mobility could be enjoyed by anyone with the right skills – including of course social skills – and a bit of luck.
By comparison with the aircraft that the RFC and even the RNAS flew in 1914, the aircraft flying four years later constituted remarkably sophisticated machines – whether they be bombers (in 1919 a Vickers Vimy would cross the Atlantic), or fighters. In terms of armaments, the key technological development for both sides was the Constantinesco synchronising gear, which allowed cowling-mounted machine guns to fire through the propeller. Each side’s success was rooted in temporary technological superiority, so that the pendulum swung from one side to the other depending upon the quality of front-line aircraft. The Allies’ huge losses in ‘Bloody April’ 1917 were because their Nieuport 17 scouts were outgunned and outmanoeuvred by the Albatros D3. The same would occur in early 1918 with the last great Focker, the DVIII. But the Allies eventually gained a clear advantage in quantity and in quality, with the Sopwith Camel and the SE5a. The Camel is the Spitfire of the First World War in capturing the popular imagination (thank you, Biggles), but the much uglier SE5a was a solid gun platform, like the Hurricane. If, like Mick Mannock, or to a lesser extent Jimmy McCudden, your flight cruised for long periods at 20,000 feet, waiting to dive out of the sun and unleash a stream of machine gun bullets at less than 100 yards from your target, then you flew the SE5a. This was truly a killing machine.
Conclusion
Both Major McCudden and Major Mannock were Catholic working-class boys of Irish descent whose ruthlessness, professionalism, cunning, tactical innovation, and technical expertise had made them natural leaders in a wholly new kind of war. The likes of McCudden and Mannock knew that if you were going to survive then you had to understand how the machinery worked, through knowledge both of the aircraft itself and, crucially, of its armaments – they always sighted and loaded their machine guns, not entrusting the task to ground crew. Trained mechanics, they felt comfortable with the technology. A classical education was of limited value sighting your guns or re-checking your ailerons, as many well-educated young men found out to their cost – not all of them by any means; and the older they were then the more cautious and the more ready to learn they proved. McCudden and Mannock offer a fascinating insight into the nature of the first ‘total’ or ‘industrial’ war. Their respective achievements highlighted the need to embrace and understand the new technology in order to survive; and that technical expertise was now a key criterion for advancement within a mechanised fighting force. They represented the new face of the 20th century where being of a working-class background would no longer automatically mean anonymity and social immobility. Yet, such a confident concluding statement demands a caveat.
For every James McCudden who escaped his proletarian roots by securing a commission and with it the promise – had he lived – of a very different postwar life from that of his father or even his brothers, there were hundreds of thousands of young working-class men fulfilling the same acquiescent role in the trenches as on the factory floor. Nor did circumstances change that much in the Second World War, with my father unusual in starting the war on the assembly line at Armstrong Whitworth and ending it as a staff officer in Berlin. ‘Temporary gentlemen’ were invariably middle class grammar school boys, often with Territorial Army credentials – the same had been true in the First World War, witness Bill Slim’s rise via unfashionable regiments from the suburbs of Edwardian Birmingham to Chief of the Imperial General Staff (‘Bobs’ – Field Marshal Lord Roberts – had followed a similar path in late Victorian Britain, and he really was the exception to the rule). The RAF was always seen as the least hidebound and most open-minded of the three services when it came to class. Popular mythology surrounding Fighter Command in the summer of 1940 and Bomber Command attacking the Reich still implicitly assumes the pilots are officers, when the reality was that a large number were flight sergeants drawn from the less affluent end of the social spectrum. It took the 1960s, with ‘Braddock VC’ flying his Lancaster in the Victor comic and Ian McShane as a Spitfire-flying non-commissioned officer in the epic Battle of Britain, for consumers of popular culture to appreciate that precious few RAF pilots from the heart of the Empire had looked and spoken like David Niven or Richard Todd.
Richard Vinen’s wonderful study of National Service from the late 1940s to the early 1960s makes clear how, unless they had really stood out at grammar school, bright young men from humbler backgrounds joining the RAF were seen as ideal NCOs, not officer material. Even if selected as officers they had no chance of becoming a pilot as only a handful of conscripts – all ex-public school – were trained to fly. Would today’s RAF recognise a Jimmy or a John McCudden, and would the system enable him to rise to a senior command? The answer has to be yes, but today of course promotion does not take place while the candidate is on active service – for obvious reasons there are no front-line emergency commissions. The biggest challenge in peacetime is surely when experienced NCOs commence their officer training. McCudden, for all his trials and tribulations in a deeply stratified society, was very good at assimilation – and this surely is the greatest test when service personnel commence the process of transferring from the sergeants’ to the officers’ mess, which even in the RAF involves a huge cultural shift. If Warrant Officer James McCudden was seeking promotion today one can imagine him arriving at Cranwell, keeping his mouth shut, playing by the rules, unfussily demonstrating his astonishing range of technical skills, and quietly making his mark. Why – because of natural ability, but also because in 2016 the system allows for raw talent to be identified and fostered. There was scant respect for meritocracy among the most powerful stratas of society in Edwardian Britain – not least the military – and yet the test of twentieth-century war provided rare opportunities to seize the moment and buck the system.
James McCudden recognised this new reality, making the most of the extraordinary range of skills he acquired while still a humble mechanic and eagle-eyed observer and gunner. Thanks to the prewar pioneers at Leysdown and Eastchurch, Sheppey really does have a strong claim to be the birthplace of British aviation. Despite Shorts’ continued presence, the onset of the First World War saw the focus shift away from the island to the Medway towns. Yet wartime Sheppey retained a close association with British aviation, not least via the important RNAS station at Eastchurch. Highlighting Jimmy McCudden’s formative years in Sheerness is a means by which we can restate Sheppey’s credentials as the cradle of British aviation both before and during the First World War. When commemorating the centenary of this terrible conflict we recognise the remarkable achievement of McCudden VC, and equally the contribution made by the residents of this island, whether in uniform or on the home front.
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