Open Writing

Eventually I was told that several weeks’ convalescence was on my schedule and that it would be in the RAF Convalescence Camp just outside Tel Aviv. That was an exciting opportunity that gave me enormous pleasure.

A train journey from Cairo to Tel Aviv and a truck to take me to the camp was the beginning of a real holiday. My walking splint was still part of me, and it was not a comfortable accessory. It only came off in shower, on toilet or in bed.

Once again I was a privileged person since my father’s business friends who owned The American Porcelain Tooth Company provided friendship, company and care. I visited them in their homes in the tooth factory and especially in the Tel Aviv Services Club, where Ida Davidowitz (an American by birth and married to one of the factory directors) was a manager. At that time the tooth factory was the biggest Palestine exporter after oranges and diamonds.

The story of the tooth factory was one of those unbelievable industrial tales. The Universal Dental Company was a major manufacturer of artificial teeth. Eventually Dentsply bought it up, but after a few years the former leader of the factory restarted a tooth manufacturing business. Again Dentsply bought him up, but this time they insisted on a clause in the contract that would exclude him from manufacturing teeth again.

Leon Blum’s answer was that they could not stop him from making teeth everything in the world, and would they insert a clause “except Palestine”. Since it was in the 1920’s when Palestine was an almost uninhabited desert, they did as they were asked. Thus it was that in the 1930’s the American Porcelain Tooth Company started operating just outside Tel Aviv.

By this time US legislation made it illegal to prevent someone from earning a living in a proper manner. Therefore, the Universal Dental Company started operating in Philadelphia.

After convalescence my enthusiasm brought me to the point of trying to get back to active squadron flying. Since I was still limping, it would not have been too difficult to work my way home as ‘No longer fit for flying’. This was what my parents hoped and expected.

Back to Flying

Step one was to be sent to a flying centre at El Ballah a little way up the Nile. There for ten days I flew again and was passed ‘Fit for non-operational flying’. This meant that a fighter squadron was past history, and so I ended up as a ferry pilot and was posted to No1 ADU (Aircraft Delivery Unit).

We were based on a comfortable houseboat on the Nile in Cairo. Periodically we were flown down to West Africa in Dakotas, Hudsons or Sunderland Flying Boats. If the latter, the route was different to include landing on the river Congo. Then in Takoradi we collected Spitfires and in groups of about ten we would fly them to Cairo, led by a Beaufighter with a reliable navigator aboard.

In about five days, with seven stops to refuel, we would get our Spitfires to the Cairo area where we were building up strength for our next move out of the Western Desert. We did not lose any spitfires on our convoys, although some of the convoys lost the occasional Spitfire. Usually it would mean the loss of the pilot too since jungle or desert, without any rescue facilities available, made it difficult to find crashed pilots.

There were two dreadful Hudson crashes at Khartoum airfield, Wadi Seidna, taking pilots from Cairo to Takoradi, which meant the death of about 40 pilots. Strange that more died on the peaceful activity of ferrying than on fighter squadrons.

On the way across Africa there were some night stops where it was possible to hire horses for a spot of riding. On one occasion two of us rented a couple of horses in the evening and set off unaccompanied. Whilst cantering across the veldt, I felt my saddle slowly slipping down the flank of the horse. Slowly saddle and John
Davis came to the ground, uninjured fortunately.

Examination of the saddle strap showed that it had been previously broken and repaired with a bent nail holding the two ends together. The nail had rusted, causing the two ends to come apart. We decided to try and catch the horse and ride it bareback to the stables.

It took a while to persuade the horse to be caught, and it needed a piece of apple to achieve this. Finally, after dark, I was helped onto the horse and we made our way back to its owner, who only gave us a toothless grin when we showed him the dangerous condition of the saddle.

The number of toothless Africans I saw was enormous. There were no dentists, and the only known treatment for toothache was to either extract the tooth with a pair of pliers or knock it out with a hammer and chisel. Little did I realise that 40 years later I would be helping to solve this problem.

Some of our pilots were involved in lucrative smuggling. Wristwatches would be taken from Cairo to West Africa, and ivory or diamonds were brought back. The really wretched part of this was that some of the diamonds were supposedly smuggled from Egypt into German hands in Turkey or Syria. Some of the big time operators were those killed in the Khartoum crashes.

On one occasion the military police were awaiting the arrival of a suspect convoy in the Cairo airfield, where the WAAF girlfriend of one of the smugglers was a radio operator. She called up the convoy with the suggestion that they should land in a different airfield - which they did.