Tag Archives: Canada

Colin Smith: WWII, 1945, glider pilot

I was a pilot and trained out in Canada mostly and then came back to this country.  I was scheduled to go onto fighter bombers or something like that but time went on, month after month.  Whether we didn’t lose enough of planes or what it was, I just don’t know.

Somebody came down one day and wanted some volunteers to go to the Far East to fly gliders, troop carrying gliders.  Now the army had lost a lot of their pilots over at Arnheim and places like that of course, but they had these ready trained pilots all waiting to go somewhere.  We went out there and were going to be on operations within six weeks, but we never did see any operations.  The Fourteenth Army at that time started pushing the Japs back down through Burma, then we were going to go into somewhere further down, Rangoon, but that never came off.  We did a bit of flying as kind of push out crews for a while on Dakotas flying supplies over Burma and dropping them by parachute and things like that. Just an ordinary looking type of aircraft, the Dakota, but marvellous really.  They’re still flying today.  Quite incredible really I think.

We went up first of all into Assam. From there, we moved round to various places around India and down into Ceylon as it was then.  It was a very pleasant time really.  We were annoyed that they hadn’t sent us in   We had a nice time up in the mountains up north, through Kashmir and places like that.

Print showing 'First recorded loop of a Hadian (Waco) Glider by Flight Lieutenant Jack Hayward and Flight Sergeant Colin Smith, 1945', from print belonging to Colin Smith

Print showing ‘First recorded loop of a Hadian (Waco) Glider by Flight Lieutenant Jack Hayward and Flight Sergeant Colin Smith, 1945’, from print belonging to Colin Smith

We were co-pilots on these gliders – Waco Hadrians. I was co-pilot with a man called Jack Hayward; he later became Sir Jack Hayward, a multi millionaire.  We’ve had quite a number of get- togethers for 671 squadron as it was then.

I didn’t do as much flying as I wanted to do.  We came back to this country and while we were waiting to Oxford, they sent us on some wonderful course, flying Tiger Moths again, or something like that and another course doing aircraft recognition and this that and the other, a waste of time really. I had four years in the RAF altogether.

Colin Smith: Nova Espero, Siani class yacht 1940s

Colin and Stan Smith travelled to Canada in WWII to train as RAF pilots. After the war, they returned, and built the ‘Nova Espero’ ,the forerunner for Siani class, in which they crossed the Atlantic,

After WWII
After the war  I think I got demobbed first actually, or just a little before my brother.
I went back to Saunders Roe for a while and went up in the mould loft in the drawing office for a little bit, and did things of that sort.

Stan, my brother, and I went out to Canada.  We’d done our flying training out there and we didn’t go right inland where we’d done the training, we went over to Nova Scotia where we built the little boat, Nova Espero – Esperanto from New Hope,  and sailed it across.
It was intended to be a two way trip.  Nobody knew us when we went there so we thought we’d make ourselves known a little bit by doing a double crossing, that was the intention.

She was a half decked boat, twenty foot long.  We designed it on the way across on the Aquitania.  We’d get down in our cabin and get the lines out and work on it, the lines were all ready by the time we got to the side.

We took only about three months I think altogether, something like that to build the boat in Nova Scotia.  We went over in March and left in the beginning of July 1949.  I’d been doing design work and all that, drawing work down at Saunders Roe.  Stan had as well.  We both chipped in on this one.  She was quite a tough little boat, clinker built and a hundred weight of cast iron ballast on the keel underneath.

We didn’t know if anyone had done any trips, prepared for it before hand or anything like that, so we adjusted ourselves with what we thought we needed and that was it.  Sponsorship, we’d never heard of that.    We worked it out and had lockers along the side of the boat under the side decks and tried to figure out what we’d need and got loads and loads of ships biscuits, far more than we needed, I suppose, and lots and lots of tinned stuff and that kind of stuff, powdered milk and lots of sugar.  Couldn’t do without that.  For water we had  twenty eight gallons I think. We had one made up, a galvanised tank with a tap in one corner.  We had that stowed up, just after the mast, up forward under the cabin.  We had no bunks.  We just about had sleeping bags, laid those out on the cabin floor, you see.  I’d say we were probably wet most of the time.

It was July through August.  We had some pretty nasty weather at times too of course. We had a little portable radio we hoped to get the time checks or weather checks or something like that.  Didn’t get a peep out of it from the time we left so we dropped it over the side and that was that.  We had a sextant, not an aircraft sextant, a proper little sextant, yacht sextant, and an aircraft compass which wasn’t actually mounted in the boat at all.  We used to carry it around with us you know and that was what we used.  We were concerned when the weather got really nasty and it did at times too.  We had a little primus stove, a little loose primus stove we used to hold between our knees, and a little pressure cooker.  We used that a lot.  We didn’t do too bad you know.

Smith brothers arrive in Yarmouth, 1949,

Smith brothers arrive in Yarmouth, 1949,after crossing the atlantic in 43 days in their 20ft boat.

Afterwards, mostly it was going up to this do up in London, and this do and all that sort of thing, which we just hadn’t expected of course, and all that sort of nonsense.  But there was one firm that wanted to turn the boat into production or something, but we didn’t go along with it, we were too busy.

We were going back to Canada and set up in business over there but it didn’t come off.  I came back to this country, met my wife and got married and that was that.

Siani class yacht

Siani class yacht: photo Colin Smith

Mary Henderson, Margery Henderson: Thorley 1940s

Yarmouth Common

Yarmouth Common

Margery Henderson, my Aunt Marge, Dad’s sister, has lived in Canada since she married a Canadian soldier in WWII and went out as a War Bride. She’s in her nineties now and has children and grandchildren there.

Recently she told me she wished she’d never gone out. She can remember going across the Common in an Army wagon with her husband and couple more of the Canadian soldiers who were over here, and thinking, ‘What have I done?’  But she said in those days, you didn’t admit it. Her mum would have been horrified.
Her father, Vic Henderson, my grandfather, came off his bike through Wilmingham one frosty morning, coming back from coastguard duties. They thought he’d cracked his ribs, had this terrible pain, and Marge was sent for in Canada. Her husband worked for Canadian Pacific, up in the logging camps right up north. It took her two days to get to a train to take her to get a boat and they were becalmed coming across. It took her two or three weeks to get home.  When her mum met her at Liverpool she thought, ‘Why’s Mum meeting me?’  By that time he’d died, but her mum, my Gran Henderson, didn’t tell her till they’d travelled back to the Island.
Mary Henderson b 1954