Bert’s Lancaster, and his love of the stage

For three years, Bert flew missions with Bomber Command – a name that comes with an inbuilt chill factor.

Bomber Command suffered the highest casualty rate of any British unit in the Second World War.

A total of 55,573 flight crew were killed out of a total 125,000 men. This amounted to a 44.4 per cent death rate.

The chances of losing one’s life were higher than in the frontline trenches during the First World War.

The likelihood of survival was reduced even further if, as Bert did, you flew uninterruptedly for two and a half years, from 1943 to the end of hostilities in 1945.

Bert, moreover, belonged to 115 Squadron. “We always seemed to get the dirtiest jobs,” he says.

Yet he survived, as did the other members of the close-knit crew he flew with throughout the war. Many others weren’t so lucky.

“In the morning you’d see a Nissen hut being emptied of a crew’s belongings and you knew they hadn’t made it,” he says. “Another seven men had gone for a Burton.”

Sometimes Bert was a direct witness of the fate of other planes and other crews: “You saw a black speck, caught in a searchlight. There’d be a puff, and then the speck wasn’t there any more. You knew they’d bought it.”

Bert was a butcher’s apprentice, still living in his Manchester birthplace, when he joined up at the age of 19.

“I was caught up in the glamour of flying,” he says. “But it didn’t turn out glamorous. I got a rude awakening. I set out wanting to be a fighter pilot. But it turned out my legs weren’t long enough – I couldn’t have controlled the ailerons.”

You didn’t need long legs for Bomber Command, and Bert was accepted for wireless operator training.

“I’d already learnt the Morse code in the Scouts, so I was one step ahead,” he says.

His squadron, 115, recruited its personnel from the north of England, but was stationed at Witchford aerodrome, near Ely. From here, 115 Squadron flew nightime missions to bomb the Ruhr industrial zone, and the Kiel U-boat compounds.

The crews covered the Allied troops as they landed on the D-Day beaches. Towards the end of the war 115 Squadron specialised in low-level bombing against German tanks.

Bert admits he was “frightened to death” on his first mission, and “it never got any easier”.

Exploding flak (anti-aircraft shells) was never far away.

He recalls: “You heard it and you also felt it. It lifted the whole aircraft up and shook it.”

RAF crews had a word for the sense of animal fear shared by every Bomber Command flier.

“Have you heard of the ‘ring twitch’?” asks Bert. “It’s a feeling that starts in the base of the spine and works its way up. Everybody was familiar with it. We all knew we could buy it at any time.”

There were no counsellors or therapists to deal with the ring twitch.

“You just got on with it,” says Bert. “But at least we knew we were fighting for our national survival. Not like our lads out in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

The flight crew had their own form of therapy.

“On nights when we weren’t flying, we’d get on our bikes and go to the pub in Ely,” says Bert. “You’d get drunk and then wobble your way back to the base on your bike.”

It wasn’t the war, but the arrival of peace that came closest to breaking Bert.

Returning home, he found his old job as a butcher was no longer available.

Men who had been called up had the right to walk back into their peacetime jobs. Bert, though, had volunteered for combat.

Bert, who had risked so much for his country, tramped the streets for 17 weeks in search of work, “any work”.

By now he was married, with a child. Eventually he was offered a job by a photographic firm He shows no bitterness about his treatment.

“I’ve had my ups and downs, like everyone,” he says. “Being unemployed after the war was a down, but all in all it’s been a good life,” he says.

He counts the move from Manchester to Basildon, in 1947, as one of the ups. The reason will sound novel to a native’s ears – Basildon’s weather.

“My wife had a bad chest, and we thought the climate would be better for her down south,” says Bert.

He worked as a factory foreman until his retirement.

Theatre, though, has been Bert’s ruling passion for 60 years. He has just written and staged a play called Goods Inwards, a new comedy presented by Basildon Players.

Following its premiere this month, other drama societies around the country are expressing an interest in the play, and it has already been taken up by the Doncaster Players.

Bert, meanwhile, is hard at work writing his next full-length play. He is also learning his part as the Caterpillar in Basildon Players’ next production, Alice in Wonderland. Not bad for a man on the eve of his tenth decade.

Directing even an amateur production is a physically and mentally exhausting business. Yet ask Bert if he has any plans to retire or even ease up and the response is blunt: “You have to keep going as long as you can. It’s when you stop doing things and stop using the old brainbox that you might as well give up and call it a day.”

Besides, he says: “You get better at what you’re doing, the longer you go on. You never stop learning, so why give up?”

He discovered a flair for the stage while he was still in Manchester. “It started almost as a dare, really,” he says. “I worked backstage to start with, then after two years I began to do small parts on stage. Then I discovered directing and writing.”

In Basildon, he and his late wife, Ivy, set up an amdram group, Centre Stage, which presented plays in Basildon for 18 years.

Eventually, Bert handed the running of Centre Stage to someone else, but has continued to direct plays on a regular basis for a range of groups.

The former RAF warrant officer admits to being something of a disciplinarian.

“I do rant and rave a bit when I’m directing,” he says. “Sometimes you lose it when actors are giving you a load of rubbish. It seems to work. I wouldn’t say actors are frightened of me, but they do seem a bit awed.”

Hardly surprising when you’re taking direction from a man who flew in Lancaster bombers.