November 14, 2005

By Daniel Mark Wheaton

In 1936, 15-year-old Sydney Clay was accepted into a three-year apprenticeship program with the Royal Air Force in England. It marked the beginning of a military career that eventually brought him to Canada, where he settled in Charlottetown with his wife.

Clay shared his experiences with members and guests of the P.E.I. Regimental Association at the Garrison Warrant Officers’ and Sergeants’ Mess on November 5.

He began his training shortly after his sixteenth birthday in 1937.

The apprenticeship combined aircraft maintenance training with full military instruction. Admission was simple: boys between 16 and 17 years old had to pass a written examination.

The young apprentices were known throughout the British armed forces as the “brats.”

The pay was modest, Clay recalled.

They were issued Lee-Enfield .303-calibre rifles with bayonets and took part in sports, bands, and other recreational activities.

“And very good ones too.”

Clay graduated shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War. A year later, he was promoted to corporal.

“They’re the meat in the sandwich.”

Corporals, he joked, received complaints from both senior officers and junior ranks.

Clay later joined a newly formed special navigation school, where navigators received advanced instruction that enabled them to locate Atlantic convoys and report their positions.

On December 16, 1940, Clay and many of his fellow airmen were suddenly informed they would be leaving England for Canada.

“We were, on very short notice, put on the troop train.”

On the recommendation of RAF officers, new training bases had been established across Canada, staffed jointly by Canadian and RAF personnel.

The airmen travelled by train to a port where they boarded the SS Leopoldville, a 17,000-ton troopship.

They boarded after dark.

“How nobody went overboard and drowned was a miracle.”

Below decks, approximately 2,000 men were crowded into ten brightly lit mess decks with only six feet, six inches of headroom. They ate and slept in the same spaces, with hammocks suspended above the tables.

The hammocks proved challenging.

“If you ever tried to get in a hammock, you know it’s very easy to go out the other side.”

The first night aboard resulted in two broken arms and several other injuries.

Smoking was prohibited below deck and after dark on the upper decks.

Meals were served family-style. Four men from each mess carried pots of food from the galley back to their tables.

The rolling seas created another problem.

The men quickly learned to keep their arms around their plates or risk watching dinner slide down the table to the person seated at the lower end.

The ship sailed before dawn on December 17, 1940.

Each morning the hammocks were stowed, breakfast was served, and lifeboat drills followed.

The men soon realized there were not enough lifeboats for everyone aboard.

In an emergency, many would be expected to jump into the Atlantic and make their way to floating rafts.

Clay estimated survival in those waters in mid-December would have been measured in minutes.

Christmas Day brought another memorable incident.

The Belgian cooks refused to prepare the holiday meal.

They were confined to the brig, and RAF cooks took over.

“A galley at sea is no place for a landlubber cook.”

After arriving in Canada, Clay was stationed at an RAF training base in Charlottetown, where he worked on aircraft maintenance.

Each aircraft required a daily inspection documented on a Form 700.

As a corporal, Clay had the authority to sign the form declaring an aircraft fit to fly.

After every flight, pilots completed a snag sheet listing any mechanical problems. Often, Clay recalled, the report simply read that there were none.

The paperwork became part of each aircraft’s permanent logbook.

Life wasn’t all work.

Dances on the base were popular, and local young men sometimes tried to sneak in because beer was available.

Although alcohol was forbidden off base, many airmen knew where to find moonshine. Routine orders even listed local homes and businesses that were off limits because they were known to sell illegal liquor.

Another option was to visit a Charlottetown coffee shop and ask for “a pot of cold tea.”

The waiter would bring a teapot filled with one-percent beer.

Charlottetown had three theatres, and only two women worked on the air base, both of them nurses.

Married airmen were permitted to bring their wives and children to Charlottetown and received three-year postingsinstead of the usual two. Those who married while stationed there also qualified for the longer posting, and their families were allowed to return to England with them afterward.

Following the war, Clay was among 60 former RAF personnel who chose to return to Charlottetown and make Prince Edward Island their home.