Why I helped Grandad get his medals ‘H
When Charlotte Vowden found out about her grandfather’s wartime past, she embarked upon a mission of her own
ere’s to looking forward – and to looking back,” I scribbled beneath the photograph of my grandparents I had stuck into the first page of my journal, on the first day of this year.
Less than three months on, my glamorous, blue-eyed grandmother, Joan, was gone. We were at her bedside when she passed away, aged 89, from cancer; my grandfather, Raymond Greenway, or Dodo as I know him, was only just about able to mutter a final “cheerio”.
Having been married for 65 years, with barely a day apart from his wife, his tomorrow seemed a lonely prospect, but I promised to look after him – visiting for breakfast in the garden, a sunset gin and tonic, or a whizz along the country lanes outside Cambridge in his hot-red MG (which, at 91, he still handles impeccably).
As spring turned to summer, time began to soften the grief, and an August trip to Duxford airfield for afternoon tea proved the catalyst for him to share a hidden chapter of his life. Watching a passenger returning from a pleasure flight in a De Havilland Rapide, Dodo mentioned it was the aircraft in which he trained as a wireless operator. Realising that not only had he never talked about this period of his life before, but I’d never thought to ask, I probed further.
Against the growling thrum of aircraft engines, he revealed how, after joining the Marine Craft Section of the RAF, aged 19, in 1943, he had gone on to become one of a small band of men testing new methods of filming and photography in the skies above Europe.
But it was when he let slip that he had never claimed the medals for his Second World War service – feeling that there were others who had done much more remarkable things – that I identified a mission of my own: to get hold of them for him.
I contacted the Ministry of Defence to find out what needed to be done, before revealing my plans. Dodo was surprised, but intrigued, and after we filled in the necessary paperwork together, he led me to an RAF trunk buried at the back of his garage, which had not been opened since he was demobbed in 1947.
Under its dusty, rusting lid lay his personal archive of wartime life: a pamphlet on what to do if captured by the enemy, menus from the mess, handwritten letters from family and friends and countless newspaper cuttings; this included one detailing a daring North Sea rescue mission his older brother had been part of.
Keen to comb through it properly, we packed it into the back of my car and set off for a weekend together in Aldeburgh to celebrate his approaching birthday.
Overlooking the waves on the Suffolk coast, I listened avidly as he told me the story behind his official title: Flight Sergeant of the Royal Air Force, No 1 Film Production Unit. His role, to accompany bombers on missions and take footage of impact sites for reconnaissance and record.
“I was bored with ground duties so went up to Whitehall in my best blues – a tunic with brass buttons – and interviewed to be a photographer,” he said. “My experience was limited to taking holiday snaps, but I said I had a box camera and that was it.”
Within days, he found himself at Pinewood Studios, where he spent three months harnessing skills as a cine-cameraman alongside Richard Attenborough. “Dickie was distinguished by his briefcase; we just had notebooks,” Dodo recalled. “He would swan around, but he was one of us.” We later discovered a Christmas card in the trunk signed by the man himself.
During training flights that took them along the Thames to Windsor Castle, Dodo had been taught how to use infrared film, a development that enabled photographs to be taken through cloud, as well as the latest hand-held cameras. Passes signed by General Eisenhower allowed him and three comrades to travel through Allied nations with no questions asked, to join bomber crews on daylight raids over Germany.
Armed with both cameras and revolvers, they were based in a sabotaged electrical sub-station near an airfield in Osnabrück – their task, to film operations targeting areas of industrial significance, including Hamburg.
The only way to get footage was for him to lie, belly-down, on the floor of a Mitchell bomber, remove the access trap and point his lens through a gaping hole – no harness, no safety belt; nothing but his Bell & Howell 35mm camera between Dodo and the ground.
“You could see the flack exploding below from the anti-aircraft guns as the Germans tried to shoot us down,” he recalled, but it’s the noise and vibration that seems to have stayed with him longer than the fear.
His photographs, unsealed from envelopes and unwrapped from tissue paper, took us, minute by minute, through the anatomy of an air raid – from loading ammunition into aircraft, to releasing bombs and the moment of impact.
Others showed Dodo looking dashing in his uniform. Still more showed a lighter side to active duty, when there was time to spend posing with friends and girlfriends. “Most inconvenient to have the same one, as you were always moving around,” he chuckled, when I suggested he seemed to have been something of a ladies’ man.
The more I learnt, the shorter the 64 years between us felt. To be the first person in almost seven decades to see the contents of the trunk felt a privilege; even luckier that I still had Dodo by my side to provide narration.
Each item in that time capsule triggered another part of his story. But out of everything, it was the memory of a love lost – his first girlfriend, and “a truck-load of soldiers whistling at her in her beautiful summer dress” – that brought tears to his eyes.
When the war ended, Dodo put his photography skills to further use, taking X-rays of men returning from active duty in a demob centre, before going on to become a property surveyor in London, where he met my grandmother. Today, he reserves the use of his camera solely for happy occasions, and will put on his best smile for iPhone selfies of the two of us.
In early October, his 1939-1945 medal and France and Germany ribbon were finally slipped through the front door by the postman, without fanfare or fuss. They now sit in their boxes beside his radio in the kitchen – tangible reminders of longforgotten service for him; and for me, that he is not just a grandfather, but a man who lived, loved and lost – before, during and after the war.
“We were all just doing what we had to do,” says Dodo, still seeing nothing remarkable in his experience. I’m grateful that I have finally seen, through his own lens, how he and his generation did not do just that – but so much more.
Under the dusty lid of his trunk lay a record of Dodo’s wartime life