"It was a question of survival. You didn’t have time for feelings,” says Bill Evans, with a smile and a dismissive shrug. He is telling
Legion about the time his plane nose-dived into the Atlantic one evening in October 1942. Bill is 98 now, which makes him the oldest surviving member of the Goldfish Club, an organisation for people who have survived making an emergency landing into the sea.
“There were four of us. We were on a photography exercise in a Hampden Bomber off the coast of Scotland,” Bill explains. “The skipper just had time to point to the escape hatch before the plane went down.” He pauses to remember. “Then we were just spiralling in, nose first, straight in. It ditched and I had to kick myself free.”
But some of the others were not so lucky. “There was a French-Canadian and an Australian. They were both floating face downwards, I don’t know why. The skipper was yelling ‘what’s wrong with them?’ We couldn’t get to them. They were too far away.” Later, when they were picked up, one of the boys had died.
Bill continues: “A fishing boat had seen us going in and later that day the skipper, the Australian and I were all lying side by side in hospital. One of them said ‘you alright?’ to me. And I said ‘Of course I am. If I’m not we’re grounded aren’t we?’ You just didn’t have time to think back then.”
What was going through Bill’s mind while waiting to be rescued? “The dinghy hadn’t worked. Even my Mae West (lifejacket) wasn’t blowing up properly. And it was so cold.” Bill’s memory of the events is clearly still sharp. But traumatic as the incident was, he says that his life was much the same afterwards. All three of the surviving crew were back in the air just 48 hours after the ditch.
Not long after this, Bill joined the Goldfish Club. It was set up in 1942 primarily to ‘keep alive the spirit of comradeship arising from the mutual experience of members surviving coming down in the drink’.
Bill remembers the Club’s 21st anniversary dinner in the 1960s. It was held at the House of Commons and Bill holds onto the menu as a memento. “There were so many of us back then you see,” he says, “it was really good fun.”
The club was the brainchild of an Australian businessman, Mr C Renton-Coombes who, in 1938, was producing dinghies for the military. So successful was his inflatable craft at keeping survivors afloat long enough to be rescued, that people would visit the factory to thank him, recounting their experiences at the same time. No one knows how many planes were ditched during the war but, by 1945, the club had more than 9,000 members. And, as Mike Dane, a member of the Goldfish Club, reminds
Legion, these were only the ones who joined, and there would have been many more.
Now, the Club retains around 500 members and exists purely as a social network that sends out a regular newsletter and holds annual dinner parties.
Mike, 74, is the newsletter editor and a committee member. His downing experience occurred in 1961 when he was working as an RAF search and rescue winchman on a demonstration with the RNLI off the coast of Kent. There were hundreds of people watching the proceedings and nothing had seemed out of the ordinary. Exercise finished, the helicopter was about 40ft above the surface of the water when the engine suddenly cut out.
Such is the design of a helicopter that it immediately fell into the sea at 45 degrees, nose down. When the blades hit the water, they bounced back from the sheer force, and cut off the tail of the helicopter. “I’ve got no recollection of it,” says Mike. “All I remember is millions of tiny bubbles. I’d no idea where anything was. Fortunately, I bobbed up into a small air pocket at the back corner of the helicopter. I punched out the window and escaped, followed by another of our men.
“The aircraft was almost vertical in the water with only the severed tail exposed when there was a disturbance from below, and our pilot shot out of the water, almost up to his feet it seemed, lifejacket fully inflated and visor down. He had been trapped by the helicopter, about 30 ft down. Then the aircraft sank and we were left floating, but in one piece.”
And although emergency landings on water may be rare these days, WWII veteran Bill has advice for anyone thinking of flying a small plane over the sea: “Always be prepared! My mates always used to take the mick, but you need a fresh water bottle. And a bar of chocolate.”
But sometimes, you need a little more than preparation to survive. The sea is an unforgiving entity, as ex-airman Hylton Winter-Taylor knows only too well. He was just 21 when his aircraft engine failed while flying over the Atlantic. It was late August 1941, and as Hylton recalls dryly, “a dreadful afternoon”. As the bomber went down, all six of the crew onboard were able to escape, scrambling to recover the rations from the wreckage on the surface of the water. Then, stranded on two dinghies in the middle of a choppy and merciless sea, they dug in for the wait. And waited and waited.
“The hardest thing was the wait. Four of the crew were seasick and I don’t think the dinghies could have stood up to the relentless battering of the waves any longer. Water kept getting in, and we were all soaked through, slithering about in seawater inches deep,” Hylton recalls.
“Time dragged – the suspense was unnerving. We were weakening and no one was talking. We’d all accepted there was little chance of rescue.”
But then, quite literally out of the blue, came the outline of a German U-Boat. What to do? Hylton remembers a desperate, heated argument between the survivors. “I was all for being picked up. Come what may. We didn’t stand a chance in that blow, no one would have seen us. The others were worried about whether the Germans would do a spot of shooting practice. But our only hope was to be captured.”
So the flight lieutenant fired off a distress flare. Thankfully, it seemed that luck – noticeably absent in the previous 48 hours – was finally with them. The Germans spotted them and took them onto the submarine. “We were ushered into the boat and down into another world full of noisy machinery and warmth. It was so surprising,” Hylton says. After 14 days and nights on the German submarine, the crew was back on dry land and spent the remaining years of the war incarcerated in a prison in St Nazaire.
But, as Hylton says, “that was our only chance.”
You don’t have to have served in the forces to be a member of the club; you can be a civilian too. Billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson was offered membership after bailing out of his transatlantic balloon in 1987 and Gloria Pullen is the only surviving female Goldfish, after she ditched a 1911 vintage Bleriot monoplane on an attempt to fly across the Channel.
Incidentally, if you make an emergency parachute landing you can join the Caterpillar Club, and if you eject from an airplane, you can join the Martin Baker Club – named after the company that made ejection seats. But there is one very important requirement asked of people wishing to join these clubs, Mike reminds
Legion: “You’ve got to get out of the aircraft, because you can’t join unless you survive.”
For more Goldfish information contact Mike Dane on 01780 765 834 or email
m.dane640@btinternet.com
