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My name is John Hankin. I was born in Liverpool in 1949 when Liverpool was still a city in the County of Lancashire. Mum and dad often told me that I came from Liverpool, Lancashire, England. My elder brother Bill was also born in Liverpool. The County of Lancashire that Bill and I were born into, no longer exists. From the 1st of April 1974, the former County of Lancashire was abolished and the part of Lancashire which had included Liverpool became part of the new Metropolitan County of Merseyside.
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My dad was Thomas Clifford Hankin. He was a sheet metal worker. He served with the RAF from 27 September 1940 until 21 May 1946. After induction and training, Cliff served until early in 1944 as a member of Ground Crew with Bomber Command. Ground Crew made sure the planes could fly and patched them up when (and if) they returned from bombing raids on enemy targets. Throughout WW2, the men who served as aircrew in Bomber Command suffered huge rates. Working in Bomber Command was very unsafe.
Wiki says Bomber Command suffered a 44.4% casualty rate – and that it was more dangerous to serve as a Bomber Command aircrew than it had been to serve as a soldier on the Western Front in WW1.
In September 1940 when Cliff joined Bomber Command, the only British offensive operations against Nazi Germany were those carried out by Bomber Command.
In September 1940 when Cliff joined Bomber Command, the only country standing in the way of a world filled with barbarism was the United Kingdom of Great Britain.
In September 1940 when Cliff joined Bomber Command, “common sense” said that victory over Nazi Germany was completely impossible – but Cliff and millions of other Britons decided to ignore “common sense”. They refused to live in a world without hope.
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Cliff tried to enlist in the Army when Germany invaded Poland shortly after World War II began on 1 September 1939. The Army rejected him because he was a tradesman. Cliff had become a qualified sheet metal worker shortly after his 18th birthday on the 25th of February 1938, nearly 18 months before the war started.
The government had decided qualified tradesmen would be more useful if they practised their trade. There were plenty of potential soldiers but there were not enough qualified tradesmen.
Serving as a tradesman in the RAF was not a “soft” option but an extremely hard one.
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Early in 1944, Cliff’s RAF service became even harder.
Bomber Command was suffering such huge casualties that ground crew were invited to volunteer as aircrew – and Cliff volunteered. In his aircrew capacity, Cliff served as an “Observer”. His job was to spot German fighter aircraft before they could shoot down his own plane – a Lancaster Bomber.
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A Lancaster bomber.
Cliff’s job for most of the war was to make sure the bombers under his care were safe to fly. This often meant he had to remove bodies and body parts from planes that had made it home, but suffered damage. The aircrew were not statistics to him. They were his friends. He suffered greatly when they did not come home.
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My mum was Josephine (Josey) Wood. She was born on 9 May 1924. Her father was William George (Bill) Wood, born in 1891. Bill Wood’s father (also called Bill) had been a labourer, but with the invention of electricity, his son Bill Wood saw an opportunity to become an electrician and became a ship’s electrician. In 1938, he was Chief Electrician on the MV Leighton and at sea when he had a heart attack. My grandfather was put ashore in Antwerp to die and his death occurred on 20 May 1938. Josey had just turned 14 when her father Bill Wood died at age 46. My grandmother Annie Grant became solely responsible for 6 children aged 23, 18, 16, 14, 12 and 10. Josey was 14 years old and went to work at the local fish and chip shop. Her mother let her keep six pence – the equivalent of £1.67 in 2019 currency and a lousy pittance even then.
When the war began, Josey had left the fish and chip shop and was working for Littlewoods Pool Company in Liverpool. Littlewoods was a very large betting agency which made most of its money by accepting bets on football. When war started, Littlewoods Headquarters building was requisitioned by the UK Government and became a factory for making bomb components, barrage balloons and woollen material.
Munitions factories were prime targets for the Luftwaffe.
After Littlewoods, Josey spent the balance of the war working in munitions factories. Apart from the Luftwaffe attacks on munitions factories, munitions factories were inherently very dangerous places to work. If handled incorrectly, munitions do precisely what they are supposed to do – they blow up, killing and maiming those in the vicinity.
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Courage is the only way that we can ever create the Paradise that should be here on Earth.
Hatred only perpetuates the Hell we have already made for ourselves.
My parents were astonishingly brave – and they were astonishingly poor.
Bravery multiplies with use. Poverty has no effect on the amount of courage we can find within ourselves.
