Ronald Hall died on 15th July 2009 at the age of 95, he had led a full and eventful life that deserves to be remembered by a wider audience than just the circle of immediate family and friends. We are indebted to his long term partner at the time of his death, Pip Jager, for generously sharing her memories with us and also for lending us some of Ron’s trove of papers and photos.
Ronald Hall was born in British Guiana on 1st February 1915. His father was in the local police force. Ron had an unsettled and not altogether happy childhood. His parents emigrated to the USA taking his siblings with them but they left Ron behind in the care of his grandfather. Perhaps understandably, Ron resented this.
Nevertheless, he was clearly a very bright boy and he went to one of the best schools in Georgetown, Queen’s College, one that usually took mostly white students. He did very well there but his life took another unfortunate turn when his grandfather died. Ron, aged 16, went to the Headmaster and explained he would have to leave as his grandfather had been paying the fees. The Headmaster said he could stay on.
He still had to find somewhere to live though. His family arranged for him to live with an uncle but that didn’t work out as the uncle was an alcoholic. So Ron then stayed with the family of his best friend. He slept in a hammock slung in the ‘bottom house’. This may need some explanation. Many houses in Georgetown are built on stilts due to the risk of flooding and the ‘bottom house’ is the area under the house. It was where many families kept their chickens. Ron did his homework by the light of a street lamp. These upheavals might have discouraged a lesser man but Ron rose above the difficulties. He excelled in his studies and later taught Latin and French at the school. He picked up languages very easily and later in life learnt Italian, German and Portuguese.
After leaving school he went into the police force, following in his father’s footsteps. But life in a British Colony like Guiana was constrained, there was only so much a young and ambitious black man could achieve. Like many of his generation, Ron was eager for a way out.
An opportunity for adventure presented itself in 1939. World War Two was declared on 1st September and on 6th Ron volunteered for service overseas. He said “I was accepted, and waited.” He had a long wait. In September 1939 it was still a matter of policy that only “British born men, of British born parents, of pure European descent” could be commissioned as officers. In fact, the British Armed Services (Army, Navy, Air Force) were reluctant to take black recruits at any level. The policy soon changed, the colour bar was officially lifted on 19th October 1939, but it took some time for the policy change to have any effect in practice.
The heavy loss of pilots during the Battle of Britain (July to October 1940) forced the RAF to reconsider and a recruitment campaign started in the Caribbean colonies. An RAF Squadron Leader led the recruitment in British Guiana and Ron “passed the physical and educational tests and filled in some forms.” Although not the first, Ron had wasted little time in joining the Royal Air Force, signing up on 13th October 1941. Cy Grant, a well-known Guianese recruit, enlisted on 10th so they almost certainly set off for the ‘Mother Country’ together The months of waiting were over! Many years later Ron told Pip that joining the RAF was the best thing he ever did.
He left British Guiana by ship, which made its way through the Caribbean picking up recruits along the way. They steamed up the eastern seaboard of America, hugging the coast to avoid prowling German U-Boats. After stopping off in Halifax, Nova Scotia, they steamed across the Atlantic in convoy to Gourock in Scotland.
Ron’s training took place at a number of locations, he mentions Syerston in Nottinghamshire, the south coast (probably Christchurch), Bridgenorth in Shropshire and Millom in Cumberland (now Cumbria). Finally the team he was going to be part of was pulled together at RAF Harwell in Oxfordshire. Harwell was often used as the base from which aircraft were ‘ferried’ out (flown out by a full crew) to destinations overseas.
According to notes in Ron’s papers, his ‘ferry’ flight left Harwell in March 1943. The dangers even of this training period are attested to by the number of Commonwealth War Graves at Hanwell village cemetery. There are six graves there from March 1943 alone, the result of various flying accidents. One of the pilots Ron was to fly with, Ron Cooper, described an incident when a landing at Harwell went horribly wrong. The Wellington he was flying touched down on the runway but refused to halt in spite of frantic braking “we were still doing 70 mph as we reached the end of the runway and the next thing we knew we were dragging all three sections of the barbed wire perimeter fence along with us, which rapidly wrapped itself around the engines, and ended up in a turnip field.” Luckily on this occasion all the crew escaped with cuts and bruises. All told, Bomber Command lost 8,000 men in training accidents over the course of the War.
Ron’s ‘ferry’ flight took him to the Middle East via Gibraltar. He was assigned to Squadron No.37 of Bomber Command. As the fortunes of war ebbed and flowed, the location of the Squadron’s base shifted from Egypt to Libya and then to Tunisia. Later it would move across to Italy but this was after Ron had left the Squadron.
Ron signed up hoping to be a pilot but he wasn’t the only black airman to find his ambitions thwarted. One Jamaican recruit, John Ebanks, who had also wanted to be a pilot, commented that his role as navigator “was also a critical job [as] many aircraft were lost not as a result of enemy fire, but due to errors in navigation.” Ron was also assigned to the role of navigator. If he felt slighted about not being selected as a pilot he had no need to be. In fact, the navigator was the ‘brains’ of the crew. As Mark Johnson, writing in ’Caribbean Volunteers at War’ explains, working without the benefit of on board radar, working from “directional readings from a beam transmitted from the ground … taking quick looks out of the window to plot their track on the ground (when cloud cover permitted) and by reading their weather reports in order to predict the flow of the wind, the navigators somehow guided their bomb-laden aircraft all the way [to the target] and back with a fair degree of precision.” Only the brightest and best were chosen to be navigators.
Pip told me that Ron had no sense of direction, not perhaps a quality you would necessarily look for in a navigator of a Wellington bomber! He told Pip that he had “got lost once and ended up landing in Gibraltar by mistake” (I believe the intended destination was Tunis!). He realised he was lost as there were no other planes around, they had lost contact with the other planes they were flying with. This may sound careless but in fact ‘getting lost’ was a common occurrence, so much so that landing in Gibraltar could be considered a success, many planes crashed into mountains or flew far out to sea never to return.
The papers Pip shared with me list 39 operational missions between the time he joined the Squadron on 8th May 1943 and 13th February 1944. The notes, written by 2nd in command, Ron Cooper, record the targets attacked on each mission. A sample: Oil refineries at Messina, Sicily, in May 1943; railway marshalling yards near Naples on 5th August (they experienced heavy German anti-aircraft fire on this raid); Tarranto naval base on 8th August (“some bombs from one stick hit a nearby cemetery”); while on 9th September it was railway yards at Grosetto (“some clot dropped bombs on the town”).
Living conditions at the various bases were rudimentary at best. The men shared tents and had to improvise beds as best they could from whatever planks and other bits and pieces were to hand. They were allocated just two blankets and used their parachutes as pillows.
Clearly, in spite of Pip’s comments on Ron’s sense of direction, he was nevertheless a highly regarded member of the team. He missed the operation on September 21st, and Ron Cooper noted “our navigator Ron Hall was not on the op – but a Flight Lieutenant Wilkinson made a complete mess of his navigation and found us 90 miles off track.” In another comment, Cooper wrote that their flight was “bang on track … what a navigator – but then Ronald Fitzherbert Hall was a first class Nav.”
It wasn’t just navigation error and enemy gun fire that posed a threat, the weather could too. When suddenly confronted by a storm the pilot had to decide quickly whether to descend and fly below it (and risk hitting a mountain) or climb and fly over it (when the freezing temperature brought its own perils). Ice could form on the wings and then be blown off by the propellers, hurling chunks of ice at the aircraft with dull thuds and the sound of ripping fabric. On one particularly stormy flight they made it safely back to base and Ron Cooper, commented “what a navigator! But then Ronald Fitzherbert Hall was a first class navigator… he took us through this terrible experience and safely back to base.” Seventeen out of seventy aircraft involved in that raid were lost.
On another occasion a bomb got jammed in the bomb bay. They knew they couldn’t land with the bomb in such a position so the two Rons, Hall and Cooper, had to clamber into the bomb bay and manhandle the bomb to wrestle it free.
In February 1945 the RAF belatedly tried to establish the number of ‘coloured’ aircrew, they came up with the number 282, almost certainly an under-estimate. At least a third were killed in action. Ron Hall was one of at least 21 men from the colony of British Guiana known to have enlisted by the time the War ended, at least eight of whom are known to have died in action. Among the survivors, in addition to Ron, were Cy Grant, who went on to a notable career in music, film and on TV, and ER Braithwaite, who would later write ‘To Sir With Love’.
Ron was promoted to Flight Lieutenant and posted to England where he worked as a flying instructor at various RAF camps including training members of the French Air Force at Lossiemouth in Scotland (no doubt the French he learned to a good standard in British Guiana came in handy).
After summing up the many hazards the crews had to overcome Ron Cooper commented “the British public never realised the true dangers the crews experienced during the bombing operations of World War Two.”
After the War Ron was employed by the Colonial Office where he was appointed ‘Head of Overseas Airmen’, a role that involved him going round RAF camps where West Indians were stationed, acting as a trouble shooter and helping them with any issues they had with the authorities. He also went on one of the trips that escorted West Indian servicemen back to the Caribbean when their service ended. – he left Avonmouth on board the Ariguani on 22nd February 1947 bound for Trinidad.
Pip recalls him pointing out to her where his office had been as they drove through Trafalgar Square (Admiralty Arch in all likelihood). But she said he rarely spoke about the War and had even thrown his medals away.
Ron attended several squadron re-unions. Commenting about one of them he said ”thank you for reminding me of the good times we had and it brings back memories of when I used to say ‘Navigator here’ which will still ring in your ears!”
Later, Pip said, he also worked for Race Relations Commission. Later still he trained as a dentist at Guys Hospital. Pip said he was a very good but that he talked too much. “He loved to talk to his patients so much that a queue always built up in the waiting room. He should have been an educator,” she said.
He had four children, one of whom, Ian, achieved prominence in the field of music as a composer.
Ron became an active member of AGNAP (the Association of Guyanese Nurses and Allied Professions) returning to the country of his birth with a group of others professionals to help with the provision of community services there. He represented his profession at conferences around the world.
Ron continued to work as a dentist until he was 83 and lived with his long term companion, Pip Jager, in South London.
The bonds of fellowship formed in war can last a lifetime. We give the final words to his brother-in-arms, Ron Cooper. Speaking at an event in 2011 Ron Cooper had this to say about his navigator, Ron Hall, “our navigator was the king and I was just the bus driver – that’s all – a bus driver. He was an educated man, far better educated than me, and always knew where we were; you could trust him completely. When he died, part of me died too and I hope he is saving a space for me up there.”