Memories & Recollections - an interview with Lt. Cmdr. Tim Thorley
Lt. Cmdr. Tim Thorley started his service at Daedalus in 1980 and performed the closing ceremony in 1996. On the 13th May 2008 he spoke to Daedalus Community Consultant Imran Bannister about some of his memories
Buildings at Daedalus
“The jewel in the Crown is Westcliffe House. The gate house, which is the property office at the moment, that was the gatehouse for Westcliffe House. It was designed. It even had Italian workmen come over to lay mosaic flooring, which is on the outside and the inside. Now if you look at the steps up to Westcliffe house, they are marble. You go inside and you look at the fire places and the banister. All right, it looks from the front a bit hoppity potchity and it’s not very pleasing to the eye architecturally, but inside. It was always kept in fairly good condition…”
“But the buildings were just amazing. Some of the history that lay behind them. And the views from the Wardroom; I used to lie in bed and just look out over the Solent
“Did you hear the story about Ross House? Well Ross House used to be on the corner where there’s a lot of the flats next to the airfield and that was the Captain’s house. It was built by, I think, Liptons, a tea, one of the tea makers. And he wanted desperately to join the Royal Yacht Squad, but he kept getting black-balled…he built this house with a turret on it. And that lined up directly with the start line of Cowes. And every time they used to fire the cannon, he’s fire another on, which meant it was a bad start. He completely rotted them up! That became the Captain’s house. It stayed like that and then they put it on the market. A chap bought it, and I think on the Thursday, the following Thursday, it was demolished.
Daedalus during the Second World War
“…you know the Ark Royal got torpedoed during the early stages of the War off Gibraltar? The survivors were brought back through the main gate into Daedalus, but nothing had changed! The buildings were the same, everything was still the same. It really was a time warp…but they came in and looked and they just couldn’t believe what was there. Because they’d never been in before. It was in a time warp. Most of the construction was done before he war. All flying started out at was is now Sultan, Grange airfield. Then some of it moved to Lee-on-Solent and they built the first base and it was all tented hangers, tented accommodation. Then they built a few things and then it took off obviously during the start of the war they finished most of the work on the White City, and they bombed it! So it all got flattened and they started again! But such was the way of the War that they were going up literally overnight.
“But it did get quite a bombing on one particular day and they hit a house in Lee, killed a few WRENS, they got killed…took out one of the hangers and one of the buildings…it got badly machine gunned and there are still bullet holes in the concrete.
“You know about operation Minotaur? The landmines. What they were is what we call an airfield denial weapon. So if you knew that the old yunkers [sic] were coming over with their parachutists on board and were going to land there, you’d blow this up and away it went. And they did it again last year because they got some more sophisticated equipment and I think they found another two of these pipe mines they were called. We weren’t allowed to call them bombs, we had to call them pipes. But they were lethal. People don’t understand as well is that there are about six in Fareham railway station in the platform…They were all over the place. Anything that was of strategic importance, they put these bloody mines in. And of course, come the invasion, they’d just blow it.
The Great Storm of 1987
“And then we had the Great Storm. ’87 that was. I was duty. I had the whole establishment to myself and this lot started about midnight. We were getting phone calls from people outside, people inside, and then I got a phone call at two in the morning from a civilian boiler man. He said ‘I thought I better just tell you, there’s a helicopter just gone past the boiler house’. What it was, we had one statically parked, the wind had picked it up and wheeled it down the road! This thing just came bouncing down the road! I rang my boss up and I said ‘boss, don’t you worry’ it was about 4 or 5 in the morning ‘I just thought I’d tell you that your computer and office equipment is all nicely safe, I’ve put it into the cells in the guardroom’ and he said ‘why? Were you worried about my roof leaking?’ The whole block had peeled off like a banana skin and was up by the fuel bunkers! Just one sheet of corrugated iron. So I kept all the trainees in because it was so dark. So I said ‘right, everybody stay in your accommodation’ because there were sheets of galvanised flying around like bits of paper. But it was quite exciting the great storm.
We had a Hercules on the airfield about 8 o’clock at night. He was revving his engines for nearly an hour. Don’t know what on earth they were doing, but he obviously heard that something was coming through and took off. But in the meantime I got a very irate phone call from a chap who was very, very rude to me and said ‘this bloody aircraft’s been revving up for an hour; I’m fed up of the noise from that airfield’. He gave his number, his telephone number, he didn’t give his name. So anyway, at two o’clock in the morning, with this absolute hurricane going through I rang him up and he was very timid, he says ‘Yes, yes hello’, I said ‘Hi. This is Daedalus here. Is this noisy enough for you?’
Life on the Base
“In the flag raising ceremony there were three blokes who used to go onto the top, the button, and one asked specially to do it because his girlfriend was there. As he comes down, what happened on that particular day, was he got halfway down and his strength failed him and he just froze. And instead of staying for help where they knock the pin out and the rope goes back into the mast, he let go with his hands, broke his back, which stopped it after that. That doesn’t happen anymore.
“Well, all the messes were good; the chief petty officers mess, the petty officers mess was quite modern. And then they used to even have married quarters at the establishment. So a friend of mine lived in a married quarter, he could never be late for work, because he was there! His wife used to actually work in the launderette on the base. She did that for 16 years. There was a post office, cobbler. When I was there I got very much institutionalised, almost like a monk in a monastery. The only time I used to meet Joe Public was maybe on a Saturday morning when I went to Fareham. Because there were entertainments there, social life, sports, the lot. There was a bank, post office, hair dresser, the lot. There was everything there. And I was there for 16 years and never once did I lock my car. You just drive in, that was it. And then we had the problems with the IRA and that tended to muck up a lot of things. Well it started round about ’81 when they started bombing the mainland and the security threats and that went up and before it was just an ID card and you were in, but then they started searching and things like that. Even if they knew you, even then you would still have to prove your identity.
“But since they demolished half the establishment, the old, what they call the white city, the air engineering school and the field gun track, all you’ve got left really is the living accommodation.
“…we had an American millionaire. He wanted to set up a unit for getting rid of hospital waste and he reckoned he could compress almost 3 tonnes of this stuff, break it right down to a brick…he was really keen, he was. That would be between ’93 and ’96.
“The police started there with a little aircraft called an Optica. It was like a big flying bow and they thought ‘this is going to be brilliant’ and they commissioned a unit there. On the second day it crashed and they were doing Ringwood market and he got too slow, stalled it straight into just the other side of the road into a wood and It burst into flames. We lost three. They were popular men in the mess as well. So then they borrowed and Islander, a noisy little thing, and they realised ‘yaeh, this is what we want’ so they capitalised on some of the things that had been going on in Northern Ireland with the special cameras and things like that and the enhanced avionics and they then bought a gas turbine Islander, which is the one they use now. And it’s very, very quiet. But that goes up day and night. That’s how that started and that’s why they expanded. When I went to see them, and we were closing the airfield, and that was defence lands, I said ‘come on chaps, there’s only seven days to go and then you’ve got to get out’. And then one day, literally four days to go, I walked in there and they were all sat there grinning away and I said ‘well what’s the joke then?’ they ‘ha ha ha, we’re going to tell you to get out!’ and that’s when they got the lease on the airfield, but they then moved into the control tower. And then, of course, the Coastguard came in.
“We had aircraft coming in from American ships and they came in to land and they called up the tower and said we’ve got the airfield in sight and said ‘where do you want us to land, the control tower?’, ‘right we’re landing now’. The control tower said ‘Hang on, we can’t see you! You’re not here!’ They’d gone to Hamble, further up the coast! They landed there. That must be about ‘84/’85. “They were just visiting. Coming for the mail"
“Another one was when they built the new housing estate. Cherque Farm. There’s the Wyvern pub. The big thing was the ideal location in Lee-on-the-Solent, by the sea and adjacent to a disused airfield. One morning there was this chap called Tanky Hernshaw in a Heron, which was a four engined piston aircraft, a real clog bomber. He was loaded up with maximum fuel and maximum weight and decided to use the short runway, opened everything up and cleared the houses by about twenty foot. The people in this new estate thought wow. This is a disused airfield, no it’s not; they’ve nearly taken out roof off!
“They had a hunter land there and he lost his brakes, lost his breaking shute, went straight through the fence, across the road and down on to the beach. That was a few years ago.
Closing Daedalus
“We had some amusing times there. It was a lovely place to work. Very friendly people. It was a great shame when it closed. But you could stand on the highest point in Daedalus and you could Collingwood, you could see Sultan, of which 60% of what we taught was being taught in the same places, so you were getting duplication. And so what they did, for £26 million they moved the air engineering school into Sultan There were defence cuts; they were going to use the money for this and that. But it’s now 12 years since I handed the keys over, in July, It’ll be 12 years in July. I handed the keys over, literally.The Defence land agent took the keys, and as a symbol we put two milk bottles outside, locked the gates and gave him the key, and that was it. The only time I’ve been back through there now is when they open it for Remembrance Day. They send the traffic through there while they close the road.
““Near the end they had a big fox population there because of the heating pipes, and they were getting really, really hungry once the place closed down. In the end we were hand feeding them from the door.
“On the Isle of Wight there’s a place called Ventnor, right down the bottom. Ventnor is what we call a TACAN site. Now a TACAN is a homing device for aircraft, so you’re coming across the Channel…and a lot of people used to use it to tell you where it was…about ten years before Daedalus closed they shut it down. Just as we were closing I got this phone call, he says ‘this is Southern Electric here, who do we make this cheque to? We’ve got a bit of a refund’ so I said ‘well, err’ and they said ‘can we make it to you?’, I said ‘yeah, OK I’ll pay it into the MoD fund. This cheque, £3,500! The MoD had been paying the electric on a standing thing, and the device had been closed down for the last ten years!"
