An Eye in the Sky: The Royal Flying Corps and Royal Air Force Career of Air Commodore Henry George Crowe MC, CBE, CBD (SC)

By Bob Cossey

This is the biography of Henry Crowe whose career encompassed time as an infantryman with the Royal Irish Regiment during the First World War, an observer with the RFC and fledgling RAF, a pilot in Ireland at the time of the Irish War of Independence, a photographic officer and flight commander in Iraq, and Commanding Officer of Nos. 23 and 74 Squadrons. His memories of time spent in Iraq and on the North West Frontier between the wars have a real resonance today, illustrating just how little has changed in some respects.Henry served at the Air Ministry in various positions and concluded his service with the RAF in India, retiring as an Air Commodore in 1945. He had a keen interest in photography and took hundreds of images of the places he served, the aircraft he flew and saw, and the people he met. With an early Bell and Howell cine camera he also captured film of Malta, Iraq and India between the wars. As a photographic record alone this book is fascinating. But Henry wrote about his experiences as well and it is his memoirs that form the backbone of this biography, written with the full backing of his family.Henry Crowe was highly decorated and especially well thought of during the course of his career; reading Bob Crosseys account of his fascinating life, it is clear to see why.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781526725974

Book preview

Introduction

Iwas first introduced to Dr Michael Crowe by his Leicestershire neighbour Michael Chapman, a member of the Guild of Aviation Artists, who was painting a scene in Malta of Hawker Demons being offloaded in Valetta Harbour in 1935. The Demons were to equip No.74 Squadron which was reforming on the island having been disestablished in 1919 at the end of the Great War, during which time they had earned themselves the soubriquet of the ‘Tigers’ thanks to their aggressive and fearless combat ethic. I was particularly interested as Secretary and Historian of the 74(F) Tiger Squadron Association because Dr. Crowe’s father, Henry Crowe, had been No.74’s Commanding Officer in 1935 and furthermore, because he had an archive of his father’s writing, photographs, original cine film taken during the 1920s and 1930s with a Bell and Howell camera and personal memorabilia from his time in the Royal Flying Corps and Royal Air Force. And whilst there are some gaps in photographs, particularly from the wartime years in India, it soon became apparent to me that all that his son did have would form the basis of a biography of a man who had led an interesting and varied life spanning two world wars, serving in the United Kingdom, the Middle East and India. Parts of that story had been told in magazine articles and in books but never in its entirety. Interestingly Henry Crowe’s memoir, written at the behest of his children in the 1960s, covers more than just service life, but family life too. And it highlights the advantages taken by a man with many interests of exploring the countries he was posted to as far as he was able.

It is thanks to Michael and Audrey Crowe, who have willingly shared Henry’s archive with me, that this biography has been possible. Their hospitality over the past few years has been hugely appreciated and I hope that the consequence of that in the form of this book has done Michael’s father’s life justice.

Chapter One

Boyhood

Henry George Crowe (always known to the family as Hal) was born on 11 June 1897 in Donnybrook, Dublin, to John Joseph Crowe, a stockbroker, and Florence Helen Crowe. A year or so after his birth the family moved in to ‘Carahor’, not so very far away in Ballsbridge. This house was completed to the design of Richard Orpen, brother of William Orpen, a war artist during the First World War and a very successful portrait painter to the rich and famous thereafter. The Crowe family was well connected and successful. Hal’s uncles Bill and Frank went to the USA, taking up business in New York and Seattle, while George and Lewis became doctors and practised in Cheshire. Hal’s mother Florence’s great uncle was Sir Howard Grubb, an engineer who made his name building astronomical telescopes for leading observatories, including the 28-inch refractor telescope, the UK’s largest refractor, at the Royal Observatory Greenwich in 1893. He also invented the reflector sight which has been used on all kinds of weapons from small firearms to fighter aircraft and is at the heart of all modern head-up displays. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1870 and the Royal Society in 1883. In 1887 he was knighted by Queen Victoria.

One of Hal’s earliest memories was of a great storm that hit the city of Dublin in February 1903. ‘The gale must have started to get up before midnight,’ he wrote later.

The noise prevented the maids sleeping so they went down to the kitchen. The wind increased so that it was screaming round the house and as it was blowing straight onto Mother and Dad’s room they moved to the other side of the house. Soon after that Cousin Di who was staying with us gave up attempts to sleep. She put on her dressing gown and just as she went on to the landing there was a shattering crash followed by the noise of falling bricks and wood. The wind now roared louder than ever. The house was in darkness as the gas was unlit and all this made Cousin Di, an old lady, almost faint with fright.

The crash was the gable at the west window being swept away by falling bricks which smashed the wash stand in Hal’s parent’s room. The floor was littered with bricks and plaster and looking up they could see through the roof. They hurriedly left the room, stumbling over debris, and lit the gas on the landing and brought Cousin Di and the rest of the family down to the dining room where they lit the fire and ‘we all had tea. We all spent the rest of the night in armchairs and sofas. The wind dropped at dawn and when it was light enough I went with dad to inspect the damage.’

The high chimney which served six fireplaces in the house was blown down onto the roof over Hal’s parents’ and Cousin Di’s rooms. She had had a lucky escape for the bed she had been in a few moments before she walked out onto the landing was covered with debris. Outside, trees were down everywhere and it was days before roads were passable. Farther afield the coast was littered with the wrecks of the small topsail schooners which carried cargoes to the various small ports around Ireland. It took weeks to get the house repaired because nearly every house in the neigh-bourhood suffered damage.

Hal’s early schooling started at a kindergarten where Swedish drill, the aerobics of the early 1900s and the foundation for modern gymnastics, and piano playing formed part of the curriculum, but he was rather put off the piano by the tutor (a fraulein as he called her) hitting him with a ruler on the hands whenever he played a wrong note. The boys wore sailor suits or Scottish dress. But life in Ballsbridge and nearby Donnybrook was generally pleasant. Trams ran into Dublin city centre although there were no cars to be seen. Everything was delivered by horse- or donkey-drawn vehicles and a forge halfway along the walk home from school always had a few animals waiting to be shod. Pedestrians often had to cross the narrow street in the village to avoid a sea of cow dung on market days or a fight as drunks were ejected from the local public house. At Miss Fagan’s shop you could buy anything for a penny. Home life too held pleasant memories for Harold.

Dear old nurse stayed with us till brother Cecil did not need her attentions. The last time I saw her was when I was home on leave from France before the Battle of Messines. The strain of saying goodbye was too much for her. Then Lizzie: what marvellous food she produced. She stayed on with brother Frank after both dad and mother died. Mother had several parlour maids, all very kind to us kids, and of course they were very smartly dressed on Mother At Home days when ladies arrived in carriages to take tea. Our gardener Pyne later joined the rebels but we felt sure his loyalty saved us from being molested in the Rebellion.

Hal was the eldest brother. Next came Frank and finally Cecil.

In those days the family doctor was a Dr Furlong who always arrived in a carriage and pair driven by a coachman. The doctor always wore a frock coat with a tall hat and never left the house without writing at least one prescription designed to suit the palate of the particular patient. ‘I can still see his guardee moustache brushing my face as he cauterised my tonsils assuring me as the smoke came out of my mouth that there was no need to panic!’

It was always a great thrill to Hal when ships of the Royal Navy visited Kingstown. Originally called Dun Laoghaire, the port was renamed Kingstown by George IV to honour his visit in 1821. Exactly a hundred years later, one year before the Irish won their independence from Britain, it reverted to Dun Laoghaire. The battleships anchored in the Anchor Roads outside the harbour but smaller vessels and destroyers were secured to buoys inside the breakwater. Except for destroyers the ships wore buff-coloured funnels, white upperworks and black hulls and the paint was enamel. ‘Later they were painted grey all over,’ recalled Hal, ‘and we thought this a terrible comedown.’

Kingstown Naval Base. Except for the destroyers the ships wore buff-coloured funnels, white upperworks and black hulls.

One Sunday afternoon Hal was at Kingstown with his father wearing his No.1 sailor suit when they saw a cutter being rowed to the Victoria Wharf steps, taking an officer from HMS Melampus, the guard ship, ashore for church. After the officer had come ashore the cutter started its return to Melampus but the coxswain had spotted Hal and when the officer was out of sight behind a shed he gave the order to toss oars which was a salute given to commissioned ranks. Hal returned the salute in his smartest manner. ‘I never forgot that little episode,’ wrote Hal, ‘and later I wanted my parents to let me go for entry to Osborne which was then the naval cadet training centre.’

On occasions such as King Edward VII’s visit to Dublin the fleet was illuminated while a firework display was given. Each ship was outlined with electric lights, a most impressive sight. When the king came Hal’s father hired a tram which had an open top. Invitations were sent out to friends and the tram took them around the sights of Dublin where buildings were illuminated, some by electric and some by gas lamps. The tram then drove down the coast to Kingstown to see the fleet and the fireworks. Afterwards it returned to Donnybrook while the guests in full evening dress sat down to a champagne supper inside the vehicle.

In 1907 the Irish International Exhibition opened at Ballsbridge and Hal was given a season ticket so that he could visit any time and he made very good use of it. ‘I learnt more at the exhibition than could have been obtained from books,’ he later recalled.

There were pavilions from every part of the British Empire. The machinery hall contained the coal fired power house for the whole exhibition as well as locomotives, racing cars, printing machinery, weaving and manufacturing processes. An art gallery, Somali village and wonder of wonders the first cinematograph in Dublin complete with a lady playing the piano. Amusements included a water chute, concerts and circus acts.

It was the sensation of the year for the Irish.

As Hal grew up activities within the Crowe family included small dances and Christmas parties when the aunts and uncles with their children came to ‘Carahor’ to exchange presents and eat a very rich turkey and plum pudding dinner. Home entertainment included a pianola and a phonograph which played cylinder records and on which the family made their own recordings. Theatricals were performed, cycle rides organised and holidays taken in North Wales, the Isle of Man and various parts of Ireland. ‘Uncle George had a motor car. What a thrill to be given a ride in it and who cared if we were smothered in dust as we chugged along. Dad was disappointed when he asked uncle to let him take the wheel but he wouldn’t let him!’

The great interest about the Isle of Man trips for the family was the journey. ‘We sailed down the River Liffey to Dublin port which smelled to high heaven with untreated sewage and we would pass big four-masted square-rigged sailing ships unloading grain: and then we would spend hours watching the great oscillating steam engines turning the paddles of the steamer across to the island. At Douglas we would travel to Ramsey on the narrow gauge railway. The great wheel at Laxey, the largest water-wheel pump in the world, attracted crowds of people.’

‘Carahor’ was always filled with relations for the horse show and other events at the Royal Dublin Society grounds at Ballsbridge. Military tournaments in particular were splendid affairs with all the troops taking part in full dress. Tent pegging by lancers, slicing the lemon by dragoons, musical rides by artillery and hussars were most colourful. The programme usually ended with troops re-enacting some episode from the South African or Zulu wars.

Hal always acknowledged that he had a very happy, privileged life as a child but as part of that discipline was always maintained. There was no playing with trains on Sundays. And very long sermons at church which was always filled to capacity with men in frock coats and tall hats and the ladies in their satins still smelling of mothballs. But outside there was abject poverty. Hal always noticed the newspaper boys in rags with no coats or stockings or shoes come winter or summer. And this in the generally wet Irish climate.

*

After kindergarten Hal moved to St Helen’s school for boys, first as a day boy and then as a weekly boarder. It was here that he met many who became lifelong friends. Life could be hard at St Helen’s with punishments for misdemeanours varying from the refusal of permission to go home at half term to a severe caning, something which both pupils and parents took as a matter of course in those days. It was during his time as a weekly boarder that an aviation club was formed at St Helen’s with Hal as secretary. The Wright brothers had just flown their heavier than air powered aircraft and so began Hal’s lifelong interest in aviation and his photographing of so many aircraft types wherever he saw them.

A Wright Flyer. This aircraft was the inspiration for the founding of an aviation club at St Helen’s School, of which Hal was secretary.

Then the time came when Hal’s parents decided to send him to England to school ‘to get rid of my Irish accent’. He went first to Clive House at Old Colwyn near Colwyn Bay, a small prep school for boys. Clive House was in a converted residence facing the sea with a private path across the main railway line from Chester to Holyhead so that the boys, who came from Ireland, Portugal, China and Assam as well as from England, could walk from the house to the sea to bathe. With the Boy Scouts troop at Clive House the boys learnt carpentry and became proficient at gymnastics in the loft of the school’s stables where there was room for horizontal and parallel bars.

In 1911 Hal moved to the Dean Close public school in Cheltenham, a Christian school founded in 1886 and set in extensive parkland in the centre of the city. By this time he was set on becoming an engineer with a leaning towards the Indian railways and he joined the engineering class. He took mathematics, physics, chemistry, mechanics and machine drawing and studied for the Cambridge local exams. The school boasted of having its own contingent of the Officers’ Training Corps under a War Office scheme and Hal joined.

Everyone was very keen and we took our drills, arms drill and lectures most seriously. Many of us met again during World War One. The contingent went to camp on Salisbury Plain in company with other public school OTCs in the summer holidays of 1912 and did field operations under regular army officers. We were near the Royal Flying Corps aerodrome at Netheravon and the Maurice Farman biplanes on training sorties flew over the camp in the calm air of early morning and evening.

From the camp Hal travelled to join a family holiday party in North Wales and at Portmadoc saw the then famous British aviator Gustav Hamel fly his Bleriot monoplane. Hamel died before reaching the age of 25, disappearing over the English Channel in May 1914 while returning from Villacoublay flying a new Morane-Saulnier monoplane he had just collected. There was speculation that the aircraft might have been sabotaged given the international tension of the time but, as no trace of the aircraft was ever found, nothing could be proved.

The Cheltenham contingent, Officers’ Training Corps 1912.

When at the Officers’ Training Corps camp near Netheravon in 1912 cadets often saw Maurice Farman Longhorns in the air.

By 1913 Hal was a student at Trinity College Dublin studying engineering. The following year he joined the family for the usual annual holiday, a very happy one. But nobody realised at the time that it was to be the last. News became increasingly bad as the summer wore on and on 4 August war was declared against Germany. As the Crowes sailed into Dublin Bay on their way home they saw many ships waiting to take men and horses to the war. Back at Trinity Hal found that several friends had left to join the Royal Flying Corps but owing to his age he realised that the best way to follow them was to join the Army via Sandhurst. So after passing examinations and successfully completing a medical he joined the Royal Military College in November 1915. All the instructing officers and NCOs had already had war experience in France and Hal and his fellow Gentleman Cadets were so keen to go to the battlefields that their fear was that the war would be over before they had seen anything of it.

Gustav Hamel’s 50 hp Bleriot monoplane at Portmadoc 1912.

The nine-month course consisted of history, military law, writing reports, drills, PT, machine-gun and arms practice on the ranges, field engineering, trench digging, bridging, demolition and riding school. To win one’s spurs at the latter, cadets had to negotiate all the jumps in the paddock without stirrups or reins and with arms folded. (Hal was proud to wear his spurs having successfully passed this demanding regime.) Another part of the course was night operations, finding their way through the local Camberley woods by compass. This helped when the cadets were called upon to search for the crew of a Zeppelin airship who were supposed to have parachuted into the woods. The cadets also had their first flight in a Maurice Farman Shorthorn biplane at nearby Farnborough. It was the first armed aircraft to engage in aerial combat during the First World War and was affectionately known as Rumpety because of the noise it made while taxiing.

Hal was very sensitive to the history of the College as a 200-year-old institution. The first Military Academy had been established in 1720 at Woolwich to train cadets for commissions in the Royal Artillery. In 1799 a school for staff officers was established at High Wycombe and in 1801 this became the Senior Department of the newly-established Royal Military College. A Junior Department was established at Great Marlow a year later to train Gentleman Cadets for the infantry and cavalry regiments of the British Army. In 1812 this Junior Department moved into buildings designed by James Wyatt at Sandhurst and was joined a few years later by the Senior Department, which in 1858 changed its name to the Staff College and subsequently became independent of the Royal Military College in 1870. The Staff College now had its own Commandant and Adjutant, although it continued to be administered by Sandhurst until 1911.

Maurice Farman Shorthorn, also known as the Rumpety, at Farnborough. Hal and his fellow cadets at Sandhurst had their first flights in this type.

The Royal Military College at Sandhurst 1915: the New Building housing C, D, E and F Companies.

The Royal Military College at Sandhurst 1915: equipment issued to cadets.

The Royal Military College at Sandhurst 1915: ascending a small mineshaft.

Life at Sandhurst was often tough. Each cadet had a separate room leading on to corridors with ex-soldiers acting as batmen, each to so many cadets. The batmen did all the cleaning of boots, buttons and equipment but the rifles and bayonets were the cadets’ responsibility and if not found to be spotless on parade punishment was by what was called a puttee parade which meant, after dining in full mess kit, doing a rapid change from dinner jacket to breeches and puttees and dashing down to the company anteroom. The first to arrive absolutely correctly dressed in every detail was let off. The others had to do arms drill for fifteen minutes. If a cadet did something which was judged to have let down the company he was sentenced to an ink bath and was made to strip and get in to a bath polluted with ink and then had to run the gauntlet naked down the corridors past each cadet who could have a flick at him with a wet towel. ‘On one occasion some fools put chemicals in an ink bath which turned the cadets’ hair white,’ remembered Hal. ‘A heck of a row over this caused the Company Commander and Commandant to be moved elsewhere. But life was not all thus. There were excellent concerts in the gym and the band played in the mess on guest nights.’

The Royal Military College at Sandhurst 1915: the lake on which the band played on as their sabotaged raft slowly sank.

There were amusing moments too. ‘As part of the field engineering course cadets had to construct a raft out of tarpaulins stuffed with hay as floats, many of which were then lashed to spars and planks to form a decking. The band was playing on one of these rafts in the shallow lake near the College one calm summer evening when cadets in boats lay alongside and without being seen made cuts in the tarpaulins. The result was a wonderful sight of the band slowly sinking, the men wading ashore and the big drum floating away! We all had to subscribe to new skins for the drums.’

Chapter Two

Rebellion

‘Alot has been written about the Easter Rising of 1916,’ recorded Hal in his memoirs, but this is not the place to do other than give a broad overview and to put his experience of it into context. The rebellion was an armed insurrection by Irish republicans whose objective was to bring to an end British rule in Ireland and establish an independent Irish Republic. It was organised against the backdrop of Britain’s heavy engagement in the war on the Continent and elsewhere and with a promised supply of arms from Germany which would enhance the chances of success. In this hope the organisers, the Military Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, were wrong. Originally intended to begin on Easter Sunday, the rebellion was postponed until Easter Monday, 24 April. Members of the Irish Volunteers, led by activist Padraig Pearse, and James Connolly’s Irish Citizen Army occupied key locations in Dublin but not before the British had seized the shipment of German arms to the rebels a few days before, which greatly reduced the scale of the rebellion outside the capital.

When it began there were just 400 British troops in Dublin to confront the rebels but reinforcements were quickly sent from England who disembarked at Kingstown on the morning of 26 April and advanced towards the city. They were repeatedly caught in crossfire at the canal at Mount Street with the rebels killing or wounding 240 men for four of their own dead. However, after five days, with up to 20,000 troops backed by superior artillery, the British army took control of Dublin. Although most of the leaders were court martialled and executed, ultimately the rebellion succeeded in encouraging active support for Irish Republicanism and the later Irish War of Independence in 1919.

Hal’s term at Sandhurst had been given Easter leave and he had arrived home before Good Friday to find that his father had joined a voluntary organisation helping wounded men from France who were being landed from hospital ships at Dublin’s port. He carried stretcher cases all Easter Sunday and when he came home that evening he told the family that there were rumours of serious trouble breaking out and that he would not be required at the docks on the following day. When the maids came back from early morning Mass on Easter Monday they nervously told of rumours of fighting in the city. Shortly afterwards scattered rifle fire could be heard close to ‘Carahor’ but being a bank holiday shops were shut and most people in the area stayed at home, so nobody really knew what was happening until one of the Crowes’ neighbours managed to get a stop-press edition of a newspaper which headlined with the news that rebellion had broken out and that ‘Roger Casement, the Irish nationalist and activist, had landed in Kerry from a German submarine to lead it which was startling news to everyone who heard it’ as Hal wrote many years later. He wasn’t entirely accurate though. Casement, who for twenty years had served in the British consular service before becoming absorbed in Irish nationalist politics, was convinced that an Irish-German alliance was a way of securing full Irish independence and had organised the shipping of 25,000 captured Russian rifles and a million rounds of ammunition to Ireland aboard the Aud. Casement persuaded the German authorities to carry him to Ireland by submarine, his idea on the face of it being to rendezvous with the Aud and supervise the landing of the arms. It turned out that his actual intention was to meet the leadership of the Irish Republican Brotherhood to persuade them to abandon the planned insurrection which he was convinced was doomed to failure as he didn’t consider the arms shipment to be enough to sustain it. He was arrested on 21 April hours after landing on the Kerry coast and the Royal Navy captured the Aud on the same day.

On the Tuesday after the bank holiday Hal and his brother Frank did a recce on their bicycles around the neighbourhood and tried to get bread from a bakery in Ballsbridge, but shops remained shut. As the week wore on rumours were rife and the noise of firing intensified and came much closer with a few spent bullets hitting the house. Troops destined as reinforcements for France were diverted to Kingstown and passed ‘Carahor’ on their way to the city. ‘Mother and other ladies brought tea and sandwiches to the roadside for the men,’ Hal wrote.

They were amused to find the troops trying to talk French to them thinking they were in France. Those same units went on towards the city and got caught by rebel machine-gun fire at Ballsbridge and suffered serious casualties. A naval gunboat, HMY Helga, was sent up the river to attack Liberty Hall which was said to be the rebel headquarters but a large lattice girder railway bridge was in the line of fire and the gunboat’s shells did more damage to the bridge than to Liberty Hall.

Liberty Hall was the headquarters of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union and the headquarters of the Irish Citizen Army at the time. Until the insurrection it had been a munitions factory where bombs and bayonets were made for the impending rebellion and it was on the street in front of the building that the leaders of the rebellion assembled before their march to the General Post Office on Easter Monday. Although the Helga’s bombardment had failed, the building was completely demolished by British artillery a few days later.

When Hal’s leave was up he had to negotiate his way safely back to Sandhurst. He and a few other cadets put on their uniforms and so got through the military roadblocks and on to Kingstown to catch the mail boat to Holyhead. The family fully expected to hear that Hal had come to harm on the way but as he said ‘these things always seem worse from a distance’. In fact the journey was largely uneventful, although not without its moments of apprehension. The cadets were closely questioned by their colleagues about the rebellion on their return to Sandhurst and were thought lucky to have seen real fire in anger.

*

At last, training complete, in early July 1916 the day of the passing out parade arrived. King George V and Queen Mary inspected the parade ‘and I remember thinking how small they both were’. The cadets knew by then which regiments they were to be appointed to. Hal had completed a ‘first appointments’ form on 19 July 1916 in which he had stated his preferences as