The Thamesmead Grump

 The Day I Met Prince Philip

On a cold, Winter's day back in 1967, I was driven by bus through the gates of RAF Swinderby to begin my six weeks of basic training; there I was taught how to march about, salute officers and other useful stuff deemed necessary to fight off the Red Army.

Fast forward eighteen months; it's 1969, the Summer of peace, love and Woodstock, and I am now stationed at RAF Wyton, (situated between the towns of Huntingdon and St Ives, Cambridgeshire), as a fully qualified Air Photography Operator. The bit of air photography I was operating was called a Type 11 film processor, manufactured by company whose name I forget. 

There isn't any picture of me on the day
but I would have looked something
like this.

The Type 11 was a remarkable piece of kit, capable of processing the 70mm film off the Vinton F95 photographic reconnaissance camera at a blistering 120 feet per minute. It was a pig to operate and only the top people were given the responsibility of doing so. (That's me, by the way).

This item plus several other machines of a similar type were housed in what was known to everyone as “The Factory”, a building across the road from the main station and from which, hopefully, all the amazing photographic reconnaissance imagery produced inside would emerge.

One day, we were informed that His Royal Highness, Prince Philip was going to be making an informal visit and everyone went into a total state of panic as we prepared for this auspicious occasion. Everything you have ever heard about involving Royal visits is absolutely true, Every item of equipment had to be polished to within a inch of its life and what couldn't be polished was painted. And yes, they actually did have people on their hands and knees with paintbrushes, smoothing the soil down in the flower beds.

Anyway, all was proceeding in its usual efficient military fashion until the fateful day when the officer in charge of polishing and shining things paid us a visit.

Now to understand what happened next, you need to know a bit about my Type 11 and its sister machines, the Type 12s whose job it was to process the much larger film that came of the F49, F52 and F96 cameras. To save you all getting bored, I won't go into the details, suffice it to say all the machines were constructed from a resin based composite material; highly suited to the job it was given to do, but (and this is important) not terribly shiny.

The Officer I/C (Polishing & Shining Things) decided that our dull and frankly, not at all shiny Type 11 and 12s wouldn't do at all and ordered them painted. It was (respectfully) pointed out to him that if we did this, the paint would flake off due to it reacting to the chemicals we were using and that the said paint would then fall into the machines when we took the front panels off (which we had to do from time to time) and render our film processing machines useless as the paint now floating inside would stick to the precious photographic reconnaissance film.

So, did we leave our film processing machines as they were or did we paint them and thus render them unusable? There is no prize for guessing. (I'll tell you a bit more about this story later).

Me, in the fuzzy background with my old friend
Ron Bevan, operating a Type 11 somewhere in West 
Germany during the Cold War.

His Royal Highnesses visit included a tour of the Factory and it was decided that he would want to see all our lovely (and now very shiny but useless) machines running. The Type 11, as I have already mentioned, was tricky to operate and in order that nothing could go wrong (the phrase “nothing can go wrong” is a military term meaning “everything will go totally tits-up at the first opportunity”), it was decided that I would put a film that had already been through the machine once already through again. This bit of bizarre logic had been worked out by someone who had no idea how a Type 11 worked. If they had asked me, I could have told them that doing this made it far more likely that something would go wrong as the physical characteristics of the film changed once it had got wet and been dried out again. Did they listen to me? Guess again.

Anyway, came the day of the visit. There I was, standing to attention next to my designated machine; my hair had been inspected by at least half the senior ranks of the RAF; my freshly issued white coat made me look like a villain's minion and my shoes wouldn't have looked out of place on God's butler. My Type 11 was running at about one tenth speed, (no lightning fast display today) and I was hoping to God that the film didn't break.

Prince Philip, looking very regal and attired as a Marshal of the Royal Air Force swept into the room and strode round at a pace until he stopped at me. He looked at me, looked at my Type 11, looked back at me again and said “going all right then?” which I thought was very gracious. I managed to stammer a “yes Sir” before remembering I was suppose to say “yes, Your Highness” but by that time he had already found something else to look at and had moved on and I didn't think I should chase after him to correct my faux-pas. The Station Commander who was in the following train winked at me as he went past so I suppose I did all right. I imagine he was hoping to God the film didn't break as well.

Many, many years later, I was visiting the Muckleburgh Military Collection in Norfolk and they had a selection of photographic reconnaissance equipment from the Cold War. Included in the collection were various air cameras such as the ones I had mentioned above and also a Type 11 processing machine. This machine was of the Mk.2 variety, identified by the fact that it had a speedometer rated at 240 feet per minute, but the front panels were coated with the nasty shellac paint that had been used on the Mk. 1 machines in the Factory all those years ago. They must have assembled it out of various spare parts. I was also really surprised at all the safety warnings stuck on it. When I was operating one, I knew not to drink the Exprol.