This little photograph was a chance find at the bottom of a rusty toolkit, left on the pavement for scrap or recycling. It is just three inches wide and shows a group of nameless men, sat, stood and reclining across the fuselage and wings of a fighter plane.
As a factual record, it is pretty hopeless. The picture would never have been particularly crisp, but years of dust and dirt, scuffs and scrapes have made the details even harder to discern. The print is too small and the focal distance too great to make out any faces. Little is visible of the plane itself and the back is blank. On top of that, the film hasn’t scrolled through properly, superimposing a second, ghost image in the foreground. But it bursts with character.
I have been seeing how much I can find out about its origins, hoping that some secret would reveal itself to me, or that the right person in the right Facebook group might interpret something I can’t. Unsurprisingly, the results have been interesting but somewhere short of spectacular.
The corroded metal toolkit itself contained an unremarkable selection of hand tools, as far as I remember, and where I found it gave me no obvious door to knock on. The photo was tucked under a tray of spanners, all coated with a crystalline red rust which had been allowed to spread quietly through the decades, undisturbed by fingers or movement. The fragile picture was face down and partly protected, but the damp, rusty tools have left their blotchy marks, nonetheless.
The double exposure may have been something for the photographer to curse when his film was developed in the 1940s, but it adds texture for me now, eighty years later, when the old uncertainties of print photography are just a nostalgic memory. The shadow figures in the lower foreground are actually the same men as in the main picture, but in slightly different positions. The camera film has scrolled vertically, rather than left to right as it did with the cameras of my own youth. I tried my luck on vintage camera forums and learned that it was likely taken with a top-loading box camera like the Kodak Brownie, which sold in the millions during the first half of the twentieth century.
The plane and the setting
I had assumed that the plane would be unidentifiable but closer inspection revealed an aerial mast behind one man’s shoulder, a circular fuel cap on the wing edge and part of the cockpit canopy. Special interest groups on Facebook come into their own with things like this. I learned from a Spitfire enthusiast that the wing edge was too thick and the plane too large to be a ‘Spit’, and then from a World War Two fighter group that it was in fact a Hawker Hurricane. The ‘Hurry’ was a larger, less manoeuvrable and less romantic plane than the Spitfire but was a dependable ‘workhorse’, which accounted for 55% of German losses during the Battle of Britain. The two were often deployed together – the Hurries would seek out the German bombers travelling slowly through the sky towards Britain’s cities, ports and factories, while the more nimble Spitfires would engage the German fighters which protected them.(1)
World War Two was truly a global conflict, and Hurricanes flew in many theatres of war. The picture was clearly taken somewhere hot, the Mediterranean, perhaps, or with the Desert Air Force in North Africa. I get the sense that this is not a hot summer’s day at Biggin Hill or another English airfield, but would struggle say why, the informality perhaps. The fourteen or so men on the wings and fuselage are uniformly skinny and most are shirtless. One wears a distinctive Australian slouch hat, its broad brim dipping to one side. The men are not just at ease but fully off duty. Together they look like they’ve just wandered over from a dusty game of cricket or football in the dry dirt. The photo is being taken during a moment of lazy camaraderie, not on an officer’s instruction.
There is a British newsreel film from 1942 on YouTube, visiting the Desert Air Force, No. 6 Squadron “in the western desert… somewhere between El Alamein and Tripoli”. The Desert Air Force brought together squadrons and men from the British, American, South African and Australian air forces, which might account for the Aussie and his hat. The Hurricanes of No. 6 Squadron were providing close air support to the British Eighth Army, as they “pursued Rommel across the wastes of Libya”. The Hurricane had been modified since the Battle of Britain to create the Mk.IID Tank Buster, and now carried two 40mm cannons, apparently the largest-bore gun fitted to any plane at the time. They were known as “Tin Openers”, although how effective they were in combat against a German tank’s heavy armour seems to be a popular topic for online debate.
The short film brims with the bravado and home-by-Christmas certainty common to many wartime newsreels.(2) We see the ground crew and the pilots at work and at rest, drinking tea and gently joshing each other for the benefit of the camera. The men remove camouflage covers and prepare the planes for their next sortie. They are more smartly dressed than our men but the scene is familiar. The narrator tells us in typical clipped tones that “quite a lot of any man’s time in war is spent waiting, waiting until he is wanted, waiting to go into action”, although this seems to apply more to pilots than to ground crew, who were constantly occupied.
Evidence, conjecture and beyond
When we spend enough time with an artefact, whether a photo, a letter or a diary, it is often surprising what reveals itself. Not all of it will be factual, sometimes it is a mood or an impression. There is what we know (the plane, the men), what we can reasonably deduce (World War II, the heat) and what is plausible conjecture (North Africa, Desert Air Force, No. 6 Squadron). There is space for all of these in historical writing but keeping each in its place can be a delicate balance. Too much conjecture or too many unchecked flights of fancy can detract from the careful research and lose the confidence of the reader. Adhere too rigidly to known facts, however, and some of the magic is lost. The key is to present everything honestly and transparently.
But facts, evidence and reasonable conjecture will only get you so far. One day I would like to read through what I’ve learnt and then leave it all behind. Part of the pleasure is in the interpretation, understanding not only people’s actions but also exploring their likely motivations. I would like to imagine the man who placed the precious photograph in his toolkit. I assume that the man is either on the plane wing or stood behind the camera, as I imagine that a photo carried as a keepsake for a departed family member would more likely be a close-up portrait, rather than a busy group scene.
I would like to lose myself in what the photograph signified to him, and to feel how strongly he carried the memory of those hot months in the desert. The little picture may have represented his years of service or been a reminder of friendship, triumph, purpose, mourning or loss. Among the thirteen would be men who had returned home at the end of the war, and others who had not.
But if this small, fragile photograph was so precious, why relegate it to a toolkit? Why not framed on a desk or wall, or tucked flat among the clean, dry pages of an album? It was perhaps an instinctive decision, the only place where the photo really belonged. Not everything finds its place in married life. Shared memories and shared friendships tend to settle more easily, whereas past experiences, relationships and traumas can be harder to accommodate. The spirit of a man of a certain generation can sometimes be hard to find in a family home, where the wife might act as custodian of its contents. Sometimes it is in a shed or a workshop, with a toolkit and the familiar tools it contains, that life makes most sense.
When it comes to clearing the contents of a late parent’s home, some parts should be more straightforward than others. Old tools should perhaps have no more emotional significance than old towels in the linen cupboard. Keep what is useful and the rest to charity. An old spanner. Do I need an old spanner?
My own experience has been different. My grandfather was a boat builder and my father was a farmer. The two men’s tools carried emotional weight long after their retirement and eventual deaths. They continued to hold a part of the man within them. My grandfather’s wooden-handled tools told not only of the wooden boats, yachts and motor torpedo boats his hands had built, but also carried something of the man himself. The same with the often-oily heavy tools my father used to keep the tractors running or the milking parlour operational. Wherever I picture him, his power is never stronger than at his workbench in the old stone workshop, with his strong, tanned neck and mess of black curly hair, while his practical mind and large, cracked hands did whatever it took to keep the show on the road.
I left the rusty toolkit on the pavement where I found it, keeping only the little photo of the plane and the men on the wing. I hadn’t given the tools a second thought until I began to think about the picture. Somewhere in this picture is a man’s life, but it was also there in the tools I left behind.
END NOTES:
- Bywater, Michael. “Our forgotten freedom fighter: Why the unsung Hurricane is the true ace of the Battle of Britain” The Independent, 17 January 2011. (Accessed through Wikipedia)
“Both the Supermarine Spitfire and the Hurricane are renowned for their part in having defended Britain against the Luftwaffe; generally, the Spitfires intercepted the German fighters, leaving Hurricanes to concentrate on the bombers, and, despite the undoubted abilities of the “thoroughbred” Spitfire, it was the “workhorse” Hurricane that scored the higher number of RAF victories during this period, accounting for 55% of the 2,739 German losses, according to Fighter Command, compared with 42% by Spitfires.” - “RAF Hurricane “Tin Can Opener” Tank Busters in the Western Desert 1942 HD -Restored”
Zeno’s Warbird Videos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdpWlgUwd2E
