Sex, drugs and RAF Watnall - the comforts of love, beer and benzedrine wakey-wakey pills...

 

Today's "Tale from Watnall Hall" comes from a kiss-and-tell, no-holds-barred wartime diary by Joan Wyndham who served at RAF Watnall during WW2. She was a Chelsea girl from a posh, bohemian family of theatrical artists. Joan's loosened moral attitude to wartime life after she joined the WAAF (Women's Auxilliary Air Force) in 1941 was perhaps surprisingly more common than we'd think today... "You couldn’t say no to a pilot - he could have been dead the next day."

Her wartime diaries chart her spectacular progress through the ranks of playboy pilots and Polish Squadron Leaders with a string of affairs and officer's mess parties...

"The war stopped us all thinking too much about the future. I joined the WAAF and was posted to Inverness, where we lived in a mixed mess with a pool. Sir Hugh Fraser, the brother of my best friend, Veronica, was in the castle next door. We had the most marvellous affair; I’d have married him had he asked. I had another affair with a Norwegian sea captain, then there were the pilots. You couldn’t say no to a pilot - he could have been dead the next day."

A posting to RAF Watnall - After working as a plotter at Inverness where she was disappointed not be among pilots, Joan was next sent to Watnall. Despite being appraised as "a very peculiar type of officer, not amenable to discipline and a bad example to other ranks", she was promoted to flight officer, and in January 1945 was posted to Watnall's Filter Room. It was, she complained, "ugly and squalid - but it has one great advantage, [another] mixed Mess!" In the military context a "mess" is your dining and recreation area used for socialising. There were usually separate messes for men and women as well as different ranks so a mixed mess would be a real treat. 

Even better for Joan, next door to RAF Watnall was RAF Hucknall's Polish training squadron, full of young pilots. At one point she was taken up for a spin by the youngest squadron leader in the Polish Air Force, and recorded that it was "the first time I've ever had my bottom pinched at 3,000 feet".

The WAAF officers were billeted at Watnall Hall which they shared with the elderly widow Lady Maud Rolleston, a moral crusader of the old school. What she thought of the young WAAFs shenanigans is not recorded for posterity! Lady Maud's young niece Elma was also posted to Watnall so word may well have got back to her.

Lady Maud Rolleston lived at Watnall Hall
while the WAAFs were billeted there during the war.
Her thoughts on their parties were not recorded for posterity. 

Stress-relief drugs - the war-stressed pilots and WAAFs sought refuge not only in the comforting arms of a lover but also in drink and drugs. Not just a glass of beer but also a handful of benzedrine "wakey wakey" pills which were regularly distributed by RAF medical officers to aircrew (and WAAFs) who were suffering from fatigue... 

"For many flyers benzedrine became virtually addictive. Doctors were only supposed to allocate the pills for use on missions (especially long-range bombing raids, where wake-fulness was obviously a requirement for combat efficiency). However, often little effort was made to regulate the supply of benzedrine, and flyers became skilled at obtaining additional quantities of the stimulant, which they then hoarded and used to sustain their energies during off-duty parties. Flyers undoubtedly welcomed benzedrine's positive impact on their endomorphins." 

Joan Wyndham describes an off-duty culture in which both aircrew and WAAFs regularly took benzedrine while partying... 

"I really love the clear, cool feeling in my head, and the edge of excitement it gives to everything you do". However, excessive use of benzedrine often resulted in over-stimulation and subsequent mood swings. As Wyndham conceded, "'you certainly can neither eat nor sleep when you are on them, and you cry a lot." 

Medical Officer and pill dispenser

Sex on the Perimeter - At a Victory Dance in the mess at RAF Watnall in May 1945 she began a passionate affair with Kit Latimer, a Spitfire pilot whose face had been badly burned after his aircraft was forced to make a crash-landing. On first meeting, Wyndham registered the distorting effect Latimer's burns had on his features, but nevertheless concluded that he was "very good-looking in spite of it". When, on their second date. the free-spirited Wyndham took the initiative and kissed him. Latimer tells her that he had been too frightened to kiss her, on account of his "face being so funny". Wyndham replied that he had a "beautiful face" and she kissed him again before dragging him off to an empty tent on the airfield perimeter, where they made love.

Attempting to remain alluring - while engaged in demanding and stressful work was inevitably a double burden for many WAAFs. Cosmetics were in short supply, as was "Evening in Paris", the fragrance of choice among WAAFs. The wearing of silk stockings by servicewomen was prohibited, and WAAF uniforms had been designed to meet the requirements of function rather than fashion. 

Joan Wyndham reported in her diary in 1941 that... "There is not much you can do to make a WAAFs uniform look sexy (apart from pulling your belt in till you can hardly breathe), but jumping up and down on your cap to loosen the brim does help to give it a rakish air." 

Getting around the rules - A Mass Observation survey of WAAF life in 1941 found that women in the service maintained a lively interest in clothes, fashion and general dress matters, and that the wardrobe of the average WAAF was little different to the average civvy girl's. 

It noted that most WAAFs violated those RAF rules which insisted that hair should remain above collar length or forbade the wearing of nail-varnish. Other WAAFs found ingenious ways to circumvent regulations requiring them to continue to wear their uniforms when off the base. One ruse was to pretend they had heavy colds, requiring them to wear bulky WAAF greatcoats, buttoned to the neck, as they left the station on the way to a dance. Safely beyond the perimeter of the base, they would remove the coats to reveal the civilian dresses they had been wearing underneath.

The dashing foreign pilots from RAF Hucknall - Neighbouring RAF Hucknall was home to a squadron of trainee Polish pilots who were regular invitees to RAF Watnall's WAAF parties. Joan Wyndham dated several Polish airmen, finding their 'ice-cold green eyes and wolf-like charms' difficult to resist. 

Polish flyers' obsession with the fairer sex was widely attested to. Rom Landau was born in Poland but became a British citizen when he served as a volunteer in the RAF during WW2. He worked as a RAF liaison officer with Polish pilots, noted that they discussed women at great length, openly, seriously, both lyrically and descriptively, as a connoisseur might talk of wine or beautiful statues.

Polish airmen were certainly seen by British women as exotic and romantic, especially after the release of the feature film Dangerous Moonlight, in which Anton Walbrook played a handsome pianist from Warsaw who joins the RAF. Many British women welcomed the attentions of Polish airmen, who were famous for their courtly manner, and seemed much less inhibited about expressing their feelings in regard to love and sex. One WAAF recalled that, with Polish flyers... 'you knew that the fellow saw you as a woman and wanted you', a refreshing quality when contrasted with the more furtive and embarrassed approach to sex offered by many of their British equivalents. If things went too far though WAAFs were obliged to use their handy hat-pins to deal with unwanted advances.

Flirtatious banter - Some female plotters might exchange over their headsets cheery banter and risqué remarks in what was called "binding", good-natured flirtation with flyers they might know only vaguely, if at all. The strain of combat could sometimes diminish inhibitions. Joan Wyndham recalled fighter pilots engaging in "filthy and facetious comments on air such as 'What's your name? Where do you come from? Chelsea, eh? Coo-er! Bet you're hot stuff'".

Some flyers, by contrast, clearly felt the presence of WAAFs in the operations room required them to maintain an almost courtly decorum, even in the most trying of circumstances. When Peter Townsend was shot up by a Messerschmidt 110 during the Battle of Britain, he muttered... "'Christ!', but in a hushed voice, 'as if I had spilled some tea on the drawing-room carpet, so that the ladies would not hear'". 

There are plenty more tales from RAF Watnall and its secret bunker girls sweating over the air raid plotting tables while trying to remain demure and alluring here at the Tales From Watnall Hall website...

Wartime Watnall - a "secret bunker girl" explains what they did down there

Wartime Watnall - Mary Harrison's wartime cartoons & ditties about life at RAF Watnall

Wartime Watnall - when the young heiress of Watnall Hall served at RAF Watnall

and for all the other tales tagged "Wartime Watnall" series click here... https://watnallhall.blogspot.com/search/label/wartime%20watnall

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Postscript - by Joan - what she did post war...

"In London after the war I embarked on an affair with Lucian Freud, who even then hated being talked about. When it ended I hitchhiked to the Isles of Scilly to escape him, then headed to Oxford. There I met Maurice Rowdon, an intelligent, good-looking scholar. We fell in love, married and had a daughter, Clare. Then he got a teaching job in Baghdad. I rented our flat to a young Russian couple and travelled with him. I had to return a few months later, by which time the girl had gone away but her boyfriend wanted to stay. One night he poured me a vodka and sang gypsy songs. Before I knew it, I was being bent backwards over the ironing board and kissed passionately. Maurice arrived unexpectedly after three months and saw instantly what was happening. Our marriage had had everything going for it apart from sex. With Shura (the Russian abbreviation for Alexander) there was no such problem, which is why we are still together 52 years later.

Good sex is essential for a good marriage. If you are repelled physically by your spouse, it will never work. But another reason Shura and I have survived for so long is that we both tolerate infidelity. There was a period after my second daughter, Camilla, was born when he was having affairs and I was finding out about them. Rather than walk out, I picked up a handsome boy in a pub and embarked on an affair of my own. John was gorgeous and bisexual. We saw each other for five years, on and off. After that, my marriage was better.

To me, it has always seemed normal that men will be unfaithful. Having had a father who was incapable of fidelity, I think I almost expected it. I knew Shura loved me and the occasional jaunt wouldn’t stop that, so I took it in my stride.

We still share a bed, but no longer have sex — we can’t be bothered. We have a cuddle, share a joke, read the same books, enjoy the companionship. My trust was never diminished by his dalliances. He has seen me through cancer, strokes and breakdowns. I know that if I am in trouble, he will look after me. That is very reassuring."

from Dawn Chorus by Joan Wyndham. 

And from her Telegraph obit dated 14 Apr 2007 ...

"Joan Wyndham, who died on Easter Sunday aged 85, came from an eccentric upper-class family and as a young woman led a disreputable life which she unflinchingly chronicled in four volumes of memoirs.

An aspiring actress, heroic drinker, jitterbugger and Benzedrine-fuelled bohemian, she enjoyed an outrageous reputation; later she held court in "Swinging London", where her circle included jobbing rent boys, April Ashley, Michael Foot, Christine Keeler ("rabbity teeth"), assorted acid-trippers and Jeremy Beadle.

To social historians she was gold-dust, being one of the few women happy to go on the record - and on camera - to discuss sex in general and her virginity in particular, which she shed early in the war after renting an artist's studio in Redcliffe Road, Chelsea. "One night there was a really bad raid and the whole shelter was shaking, and I thought: 'Ah well! The opposite of death is life so I might as well go and get myself devirginised!' " she explained on television last year.

In the 1970s Joan became the restaurant critic for the French guide GaultMillau, jetting between London and New York; later she was a cook at the Royal Court Theatre. Defying social conventions all her life, she once unexpectedly defied medical convention too: after years suffering from painful gallstones, and submitting to the divided opinions of expensive doctors, she found herself cured in an instant when she was hit by a lorry in the Fulham Road.

Only in her sixties did Joan Wyndham turn to writing. Her younger daughter came across her diaries in a trunk in the attic and convinced her mother that she should publish them. They chronicled the adventures of a young woman on the loose in war-time London, living it up with the likes of Quentin Crisp ("hair down to his shoulders"), Philip Toynbee ("sick on the sofa"), Dylan Thomas, Julian MacLaren-Ross and David Tennant, her cousin who owned the Gargoyle Club.

When she was 21 she had an affair with the "so unbearably attractive" 17th Lord Lovat, commando leader, hero of the Dieppe beaches and 25th chief of the Clan Fraser, whom she had met during a mess party at his house, Beaufort Castle. [Was it not his brother Sir Hugh Fraser?? Or perhaps both!] In describing their assignation over partridge at the Ritz, she not only kissed but told all, unsparingly, in another memoir, Love Is Blue (1986).

In July 1943, in a taxi in Soho, Dylan Thomas, who had pinched her bottom in a pub, "smothered me in wet beery kisses"; later she had to bolt and bar her bedroom as the poet repeatedly hurled himself against the door. Only at war's end did she come to the conclusion that the black depression she felt - "an unidentifiable cafard lying in wait for me like a vast cloud of poisonous blue gas" - was the result of "too many men".

She sought remedy in an early night, a mug of Ovaltine and a resolution to renounce her life of sin. Joan Wyndham had occasionally sported a strong pair of wartime lock-knit directoire knickers to repel the advances of unwelcome suitors, and surprised herself when she totted up her wartime lovers and found she had slept with only four.

After the war, she decided against going up to Oxford. "Five years of regimentation," she explained, "have left me with a lust for liberty that has to be satisfied." Later she came to regret that decision.

Joan Olivia Wyndham was born on October 11 1921 at Clouds, the Victorian sandstone house in Wiltshire built by her great-grandfather, the dandy Percy Wyndham. She spent her first three years there, hazily remembering that it had 40 bedrooms and a kitchen so far from the dining room that food was transported on a miniature railway track.

The house, rebuilt after a disastrous fire in 1888, had passed to Percy's son George Wyndham, reputedly the handsomest man in Edwardian England who, following a failed political career as Balfour's chief secretary to Ireland, had been found dead in a Parisian brothel. His nephew Richard, known as "Dirty Dick", who had inherited Clouds during the First World War, was Joan's father; her mother, Iris, was the daughter of a diplomat.

Joan's parents divorced when she was two, and she was taken by her mother to live in London, at a house in Evelyn Gardens off the Fulham Road. Her mother having converted to Roman Catholicism, Joan was a religious child, and was sent at the age of seven to be a weekly boarder at the nearby Convent of the Assumption; from there she went to another convent at St Leonards-on-Sea, where she played the piano in the school orchestra.

Aged 15 she fell in love with the young John Gielgud; having seen him in Hamlet, she "sometimes followed him home so that I could kiss his doorknob". She later transferred her affections to "the totally gorgeous" Laurence Olivier and the dancer Robert Helpmann ("gosh, what a bottom!"). In 1937 Joan went to Rada, but left after a year. Nearly 70 years later she published a witty account of her time at Rada in her memoir Dawn Chorus (2004). Her wartime diaries, Love Lessons (1985) and Love Is Blue (1986), described her service with the WAAFs, which started at 9 Group Fighter Command near Preston, where she was a filter room plotter.

After being commissioned Joan Wyndham was posted to Fighter Command headquarters at Stanmore, which she described as "living in some wonderful dream" compared with the dreariness of Lancashire. She spent her first week's leave with a bearded Czech artist who had picked her up in Wigmore Street, and who had rented a room in a former brothel in Oakley Street, lived in by Dylan Thomas and owned by a woman with the telegraphic address Chastity, London.

During another drunken fling in London en route to a new posting in Inverness, Joan Wyndham woke up fully-clothed to find a man, naked beneath a black mackintosh, standing at the foot of her bed; he told her he was a reporter with the Sunday Graphic. Their subsequent amorous encounter did not please Joan's new paramour, a Hungarian called Zoltan, whom she abandoned on learning that he had a wife. At Inverness she fell for a handsome Norwegian naval first lieutenant, marooned in port during a refit, who cut notches on her bedpost with an enormous commando knife, and from whom she caught fleas.

Despite being appraised as "a very peculiar type of officer, not amenable to discipline and a bad example to other ranks", Joan Wyndham was promoted to flight officer, and in January 1945 was posted to Watnall, near Nottingham. It was, she complained, "ugly and squalid - but it has one great advantage, a mixed Mess!" At one point she was taken up for a spin by the youngest squadron leader in the Polish Air Force, and recorded that it was "the first time I've ever had my bottom pinched at 3,000 feet".

After the war she met and married her first husband, Maurice Rowdon, the son of a docker who admired his new daughter-in-law turning up for the wedding "all dolled up like a tallyman's ink bottle". Joan and her new-born daughter Clare followed Rowdon to Baghdad, where he had landed a teaching job; but the marriage was dissolved on their return to England.

Meanwhile, Joan's father had been shot dead by a sniper while covering the Arab-Israeli war for The Sunday Times, and she used her legacy to buy a small cottage in Kent. She was startled to learn from Cyril Connolly that Dick Wyndham had been "one of Europe's great flagellists", and had been known as "Whips" Wyndham.

Joan's affair with her Russian lodger, Shura Shivarg, produced another daughter, Camilla. After spells as a horoscope writer, working in a theatre and as a publisher's reader, Joan moved to Oxford to open the city's first espresso coffee bar, complete with jukebox.

In 1957 she divorced Rowdon and married Shivarg, buying a scruffy five-storey Georgian house in Wellington Square, off the King's Road, and landing a job on Housewife magazine. She stuck this for a couple of years before becoming a prominent figure in the King's Road set in the mid-1960s. In the 1970s she and Shura visited Russia and the United States, where she met Andy Warhol and looked up her aunt Olivia, who lived with a black actress in Harlem.

By the time she turned to writing in the 1980s, Joan Wyndham had moved back to the Fulham Road. In later life she came to dislike cooking, but nursed passions for whisky, cigarettes, the television programme Blind Date and Diana, Princess of Wales. An operation to remove a tumour in 1989 robbed her of her sense of taste, and although her memory faltered in old age, she managed to produce a further two volumes of memoirs: Anything Once (1992) and Dawn Chorus (2004).

Joan and Shura Shivarg, were renowned for their parties; Shura ran several popular Chelsea restaurants, including Nikita's and the Golden Duck. She submitted an autobiographical novel to her agent shortly before her death.

Joan Wyndham is survived by both her husbands and by both her daughters."

Sources and Notes 

"Love is Blue, a wartime diary" by Joan Wyndham

https://web.archive.org/web/20090530153700/http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1548532/Joan-Wyndham.html

The Flyer : British culture and the Royal Air Force, 1939-1945 by Francis, Martin

https://masterbombercraig.wordpress.com/avro-lancaster-bomber/lancaster-crews/wakey-wakey-pills/

https://www.thetimes.com/travel/destinations/uk-travel/england/london-travel/love-etc-kh7wt55qzpn

Picture credits - cartoons by Watnall WAAF Mary Harrison, IWM