RAF DEVERSOIR 1952-53
As Remembered By Hamish M. Brown
AN UNDERSEA ADVENTURE
I was interested when visiting the National Museum of Flight recently to see a Tiger Moth; as a CCF cadet (circa 1950) I was allowed to take the controls of one at a summer camp. On querying a crater on the ground below I was told, “Tiger Moth crash last week”. There was also a Meteor jet fighter in the Museum, the new advance on ‘prop planes’ a squadron of which we had at RAF Deversoir in the Canal Zone in 1953. We were rightly proud of them, though as a lowly National Service telephonist, I only admired from afar.
Well not quite true. For certain exercises/missions extra fuel tanks were used and then dropped out in the desert. Enterprising local brought these to camp to sell. A consortium purchased some, beat out the metal to give sheets from which the hulls of a catamaran were made for sailing on the Bitter Lakes. This gave us a great deal of pleasure – until disaster struck.
We were sailing along on the crest of a wave where the Suez Canal entered the lake when a big liner (the Durham Castle) came out from the canal (too fast we reckoned later) with the result it sucked the water away and we hit bottom. Before we could do much the water returned, as a curling wall which crashed down onto us and making a good demolition job on our craft.
I was suffering from a cold so was normally clothed (the rest were wearing swimming trunks) and sitting forward to keep out of the way, reading a book. When I surfaced after a good tumbling in the salty foam I still had hold of my book. I had to keep it as a souvenir, salt stains and all, and still have it. The title was The Undersea Adventure.
RAF Deversoir was being run down so there were no more drop tanks, the squadron
moved on, and eventually I was posted to RAF Eastleigh outside Nairobi in Kenya.
This was to give an odd coda to our Bitter Lake’s fiasco. On leave in
Mombasa I was seeing a lady friend onto a liner and, on board, noticed the ship
was the Durham Castle