I Think I Prefer the Tinned Variety

Seventy years ago, World War II uprooted my father from a coal mining village in South Yorkshire and transported him thousands of miles to Sierra Leone in West Africa and later to a tropical island in the Pacific. I Think I Prefer the Tinned Variety: The Diary of a Petty Officer in the Fleet Air Arm during World War II is a short, annotated diary (approximately 22,000 words) which records his extraordinary experiences and the on-going banalities of everyday life on a naval air-base far away from home. This blog includes the collection of original photographs that go with my short e-book I Think I Prefer the Tinned Variety: The Diary of a Petty Officer in the Fleet Air Arm during World War II.  They are in the October 2012 folder of the Blog Archive. If you would like to read I Think I Prefer the Tinned Variety: The Diary of a Petty Officer in the Fleet Air Arm during World War II you can get a flavour of the book from the free sample on the Amazon site. Just follow one

I published I Think I Prefer the Tinned Variety: The Diary of a Petty Officer in the Fleet Air Arm during World War II as a download for Kindle in October 2012. At the start of the book I explain how I came to research my dad's war time diary and publish it with my annotations as a Kindle download. "After I retired I spent many a happy hour researching both my own and my husband's family histories. Eventually though, I came to a dead end after I had explored every aspect of the lives of even the most distant relatives. I had already sorted through a box of old photos that had been in the loft for years and had labelled as many of them as I could. Now I turned my attention to an old, homemade, hard backed notebook with the initials N.B. stencilled on the deteriorating hessian cover. I knew that this was a collection of photographs and postcards that my dad had stuck in the book accompanied by captions in his tiny, precise handwriting. Folded into the book were lots of

Happy New Year! Thanks to everyone who has  downloaded and read my book during 2012. All the best for 2013. Cathy

Best wishes for a very Happy Christmas. I'll be back in 2013  with more additions to the story  and details of a new family history project.

A couple of days ago I visited the National Railway Museum in York. When I was looking at my photos later I realised that some were photos of trains from the old London, Midland and Scottish Railway. I remembered that my dad had made a reference to that railway company in his diary which I'd quoted in I Think I Prefer the Tinned Variety: The Diary of a Petty Officer in the Fleet Air Arm during World War II. He wrote: "On Tuesday 8th May (1945) the newspapers were head-lined "It’s all over in Europe" and gave histories of the last five years. Flags were flying in Sydney but no crowds surged through the streets. We made sure our rooms were booked at the British Centre and went for a drink to celebrate Victory. A couple of drunken sailors were the only signs of the momentous day it was. At seven o’clock we were steaming out of Central Station just as the city began to warm up and celebrate. Australian trains are horrible. They are uncomfortable, slow, draughty and

As I wrote in my previous post, my dad (Norman Buckle) had kept a copy of the first edition (Friday July 20th 1945) of  The Pacific Post: Daily Newspaper of the British Pacific Fleet with his photographs and diary. It's only a 4 sides of a folded sheet newspaper but it is crammed with interesting stories. It's fascinating to read what the authorities thought would interest the servicemen all those thousands of miles away from home. Here are the remainder of the cuttings from the front page:

I explain in I Think I Prefer the Tinned Variety: The Diary of a Petty Officer in the Fleet Air Arm during World War II that o n Friday July 20th 1945 "The Pacific Post: Daily Newspaper of the British Pacific Fleet" was launched. My dad, Norman Buckle,  saved a copy of the first edition with his diary. He was a member of  MONAB 4 stationed on the island of Ponam as part of the support network for the British Pacific Fleet in 1945. [If you click on the cuttings they're easier to read when they are on the black background.]   First page of the first edition of the Pacific Post: Daily Newspaper of the British Pacific Fleet 20/07/1945     Close-up of the main picture story.     Editorial Part 1     Editorial Part 2     From the front page of the first edition of The Pacific Post  

In the introductory pages of I Think I Prefer the Tinned Variety: The Diary of a Petty Officer in the Fleet Air Arm during World War II I've written about my father's background: " Norman was a working class lad who was born in 1924 and brought up in the village of Royston , near Barnsley, in South Yorkshire . He was fortunate, having passed his eleven plus, to have enough family support to go to the local grammar school at Normanton. He was studious, worked hard and passed his School Certificate. At the age of sixteen he was offered employment as a clerk at the salary of £1 - 0s - 0d per week (about £30 in to-day's money) in the Public Health Department of the West Riding County Council in Wakefield thus breaking three generations of the family's tradition of going down the pit." Norman in 1939 aged 15 years. Normanton Grammar School in 1920 Normanton Grammar School in 1925. Norman started there about ten years later. In August 1

When I was researching the background to I Think I Prefer the Tinned Variety: The Diary of a Petty Officer in the Fleet Air Arm during World War II I tried to find out about the development of the island of Ponam, near Manus, in the Admiralty Islands (part of present day Papua New Guinea) as the naval air base to which my dad was posted in 1945. I was delighted to find out more last week in Hansard (the record of Parliamentary debates). In The House of Lords on July 11th 1962 in a debate to do with Naval Estimates Lord Ashbourne reminisced about the base at Manus, in the Admiralty Islands of which he had had first-hand knowledge during the war. "Within about three months of capturing the Admiralty Islands from the Japanese the Americans had turned this almost desert island into a great fleet base, with alongside berths for unloading cargo, with floating docks, with a 10,000-feet airstrip, completed, they say, within fourteen days of the initial landings on the island. They bu

I wrote in I Think I Prefer the Tinned Variety: The Diary of a Petty Officer in the Fleet Air Arm during World War II that when my dad was de-mobilised from the Fleet Air Arm at the end of World War II he received a war gratuity properly known as a Certificate of Post War Credit. The actual document was preserved amongst his papers.