There once was a dog that called RAF Bicester home. Her name was Dinah and she made such an impression that she was a valued contributor to Whizz-Bang, the printed publication of the site.
It was an underground magazine, and today offers a fascinating insight into the real lives on site during its most important period. It has been reprised once, during Flywheel, and lends the name ‘Off Duty’ to the Scramblers+ magazine.
Returning to Dinah this National Dog Day, her breed is unknown but she was evidently the Commanding Officer’s dog. Her letter says as much.
She must therefore have been owned by Group Captain JM Warfield. John ‘Johnnie’ Mortimer Warfield led No13 Operational Training Unit and was Commanding Officer of RAF Bicester from October 1943 until January 1945.
Volume 2, Issue 1 of Whizz-Bang, her issue, was produced in December 1944 according to the cover.
Case closed.
Except he was replaced by Wing Commander PL Hancox, OBE, who had been in charge of Forward Equipment Unit, FEU, at RAF Bicester since February of 1944. OTU and FEU lived in each other’s pockets, usually happily but always cramped, at RAF Bicester for months. OTU had been onsite longer, training pilots for some four years, and had long claimed the Married Quarters; FEU were banished to tents around the airfield, charged with sending equipment all over the world out of Bicester.
In those tents must have lived Dinah, because in her exchanges in the magazine she ‘writes’ specifically to her friends in FEU. ‘As I watch these young pups gambol around me, I glow with pride at the thought of what I too have given to FEU,’ it concludes.
In the second issue, in which Wing Commander RC Browning announces his taking over from PL Hancox, Dinah writes: ‘am still here but things are not the same. The Win-co has gone to his family.’ It ends forlornly, the writer perhaps speaking for the whole station: ‘I too would like to be going home.’
Dinah was not the site’s only dog in its history. Posing for a photo stored within the archive, which forms much of 100: A Technical Site’s Centenary, a dog sits with No90 Squadron arcing in front of Bristol Blenheims on the airfield (top). Pickwick is its name, presumably inspired by the Bomber Command codeword used by Pathfinders.
Their spirit lives on and today, dogs wrestle with cars to be the star at the Scramble.
