Australians at War Film Archive Barry Finch
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Australians at War Film Archive Barry Finch - Transcript of interview Date of interview: 5th July 2004 http://australiansatwarfilmarchive.unsw.edu.au/archive/2064 Tape 1 00:40 Barry thanks very much for being here and letting us come into your house today. The Archive wouldn’t exist without you giving us your time so thanks for everyone from the Archive. A pleasure. To begin with we need a quick introduction to you, so I’d like you to give a quick introduction to your life just starting from where you were born and grew up. 01:00 I was born in Lindfield in NSW [New South Wales] in Sydney, and I lived there with my Mum and Dad and sister until I was an eighteen year old and then I joined the air force. In the meantime of course, I had been to school at a little tiny two room school in East Lindfield finishing up at Shore, Sydney’s Church of England Grammar School from which I graduated with matric 01:30 and then I went to the tech to study architecture. (UNCLEAR) architect, or was. Subsequently, of course, in a years time I joined the air force at seventeen and a half and went into camp at eighteen at Bradfield. I did my initial training there and began flying at Benalla in Victoria 02:00 from there to Mallala in South Australia where I began flying twin engine aircraft and got my wings over there. Then we came back to Bradfield again then I pushed….sent to America simply to cross it over, we didn’t stay there, got as far as Boston and then back down to New York where we got on a ship across to the UK and then into the, down to Brighton where we 02:30 formed a personnel centre there. We subsequently had a few stays at various fill-in spots. One was in Tiger Moths [old fashioned aircraft] playing around anywhere we liked in the UK [United Kingdom] just to get to look at what the English countryside looked like from the air. Which was quite different of course, to Australia, 03:00 and very useful. A pity a few of the American hadn’t a chance to do it. Second, I did a course on a ‘keep fit’ type thing. Then I did an AFU [Advanced Flying Unit] training when I converted onto single engine aircraft again. That was quite successful and quite enjoyable on Masters, Miles Masters trainers. 03:30 Then they were talking about converting people back from singles to twin engine aircraft and I said, “Not for me. I’m staying on single engines.” And I applied for an overseas posting along with a lot of others and we finished up getting up to the Blackpool personnel centre where they accumulated a great crowd to go to the Middle East. Off we went to the Middle East on the old [SS] Orion, landed at 04:00 Port Said and then to Jerusalem where we had to wait again to get to another OTU, Operational Training Unit, where we were to fly Kittyhawks, and that was down just near Abousir, just near Cairo. From there we were ultimately sent to a staging spot to await our overseas posting back up to the front line. 04:30 So we finished up around about April 1943, I was ready to go, I’m sorry it was April 1944, I beg your pardon, to the squadron and joined the squadron in Italy when it was prior to the fall of Montecasino. I was there for ten months, 05:00 having started as a sergeant pilot when I finished up I was a flight commander, flight lef [lieutenant], and came back to Egypt again then as a flying instructor to teach people how to fly Mustangs, ‘cause we had been flying Mustangs. They sent me to a flying instructors’ school, which I did. 05:30 Soon after that we got back to Egypt again. War in England, VE [Victory in Europe] Day came along and I ended my war in that part of the world, but I was still instructing. So I kept going for about a fortnight and then I got a signal to say that I was posted to command a Spitfire squadron in Burma, and I thought, this is going to be pretty bloody good. And so I got myself all packed up 06:00 and was sitting there on the aerodrome in the control tower waiting for the Dakota to come and pick me up, which was all arranged, and the next thing another signal came through, “Posting cancelled.” So that was the end of that. Soon after that we were waiting for a ship to come and take us somewhere and VJ [Victory over Japan] Day came along so that was the end of the war. And we had to wait until about next 06:30 November, about six months for a ship to bring us back to Australia. So that was the end of my war experience. Coming back I married and we built a little house in due course after much stress and stridulation, and I was still going to night school for another five years to get my architecture finished, 07:00 and I’ve been architecting ever since. Its been a long and varied career. I’ve been in it for over fifty years now and had the biggest practice I think in Sydney, we had a very large practice building high rise buildings. Then travelling around the world to various places to have a look at other things, and I was asked to go over to New Zealand on one occasion 07:30 to open a practice for the firm over there which I did. After four years came back again. The high rise buildings became thick and strong, we were doing an awful lot of them. I got a bit sick of being a manager rather than an architect and managing site meetings with forty people, that was just ridiculous and I decided I wanted to get out. 08:00 So I decided to retire to a small farm we had out near Oberon. And I farmed there for a while and then ran into a fellow who asked me would I like to go to Adelaide, I said, “No thanks.” But he said you’re the fellow they’re looking for, he was one of these job procurer types. So I had my own little aeroplane and I flew it across to Adelaide for the interview and it turns out that the 08:30 lord mayor, who was sitting at the table along with three other aldermen at that appointment, asked me did I fly over, and I said, “Yes.” And he said, “Did you fly in the air force?” And I said, “Yes.” He said, “What course were you on?” And I said, “Twenty-seven.” He said, “Good God, what places did you go to?” I said, “To Mallala.” And he said, “Well I was there too.” So one of the aldermen said, 09:00 “You’ve got the job.” On the spot, so that put an end to that. So I stayed in Adelaide for five years on a contract, stirred up a bit of activity in Adelaide and then came back to retire in Blackheath, and I’ve been there ever since, until a few minutes ago. Somehow you got to Cooma. Somehow I got to Cooma, yes. I’ve been in Cooma a year. 09:30 That’s fantastic. Just one thing you didn’t mention is your own family, did you have a large family or many children? Well, not a large family, we had four adopted children. We have, my eldest boy is just on fifty or pretty close to it, could be a bit more than fifty now, we’ve been married fifty-eight years so he must be. We have twins that are about forty-five or coming up to about fifty, and another one 10:00 who was a foster child and she is living up in Brisbane or Ipswich in Queensland. And they’ve all got grand children and we’ve even got great grandchildren, four or five of them. I lose track of them. Of course my wife has to (UNCLEAR) them I must admit I find it very tiring trying to try and remember the names. We won’t go into too much detail then. One other bit from the summary 10:30 that I would like to just fill in is, while the squadron was in Italy were you operating out of a number of different places? Yes, we were. Could you give us that list of places or are they not at hand? I don’t think that it will mean too much because they weren’t really, in some cases, they were not always villages. We started at a place called Cutella which is on the east coast of Italy and from there we moved across to 11:00 Saint Angelo. This is all south of Rome and north of …between …well actually Italy slopes over a bit you know, we were a bit higher on the west coast than the front was, Saint Angelo. And then when Rome fell we went up to a place called Fellarium [?]. I’m sorry we went to Gerona which is a little airfield outside of Rome, on the edge of the city actually, 11:30 which had been occupied by the Germans and also by the Italian Air Force.