Harry arrived in Halifax, Nova Scotia after 6 days at sea and boarded a train that was to take him to Moncton in New Brunswick which was a holding camp. He was not in Moncton for more than a week or two before all the navigators were posted to No.1 ANS, Air Navigation School at Rivers, Manitoba.

The course lasted about 4 months and was demanding work. There were about 40 pupils on the course, several couldn't cope with more than a few hours flying.

Class work consisted of map reading, meteorology, plotting courses - true and magnetic, calculating wind speeds and direction, etc. 

The aircraft were yellow-painted Ansons, the first task the trainee navigator learned was to manually wind up the undercarriage on take-off, some 140 turns of a crank!  They were extremely reliable planes and very safe and simple to fly, but not always without incident!

A typical yellow training Avro Anson flying over a kopje in Southern Rhodesia, one of Dad's first attempts at watercolour painting!  (The paints were sent to him from England by his brother Harry.)

The first flights were all in daylight and were called familiarization and map-reading, the most elementary form of navigation, that of identifying features on the ground.  Canadian maps were simple in comparison to the British equivalents.  The prairie, which stretched out to the horizon was prominently marked by radio ranges, which were then the chief aid to navigation.  These operated on the Lorenz system of a dot-zone and a dash-zone.  In the centre of the zones the two systems overlapped to give a continuous note: this was the beam the aircraft followed.  There was a cone of silence over the actual transmitter, this gave an accurate pinpoint.

All early flights were concerned with ground pinpoints which were related to topographical map features, and trying to find the angle of drift from a sighting instrument.  Later training included aerial photography from hand-held cameras, taking a series of over-lapping oblique shots from which a mosaic called a “line overlap” could be built up.  But at this stage, the basis of all the trainees' navigation was dead-reckoning which involved keeping a plot, that is drawing the route on a chart to be followed and after calculating the various parameters involved in solving the triangle of velocities (the effect of wind velocity and direction on the aircraft’s course), marking the actual position of the aircraft over the ground to enable any corrections of direction and time to be made. 

Quickly they discovered that most difficult aspect of the classroom theory of the triangle of velocities was always the wind, which blew where it wished!  The Dalton computer, a sort of circular slide rule with a perspex centre was a great help but even with this instrument to hand, establishing their true position and course was not easy.

Trainee navigators always flew in pairs, one did the navigating whilst the second one practiced his sextant work at night time or taking bearings with the astro-compass in the daytime.  Being taught to navigate by the stars made some wonder how they could be expected to pinpoint targets over Germany using such crude methods of navigation. Trying to get a fix on a star with the plane bouncing about and a dimly illuminated sextant bubble was very difficult indeed.  However by learning to navigate using the crude tools at navigation school meant that they understood the mathematics of the whole business.  They flew the prairie from Winnipeg in the east to Regina in the west, and between the 49th and 52nd parallels.

Standard symbols were used on the charts: the course was a line marked with one arrowhead, the track with two arrowheads and the wind direction with three.  An air position was a triangle, a pinpoint fix was a circle with a dot in the centre and a radar fix a cross.

The pilot was a staff man who usually flew the aircraft the way he thought it should go regardless of what the pupil navigator told him! One could see such enormous distances in the prairies that it was very difficult to get lost. The wireless operator was also staff. He supplied the navigator with loop bearings and radio fixes on request. Exercises flown included astrograph, vertical line overlap, square search, compass swing and evasive action.  The basic premise of all of them was to pinpoint, visually, or by bearing and distance, your actual position compared to the initial one, and by using the "Dalton" computer, determine the actual wind speed and direction and calculate a new course and airspeed in order to reach the turn point on time.

Navigational flying exercises were called 'cross countries’, usually lasting 3 to 4 hours. By the end of the course, trainees had completed approximately 100 daylight flying hours and the same number of night time flying hours. The winter cold across the prairies, with the wind blowing almost permanently from the Arctic, made flying in the draughty Ansons a numbing business.

Those successful navigators received their covetted brevet, their sergeant's stripes and a pay increase!  No wonder Harry's looking so pleased with himself!

CFB (Canadian Forces Base) Manitoba as it is today, largely forlorn and derelict.