Local Folk – June Brandon

June Brandon may be a familiar figure to anyone who knows Snells Beach. At least twice a day, this doughty 92-year-old can be seen riding through town or along the waterfront on her mobility scooter with her little dog, Barney, sitting at her feet. What few people realise is the vital role June played in photographic reconnaissance during World War II, when she was the first person to develop and see images of the Dambusters Raid and the sites for the Normandy Landings.

Mahurangi Matters reporter Sally Marden spoke with Jane.

My father was in the Ghurkas, in the British Army, and I was born in India, way up in the Himalayas. When I was three, father said, ‘I’ve got your birthday present, come with me,’ and he took me down the garden path and there was a little grey donkey; it was love at first sight. She was called Patsy, and she was a real character.
My father was wounded out there and got a bout of malaria and so we were going back to England, but he died from the malaria and the wound. I was eight.

When we got to the Suez Canal, mother said, ‘You can throw your topees [pith helmets] in the sea, we won’t need them any more’. She thought it would be a treat because I hated those topees, but I burst into tears, because I realised then that I’d never see my father or my donkey again.

War broke out when I was 16. My first experience of war was when we lived in the New Forest. I was sitting next to the apple tree in our garden shelling peas for supper, and my brother was up the tree, when a plane came over and he said, ‘It’s got funny markings’. I said, ‘It hasn’t got black crosses on it so let’s not worry about it’. It turned around and flew right up the main street of our village, New Milton, dropping bombs all the way. It was just after France had fallen to the Germans and it was a captured French plane. It killed 30 people and injured 75. I went down to the village the next day to get some things for mother and they were chopping the tops off all the trees, and I said what are they doing? One of the men said we might as well tell her, she’ll find out anyway; they were cutting them down to get parts of bodies that had been blown into them.

I left school at 17.  Mother had to go to London and I went straight to Victory House in Kingsway (the RAF’s recruitment centre). I said I couldn’t produce my birth certificate because I was born in India, which was a lie, I could easily have got one, but they didn’t question it and I got in under age.

I had done a bit of photography, so I was put down as a photographer. I was sent to RAF Benson [Photographic Surveillance Unit] just outside Oxford where we were only taking photographs; there were no guns on the planes.
The pilots were amazingly skilled. Because of the weight of the cameras – there were two large cameras behind the pilot’s seat – they only had their tactical skill and speed to get them home if they were seen.

We were in teams and I was always in the darkroom. We had to have special machines because a lot of the films were 500 negatives long. We’d develop each film as it came in, print them off, then send them to Intelligence to see what they could make of it. We did a lot of work finding where the doodlebugs [flying bombs] were coming from.

Towards the end of the war, six of us were sent into a special room and told we had to do all the film by hand, then print onto thin panels of tin. We were warned not to bend them or to make any mistakes, then they were very carefully packed into boxes and sent to Bletchley Park, where from them they made scale models of all the invasion beaches in northern France, and so we knew exactly where they were going (for D-Day).

The other great excitement when we finished work one day, we’d been on duty for 24 hours, but there was a panic on, and we were told, ‘One and Two Teams, back to Photographic Section’, so back we go. I was given a film and told to develop it and came out to find a room full of senior officers. One of them said there was a view chamber to see if the film was all right, so I looked into it and could see a dam had been broken …that was the Mohne. Then came the Eder, but not the Sorpe. But I didn’t know how they’d been broken, and it was tragic, the loss of life.

What did strike me all the way through the war was the kindness of people to each other all the time – letting you sit on a kit bag on a railway station, say – and it was everybody, in the services and out of the services. And there was this one, simple determination that Germany wasn’t going to get England.

My job ended when the war ended and I was put in administration … Honestly, I hadn’t a clue. I was put in charge of 200 WAAFs at RAF Henlow and they were all bored and wanted to get out of the forces, so I arranged plays and hockey matches. They then tried to send me on recruitment, but I got married and got out.

Some years later, my husband got a job in the United States. I absolutely hated it. Everyone was suing each other, divorcing each other and it was all money, money, money, so we left and paid our passage to New Zealand.
We arrived in 1960 and we loved it. We went to Wellington, where my husband had a job editing a magazine for the old Department of Scientific & Industrial Research.

My husband died in 1968 and I went straight to the NZ Navy Office to work because there was no one to look after my three sons.

I had a wonderful job. I had to arrange the whole programme for all visiting ships – their call on the Governor General, their call on the Harbour Master, all the official activities, sports trips, trips to the Wairarapa to see sheep – there was always this fascination with sheep!

One of the funniest was when the guy who did the victualing [food provisions] was off, so I thought I’d try to help him out. The Ark Royal aircraft carrier came in and they gave me this great big paper specification of the cheese they required – moisture content, salt content, I’d never seen anything like it. So off I went up to the Cheese Board and a man said, ‘Can I help you?’ And I said I’d like some cheese, and he obviously thought I just wanted a 4lb block. He said how much and I said ‘A ton!’. He said come this way, and have a cigar!

The other funny thing that happened was when two Japanese destroyers came. Tradition dictated that if you gave them a present, they must use it, it’s a courtesy. Someone decided to give all the sailors a free bus ticket. I had to take my car for maintenance after work and as I drove past there were all these sailors in a long line waiting for buses and lots of bewildered Wellingtonians wandering how they were going to get home that night!

I moved to Snells Beach more than 20 years ago to be near my son. I’ve loved it here, but it’s changing. I’m 92 now. I’m still out twice a day with Barney, and a lovely girl from Rodney Health takes me shopping, so I manage.