Sean Feast speaks to co-author Jeannie Benjamin about her life fighting injustice, and her pride in her father’s RAF career.
Jeannie Benjamin always thought her father had been shot down in a Lancaster. It was quite a revelation, therefore, when she discovered he also flew Mosquitoes, and that he was a Master Bomber, one of the élite of the élite of Bomber Command.
“For all of my life my father’s absence has affected me, but he has always been present,” Jeannie says. “My mother had kept all his letters from the war, and a photograph of my father and his Distinguished Flying Cross and Bar were always on display. She kept them along with a photograph of me on my first day at school with a paper poppy in my blazer lapel.”
Jeannie was only 18 months old and her sister a babe in arms when their father Eric was killed. Her education at a private Catholic School for girls in Twickenham was paid for by the RAF Benevolent Fund: “Every term there were two reports produced about me – one for my mother, and the second for the Fund so they could check on their investment,” she jokes.
At 18 she went to teacher training college (“Those of us who made it to VI Form became teachers or nurses, and everyone else became secretaries,” she laughs) with a view to becoming an Infant School Teacher. One of the first jobs she was offered was back at the school she had attended as a pupil which she politely declined.
Her career was interrupted by marriage and children, after which she took on various part-time and supply teaching roles. Later she became a lecturer at the Dartford College of Education, helping to train teachers to teach. She also became more active in her union, the National Union of Teachers (NUT), now the National Education Union, attending the NUT’s annual conference in Jersey in 1983.
Fighting inequality and injustice as a modern-day Joan of Arc
She spoke at that conference on equality and gay rights: “There were many injustices in those days,” she explains. “I had always been a feminist, Joan of Arc was a heroine of mine, so calling out inequality – whether gay rights or women’s rights – was very important to me.”
Jeannie’s union activities are recorded in her first book It’s Not The Same Friday. As someone on the far left, she felt many in the leadership were not being radical enough and was not shy in calling out the NUT General Secretary Fred Jarvis for arriving at conference in a chauffeur-driven limo. She became actively involved in her local Kent branch and at a national level in the NUT.
When her children had grown up, and after getting divorced, Jeannie was able to put her energies in a further direction. In 1993 she changed careers, left teaching and began working for the trade union UNISON, taking up the post of Regional Women’s Officer for the South East of England. When she and her colleagues discovered that men in equivalent positions were being paid more than their female counterparts, the Regional Women’s Officers took an Equal Pay case against UNISON and won. “I am not sure they liked us all that much,” she laughs.
“We celebrated by taking a city break to Amsterdam and continue to go away as a group even today, over 20 years later.”
Not content with restricting her activities to the Union, Jeannie sought to become an MP and even made it on to an all-women shortlist for the constituency of Gravesham only to be informed that such shortlists had just been declared illegal. She claimed on another occasion that she had not been selected for a particular seat because she was not wearing the right suit: “It was frustrating only ever being considered to stand in safe Tory seats,” she says. “I am proud, however, that in 1992 when I stood for the safe conservative seat of Sevenoaks, I managed to increase Labour’s share of the vote to 9,470 – which was quite an achievement.”
In 1997, after failing to secure a safe seat and become an MP, she remembers feeling particularly conflicted when Tony Blair was elected to power: “It was like everyone was celebrating but I didn’t have an invitation to the party,” she recalls.
(Jeannie with Tony Blair at the Labour Party Conference, Blackpool, October 1994.)
“Perhaps I wasn’t following a coherent strategy,” she jokes. “On one occasion I can recall driving all the way down to Exeter after work to make a brief speech and then driving all the way home the same evening!”
After her political dream had come to nothing Jeannie took early retirement and attained a Masters in Neuro Linguistic Programming to add to the BA in Educational Studies that she already had from the Open University. She launched her own personal development training courses and started to write. She also became interested in learning more about her father.
The desire to learn more about her father’s wartime career
“Growing up it had been normal not to have a father,” she explains, “and when I started writing my memoir It’s Not The Same Friday I realised how much he came into my story.”
(Jeannie's father Eric.)
Various serendipitous events then unfolded. She was contacted by a genealogist and discovered several cousins she never knew existed and was approached by an historian in the Czech Republic who was researching a raid to Brux in which her father had taken part. Most incredible of all was hearing from and then meeting Fraser Muir of the Royal Canadian Air Force. Fraser had been in Main Force and heard her father’s last words being transmitted on the night he was shot down.
Jeannie’s quest to learn more about her father’s life led her to a Facebook group forum (the Bomber Command Interest Group) run by Steve Darlow, owner and publisher of Fighting High and an accomplished Bomber Command author. She had already scoured the internet and visited The National Archives, but the challenge was where to start: “I applied for my father’s service record, but it was full of acronyms and very difficult to decipher,” she explains.
Undeterred, Jeannie forged ahead and little by little began to piece her father’s story together into a narrative, transcribing her father’s letters: “I approached Steve to see whether he thought it might make a book and he introduced me to you,” she laughs.
Flying Fairey Battles in France and Lancasters over Berlin
The result is Main Force to Mosquito Master Bomber which details Wing Commander Eric Benjamin’s war flying Fairey Battles in France, Lancasters over Germany, and then as a Master Bomber on Mosquitoes until he was shot down and killed on night of 19/20 February 1945. His face appears in a contemporary Pathé newsreel from 1943 during which you can also hear his voice.
(Jeannie with author Sean Feast and Bomber Command veteran and Mosquito pilot George Dunn, at a book signing for Main Force to Mosquito Master Bomber, at the De Havilland Aircraft Museum.)
Since being published, Jeannie has very much enjoyed the circle of signing events at Duxford and the De Havilland Aircraft Museum among other venues, and was especially honoured to be invited to talk at the Women in War Festival, as part of a panel chaired by Suzanne Raine, a Trustee of the International Bomber Command Centre, with various women authors including Clare Mulley: “I was very nervous before speaking and Clare was very kind in asking me if I would be OK,” she says.
“As a trade union official and as a Parliamentary Candidate I was well used to public speaking but this was different; this was very personal. It was a very emotional day and by the end of my talk about my father there wasn’t a dry eye in the room.”
Speaking at the Festival and meeting readers young and old at different events has given Jeannie the appetite to do more: “It’s reassuring that so many people are still interested in what my father and hundreds more like him achieved in the war,” she concludes, “but also that they were just people, with families, doing their bit to make a better world for us all.”
Copies of Main Force to Mosquito Master Bomber signed by Jeannie Benjamin and Sean Feast can be found here.