Sheryl Mcintosh's Blog: The 'Softening' of the Armed Forces

Are all RAF pilots like her, Daddy?

The 100th anniversary of the RAF has seen a newly re-vamped exhibition put on at the RAF Museum at Hendon. I'd been meaning to go for a while, and took an opportunity yesterday. The major changes are really only one new hangar's worth of general intro to the RAF, plus the retrograde step they've taken of closing my favourite exhibit, the Short Sunderland (which can only be viewed from the outside now: you used to be able to wander through it).

Well, it's all very shiny. I'd been warned there is much dumbing-down in evidence, but I can't really agree with that; and the hardware is all there (check out that Vulcan bomb bay, lads); and the archive is as fine and professional as ever.

But there is certainly, how shall we put it, a lot of 'profiling' going on. In this new intro hall, illustrating the 100 years of the service there are many individual stories told on the back of life-size cardboard photos of RAF personnel, like the rather fetching one on the right.

Are you getting the picture? Yes: of the 51 RAF people whose photos appear in this hall, 21 are of women, almost 42%.

Now: what % of today's RAF, do you imagine, are women? Answer: 17%. And what was the figure at the height of WW2? 16%. And what % of the 109,484 members of the Service who gave their lives on active service ..? They don't mention that.

But are we surprised? - when soi-dissant *historian* Dan Snow can lie to his children that women flew Spitfires in combat? By contrast with shameful behaviour like that, the exhibition is as pure as the driven, errrr, snow.

Still, I am pleased to note the Museum still describes the prominent twin Aden cannon-bulges on the Hawker Hunter as 'Sabrinas'. Until some passing thought-policeperson notices ...

ND