"Ode to an ERK” by Erik Sykes (1942)

[ricardian]

The comedian Eric Sykes was an LAC wireless operator in WW2 and he wrote this in 1942:

Three cheers for the man on the Ground.
Wherever you walk, you will hear people talk
Of the men who go up in the air,
Of the dare-devil way they go into the fray,
Facing death without turning a hair.
They'll raise a cheer and buy lots of beer
For a pilot who’s home on leave.
But they don't give a jigger
For a flight mech or rigger
With nothing but 'props' on his sleeve.
They just say, 'Nice day' and then turn away
With never a mention or praise.
And the poor bloody ‘erk’ who does all the work
Just orders his own beer and pays!
They've never been told of the hours in the cold
That he spends sealing Germany's fate.
How he works on a kite, till all hours of the night
And then turns up next morning at eight.
He gets no rake-off for working till take off,
Or helping the aircrew prepare.
But whenever there's trouble, it's 'quick, at the double',
The man on the ground must be there.
Each flying crew could tell it to you,
They know what this man's worth.
They know he's part of the RAF's heart
Even though he stays close to earth.
He doesn't want glory but please tell his story,
Spread a little of his fame around.
He's one of the few so give him his due,
Three cheers for the man on the ground.

[bob2s]

0r to put it another way. You can teach a monkey to ride a bike but if the chain falls off he is stuffed.

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

I was always nice to my Erks.

I did enjoy taking them up in the back seat, which was a gentle way of proving to them that you cannot, in fact, teach a monkey to fly.

We had a particularly close association with the ginger beers on my first, a deployment squadron. We aircrew (all T/R, B/F, A/F trained) would sometimes be fixing stuff in another country via telephone messages, and they might likewise be fixing the aircraft in the middle of nowhere with what they could scrounge nearby. I recall a punctured canopy seal being repaired with a bicycle inner tube (the first attempt, of course, used the bicycle puncture repair kit, but that could not cope with supersonic, so a patch of the inner tube and a sh!tload of araldite was called for). We also had Erks who were backseat qual'ed (allegedly) and 'split-brained' (part trained up in another Erk speciality) so we could run them out to fix stuff in strange places.


The problem, as Erik (interestingly, an anagram of 'I erk') points out, is "people".

p.s. in my experience, all ginger beers are comedians.