John O’Nions was born in Llanelly, Monmouthshire, in 1937. He grew up on the Isle of Wight until the age of nine when the family moved to Highcliffe-on-Sea. He attended school and the Royal Air Force Air Cadets, leaving at the age of 15 to join the Royal Air Force as a boy entrant. After three years of technical training, O’Nions was posted to Christmas Island for Operation Grapple where he worked on aircraft servicing. He stayed in the Royal Air Force (RAF) for the rest of his career, working at home and abroad including in Singapore. O’Nions and his wife spent some time living in France before returning to the UK, where they now live in Winchester, Hampshire. They have three children and five grandchildren.
Interview extracts
Description
After three years of technical training as an RAF boy entrant, John O’Nions was posted to Christmas Island for Operation Grapple, where he worked on aircraft servicing. In this clip, he remembers flying planes filled with beer in order to chill them for consumption, showing us that military discipline was not always strictly upheld on the island. O’Nions stayed in the RAF for the rest of his career, working at home and abroad including in Singapore.
This is a short extract from an in-depth interview. John O’Nions was recorded for the Oral History of British Nuclear Test Veterans project in 2024. The interviewer was Fiona Bowler. This project was run in partnership with National Life Stories and the full interview can be accessed at the British Library.
Transcript
We had a big lagoon. As you know, Christmas Island is shaped in a horseshoe and in the centre there’s a lagoon, we used to go swimming in this lagoon. Why we never got eaten by sharks or anything like that… oh, and fishing.
Fishing?
Fishing. Fishing off the reef, swimming in the lagoon, or lying out in the sand. And then we did have a little cinema there, which was an open-air cinema.
Okay.
We used to go to the cinema in the evening, they used to show those Tom and Jerry cartoons.
Did they?
I think there was a big, Christmas Day on Christmas Island, I think that was a big deal, they had running Tom and Jerry cartoons in the cinema right through. And we obviously, drinking, we used to have so many, we used to go to the NAAFI and get cans of beer, you know, you could go there. But that was a problem there, chilling the beer, because the NAAFI would only have so much chilled beer, and of course, once the beer, sold out the chilled beers, it was all warm. So what we used to do, we used to load beer into our Dakotas, and then take them up into the… take them up to 8,000 feet and fly around. [laughs]
To chill them?
To chill them. [laughs]
[ends at 0:01:27]
