RAF Tangmere
By the evening the weather is little better. It looks unpromising, but Farley is determined to help his stranded friend. Schneidau has no wireless transmitter and, having despatched his two pigeons, now has no means of contacting London.
Farley takes off at 22.00. F/Lt Keast estimates that Farley has fuel for a little more than 6 hours’ flying. The earliest he is expected to make contact is 02.15, with earliest return to base at 03.00.
In Chapter 3 of his book “We Landed by Moonlight” Hugh Verity wrote that Farley removed the rear canopy before setting off for France, This has puzzled me for many years, as there didn’t seem to be a logical reason for doing so. For a detailed explanation, read the separate post below.
France
Farley lands near Montigny at about 00.15 hours BST. He lands on the three-torch layout agreed with Schneidau beforehand. The format is a simplified version of the layout recommended in the RAF Army Cooperation manual. Farley would have known about it from his early service in two Army Cooperation squadrons.
While Schneidau clambers aboard, Farley will have re-set the flaps and tailplane for take-off; it would have been standard drill to reset the gyro-compass. Soon after they take off, Farley realises that the tailplane has somehow been damaged. He would have had to control the aircraft’s climb and descent on the throttle. Soon after takeoff there is a loud noise: Farley believes they have been fired on from below. The course-setting compass between Farley’s legs has been damaged. They make their way north-west. With distance the gyro (if still functioning) would have become more approximate, so they increasingly have to fly by the stars and the moon, now risen behind them. Farley has to climb above the thick blanket of cloud to keep the firmament in view, but once up there he has to fly on a low throttle to maintain level flight. It is also very economical on fuel, giving them a range much greater than normal. There is a strong south-westerly wind, but they have no way of telling how strong it is; it pushes their track to a more northerly direction.
RAF Tangmere and RNAS Ford
At 03.20 Keast and Schneidau’s escorting officer are told that a faint transmission has been received, but it is unintelligible. They hear nothing more. The weather is still poor, strong wind and heavy rain. Shortly after 4.15, they assume that the Lysander will have run out of fuel, and must have come down somewhere. They issue a signal to warn all airfields to look out for a Lysander, and at daybreak set about organising a search party. Three Blenheim crews, one of whom has just returned from a patrol, to take them up and search along the coast. They are still in the air when they are contacted by Tangmere control and informed that a Lysander has recently landed near Oban.
RAF Connel, Oban
Farley and Schneidau have continued northwards. The unbroken cloud beneath them gives no clue as to their position. As it starts to get light they guess they might be over the Frisian islands, but the sight of some hills leads them to conclude they are probably somewhere off the Irish coast. They decide to land as soon as possible after daylight. Shortly before 07.00 the Lysander runs out of fuel, and they aim for a level field. They realise, too late, that the field is studded with poles, a precaution against an enemy landing. Farley tells his passenger to get his head down in case one of the Lysander’s wings hits a pole and folds backwards above the rear cockpit.
Update 28 June 2025
In the third chapter of his 1978 book ‘We Landed by Moonlight’, Hugh Verity wrote that, before F/Lt Walter Farley set off for France to pick up SIS agent Philip Schneidau, “the sliding roof over the rear cockpit had been removed to make it easier for Philip to climb in”. This has puzzled me ever since I first looked in detail at this operation: why on earth would the pilot want to remove the canopy protecting his agent from the elements, exposing him to the bad weather that had already caused Farley’s attempt to be postponed from the previous night, and was still in force? It didn’t make sense: the weather that weekend was dumping near-constant rain over southern England and the Channel. Moreover, the VHF radio telephone set was located in the rear fuselage, and would get soaked, almost certainly rendering it unserviceable. Verity knew the Lysander intimately: he would not have written something so unusual unless Philip Schneidau – a close friend both during and after the war – had been so clear and definite about it.
F/Lt Walter Farley never wrote a post-operation report. He should have written one, but he didn’t. Ten days after crash-landing at Oban he attended a Hudson conversion course at RAF Silloth on the 30th and on his return to North Weald on 8 November he was shot down in a Hurricane, breaking a leg and suffering burns which put him in hospital for several weeks. Farley was clearly still out of action when the King visited RAF Stradishall on 28 January; it was left to S/Ldr Keast to tell the King about Farley’s extraordinary flight. It is still surprising that Farley was not persuaded to write up this operation once he returned to Air Intelligence duties at the Air Ministry in early 1941. He was killed in action in April 1942, so we are reliant entirely on Philip Schneidau through Verity. The canopy’s removal was a puzzle, and it slightly bothered me that there didn’t seem to be a logical explanation.
The Shuttleworth Collection Lysander unintentionally provides a plausible explanation. This aircraft has been made to look like a Special Duties Lysander: a ventral fuel tank has been fitted between the main undercarriage, and a version of the external ladder for agents has been fixed to the port side of the rear fuselage. But this aircraft, built in 1938, spent its war as a target tug in Canada. Its conversion to Special Duties guise in the late 1990s was entirely cosmetic: the ventral fuel tank is a non-functional dummy, the fuel and oil tanks are the standard size – the SD version had a large oil tank behind the pilot which blocked him off from his passengers – and finally (and crucial for this article) the release mechanism for the rear canopy is on the starboard side, where a normal crewman clambers up to enter the rear cockpit, using a protruding foot rest at the base of the fuselage, and a semi-circular cut-out half-way up. This is difficult enough in the daytime, requiring a degree of athleticism. I have never tried in the dark, but the steps would be difficult to find; the Lysander had not been designed for night operations. On the port side, of V9552, at the head of the ladder, along the bottom edge of the canopy, is a legend in red lettering:
OPEN OTHER SIDE
In other words, you can enter the Shuttleworth Lysander using the ladder only if the rear canopy has already been slid back and open. So what has this to do with the Farley-Schneidau pick-up operation?
The Lysander used by Farley was R9027. It was taken on charge by 419 Flight on 18 September: its first appearance in Farley’s logbook is on the 20th. Schneidau has been credited with the ladder’s basic principle and design, but he may not have seen it in the flesh until Farley arrived in France to pick him up. Farley’s logbook shows that he flew R9027 to Yeovil and back on 16 October, while Schneidau was in France.
I suspect that the reason Farley removed the rear canopy on R9027 was because its opening mechanism had not been converted to open from the Port side. Exactly when the problem was realised is not known, but it may have been too late for Westlands to design, fabricate and install a solution before the operation. Farley could have had the rear canopy opened and slid back before he took off for France, but a heavy landing in France might well have caused the canopy to slide forward and shut. On clambering up the ladder, Philip Schneidau would have been stymied by a closed canopy with no means to open it. He would have been forced to go back down the ladder, walk round the rear of the aircraft to the Starboard side, somehow find and mount the difficult standard footholds in the dark, and open the canopy, provided that the hard landing had not jammed it shut. Schneidau would then have needed to return to the Port side to load the important documents he had been tasked to bring back. Even if he had somehow divined exactly what to do, and in the right order, all this would have taken time, increasing the risk of discovery and capture. It is therefore logical for Farley to have had the rear canopy removed. It was, after all, only five years since open cockpits had been the norm.
So why hadn’t the ladder been mounted on the Starboard side? The footholds for the pilot to enter the cockpit are on the Port side – from the earliest days of flying the convention for single-seater aircraft has always been for a pilot to enter from the Port side, just as you mount a horse from its left. (In a modern airliner the Captain still occupies the Port seat.) On the Lysander the footholds for climbing up to the cockpit are therefore on the Port side, with none on the Starboard. If the agent needed to talk to the pilot before clambering aboard (and they usually did), it made sense for both entrances to be on the same side of the aircraft; hence the ladder’s position on the Port side. It also allowed the standard entry method to function on the Starboard side.
Special Duties Lysanders were soon fitted with the canopy release mechanism on the Port side: Lysander T1508, which had been allotted to 419 Flight at about the same time as R9027, was photographed by the Vichy authorities after S/Ldr Nesbitt-Dufort crashed it near Issoudun in December 1941. These photos (which were in British hands before Nesbitt-Dufort made it back to England in February 1942) clearly show the release mechanism on the Port side. On later Lysanders a mechanism for the pilot to unlock the rear canopy from inside the cockpit was fitted on the port side, by the pilot’s left shoulder. Such a mechanism can be seen on the RAF Museum’s newly-restored Lysander R9125, which served with No 161 Squadron in 1944 as a genuine SD-equipped aircraft, though it never was never flown on operations.
David Upton was instrumental in restoring the RAF Museum’s Lysander to its wartime Special Duties standard and livery, and Ian Titman is an historian with a special interest in the Special Duties Lysanders and their operations. Their help and advice, and the cooperation of the Shuttleworth Collection, has been most helpful in my research into this matter.