Page 90 - Demo

90they would need to build up their own armed forces and while so doing they were content to assist with the training of British personnel. As with the Canadian case, the negotiations were protracted but the so8called %u2018Van8Brookham%u2019 Agreement was eventually signed on 1 June 1940.14 As originally drafted this involved RAF training units, some, as in Canada, transferred lock stock and barrel from the UK,15 operating independently of SAAF schools. In practice, the two organisations were progressively integrated and a year later these combined arrangements were formally endorsed when the original memorandum was replaced by the Joint Air Training Scheme %u2013 the JATS. The original Riverdale Agreement would expire in March 1943 so a major international Training Conference was convened in Ottawa in May 1942 in order to co8ordinate the continued training of Allied aircrew and to extend the Agreement for a further two years, to March 1945. At this conference, the British agreed to relinquish control of the RAF8run training units in Canada to the RCAF. This organisational change was significant enough to warrant changing the name of the whole Canadian enterprise or, to be more accurate, seemingly agreeing to give it a mutually acceptable name for the first time. Thereafter it was officially known as the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. Strictly speaking, therefore, it was now appropriate to refer to the arrangements with the various Dominions as the BCATP, the JATS and the RATG.16 Because they alone were involved in all three of these activities, and had an interest in the output of various national schemes, from their strictly Anglocentric perspective, the British needed an umbrella term to embrace all of these arrangements and by 1942 it was generally understood (in London, at least) that the %u2018EATS%u2019 meant virtually all training being conducted %u2018overseas%u2019 on behalf of the RAF. It is interesting to note, incidentally, that, although it was not formally introduced until 1942, most Canadian writers tend to describe all wartime training activities in Canada as having been conducted under the BCATP from the outset17 while their British counterparts still tend to use the EATS label somewhat indiscriminately. This is not the place to explore the complexity of this global organisation, suffice to say that at one time or another well over 300 separate schools would participate in this vast undertaking.