Photographer of 'Dam Buster' bombs Barbara Dallas turns 100

IT’S quite a thing to reach your 100 birthday – but quite another to have lived a life that could have come straight out of Hollywood.
York’s Barbara Dallas, who is celebrating her 100th birthday today, has had a life full of adventure and jeopardy, including escaping from Nazi Germany and coming to Britain as a refugee and being a war photographer where she took images of the bouncing bomb trials.
In her early twenties, Barbara was a photography officer for the WAAF during the Second World War, where she photographed the infamous bouncing bomb trials. The attack disrupted Germany’s war production, demolishing the Mohne and Eider dams in Germany’s Ruhr valley on May 16, 1943. 
The story was immortalised in the film The Dam Busters.

Barbara in her WAAF uniform in her early twenties

Early in the morning of September 23, 1942, Barbara was tasked with an exercise aboard a low flying ‘Kangorooster Nan’ airplane, flew by squadron commander of the Australian RAAF, Pilot Willis, to test the new H2S camera.

Barbara penned in her diary: “I was told to don my battledress as we were going over to Scampton – one of our group’s Lancaster stations by the seaside.

“The trousers were deadly scratchy, but I was glad of them when the riggers and fitters had to laughingly manhandle me into the very tight cockpit of the huge Lancaster: I had never been in a Bomber.

“I was to play the part of the Bomb-Aimer and press the Bomb Gone button and coordinate the camera to take consecutive pictures of an object being dropped. So I had to crawl along the cockpit to the Bomb Aimer’s bench, lie flat on my tummy and look down through the Perspex onto the sea below and arrange the camera.

“We took off with a roar and flew so low that I feared we would end up in the drink [the sea]. It was a wonderful clear day, and the sea was sparkling in the sun. I felt like a seagull – it was a wonderful real flying experience!“

After watching The Dam Busters 1955 film, starring Richard Todd and Michael Redgrave, Barbara realised that the H2S camera was used as a cine camera, as they used her technique in the making of the film. She didn’t realise the significance of the bouncing bombs till the film was released, and she felt proud to have photographed the trials.

Film still of the bouncing bomb from The Dam Busters

Her daughter, Angela Burt, 75, joked affectionately: “I got sick of hearing about the Dam Busters!”

Barbara joined the WAAF - the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force- as a photographer in 1941, after studying photography at Guildford art school.

Initially, her stepfather Ernst advised against it – but she was very clever, rising to the ranks of photography officer, and he became very proud of her.

Barbara had an exciting career in the WAAF travelling around England, starting in training courses in Morecambe and Blackpool, to postings in Old Sarum, the army cooperation station near Salisbury, RA Bournemouth, and Abingdon. At Binbrook she plotted bombing photos, taking aerial photographs to help work out plans for the bombers to follow.

Barbara Dallas who turned 100 this week

She reminisced: “It was a wizard place - so exciting”, remembering the night clubs and parties she attended, the friends she made during her time in the RAF, and detailed the last time she saw men before they were sent away:

“My last boy friend, Bernard Clegg, an RAF fighter pilot…We saw each other several times and he wrote me very nice letters. Then one day I got the news that he had been killed.

“New Year was the last time I saw Frank. My handsome RAF chap had asked me to dance on the pier at Morecambe - when I got to Blackpool he was posted.”

She took course photographs of the army aircrews before they were sent on campaigns. This is how she met her husband, Yorkshireman Ian Dallas, in front of a Lysander plane. Five weeks later, he was posted to Algeria for the eighth army’s invasion of Sicily, which left Barbara “bereft”.

Barbara Dallas as a baby with her mother, left, as a teenager in Germany, and as a nurse in the 1950s

They married in 1945 and settled in Yorkshire, first in Bradford, then Harrogate, and had three children - Angela, Colin, and Andrew, and later eight grandchildren, and eight great grandchildren.

Barbara wasn’t originally from the UK– and her younger years are worthy of another movie.

She was born during the Spanish flu pandemic, to Eleanore Wagner, a German actress, and Gottfried Schmidbauer, a Swiss photographer. They separated as Vienna beckoned Lore back to the stage, and Gottfried went to write a novel in Egypt, losing contact with Barbara. Lore remarried - Ernst August Bamberger, a Jewish banker from Germany, and they had her brother Francis in 1931.

They lived as a family in Berlin. Her diary entries detail the life of an enthusiastic, sociable schoolgirl, who played sports, holidayed abroad, and had an interest in photography. One Christmas she was gifted with “stuff for developing films” and was excited to see an image of a Venezuelan refugee projected from an epidiascope onto a screen in a Geography lesson.

However, her childhood was also tinged with the sinister creeping in of the Nazi ideologies as they were taught to her at school:

“One day we had a visiting biology lecturer. The subject was the Aryan race…. At noon we had Hitler Youth activities, which I would happily get out of as I was Swiss.”

Hindsight tells us that her otherwise normal youth was to be short lived. Ernst’s bank was forcibly overtaken in 1938 and was warned he would get arrested if he protested. They knew they had to flee, fearing someone would come to the door and take him away.

Movie poster of The Dam Busters which told the story of the bouncing bomb

Ernst escaped to England, but they couldn’t join him until they all had visas. While her parents took care of the details, Barbara went to boarding school in Switzerland, until she was to travel back to Berlin, get her travel documents, and take the long trip to England - alone, at 17, with little money to buy herself food on the way.

On her tram journey to Amsterdam, after which she then crossed the channel, she had the disgust of sharing a table with the enemy:

“Two fat, beer-bellied, bald and sweating Nazis plonked themselves at my table and ordered me a beer. I did not want to be put into a Concentration Camp at the last moment, so I proudly declared that I was Swiss, which impressed them.

“They saw me off on the train, slapped me on the shoulder and assured me that within six months Switzerland would be liberated – by them!”

After a gruelling journey she made it onto safe shores: “The sea was like pale blue silk, and the setting sun made a red glowing path for the ship to reach England. When I caught sight of the white cliffs of Dover, I thought I’d arrived in the Promised Land”.

In a peculiar twist of fate, Barbara would come to know what happened to her biological father, Gottfried. She volunteered for the Red Cross in Harrogate in the 1950s, earning proficiency medals for Home Nursing and First Aid. In 1976, on a trip to Vienna, she happened to pass a Red Cross Office:

“On the spur of the moment, I asked them to trace my long-lost Father - five months later we got a call from a man in Switzerland, who said, ‘I am your brother Peter’”.

Peter was the son of Gottfried and his wife Olga. He had joined the Swiss Nazi party after he lost his job at a Jewish owned publisher. He had no choice in doing so, as he had to prove he wasn’t Jewish so he could reopen his photography studio and thus earn a living. He had died six months previously, though Barbara became good friends with Olga and the family.

Barbara, who now lives in York, is celebrating her 100th birthday with her family in Hampsthwaite, Nidderdale, and enlarged copies of her photographs will be on display.