The clutching hand

The clutching hand: Applied sometimes to a Quartermaster Sergeant, as being popularly supposed to benefit personally when there was a shortage of anything, rations, etc. The phrase would seem to have originated with a certain film melodrama of an exceptionally lurid kind. Also, an Air Force nickname for the "D.H.6" (De Havilland) aeroplane in use in 1917-1918 as an elementary training machine.