This sense of eerie abandonment was amplified in a later episode, ‘The Hour that Never Was’ (1966), in which Steed and Mrs Peel are due to attend the closing down of another fighter base, RAF Hamelin. Once again, there is a sinister atmosphere, verging on the hallucinatory; and once again what comes through most clearly is a sense that in the real world, so many bases and stations which had once launched some of the finest heroic actions were now being abandoned, as if a new generation – in a new, technocratic era – was turning its back on the wars of the old. This was now a post-atomic world; the Spitfire already looked charmingly anachronistic.
Yet the functions of Fighter Command – in the chilly new conditions of the Cold War – remained philosophically the same, and the RAF held on to Bentley Priory as an administrative headquarters. Though the technology was changing fast, and being outsourced to different corners of the kingdom, its basic functions remained the detection of incoming aircraft and the ability to strike back at any enemy incursions. From the 1940s, the Royal Air Force became more and more involved in the realm of signals intelligence, and though this was not Fighter Command’s area of expertise, there was enough international tension during the period to keep all personnel alert to unauthorised incursions into British airspace. At a distance of some seventy years, it grows increasingly strange to think of the sheer monolithic size of the Soviet Union, from the Baltic states to the border of China, from the Adriatic to the Berlin Wall. The RAF and her allies were now facing an air force of ever-increasing scale and ingenuity. From 1949, Soviet Russia had the Bomb. Any fighter from behind the Iron Curtain flying over NATO waters had to be monitored, intercepted, repulsed.
The early 1950s brought a variety of skirmishes – American planes flying over Soviet territory were fired upon – and potentially lethal mistakes, such as the 1953 incident when a British European Airways passenger flight was targeted near the border of Germany by Soviet fighters who mistook it for an RAF plane. There was an urgent sense that agreement over air routes had to be reached and throughout this period, RAF fighters were in no doubt that if they were fired upon, then they were to fire back.
There were other menaces to consider too, as time and technology moved on. It fell to Fighter Command during the Cold War to monitor the skies for incoming ballistic missiles – an echo of the V-2 rocket campaign. But the speed of this new generation of weapons was far greater; and the precise and specialised task of providing early warning was no longer the province of fast, sharp women calculating vectors at speed. The computer era was dawning; the first satellites had been launched into the heavens. Intelligence in all senses was still essential, but this was a new world where there might conceivably have been a chance either to deflect such missiles, or at least warn personnel and civilians in potential targets to take shelter.
Yet Bentley Priory itself kept a certain old-fashioned feel. From the 1950s to the 1970s, new recruits to the Royal Air Force were taught to look on it almost as a shrine, or at the very least as a source of inspiration: by now, it was widely understood what Air Chief Marshal Dowding and Air Vice Marshal Park had achieved, and the fresh generation was keen to remain true to that. The house was still used for squadron reunions, and for royal visits too. The young Queen Elizabeth II attended a dinner there in 1958 to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the RAF. As in the war, the estate was still strictly fenced and patrolled, with sentries on permanent duty at the main gate. Nor was the Royal Observer Corps forgotten: in February 1966, it was presented with a special banner at Bentley Priory by the Queen.
The 1960s and 1970s brought all sorts of familiar difficulties; funding was squeezed, priorities had to be decided. Nonetheless, the RAF as a whole was, in terms of morale, very healthy. In terms of recruitment, it did not have to go to the sometimes strenuous lengths of the army. So even many years after the war, ‘the romance of flying coupled with the security and respectability of the job and the prospect of a reasonable second career outside have made up an attractive package,’ reported The Times defence specialist. At Bentley Priory, the terminology was changed slightly, as the technical nature of defending airspace evolved: in 1968, there was a transmogrification to Strike Command. By 1970, the Priory oversaw an array of the newest weapons, as well as planes: among the missiles were ‘Phantom’, ‘Lightning’ and ‘Bloodhound’. It remained the spiritual home of the still-extant 11 Group; now, in this new era of SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) and détente, whoever commanded the group also sat in on vital NATO conferences.
The site became a source of fascination for those who opposed both nuclear power and weaponry; the security services were teased by the Guardian newspaper in 1984 by its then diarist, a young Alan Rusbridger, who reported that he had been sent, in an unmarked brown envelope, ‘the drawings for the bunker and communications centre at Bentley Priory’. These, he added, featured a droll note of comedy: the carpet colour for the bunker was described as ‘Warlord Burnt Orange’.
And despite the secrecy surrounding the site, members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament went there the same year to protest against nuclear proliferation. The demonstration was slightly in vain, not least because control of nuclear weaponry had almost two decades beforehand been transferred to the Royal Navy. Nonetheless, they argued that the site would be a target for enemy nuclear missiles should war ever break out, and that in turn spelled doom for the entire population of north London.
As soon as the Berlin Wall collapsed in the autumn of 1989, the Cold War assumptions and fears of the last forty years dissolved into the air; whatever the many threats that hung over Britain, they would no longer centrally involve fighter aircraft and ballistic missiles conquering the country’s airspace – though obviously there were many other regions of instability in the world, and many reasons to remain as vigilant as ever. The terrible events of 11 September 2001 brought new possibilities for death from the skies; and it was clear that London would be a target for potential terrorists. The skies by then were being comprehensively monitored by a huge range of satellites and sources; there was not a wisp of cloud that could not be accounted for. In recent years, Israel seems to have led the way in establishing the sort of air defence that other countries have long yearned for: the so-called ‘Iron Dome’ system, working at unfathomable speed, using missiles to intercept and bring down missiles. From a pilot ‘tipping the wing’ of a V-1 flying bomb in 1944 to fully automated computerised intervention seventy years later in 2014; though the technology is astounding, the principles remain the same.
RAF Bentley Priory came to the end of its working life in 2008. In its latter years, a little of that modest veil of secrecy was lifted, on group open days where the public at last had a chance to look around the old house, walk in the grounds and gaze across, as Lord Dowding had done, at the distant prospect of Harrow on the Hill. But what was to happen to the property once it had been relinquished by the Royal Air Force?
There was a precedent about thirty miles to the north in Buckinghamshire; another fine country house that had found extraordinary new life during the war, and which had entered a twilight period of official secrecy. Bletchley Park, discarded by the government in the early 1990s, was rescued by a group of energetic volunteers, who tackled the decaying house, started raising funds, and made it their mission to let the world know that it was there that some of the greatest feats of the war – the cracking of the German Enigma codes – had taken place. Recently it became clear that the house and grounds of Bentley Priory offered up a similarly excellent educational opportunity: the site at which the defence of the realm was masterminded at a point in history where the country could quite easily have fallen. As all subsequent RAF pilots looked to the house as a sort of spiritual base, so now the general public should have a chance to visit and to understand why it generated that sort of emotion.
And like Bletchley, after some years of enthusiastic lobbying and eager fund-raising, Bentley Priory is now a brilliant and engaging museum. As well as the Spit
fire in the driveway before the house’s front door, there are the countless moving exhibits – flying logbooks, photos, a beautiful Battle of Britain stained glass window, not to mention a startling recreation of Lord Dowding’s office, in which his words and orders are brought back to animatronic life via special recordings and clever film tricks. The centrepiece is a meticulous and fascinating recreation of the Filter Room; the museum was officially opened in 2013 by HRH the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall. On the day, Battle of Britain veteran Wing Commander Bob Foster DFC AE declared: ‘Along with my fellow veterans, I felt it was so important to preserve Bentley Priory because of its enormous symbolic and strategic significance. To see it so beautifully restored as a museum that tells the story of Dowding, as well as of the Battle of Britain air crew and the huge network that supported us, is fantastic.’
It is rare for era-defining events to be recognised as such while they are occurring; amid the chaos and cacophony of history, it takes time for the prevailing narrative, the widely understood and deeply felt version of events to emerge. Not so with the work of Fighter Command; those who flew, those who supported them on the ground, and those who so carefully monitored the movements of that celestial ballet, knew that they were involved in something extraordinary. What lingers now is a sense of purity, both of purpose and of action. The teenage boys receiving their orders, running for their planes, to defend the blue skies above; and the young girls down below ensuring that the enemy does not elude them.
Today, many walking on the chalky ridges of the South Downs, or through the rich orchards of Kent, look up at the pale sky and feel the proximity of history; they imagine with ease the white trails, the flashes of silver, the arcs and the curves. There is still, to this day, shrapnel to be found embedded in the green meadows and beneath the roots of little apple trees. Those who stand on the tops of hills, gazing down over Kentish villages or looking at Canterbury in the distance, momentarily superimpose on the horizon barrage balloons and distant black formations of incoming bombers. It is still so close that it doesn’t even quite feel like history. Those battles resonate loudly in the present – because the impossibly young pilots who sacrificed themselves to ensure that generations to come would be free of tyranny embody an ideal that goes far beyond national or temporal boundaries. They represented not just the best of British, but more pertinently the best of everyone: acting bravely in conditions of unimaginable stress and fear; putting their lives on the line every day while at the same time behaving with grace and good humour and intelligence. They hardly seem like ghosts now; their memories are too robust and substantial. The man who commanded these pilots, and who yearned to communicate with them after their deaths, deserves that place among their jostling, lively presences.
There is debate, and will be for decades to come, about how ready the Nazis were to invade Britain, and about whether any such invasion could have been a success. Lord Dowding – who contrived to be both stuffy and visionary – had no doubt of the peril. The system that bears his name is one sort of memorial; the fact that he felt so piercingly for the lives and immortal souls of his brave young pilots is another.
Endnotes
1 The Celestial Ballet
1 Angels 22: A Self Portrait of a Fighter Pilot (Arrow Books, 1977)
2 The Vision of Wings
1 ‘The Use of Balloons In War’: talk delivered by Eric H. Stuart Bruce, printed in Journal of the Society of Arts, February 1902
2 Michael Paris, ‘Air Power and Imperial Defence 1880–1919’, Journal of Contemporary History, April 1989
3 Basil Collier, Leader of the Few: the Authorised Biography of Air Chief Marshal the Lord Dowding of Bentley Priory (Jarrolds, 1957)
4 Ibid.
5 As quoted on raf.mod.uk, ‘The Early Years of Military Flight’
6 John Ferris, ‘Fighter Defence Before Fighter Command – The Rise in Strategic Air Defence in Great Britain 1917–1934’, The Journal of Military History, October 1999
7 From Giulio Douhet, ‘The Command of the Air’ (pub. 1921), cited in Paul K. Saint-Amour, ‘Air War Prophecy and Inter-War Modernism’, Comparative Literature Studies (Penn State University Press, 2005)
8 As quoted in Philip S. Meilinger, ‘Trenchard and “Morale Bombing”: The Evolution of Royal Air Force Doctrine Before World War II’, The Journal of Military History, June 1996
9 As quoted in Malcolm Smith, ‘A Matter of Faith – British Strategic Air Doctrine Before 1939’, Journal of Contemporary History, July 1980
10 Philip S. Meilinger, ‘Trenchard and “Morale Bombing”’
11 Philip S. Meilinger, ‘A History of Effects-Based Air Operations’, The Journal of Military History, January 2007
12 Philip S. Meilinger, ‘Trenchard and “Morale Bombing”’
13 National Archives, AIR 1/2692
14 T.E. Lawrence, cited in Priya Satia, ‘The Defence of Inhumanity: Air Control and the British Idea of Arabia’, The American Historical Review, February 2006
15 RAF Archives, AC71/17/17
3 The Seduction of Flight
1 Paul Brickhill, Reach for the Sky – The Story of Douglas Bader (Collins, 1954)
2 R.J. Overy, ‘The German Pre-War Aircraft Production Plans 1936–39’, English Historical Review, October 1975
3 Peter Fritzche, ‘Machine Dreams – Air Mindedness and the Reinvention of Germany’, American Historical Review, June 1993
4 Martin Francis, The Flyer: British Culture and the Royal Air Force 1939–45 (Oxford University Press, 2008)
5 Peter Townsend, Duel of Eagles (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970)
6 Jane Oliver, cited in Martin Francis, The Flyer
7 Vincent Orange, ‘The German Air Force Is Already the Most Powerful in Europe’: Two RAF Officers Report on a Visit to Germany Oct 1936’, Journal of Military History, October 2006
4 The Lines in the Heavens
1 Gordon Mitchell, R.J. Mitchell, Schooldays to Spitfire (Stroud Publishing, 2002)
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Peter Townsend, Duel of Eagles
6 Geoffrey Wellum, First Light (Viking, 2002)
7 Quoted in Martin Harris, The Flyer
8 Foreword to Gordon Mitchell, R.J. Mitchell, Schooldays to Spitfire
9 E.G. Bowen, Radar Days (Hilger, 1987)
10 Robert Watson-Watt ‘Radar Defence Today – and Tomorrow’, Foreign Affairs, January 1954
11 E.G. Bowen, Radar Days
5 The Secret Under the Hill
1 National Archives AIR 16/408
2 Ibid.
3 National Archives AIR 16/677
4 National Archives AIR 2/4400
5 Ibid.
6 As quoted in Peter Flint, Dowding and Headquarters Fighter Command (Airlife, 1996)
7 W.E. Johns, Popular Flying, November 1937
8 National Archives AIR 2/1774
9 National Archives AIR 2/4261
10 Vera Charlton, as contributed to the BBC’s ‘People’s War’ website
6 We Are At War
1 Richard Hillary, The Last Enemy (Macmillan, 1950)
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Vincent Orange, A Biography of Sir Keith Park (Methuen, 1984)
7 Dress Rehearsals
1 Richard C. Smith, Hornchurch Scramble (Grub Street, 2000)
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Vincent Orange, A Biography of Sir Keith Park
5 Basil Collier, Leader of the Few
6 T.C.G. James, Royal Air Force Official Histories: The Battle of Britain (Frank Cass, 2000)
7 Peter Townsend, Duel of Eagles
8 ‘Interesting Work of a Confidential Nature’
1 Vincent Orange, A Biography of Sir Keith Park
2 Geoffrey Wellum, First Light
3 Lord David Cecil, ‘The RAF’, in William Rothenstein’s collection of drawings and sketches, Men of the RAF: Forty Portraits With Some Account of Life in the RAF (Oxford University Pre
ss, 1942)
4 Roald Dahl, ‘Death of an Old Man’, first published in Ladies’ Home Journal, 1945
5 Athol Forbes and Hubert Allen (eds), Ten Fighter Boys (Collins, 1942)
9 Blood Runs Hotly
1 Dowding correspondence held in RAF Archives AC 71/17/24
2 RAF Archives AC 71/17/28
3 RAF Archives AC 71/17/29
4 RAF Archives AC 71/17/30
5 Paul Brickhill, Reach for the Sky
6 Ibid.
10 Alert
1 As cited on the RAF’s official website, raf.mod.uk
11 The Sky was Black with Planes
1 Robert Wright, Dowding and the Battle of Britain (Macdonald, 1969)
2 As quoted in Basil Collier, Leader of the Few
3 The captain in question quoted in The Times, 11 July 1940
4 Geoffrey Wellum, First Light (Viking, 2002)
5 As quoted in Jeffrey W. Legro, ‘Military Culture And Inadvertent Escalation In WW2’, International Security, Spring 1994
6 RAF Archives AC 71/17/24
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Wright, Dowding and the Battle of Britain
12 Nerve Endings
1 Basil Collier, Leader of the Few
2 Francis Wilkinson interviewed by Robert Wright in Dowding and the Battle of Britain
13 Big Wing
1 Basil Collier, Leader of the Few
2 Ibid.
3 Iris Cockle, as contributed to the BBC’s ‘People’s War’
4 Paul Brickhill, Reach for the Sky
14 ‘We Will All Be Here Soon’
1 Geoffrey Wellum, First Light
The Secret Life of Fighter Command Page 31
