Flying Offier X

80 years after the Battle of Britain, Richard Bates recalls the role his father H.E. Bates played in telling the stories of the famous ‘Few’

- Richard Bates

This month we celebrate the 80th anniversary of The Battle of Britain – only the second threat of invasion of our island in the last 1,000 years. Victorious though we were to be in 1940, it was the closest we have ever come to defeat as a nation.

My father – the novelist H.E. Bates – was living in Kent with his wife and four children and was too old to be called up for service when war was declared in 1939.

However, by 1940 he was itching to ‘do his bit’. He eventually joined the Volunteer Reserve of the RAF and was posted not to the battlefield but to Air Ministry in Whitehall.

There he joined a department named PR3 together with a group of men of similar age. They were a motley crew of poets, painters, photographers, cartoonists and writers. At first it seemed that Air Ministry had little use for them, but then as the war became more threatening the authorities realised they needed to educate the public about the very serious possibility of a second World War developing.

‘Bates asked Air Ministry for a beer allowance so that he might interview the pilots at a local pub’

To give the country some assurance that Britain was not alone in this conflict, H.E. was charged with visiting a number of Fighter and Bomber stations across southern England, where he would interview pilots who had escaped from neighboring European countries that were already under the deadly heel of the Nazis.