Pilots of destiny

This month, 80 years ago, a desperate air battle to stop Nazi domination began over southern England. Here are the stories of three of the Few; young Herts men who helped stop an invasion

- Malcolm Triggs

A statue of a solitary airman staring contemplatively out over the English Channel forms the centerpiece of a national memorial to the men Churchill immortalised as ‘the Few’.

The location, atop Kent’s famous white cliffs and within sight on a clear day of the coast of France, is an appropriate place to pay tribute to the men of the Royal Air Force who defeated the Luftwaffe in 1940 and saved Britain from Nazi invasion.

It was, though, a Hertfordshire man, himself a pilot in the Battle of Britain, who was the inspiration for, and the driving force behind, the enigmatic sculpture at the heart of what is now the Battle of Britain Memorial.

Alan Geoffrey Page (known as Geoffrey) was born in Boxmoor on May 16, 1920 and would go on to have an impressive career in the RAF, earning the Distinguished Service Order and a Distinguished Flying Cross and Bar. It was many years after the conflict that he was to inspire the creation of the National Memorial to the Few at Capel-le-Ferne, now a focus for those who wish to pay their respects to the fewer-than 3,000 men whose bravery and sacrifice helped turn the tide of the Second World War.

It was towards the end of the 1980s that Geoffrey realised that there was no dedicated memorial to the friends and colleagues with whom he had flown in 1940, and decided to put that right. With no site, no memorial and no funds, all he had was an idea – and the kind of determination that was perhaps not surprising in one who had defied seemingly insurmountable odds some five decades earlier.