If anyone could be described as a poster-boy for “The Few” – as Battle of Britain pilots were christened - it was Richard Hillary. He was good-looking, athletic, intelligent and possessed a natural insouciance which both attracted and repelled. Born the son of an Australian diplomat he was brought up and educated in England and by the time he arrived at Oxford in 1937 he was self-confident, good at sport (especially rowing), attractive to women and possibly not very likable or indeed pleasant. As he himself said of that period he and his friends were bound together by a distrust of emotion and by “a somewhat self-conscious satisfaction in our ability to succeed without apparent effort”.
One episode from his undergraduate days says it all about him and that particular generation. On a rowing tour in pre-war Nazi Germany the boys from Oxford found themselves taking part in a tournament against five rival crews who were better trained and much more confident. Needless to say, to the horror of the Germans, the untrained and lackadaisical Oxford crew won leaving Hillary to muse that it was very much a foretaste of what would happen during the war, that “undisciplined though we might be, we were a match for Hitler’s dogma-fed youth”.
During this same period Hillary served in the University Air Squadron and on the outbreak of war joined 603 Squadron operating from RAF Montrose. No sooner had the squadron moved south than Hillary had five “kills” to his name and had also experienced his first crash on August 29 when he crash-landed in a field near Lympne. Four days later during a dogfight over the Channel Hillary’s Spitfire was hit by a Messerschmitt 109 and he only just managed to escape from his cockpit after the canopy jammed. Horribly burned during the descent he landed in the sea off the Kent coast and after three hours in the water was picked up by the Margate lifeboat.
From there after treatment at Margate and in London he was sent to the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead where his severe burns were treated by the distinguished plastic surgeon Archibald McIndoe who was responsible for treating aircrew who had been badly burned, mainly in the face and limbs. Miraculously Hillary’s face was mended and the government sent him on a propaganda tour of the US but his talks were confined to radio broadcasts as his hosts feared that his scarred features would be off-putting to audiences. It did not prevent him, though, from having a passionate affair with the actress Merle Oberon, wife of the distinguished movie director Alexander Korda.
Like most members of McIndoe’s “Guinea Pig Club” - the treatment was in its infancy and largely experimental - Hillary was anxious to return to flying duties. Having used his influence to persuade the authorities to agree to this move – it helped that his memoir The Last Enemy had become a bestseller - he was posted to 54 Operational Training Unit at RAF Charterhall near Greenlaw in Berwickshire. It was clearly a mistake as Hillary was physically incapable of handling an aircraft and the inevitable happened: on the night of January 8 1943 he was killed together with his navigator Sergeant Wilfred Fison when he lost control of his Bristol Blenheim V light bomber which crashed in heavy fog near Crunklaw Farm. The site is marked by a memorial to the two men and was unveiled in 2001.
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