Captain Mainwearing of the Walmington-on-Sea Home guard platoon was insistent that Britain should never be squashed under the tyranny of the Nazi jackboot. By the summer of 1940, however, the country very nearly was but the incredibly audacious bravery of the ‘few’ prevented Britain from falling into such a dismal fate.
Hitler’s ‘Operation Sea lion’ was poised to launch its fleet of landing craft against a beleaguered island. All that was needed was to gain mastery of air power. This is when the stately home of Bentley Priory near Harrow in London also gained its finest hour together with those ‘few’ who fought and won the Battle of Britain after the Battle of France had been lost.
The commander of RAF Fighter Command at the time of the Battle of Britain, Sir Hugh Dowding, was honoured for his efforts with a peerage, as Baron Dowding of Bentley Priory. Hauled out of retirement Dowding reorganised the RAF and turned it into a supreme fighting force. Ironically the Axis power had superior fighter planes with larger bullets, more guns and a longer firing time when compared with the Spitfire’s couple of minutes. The secret, as the UK pilots admitted, was to fire with the sun behind one and to wait until the very last moment when one was as close to the enemy as possible.
Bentley Priory has gone through various reincarnations since its founding as an Augustinian monastery in the early middle ages. It subsequently became a stately home with additions by that great architect Sir John Soane, a residence for Queen Adelaide widow of King William IV, a hotel, a girls’ school, the centre of RAF fighter command and now partly a museum celebrating its crucial role in World War II and an exclusive housing estate.
All these stages are well illustrated in the museum which is an example of how these marvellous mansions, so often close to destruction, may survive with initiative and investment.
We enjoyed the excellent and brilliantly explained exhibits including a 3-d film of Dowding’s time at the priory:
We delighted in the grand architecture which included Queen Adelaide’s accommodation:
We loved the well-kept Italian gardens with their floral displays and their background of the wilder parts of the priory park which is a site of special scientific interest.
I had normally thought that Stalingrad spelt the death-knell of the Reich that was to last a thousand years but I now realise it was the RAF’s victory in the Battle of Britain that really shattered the Hitlerian delusion. How the ex-corporal could have carried on WWII by attacking the Soviets in 1941 while knowing that the UK still remained undefeated beats me and I am no military strategist!
Thank goodness, however, for that elementary tactical mistake! Would Europe have still been dominated by totalitarian governments in the East and in the West today? Would extermination camps have been set up in the UK as well? Would we have to start driving on the right? Would German have become the first language in British schools? Who knows. The Third Reich was so near to perfecting the first atomic bomb which would have definitely sealed the world’s fate; indeed, Bentley Priory continued its defence role until 2008 when operations were finally transferred to Northolt. That Cold War bunker still remains, now filled it, and if I was luckily not brought up in the dark days of the Second World War I still had to suffer the menace of my body melting in a nuclear attack.
Will we still have to suffer further man-made menaces today? What armageddon will come first? The increasing peril of global warming or the increasing threat from terrorist groups who now, for the first time in their history, have an air force and a huge armoury of weapons and materiel virtually abandoned like free gifts by the forces they fought against for so many decades? It doesn’t quite bear thinking does it? But neither did the threats that faced Britain in 1940. Then, however, there was a man who was truly able to face the storm and prepare for it; someone who, disillusioned and embittered, ended his career as a member of the Theosophical society and as a believer in fairies, Air Chief Marshall Hugh Caswall Tremenheere Dowding GCB, GCVO, CMG.
