You will doubtless have read the news and possibly even an obituary of Group Captain John ‘Paddy’ Hemingway, the last of ‘the Few’, who died this week at the great age of 105.
That he lived beyond the age of 21 is little short of miraculous, of course – given that he was shot down no fewer than four times in just a fortnight during the Battle of Britain, which claimed the lives of 544 pilots out of nearly 3,000 who fought for Fighter Command.
Without the victory their service and sacrifice brought, it’s highly likely that the outcome of the second world war would have been reversed. Therefore Group Captain Hemingway’s death is a moment of real national significance – up there with the death of the last Tommy, 111-year-old Harry Patch, in 2009 – because he was our last living link with those valiant young men who filled the cockpits of Hurricanes and Spitfires day after day, sortie after sortie, through the summer of 1940.
But while the last of the Few is gone, there is one way to bring them back – up to a point at least. If you head to your television or computer and go to BBC iPlayer, you really can get close to them, for an hour and 33 minutes – by watching Angels One Five.
Starring Jack Hawkins and the great Michael Denison, 1952’s Angels One Five is almost certainly the very best film made about the Battle of Britain. So if you want an insight into how a bunch of outgunned and outnumbered young men saved Britain in its moment of the gravest national peril – mostly on a diet of beer, cigarettes and hope – then this is the ticket.
Beginning in June 1940, it tells the story of a young Scottish pilot officer named T.B. Baird (nicknamed ‘Septic’) who joins a fighter squadron in Kent (filmed largely at RAF Uxbridge) but does so in a highly ignominious fashion. Coming in to land – he is delivering both himself and a new Hurricane to the squadron – he finds another aircraft landing across the runway. Baird promptly leapfrogs the plane ahead, avoiding a catastrophic collision, but crash lands at the end of the runway in the garden of the Squadron Leader.
After this difficult start, he does go on to join the thinning ranks of ‘Pimpernel’ squadron, is duly accepted, and falls in love with the pretty Betty Carfax played by Veronica Hurst, only to meet a sticky end. As a result Baird and Carfax never make their date and the last interaction we have with a fatally injured Baird is over the radio with the station commander played by Hawkins when the young pilot tells his boss that they’ll have to postpone their planned running race… ‘indefinitely’. Throughout this exchange correct radio voice procedure is followed and the only nod to the emotion of the moment is when the women in the operations room lower their gaze, or when Hawkins looks wistfully into the distance and says ‘out’, before hanging up.
The film ends with the wife of the squadron leader hanging a lantern in the ruins of her house at the end of the runway to help the pilots land safely. The camera then pans back and Winston Churchill’s famous line from his ‘the Few’ speech is displayed – ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few’. Then the soaring brass of the ‘RAF March Past’ plays and the credits roll.
Everything about Angels One Five stresses the importance of duty, rectitude and resilience in a world where bad things happen to good people, all the time
In other words, it’s like a version of Top Gun from a parallel universe, one where Tom Cruise’s Maverick never beds Kelly McGillis – he gets about as far as a chaste motorbike ride, perhaps – and where he dies, without fanfare, at the end. And then no one says anything about it.
Everything about Angels One Five stresses the importance of duty, rectitude and resilience in a world where bad things happen to good people, all the time. So when the operations room is bombed they just pick themselves up, brush the dust off and have a cup of tea to get over it (which does indeed happen in the film).
Of course the verisimilitude is aided by the fact that the film is based on a novel by Wing Commander Pelham Groom, who was technical adviser too. It’s also filled with the crop of postwar acting talent, many of whom had been in uniform so actually knew what it was like. Hawkins had been in the army, Denison had served in the Intelligence Corps and emerged as a captain – and the squadron leader in charge of the operations room was played by Cyril Raymond, who had served for six years in the RAF, was mentioned in dispatches and ended up a Wing Commander and military MBE.
But there’s more to it than that. They had lived through it. And throughout there’s a phlegmatic core like granite flowing in the veins of these men and woman, as they acknowledge those who haven’t come back or roll up their sleeves to get on with warfighting – all as they’re bellowing ‘tally-ho’ when they spot an enemy aircraft. What strikes me from reading remembrances from Group Captain John Hemingway is that it’s like reading dialogue from the film. ‘I’m alive because of luck,’ he is quoted as saying in the Times’s obituary. ‘It’s not false modesty. It was characteristic of those times and the culture of my squadron to be resolute, realistic and not to dramatise those very dramatic times.’
And indeed they were – more than dramatic enough. Which meant that to survive them, people had to merely cope and manage and get on, not revel in or fetishise the horror. In other words, how different this is from our own age.
So I exhort you, find an hour and half this weekend to pay tribute to Group Captain Hemingway and the others who died before him by settling down in front of Angels One Five – named from the RAF jargon of the era (‘Angels’ = enemy, ‘one’ and ‘five’ meaning 15,000 feet). It’s a monochrome masterpiece, a kind of unsparing Guernica dedicated to the Battle of Britain. If I had my way, this film would be played in every secondary school the length and breadth of Britain. This is what positive masculinity looks like. More than that, it’s what duty, courage, sacrifice and resilience look like. It’s a window into a lost world, but one that Group Captain Hemingway would have recognised only too well.
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