Written by Tony Pratley.<\/p>\n
The story of the Battle of Britain, when written down, almost always begins with a quote.\u00a0 It is not a rule, more a convention.\u00a0 \u2018What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over.\u00a0I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin.\u2019 Winston Churchill\u2019s famous declaration even introduced the opening title sequence of the film Battle of Britain <\/em>(1969).\u00a0 Chroniclers in search of something less common do have plenty of choice.\u00a0 King George VI, \u2018I feel happier that we have no allies to be polite to and pamper.\u2019\u00a0 Air Chief Marshall Dowding, \u2018thank God we are alone now.\u2019\u00a0 Even Hermann Goering, \u2018we\u2019d forgotten the English fought best with their backs to the wall.\u2019\u00a0Any one of these quotes will do and it will set the narrative agenda, telling the reader that the story to follow will be about an extraordinary episode in the life of an exceptional nation.\u00a0 \u00a0It is an oft-repeated tale \u2013 a myth, a \u2018memory\u2019, a confection of fact and fiction. Whatever it is, though, is of little concern here.\u00a0I am more interested in the story-teller.\u00a0 This is because, since the beginning of the 1990s, there have been more and more occasions when words won\u2019t do.\u00a0 Such an occasion will be outdoors and involve a crowd numbered in the thousands, and then a Spitfire flypast will do very well instead.<\/p>\n What impact has this had on our traditional story?\u00a0 \u00a0We should remind ourselves who told it first.\u00a0 In the late summer of 1940, the Air Ministry\u2019s Historical Branch commissioned Hilary Aiden St George Saunders, who worked under a number of pseudonyms, to write a short popular account of the air fighting that was then drawing to a close.\u00a0 Whatever the intention \u2013 whether propaganda, communiqu\u00e9 or reportage \u2013 it was a timely intervention.\u00a0 Public perception of the summer-long air fighting was vague and unfocused.\u00a0Saunders worked quickly, as any good jobbing writer must, and his thirty-two page pamphlet was published in March the following year under the title The Battle of Britain: An Air Ministry Account of the Great Days from 8th<\/sup>August-31st<\/sup>October 1940<\/em>.<\/p>\n It was an immediate sensation.\u00a0 Over 300,000 copies were sold on its first day of publication.\u00a0 There were three good reasons for this.\u00a0 The story was a revelation.\u00a0 It managed to bemuse, if not confuse, members of the Air Council.\u00a0 Air Chief Marshall Sir Wilfrid Freeman, Vice-Chief of Air Staff, was one notable sceptic.\u00a0 He would not countenance RAF endorsement of the story Saunders told.\u00a0 That would have to wait until he had moved on to the Ministry of Aircraft Production.\u00a0 On the high street things were different.\u00a0 As an Air Ministry account published under the aegis of His Majesty\u2019s Stationery Office (HMSO) it had more than enough credibility.\u00a0\u00a0 Above all, its remarkable sales were down to its good news.\u00a0A battle had been won and, in March 1941, that was welcome news indeed.\u00a0 None of this, of course, explains why Saunders\u2019 account remains definitive, but the reason for that is straightforward.\u00a0 Saunders set down a new national saga. Woe betide the revisionist who would betray the nation.<\/p>\n A quote is worth a thousand explanatory words, so familiar is the story. But it is a story that has lifted off the page and taken to the air.\u00a0The Battle of Britain Memorial Flight (BBMF) estimates that it performs before over seven million people annually.\u00a0A further forty Spitfires are flown by civilian operators during the summer air show season, to which only football attracts more spectators.\u00a0 Audiences are impressive today but they were not always so.\u00a0 They only started to markedly grow at the beginning of the 1990s.\u00a0Why?\u00a0 The answer was the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of the politics of identity.\u00a0 It was the beginning of a cultural revolution which has had its impact on the story of the Battle of Britain.<\/p>\n The original story, \u2018invented\u2019 by Saunders, is about the nation.\u00a0 It was never about the RAF, for instance, and for this the RAF only had itself to blame.\u00a0For almost fifty years it sought to deny the Battle of Britain, embarrassed by a defensive victory.\u00a0 Today the story is not about the nation but a tribe, the English.\u00a0 It is the Spitfire\u2019s doing.\u00a0 It was in 1942 that the box-office hit The First of the Few\u00a0<\/em>first entwined the story of the Spitfire with that of a typically English genius \u2013 visionary, romantic, well-mannered.\u00a0 The film\u2019s director and star Leslie Howard had built a career in Hollywood during the 1930s portraying such.\u00a0 As a patriot, he had returned to England in 1939 determined to do his bit and that would turn out to be The First of the Few<\/em>.\u00a0 The link he first described would now lie dormant until 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall.\u00a0It had to wait upon that change of narrator.<\/p>\n Post-war, the story told by Saunders was open to interpretation but not revision.\u00a0 Interpretation was how it remained relevant.\u00a0 It survived the rough and tumble of popular culture by being adaptable.\u00a0 Boys who played with their new Airfix plastic Spitfire toys were oblivious to the rhetoric of a nation in arms, a people\u2019s war.\u00a0 Now, however, with a change of narrator, I would suggest the story of the Battle of Britain has at last been revised and not just re-interpreted once again.\u00a0It is no longer about a nation but a tribe.\u00a0 What it means for its place in British popular culture remains to be seen.<\/p>\n Tony Pratley completed his Ph.D. at the University of Kent in 2018.<\/em><\/p>\n Image Credit: CC<\/a> by Alan Wilson<\/a>\/Flickr.<\/em><\/p>\n