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from Cathy (cathyvpreece@aol.com)
April 12, 2002

Tory leader sees father's memoir get fresh wings By Robin Young THE Leader of the Opposition, Iain Duncan Smith, was flying by the seat of his pants yesterday at the Imperial War Museum in Kennington, south-east London. He was gracing a book launch in place of his late father, Group Captain Wilfred “Smithy” Duncan Smith, who died in 1996. The post of Leader of the Opposition is certainly no bed of roses, but “Smithy” Duncan Smith really knew what it was to be in the hot seat. He was a Spitfire pilot who survived four years in the skies at a time when an RAF pilot’s average life expectancy was just four and a half weeks. Iain Duncan Smith, whose own literary ambitions stalled with the rejection of his first novel, a thriller called Ithaca, was relaunching his father’s war memoir, Spitfire Into Battle, which has returned to print after a 20-year hiatus. The book includes some episodes of dry humour, such as an account of using a Spitfire’s home run to shoot up German officers “for diverting sport” while they were gardening. Spitfire Into Battle is hailed by its publisher, John Murray, as “a backlist classic”. Iain Duncan Smith has supplied a foreword for the new paperback edition. Having himself preferred the Scots Guards to the RAF (“my father was always telling me the Army were pongos, to which I had to reply that we called the RAF Crab-air”), Mr Duncan Smith perhaps wisely chose to fly yesterday in close formation with another son commemorating his Spitfire- generation father: Dr Gordon Mitchell, whose book about his father, the Spitfire’s designer, is reissued in a revised, enlarged third edition entitled R.J. Mitchell: Schooldays to Spitfire. For such a dual event many of the Few and their widows, descendants and admirers were on parade. Dame Vera Lynn beamed; Lady Bader, widow of air ace Sir Douglas, circulated; Air Chief Marshal Sir Christopher Foxley- Norris, chairman of the Battle of Britain Fighter Association, still cut a noble figure, touring the room in a wheelchair. Some of the veterans were a mite irascible. Raymond Baxter, the veteran television presenter who flew 227 wartime missions in Spitfires, said bluntly: “I can never forgive ‘Smithy’ one thing. In his book he says that at one stage RAF morale was very low. In six years in the Service I never knew it so. It was always quite amazingly high.” “Yes, that was complete balderdash,” confirmed co-pilot Mike Francis, obviously ready to scramble for another aggressive sortie if required. “We never doubted we would win.” But they added afterwards that “Smithy” had been a great leader, an inspirational officer who shot down 18 enemy aircraft. “Smithy”, one of the RAF’s most decorated pilots, became the last RAF pilot to fly the Spitfire operationally after the war. The aircraft was described as “beautiful and frail, yet agile, potent and powerful”. “I always wanted a woman like that,” remarked Squadron Leader Gerald “Stap-me” Stapleton (six confirmed kills, many probables). After photographs with the museum’s Mark 1A Spitfire, still in its wartime livery, Mr Duncan Smith spoke from notes hastily sketched on the back of his chequebook. “I would not draw parallels between myself and my father,” he said, “but you cannot help but learn from somebody who has displayed such leadership. His was a remarkable generation, and I like to think he was a remarkable member of it.” The new edition of Spitfire Into Battle has on its cover, at the Tory leader’s suggestion, a picture of a painting which has hung in the family home for decades. “I thought the photographs they originally proposed looked dull,” he said. “I got my mother to photograph the family’s painting of a Spitfire in the clouds from an angle, so that she would not get reflected flash, and that was it.”

(posted 8022 days ago)

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