Dowding of Fighter Command

Victor of the Battle of Britain

Vincent Orange

• Publisher: Grub Street Publishing
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781908117748
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

An extensive biography of the life and distinguished military career of the Scottish air chief marshal.
Making full use of archival sources, studies by other scholars, and information provided by family members, Vincent Orange has completed the first biography of Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding to cover his entire life.
Soldier, pilot, wireless pioneer, squadron commander, spiritualist, champion skier, "Stuffy" Dowding is perhaps best known as the creator of the first radar-based air defense system and his no less remarkable management of such throughout the Battle of Britain. Dowding served in "delightful and dangerous Iraq," helped to pacify unrest in the Holy Land, was involved in the R.101 airship disaster, and oversaw the creation of Britain's first eight-gun monoplanes, the Hurricane and Spitfire. Controversially dismissed from Fighter Command and refused the R.A.F.'s highest rank, he nevertheless became the first airman elevated to the peerage since Trenchard. Westminster Abbey was packed for his memorial service in March 1970 with more than 46 air marshals in attendance; and in 1988, H.M. the Queen Mother unveiled a statue in his honor.
With his expert eye, respected historian Orange has analyzed and evaluated every episode of Dowding's exceptional career to produce the definitive biography.

1

From Moffat to Upavon, 1882-1914

Wiltshire Scotsman

His full name was Hugh Caswall Tremenheere Dowding. He was a Scotsman, born in the village of Moffat, about 50 miles south of Edinburgh, on 24 April 1882.¹ A number of historians, however, insist that he was really an Englishman because his father was from the other end of Britain, latest in a long line of Wiltshire men, most of them parsons, teachers, soldiers or sailors although his great-grandfather – John Dowding – was a banker and owned a local newspaper.² His mother was also from southern England, but it can be argued that the boy was shaped by his first 13 years in Scotland. As a rule, we do not change much after that age, save to become a disappointment to ourselves and to those who know or even love us.

Moffat has a splendid statue of a ram, erected in 1875 and standing proudly on a rock, to honour the importance of sheep farming in the area. The image of that ram – immovable, unwilling to back down from any challenge – might also stand for Dowding. He would often have heard locals telling visitors that ‘it has nae lugs’; true, but it sees clearly, just as Dowding did throughout his long life as a soldier, airman and in his last 20 years as an influential opponent of cruelty to animals. It is likely, however, that Moffat’s famous Toffee Shop, an irresistible magnet for locals and visitors alike, appealed more to young Dowding – if he was allowed to spend his pocket money there.

Whether we think Dowding was shaped more by rural Scotland than rural Wiltshire, he was certainly not an urban man: Whitehall was never, for him, a natural home, which may help us to understand why he was so often at odds with officers who were comfortable in its corridors of power. Moffat has a sulphur spring and some of that sulphur evidently got into young Hugh’s bloodstream because many of his colleagues – especially those in high office – would be shrivelled by him in later years. It was only when he was elderly and married for a second time that he became an amiable chap, easy to get along with.

John Dowding, Hugh’s great-grandfather, had a son, Benjamin, who reverted to family tradition and became rector of Southbroom in Wiltshire.³ He married Maria Caswall, daughter of a fellow-parson and grand-niece of a bishop. Hugh’s father, Arthur John Dowding (1855-1932), was one of their ten children. He was educated at Winchester College, as were several of Hugh’s forebears. One of Britain’s oldest public schools (founded by bishop William of Wykeham in 1382), it is spiritual home to countless ‘Wykehamists’ who became famous in every walk of life and enjoy a reputation for being distinctive if not distinguished. Arthur was a good scholar, cricketer and athlete, cheerful and popular, who very properly became a prefect. He did well after Winchester, when he went up to New College, Oxford (also founded by bishop William, in 1379).

After brief spells of teaching in England, Arthur went to Fettes College in Edinburgh, one of Scotland’s most famous schools. There he learned that wealthy local families regretted the lack of a nearby preparatory school run by gentlemen for their sons awaiting entry to Fettes. Arthur had class; they had money. So he agreed with a clergyman friend to set up a school dedicated to St Ninian that opened in Moffat in 1879. Ninian, who lived c. 360-432, was a significant choice as patron because it was he who began the endless task of converting the Scots to Christianity. He also built the first known stone church in Britain.⁴

There were nine first-day pupils, among them E. W. Hornung, creator of Raffles – gentleman, cricketer, thief – who is the antithesis of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s immortal Sherlock Holmes in that he commits crimes instead of solving them. Willie Hornung married Doyle’s sister Connie and the two authors became close friends. Like Doyle, whom he greatly admired, Hugh Dowding became in later life a devout Spiritualist.⁵

St Ninian’s prospered and in 1880 Arthur Dowding was able to marry Maud Tremenheere (1855-1934), daughter of Lieutenant-General Charles Tremenheere, chief engineer in the Public Works Department of Bombay Presidency. Arthur and Maud had four children, of whom Hugh was the eldest. Then came Hilda (1884-1976), who never married. She skied well and became a fine ice-skater. During the Great War, she served with the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry in Italy. Otherwise, like so many daughters of her class and generation, she devoted her life to the family, especially to Hugh. At number three came Arthur Ninian (1886-1966), who reached admiral rank in the Royal Navy and finally Kenneth Townley (1889-1979), an articled clerk with a firm of London solicitors who joined the Royal Flying Corps in 1914, qualified as a pilot and briefly commanded a squadron in Italy. Unlike his brothers, Kenneth chose not to follow a military career after the Great War.⁶

Hugh’s parents were intelligent, educated, hard-working and prosperous; morally secure, wise and firm. He was not sent away from home at a tender age, as were so many boys of his class, to cope with strange adults and a host of unknown boys. On the other hand, there are disadvantages to being the headmaster’s son. When the other boys left St Ninian’s for the holidays, Hugh merely moved to another room in the same house. Although Arthur Dowding was respected by his pupils, it was inevitable that his words, moods and actions should be much discussed by the boys in private, and not always reverently, but Hugh was excluded from all this normal, healthy gossip.⁷

Unstuffy Maverick

Dowding acquired the nickname ‘Stuffy’ when he was about 30 years old, and some of that word’s meanings might reasonably be applied to him: he was indeed ‘prim’, as were many late Victorian gentlemen – and ladies – of the comfortable middle-classes. No-one, however, denies that he became a man of formidable personality – cold, rather than hot – with a sharp tongue and an even sharper pen. Usually, though, when dealing with subordinates or with those men and women who worked as hard as he did, he was the soul of formal courtesy. Better still, he was a good listener and as ready to back them, if he thought they had a fair case, as he was to stand up for himself in any dispute with other authorities, no matter how high. But it was mainly on the polo ground or the ski field, or with members of his immediate family, that Dowding was a jovial man. One says ‘mainly’ because a contemporary of his – Air Chief Marshal Sir Philip Joubert de la Ferté, who was by no means an uncritical admirer – recorded that:

‘Out of office hours he could be an extremely entertaining companion, having a fund of good stories and a quick wit with which to tell them. This sense of humour did not, as a rule, extend into his work, and he could be extremely exacting and tiresome to his subordinates. He had, however, a great sense of justice which earned him the respect of all who worked with him.’⁸

‘Since I was a child,’ Dowding once recalled, ‘I have never accepted ideas because they were orthodox, and consequently I have frequently found myself in opposition to generally-accepted views.’ He went on to say, somewhat smugly even though with justification, ‘perhaps, in retrospect, this has not been altogether a bad thing.’⁹ If that is so, we might think of him as a maverick rather than stuffy: the dictionary tells us that one meaning of ‘maverick’ is an unorthodox person and Dowding was certainly that.

As for the ‘generally-accepted views’ which Dowding opposed, he had in mind those of Hugh Trenchard, widely regarded as a founding father of the Royal Air Force. Trenchard, his acolytes and many historians (not only those appointed by the Air Ministry) elevated those views into a doctrine.¹⁰ For many years, that doctrine was blindly accepted by most ambitious officers, but never by Dowding. This resistance to conventional opinion lies at the root of his many quarrels with authority. He was also reluctant to accept a need to persuade opponents that he was in the right or even to compromise with them. Persuasion and compromise were concepts that he found difficult to accept throughout his career, especially in important matters that he had carefully studied. During the 1930s he became the RAF’s most senior serving officer and disliked resistance to his decisions from Air Ministry officials who were very much his juniors in rank and service.

This exasperating maverick might best be described these days as ‘Dowding of Fighter Command’. When he was tardily raised to the peerage – as a mere baron, unlike several contemporaries who were made viscounts or even earls – he took ‘of Bentley Priory’ as part of his title. Certainly appropriate, but the broader title would be even more fitting, for no subsequent head of that command, now extinct, had either his authority or bore anything like his weight of responsibility for Britain’s safety.

As for Bentley Priory and the grounds in which it stands, they will pass out of Royal Air Force hands in 2008. Sic transit gloria mundi as it always does, for nearly everyone who served at Bentley Priory when it mattered to Britain and her allies is now dead or soon will be. The decision to sell pleases those persons who propose to convert it into a housing estate, and does not distress those revisionists who like to tell us that the significance of the Battle of Britain has been grossly exaggerated. Perhaps it has, in some quarters. But they also insist that Dowding’s command did not fight it alone. In fact, neither he nor the men and women, in or out of uniform, who served with him before or during 1940 ever made such a foolish claim. That year (and also the five years following) form one of those rare periods in the life of any society when a majority of its people were united by a great purpose and tried (how they tried!) to live above their ordinary selves. We have not seen the like since.

The failure of the Royal Air Force to promote Dowding to its highest rank disgraces those responsible, as scores of men and women who served with him – including many opponents – have said or written, often vehemently, in every year since at least 1943. Fortunately, the guilty men are now barely remembered and their pettiness has not prevented Dowding from being recognised today as one of the 20th Century’s heroes, a man who deserves permanent honour for the vital part he played in preventing the worldwide triumph of Hitler’s vile régime.

As Basil Collier, his first biographer, wrote more than half a century ago:

‘It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that, but for Dowding, there would have been no Hurricane, no Spitfire, no radar chain, no escape for the Royal Air Force from the fate that had overwhelmed its counterparts in European countries, no avoidance of irremediable disaster.’

He was ‘the presiding genius’; the ‘Victor of the Battle of Britain’.¹¹

He also deserves credit for selecting a man – Keith Park – who proved capable of conducting that defence during 1940.¹²

Artillery Officer

Dowding left St Ninian’s in his 14th year for Winchester College. It was a world away, in distance and customs, from everything he had known. He arrived alone, after a long journey via Edinburgh and London, and remained alone, throughout his four years there (1895-9). Unlike his father – a Wiltshire man who entered that school from close range with several friends – Hugh made no mark. Useless at games; not at all a bright spark socially; barely adequate academically; never considered prefect material; and speaking, when he spoke at all, in a curious Scotch-Wiltshire accent. He did, however, become a very correct late-Victorian gentleman, taking to heart Winchester’s motto, ‘Manners Makyth Man’.

Quite unable to master classical Greek – essential for following his father to New College, Oxford – he decided to enter the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, in September 1899. According to his stepson, Dowding hoped to become an engineer, a calling that would have suited his practical talents. For a boy of his class in that generation, however, his only hope of achieving such an ambition – supposing it was as fully formed then as he later claimed it had been – was in the Army. As a consequence of the outbreak of war in South Africa, the course at Woolwich was shortened to one year and Dowding was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Royal Garrison Artillery in August 1900, aged 18. His examination results were too poor (laziness, he later admitted, was the cause) to win him a commission in the more prestigious Royal Engineers.¹³

Second Lieutenant Dowding served first in Gibraltar. In those days, he recalled in 1956:

‘Unless one had a pony one was confined to the somewhat dreary precincts of the Rock. A second lieutenant’s pay at that time was 5s 7d a day and one’s mess bill came to about 3s 6d even for the most temperate. So, even with the £100 a year allowance which I had from my father, it was some months before I could save up the £15 which it cost me to buy my first pony.’

One’s heart does not bleed for this young man, because such a generous annual allowance was well beyond the reach, if not the desire, of most contemporaries. Thanks to his father (and his own frugality), he was able to enjoy hunting in the nearby cork woods: ‘I don’t think we did much execution among the foxes, but it was great fun and got us away from the prison-like confines of the Rock.’

In the late autumn of 1901 Dowding’s company was transferred to Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where he learned to shoot fast-flying snipe and made his first attempts at playing polo: not a game for the faint-hearted, but a social obligation for ambitious subalterns. Dowding, however, became dissatisfied with his career prospects and asked for a transfer to the Mountain Artillery. He had still to learn the outcome of his request when the company was transferred, after less than 12 months, to Hong Kong.

There he was promoted in May 1902 to lieutenant and flourished: plenty of polo, horse-racing, yachting, picnics and even mixed bathing. Racing at Hong Kong was great fun, he recalled, and entirely amateur. Every year a batch of 30 or 40 ponies was brought all the way from Manchuria, more than 1,200 miles to the north. One paid a fixed price for a pony assigned by lot. Dowding got what seemed to be a hopeless nag, which he named Panjandrum, and refused to place a bet before riding him in the first race for both of them. To everyone’s amazement, especially his own, Panjandrum romped home. A drunken Canadian doctor, who backed him by accident, won $1,140 and Dowding’s capacity for composure under stress received its first serious test.

Another test came in February 1904 when a Japanese attack destroyed Russian warships in Port Arthur, at the southern tip of Manchuria. The authorities feared that a Russian fleet might try to seize Hong Kong as a base for operations against Japan. So Dowding, in charge of the defending guns, got a shock when a sergeant told him that ‘there was two Russians shot here this morning’. After further discussion, he learned that the sergeant had actually said ‘there was two rations short here this morning’.

Dowding spent one leave in Japan, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 FROM MOFFAT TO UPAVON, 1882-1914
• 2 LIFE AND DEATH ON THE WESTERN FRONT, 1914-1915
• 3 AT ODDS WITH TRENCHARD, 1916-1920
• 4 FROM PAGEANTS TO PALESTINE, 1920-1930
• 5 FRAMING AN AIR DEFENCE, 1914-1930
• 6 LIFE IN THE 1930s: AN AIRCRAFT REVOLUTION
• 7 LIFE IN THE 1930s: RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT
• 8 AT FIGHTER COMMAND, 1936: SAVING A DESTITUTE CHILD
• 9 IMPROVING A SYSTEM, 1937-1938
• 10 STRENGTHENING FIGHTER COMMAND, 1938-1939
• 11 PREPARING FOR WAR, 1939
• 12 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE HILL, 1933-1940
• 13 THE PRACTICE WAR, 1939-1940
• 14 FROM NORWAY TO DUNKIRK, APRIL TO JUNE 1940
• 15 THE DAY BATTLE, JUNE TO AUGUST 1940
• 16 THE DAY BATTLE, AUGUST TO OCTOBER 1940
• 17 THE NIGHT BATTLE, SEPTEMBER TO NOVEMBER 1940
• 18 WHAT HAPPENED NEXT: AFTER NOVEMBER 1940
• 19 AMERICAN INTERLUDE, NOVEMBER 1940 TO MAY 1941
• 20 END OF A CAREER, MAY 1941 TO JULY 1942
• 21 OUT OF OFFICE, AFTER JULY 1942
• 22 A NEW CAREER, FROM JULY 1942
• ENDNOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY AND SOURCES
• INDEX