Six of the Best
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Six of the Best

A Pantheon of Great British Heroes

Sean Brunton

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eBook - ePub

Six of the Best

A Pantheon of Great British Heroes

Sean Brunton

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About This Book

Suffer with Richard the Lionheart in the desert – fight alongside William Wallace at Stirling Bridge – set sail with Lord Nelson – stand your ground with the Duke of Wellington – fly high with Albert Ball VC – and defy the Nazis with 'Big X'…
Hark back to our distant and not so distant past and read about the audacious, courageous and defiant deeds of six Great British heroes. Spanning our island history from the middle ages to the Second World War, these pithy and punchy biographies tell their glorious, moving and sometimes shocking stories.
Striking a determined blow against modern political correctness, Sean Brunton's book will restore your faith in men, Britain and life.

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Year
2021
ISBN
9781398429031
Roger Bushell
‘Big X’
Public schoolboy, Cambridge graduate, barrister, skier and lady-killer; Roger Bushell was the cut-glass, loveable rogue straight out of central casting. But as an RAF Spitfire pilot, escapologist and ultimately as the mastermind behind the biggest breakout from a Nazi POW camp of the entire war, he was as gritty, ruthless and irrepressible as any hero this country has ever nurtured. Though like so many, he was cut-off in his prime. Immortalised as ‘Big X’ in the film The Great Escape, Bushell represented that confident, charming yet defiant patriotism which put fire in the bellies of his fellow countrymen whilst making his enemies despair.
Born in the Transvaal of South Africa, Bushell was the son of a successful English mining engineer. The family lived in privileged surroundings, but he was no namby-pamby child. He learned to drive, ride, fish and shoot at a very early age. In fact, the Bushell family were of some antiquity, an early ancestor having fought at the Battle of Hastings as one of William’s knights. In the Middle Ages, Sir Alan Bushell, who died in 1245, lived by the motto, ‘While I breathe, I hope.’ An older cousin of Bushell’s was Major-General Orde Wingate, the inspirational leader of ‘The Chindits’, the guerrilla army who had the unenviable task of confronting the Japanese army in Burma during WWII. So he came from pretty brave stock.
His mother observed that as a boy he possessed two chief qualities: bravery and honesty. He was also prone to mischief. Whilst Roger was at his South African prep school, several boys were beaten for using a fire escape to spy on the matrons whilst they undressed. Whilst there is no proof that Roger was one of the miscreants, it sounds like the kind of thing he might have done. More pertinently, some also escaped from their dormitories by using the narrow heating shafts that ran down through the school to the ground floor. These shafts bear an uncanny resemblance to the inside of the famous tunnels he conceived later in his life.
At 13 he was sent to school in England: to the military academy of Wellington College in Berkshire. There he was schooled surrounded by the traditions of stiff upper lip, fair-play and gallows humour. His was an education in the Tom Brown tradition and he displayed many of the worthy characteristics of that legendary English schoolboy. Despite a rebellious streak, signs that he was a born leader emerged immediately he arrived when his housemaster wrote to Bushell’s parents, saying:
‘Don’t worry about him. He has already organised the other new boys. I know the type well. He will be beaten fairly often, but he will be well liked and perfectly happy.’
Although he excelled on the sports field, Bushell was a free spirit and did not greatly enjoy the regimented life of Wellington, described at the time as ‘an open prison for boys’. But he flourished and developed a suave belligerence. When he left, his house journal remembered him as an ‘indomitable spirit’, who was ‘always prepared for anything, from big side-runs to a free fight.’ When he left, he spent two terms at Grenoble University where his natural aptitude for languages was converted into true fluency in French. Being based at the foothills of the Alps placed two other new-found attractions in his path: skiing and pretty girls. These were both interests which he immediately pursued with vigour.
Rather than following his father’s ambition for him, to study engineering and follow him into the mining business, Roger in fact went up to Cambridge to read Law at Pembroke College. Here he fell in with a somewhat racy set and developed what his mother perceptively described as a ‘joie de vivre and a touch of joie de vice.’
Whilst he was a bright lawyer, it was his skiing that he really applied himself to. He was in the Cambridge Blues team which beat Oxford in 1930, won the Langlauf at the British Ski Championship at Wengen in 1931 and captained the combined Oxbridge team against the Canadians in 1932. It was whilst competing in Quebec that Bushell had an accident which embedded a ski-tip in his cheek and the corner of his right eye; thereafter, as can be seen from the photographs, he had a somewhat raffish, sometimes slightly sinister droop to that eye. He was described by a pioneer of Alpine skiing as ‘one of the great characters of St Moritz… ’ An early member of the English Kandaha Club in Murren in the Swiss Alps, by the early 1930s he was ‘the fastest Briton on skis’. He had a black run named after him in St Moritz, both on account of his efforts in organising Anglo-Swiss ski-meetings and, more impressively, for his smashing the record for its descent.
Having scraped through his Finals with a Third, his friendship with the high-living Cambridge set, including Viscount Knebworth, opened the door to an even racier life as he headed for London. As his biographer, Simon Pearson described, ‘The fast lane was about to become a lot faster.’
After the Great War, Lord Trenchard, the ‘Father of the RAF’, wished to create a reserve force of part-time pilots to act as back-up to the fledgling RAF. One of the five squadrons set up was 601 squadron, aka ‘the Millionaires’ on account of the type of men invited and affluent enough to join. Flying, it seems, had become the new skiing. It was an exclusive club for wealthy and well-connected young men. The admissions policy was described by an early commanding officer in this way:
‘I gave each applicant marks for his school record in scholarship and athletics. And if he could ride a horse or drive a car, or a motorbike, or sail a boat or ski or play the piano, I gave him more marks.’
Lady Georgiana Curzon
It was a simple but effective way of preventing outsiders from crashing the new party. And so Bushell literally began to fly. He made up for his own relatively modest upbringing with his charm and flamboyance and by the early 1930s, Bushell was racing around London with the elite. It was through them that he met Lady Georgiana Curzon, the socialite and beauty who was to become the love of his life. They enjoyed a glorious summer in 1934. But it was not to be as, in 1935, at her parent’s direction, she married the very wealthy Home Kidston.
Charm and charisma can only get you so far. Georgie’s father Lord Howe had shut the door in Bushell’s charming but non-aristocratic face.
Despite his great friend Lord Knebworth being killed in an air accident in 1933 – a not uncommon fate for budding pilots in those early days of military aviation – Bushell continued and loved to fly. But flying was an expensive ‘hobby’ and so he simultaneously embarked on a career at the Bar, in an attempt to gain some form of financial independence from his father. Bushell moved into a flat in Tite Street with an old school friend, Michael Peacock. The two were inseparable ‘lads about Town’. They both flew, both practiced at the Bar and shared almost everything. They bought a car together and even shared a tail-coat between them, although one can’t help but suspect that Bushell got the greater use out of both of them.
But Bushell had no need to share one thing: women. As his own sister Lis said of him many years later:
‘Roger always had a girlfriend and very often a married one and a rich one. He had many, many girlfriends.’
When his own commander of 601 squadron was told that a scarlet earring had been found in the cockpit of Bushell’s plane, he dryly surmised that Bushell had ‘probably swallowed the other one’!
Having been called to the Bar in 1930, he showed early promise as a criminal defence advocate, practising from his chambers at 1 Temple Gardens, Middle Temple. His name appears frequently in the papers of the time. Apparently, according to one commentator, his style of cross-examination was ‘as unconventional as his slalom technique’.
In 1939, just before the outbreak of war, he defended two RAF pilots for their alleged involvement in the infamous ‘Battle of Barking Creek’, in which a young English pilot officer was tragically shot down and killed by a British Spitfire in a chaotic, friendly-fire cock-up.
Bushell’s clients were acquitted. But whatever the truth of this ‘tragic shambles’, the trial focussed the minds of the RAF on the inadequacies of their Radar and ID procedures at that time. This was perhaps timely, bearing in mind the imminence of the Battle of Britain.
In the meantime, Bushell had been promoted to Flying Officer in February 1934 and Flight Lieutenant in July 1936. But if the winds of war were beginning to blow across the Continent, they had not made much effect on Bushell. It was that same summer when 601 squadron ‘kidnapped’ an officer from rival 600 squadron, bound him and left him out on the parade ground at their base at Hawkinge airfield. When other members of the squadron rushed out to see what was lying there, Roger and his chums proceeded to bomb them from the air with bags of soot, flour and balloons filled with milk and ink. A few days later, 600 squadron retaliated when, at 4.00 am, they bombed 601 squadron at their country retreat in Kent, dropping ‘bombs’ of eggs, yellow ochre, rotten fruit and treacle from their 15 planes; larking about which would probably not be tolerated in the RAF nowadays.
By 1938, Bushell was selected as the volunteer pilot’s representative in a show of aerobatics at the Empire Day display. As his Commanding officer described:
‘His piloting, of course, was exceptional from the start…and this in a squadron where everyone was so enthusiastic and where the normal level was so high. To be outstanding in that crowd was a difficult feat.’
Meanwhile, whilst these hijinks were carrying on in good old Blighty, that same sense of humour did not seem to be replicated in continental Europe. Hitler had created a new air force and by 1937 it was dropping real bombs on real Spaniards in Madrid. On the 26th April 1937, the Luftwaffe committed what was probably the first of their countless Nazi atrocities when they dropped hundreds of bombs on the undefended town of Guernica in the Basque country, killing an estimated 1,654 civilians. The reason they did it? Target practice. By now, even Bushell and his friends, despite their japes, were starting to become aware of the imminent and ugly threat of Germany. Baldwin’s government had started to expand and arm the RAF. The party was nearly over.
As news arrived of Hitler’s ‘deal’ with Stalin to secure his Eastern Front, Bushell was on holiday in Antibes. Demonstrating typical sangfroid, he wrote to his parents,
‘It’s that silly ass Hitler again… it’s becoming such a bore too, and what is much worse, it’s mucked up my holiday this time… ’
A few days later, Hitler invaded Poland with one and a half million troops led by 1,500 Panzers. But Bushell was not intimidated, sending a short telegra...

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