When you go home, tell them of us ……. : A Walk in the Kent Countryside

Proudly adding this piece of local history written and contributed by Malcolm Gough, Principal of Sutton Valence Preparatory School, Kent, England.

A Walk in the Countryside in Kent

Not long after I arrived to take up my new post as Headmaster of Sutton Valence Preparatory School, Chart Sutton, Kent, in August 2012 and before the first term had started, on a glorious Summer’s late afternoon I decided to explore the beautiful surrounding countryside with my daughter. Our first walk took us below the school, into the farmer’s fields sloping down towards a thicket of trees and a little stream. A short distance away, and invisible, from the lane we came across a small cleared out space and a memorial. It was neatly kept, in contrast to its setting, the side of a wheat field near a wood in the middle of Kent.

Memorial in a wheat field

It seemed different in nature from the kind of thing one would see for a family memorial, and so we determined to find out more about it. I did not realise that in fact my first official duty for the School was to be very closely associated with this spot. The memorial was for a young Hurricane pilot, one of ‘The Few’ who had sadly crashed in that exact place into the side of the hill. Since then, and up until 16 years ago, the identity of that the pilot was unknown, until some good detective work gave him a name and with that the person was revealed. The BBC reported on this last year and some of the story can be found here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/insideout/southeast/series1/plane-crash.shtml

The annual Battle of Britain Memorial Service for our area takes place each year in September at St. Michael’s Church, Chart Sutton, and everyone processes down to the memorial where The Last Post is played. It is attended by a couple of the surviving local ‘Few’ and their families, the local Air Cadet force, the Mayor of Maidstone, an Air Vice Marshall and many others. After that, when weather conditions are suitable, there is a flypast of a surviving Spitfire and then I host the tea for everyone, where there are speeches etc., at the School. In my second year the weather was such that there wasn’t a flypast, and one of the old pilots gruffly remarked to me that back then they ‘didn’t have the luxury or time to decide whether or not the bloody weather was favourable’!

This year at the tea, I spoke to an elderly lady quite by chance in the queue for cakes, and it turned out that it was she, as a young girl, who together with her sister had been sent by her father, a farmer, to see what had happened when the crash of the aircraft had happened; she would never forget the scene, which she thankfully did not get too close to, because she could see there was nothing that could be done, other than race back and call the emergency services.

This year I waited back at the School in case I was needed rather than go down to the memorial. The sound of trumpet drifted up from the fields below and my family and I were on our balcony when the Spitfire flew just a few yards overhead. I was struck by its sheer pace (many times more than a light aircraft today) and that unique guttural sound of the powerful Rolls Royce engine. I found myself reflecting on Pilot Officer Robert Shaw, who crashed about five hundred yards from where my family sleeps safely each night, and the sadness of his lost future. Also, the poor Belgian pilot who crashed up the road a couple of miles away into Staplehurst Rail station killing himself and a station clerk. I thought about my own family and in particular the grandfather, also a Hurricane Pilot, that I never knew and realised once again that history is often best appreciated and understood through lower key, local events and stories than in books and films that, whilst invaluable, can also serve to keep us at a distance from the realities of the past, as of necessity they dwell on larger generalities.