Yesterday, on Battle of Britain Day, Chris Lloyd joined family members and villagers at the grave of the 22-year-old pilot who gave his life to turn the course of the Second World War
IT was a very English churchyard scene, with newly mown grass around the grave which was beside a stone wall and beneath the spreading branches of an oak tree, its green acorns still in their cups.
As the 30 mourners bowed their heads to remember the Battle of Britain pilot who lay beneath their feet having given his life exactly 80 years ago, birds sang in the warm September sunshine, a cockerel crowed faintly and, somewhere faraway, a tractor prepared a field for next year’s crop.
Suddenly the rural silence was broken by a memorial flypast.
A Hawk from RAF Leeming, a light burning brilliantly beneath its cockpit, sliced through the air just above Middleton Tyas church at 500ft, ripping through at 400mph, its noise tearing after it a millisecond later.
As soon as it had come, it was gone – time barely to raise a camera lens to capture the moment – and the silence returned, full of birdsong and a distant tractor’s rumblings.
Flying Officer Peter Pease died at 3.05pm on September 15, 1940, as he flew his Spitfire fighter into a formation of German Heinkel bombers in the skies of Kent. He was only 22.
But that day, “the few” of the RAF – men like Pease – managed to gain the upper hand over the Luftwaffe and turn the course of the Second World War, and so the date is now commemorated as Battle of Britain Day.
“We give thanks for the service of Peter Pease,” said churchwarden Elizabeth Croft before the Hawk tore through. “Like Peter, so many young lives, hopes and dreams were never realised as lives were given so we could live in peace and freedom.”
FO Pease was the great-great-great-grandson of Edward “the father of the railways” Pease who created the Stockton & Darlington Railway, and he would have become the 3rd Baronet of Hummersknott had he survived the war.
Instead, he was buried in the family plot at Middleton Tyas.
“It is quite overwhelming,” said his 24-year-old grand nephew George Varley. “I first came to this church in 2017, for my grandmother’s funeral, and I was the same age as he was.
“My grandfather knew him and talks about him, and we were in touch with his fiancé until she died recently.”
He had travelled up for the occasion with his mother, Carolyn, and Lord and Lady Inchape. “My mother was his sister, and he was a very good friend of my father’s,” said Lord Inchape. “They were only six weeks apart, in the top form together at Eton and went to Cambridge together – that’s how my mother met my father.”
Wing Commander James Taylor-Head, the commanding officer of 100 Squadron based at RAF Leeming whose Hawk had shattered the silence, said: “It is very poignant. We cannot forget history and what people have sacrificed.
“The reason why we do what we do is still the same, although today it is a different enemy – they are not attacking the UK mainland, but we work in support of Nato and our allies to defend ourselves.
“Back then was a completely different climate. What they did then we wouldn’t consider now because we look at life and risk in a very different manner – they just flew straight into the face of the enemy.”
Today it takes five years training and 300 hours flying to become a frontline pilot. Peter Pease had only been a full-time airman for 11 months, and his frontline flying career lasted only three months.
The attendance was reduced by the pandemic restrictions, but it included many local people. Gillian Lambert, of Skeeby, had been the Peases gardener at Prior House in Richmond in the 1960s; Susan Mahaffy, inspired by Peter Pease’s story, brought a kneeler she has spent two years making at 18 stitches to the inch to get the precise detail of his plane. It will now become a memorial to him inside the church.
“The Pease family were absolutely huge in Middleton Tyas and were involved with all of the village’s big families,” said Steve Hill, who was one of the organisers of yesterday’s ceremony, “and they have kept in touch with us because they appreciate the way the village looks after the graves.
“We just felt it would be right to do something because it is the 80th anniversary.”
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