Search Results for: Tim elkington

While researching and writing my 21st book, Running Up The Down Escalator, I have had to cut various sections to ensure the thing doesn’t become too voluminous. Here’s one section I cut, telling the story of our father, Tim’s, persistent good luck, despite many incidents and accidents, through WW2.

Born in 1920, Tim lived to fly—though it almost killed him many times. He had trained at RAF Cranwell, joining No.1 Squadron in 1940, as the war got under way. The day after he shot down an enemy fighter, he was himself shot down, but was soon back in action. On 9 October, he probably destroyed a Junkers 88, then on the 27th he sent a Dornier 215 diving into the Channel. 

On the debit side, at one point he flew into a high-tension power cable across the River Tyne, plunging the village where he was billeted into darkness. ‘Not popular,’ his notes to me recalled. ‘Posted!’

By August 1941, following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, he set sail with 134 Squadron, as part of 151 Wing. They operated Hurricanes in the Murmansk area, teaching Soviet aircrew to fly and service the aircraft. While in the Soviet Union, he would share in the destruction of another Ju 88. 

His convoy was the only one to make it unscathed both ways. And the luck kept coming.

At one point he was a CAM pilot, a daredevil ploy that involved flying rocket-assisted Hurricanes on sorties from converted merchant ships to protect convoys. The life expectancy of downed pilots in the icy Arctic waters was measured in minutes. 

In 1994, Tim faxed me the background details on one of the biggest issues the RAF pilots faced at the time in Russia. Low quality standards in the Russian fuel industry meant that the Hurricanes would stall when wax formed in the fuel at low temperatures experienced as the aircraft climbed. In the end, tin—of which Russia was a major producer—became a key element in the Broquet fuel catalyst, which helped save the day.

That adventure ended when the rest of his squadron was sent to the Middle East and Far East, where many of his colleagues and friends were lost. Of thirty-five CAM ships, he later discovered, no less than twelve were sunk.

Posted back to No. 1 Squadron, he also narrowly avoided the disastrous PQ17 convoy to Russia, where his replacement CAM pilot was killed. Next, he was switched to hazardous night fighter work and attempts to down early V1 flying bombs, or ‘doodlebugs.’

Then came 197 Squadron, flying heavier Typhoon fighter-bombers. Here Lady Luck seems to have intervened particularly energetically. With another pilot, he was posted to 67 Squadron, then sent to India, considered extremely dangerous at the time for RAF pilots. Their convoy through the Mediterranean was unescorted, losing several ships along the way. And that other pilot? He was shot down and beheaded by the Japanese. 

Back home, meanwhile, 197’s Typhoons were used in low-flying ground attack roles during the D-Day landings, resulting in the loss of 38 of their 40 pilots. Again, that could so easily have been Tim.

In later life his upper lip sported a scar that made him seem permanently, quirkily amused. That wound had been incurred when the engine of his Mustang failed on take-off in India. Trapped in a fume-filled cockpit, he managed to crack through the canopy and escape. 

Later, test-flying a captured Japanese Zeke-52, his cockpit filled with spurting fuel. Next, flying a Tempest back from Delhi, he was overcome by fumes, tried to bail out, failed and eventually, as a last resort, managed to land the aircraft safely at Cawnpore. In 1945 alone, his aircraft suffered four successive tire bursts, with India’s baking sun causing rubber to perish rapidly.

But one of his greatest wartime escapes happened as the war reached its bloody finale. He was ordered to lead a flight of six spotter planes down to Ceylon (today’s Sri Lanka), to take part in ‘Operation Zipper’ as the Allies invaded Burma (today’s Myanmar). By its very nature, a low-flying mission, in slow aircraft, he was informed, would be something of a suicide mission. 

Then, as they were on their way, the news came through that Japan had surrendered. Thanks to the psychological impact of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings on a Japan that would otherwise have fought on, at immense cost to its own people and to the invading forces.

GreenBiz published my latest column today, focusing on the role of awards and prizes in the next phase of change.

Maybe it’s the continuing saga of my eye surgery, with a couple of recent trips to Moorfields, that has me seeing the world in a slightly kaleidoscopic way? But I think it’s more a question of the general acceleration ahead of COP26, opening this week.

While cleaning up my computer desktop ahead of leaving for Glasgow, I came across these images from recent weeks. The Sacha one came through today from Conservation Without Borders, ahead of the ITV documentary this evening on Sacha’s flight, led by Joanna Lumley, filmed before the tragic crash on 18 September.

The next two images link to a presentation I did to senior partners at lawyers Slaughter And May, and then I did another session for lawyers Mission de Reya, this time spotlighting the work of young environmental activists.

The goose reflects the fact that all around the signs of autumn are pressing in. In that spirit, we have had three new windows put into the house, one on each floor, to better insulate, thermally and acoustically.

The last two images are from an evening out we had with the team, at the Conduit Club – the first time we had been there since the move from Mayfair to Covent Garden. A delightful evening.

Among things that have been in my mind recently have been my first air trip, this one to Zürich, to present to bankers Julius Bär, with a frenzy of form-filling before I went; a continuing series of talks (e.g. one for chairs of Deloitte client companies, another involving moderating a panel of CEOs for WBCSD); and thinking about the next book, which suddenly seems to have got itself together after a number of abortive starts.

My favourite Kew Gardens greenhouse is the Princess of Wales Conservatory – where in 1985 Sir David Attenborough buried the time capsule originally thought up by Elaine during a dinner in Barnes with Gaia Books co-founders Joss and David Pearson.

The time capsule contained seeds of extinction-prone plants and a copy of The Gaia Atlas of Planet Management, which I had helped Joss and Norman Myers bring to life.

Our daughters, Gaia and Hania – then aged 6 and 8 – sat on Sir David’s knees, all three wearing hard hats, as he prepared to lower the time capsule into the newly-built Conservatory’s floor.

Yesterday, Gaia, Elaine and I went to see this year’s Orchid Festival – and walked around the time capsule plaque, while I pondered that each and every orchid on display was a time capsule in its own right. Shaped by its evolutionary history in ways that emergent sciences like epigenetics are only just beginning to probe and understand.

2019 has been a year to remember, with both my father, Tim, dying on 1 February, while Elaine and I were in Copenhagen, and my mother, Pat, dying this week, on 19 November. In her case, after a long illness that had her confined to bed – dependent on my three siblings and various forms of nursing and end-of-life care, including the magnificent Kate’s Home Nursing. Both died at home, with family members around, a real privilege in these days of increasingly institutionalised care.

As her younger brother, Paul, put it to me today, “Pat, my sister, your mother, was a most remarkable being – she was very close and dear to me all my life and a prop and mainstay in troubled times. She had what I can only describe as a ‘glow’ – almost an aura that even shows in photographs of her over the years, she will be most sorely missed by us all, and leaving us she has taken with her much love and many memories.” She was certainly an extraordinary story-teller.

Recalling her in happier times, and her first use of headphones, the first image is of her in the Hill House kitchen. I had recorded her talking about the poltergeist that haunted her as a child, when her parents were divorcing, and the ghost that she was convinced haunted (in a positive way) the end of Hill House where there is a 400-year-old oak staircase. We knew her as Belinda. The story goes, though we heard it long after Pat first saw a mob-capped girl sitting at the foot of her bed, that a young maid fell down the stairs and broke her neck.

The second image, below, honours the huge responsibility her generation carried, symbolised by the Soviet/Russian veterans coming up to see her in bed after Tim’s memorial service. His photo, with great-grandson Gene on his lap, is in the background. The woman in red hat a former partisan, the only person from her entire town to survive WWII. A world of ghosts.

Pat and Tim voted the wrong way on Brexit, she saying the chimney-sweep told her to do so, but we loved them nonetheless!

She would have loved the fact that I was at Buckingham Palace the day after she died, though the sacking of Prince Andrew would not have escaped her notice or comment.

Her views didn’t always follow well-worn tracks, though she would most definitely not have approved of the way in which the monarchy was being dragged through hedges backwards by the shenanigans of the Queen’s favourite son. But she would definitely have approved of the way half a dozen grey vacuum cleaners were arrayed in one space I passed en route to the Billiards room, lined up in regimental order.