With Charlie and Chippy in bombed out London on February 5th 1941 and the telegraph message that all was well

On leave , 1941

There is something quite sobering in realizing that events which were still fresh in many people’s memories when I was growing up are now 79 years old.

For my generation the Battle of Britain was still recent history.

I was born soon after it began and I grew up with family stories of watching the vapour trails in the skies over Kent and those old black and while films of “the Few.”

Later still on warm summers evenings we would drive out to the Kent pubs some of which were close to the old RAF stations.

But 75 years is a long time and it is easy to take the events for granted after all they are well known and the significance of those few months in the summer of 1940 can get lost in the bigger picture of a war which involved millions and was spread over the continents of the world.

The Line Book

To do so of course is to lose sight of what those months meant to the people who lived through them from the pilots who fought in the skies, the ground crews tasked with keeping the plane s airworthy and the backroom men and women maintaining the radar stations and plotting the incoming enemy aircraft.

Added to which were the families of all those in the front line, watching from a distance and always prepared for the worst.

It is not easy to get a real sense of what all that meant but sometimes you can get a glimpse.

And this month I have been lent the Line Book of 222 Squadron who fought in the Battle of Britain.  The book which is really a day to day record of what went on belongs to my friend David Harrop who acquired it after it had been found in a skip.

Charlie and Chippy in London......... "B flight holding its end up" 1941

So over the next few weeks I want to share this very human set of stories, but I am beginning with a telegram which comes from February 1941.

By then the battle had been won and 222 squadron after a spell in Scotland was back in the south of England on “offensive duties.”

And on Wednesday February 5th, “Chippy and Charlie” telegraphed F/Lt Van Mintz D.F.C., with  “just a line to let you know B flight is holding its end up in London.”

All I know of the three is that F/Lt Van Mintz D.F.C.,was according to David, "Brian Van-Metz a South African ace known to his mates as jeep jeep," and "Chippy was Sergeant D J Chipping."

In time I might be able to identify all three but for now it is just one of those tiny pieces of the human story.

Chippy and Charlie were on leave from RAF Coltishall but felt the need to touch base and no doubt would soon return and perhaps will appear in the line book.

We shall see.

Picture; telegram dated 1941 from the collection of David Harrop