Battle of Britain museum visits 1 - Bentley Priory

[33LIMA 972]

The prologue

'Not really a mission report', you might say, but I was 'a man on a mission' in this case, and there is a strong combat sim connection!

Like reading up on the subject, a museum visit can be a great way of deepening your ‘feel’ for the historical background of a sim you’re playing...thereby enhancing that semi-mystical quality called 'immersion'. I’ve been playing A2A’s most excellent Battle of Britain II solidly now for about six months, which has spurred me to expand my stock of books on the subject. And I enthusiastically grabbed the chance proffered by a short break in London last week to pick and plan some related museums to visit. Online research soon identified the two I most wanted to see and this report records and illustrates the first of my visits. I hope it and the one to follow will be of interest to anyone contemplating doing likewise, or those too far away to do so, and a useful supplement to the museums' own sites - which for Bentley Priory, you can find here.

The 1969 film Battle of Britain has many memorable moments. For me, one of those moments is right at the end. Lawrence Olivier, playing Air Chief Marshall Sir Hugh Dowding - head of RAF Fighter Command and architect of the defensive system that nowadays bears his name – walks out of his office at Fighter Command HQ and onto the veranda. The tide has turned and he can sense his battle has finally been won. He looks out across the beautiful gardens, south towards London, like his own command bombed but not broken. The camera follows his gaze, up into the blue sky, as Ron Goodwin’s majestic main theme wells up. Churchill’s famous tribute to ‘the Few’ is displayed, and the credits begin to roll, starting with the Battle’s real participants and their casualties.

The scene was of course filmed at the real HQ at Bentley Priory. Finding that it was now a museum, open to the public, I was quietly thrilled to think that  I might see Dowding’s office, stand on that veranda and savour that same view – walking in the footsteps not only of ‘Sir Larry’, but also of Hugh Caswall Tremenheere Dowding, the great man himself.

I’ll try to avoid duplicating here what you can readily find in the museum’s own website, and concentrate on what I saw when I went there.

I had three nights at the St Giles Hotel at the bottom of Tottenham Court Road, a few yards from the junction with Oxford Street with the Centre Point block just across the road and the Post Office Tower behind the hotel on the other side. Bentley Priory was open ten till five (four, October to February) but only on one of the days of my stay – the Monday – so it was then, or never. I took the London Underground aka ‘Tube’ from Bond Street station a short walk away. Bentley Priory is in Stanmore, right out in ‘the leafy suburbs’, and the last station on the Tube’s Jubilee Line. You can walk the last mile or so, mostly uphill, but I jumped on a number 142 double-decker London bus at the stop immediately outside Stanmore station. The whole journey took over an hour each way, with about the last half of the Tube part out in the open, which is a bit less wearing, and more interesting, than being whirled along noisily in a tunnel. As a sop to any railway fans reading this, this is Stanmore station looking north.

The station is used by conventional ‘overground’ trains as well as the Tube, all third rail electrified and operated by London Transport – or Transport for London aka TfL, somebody having decided such a rebrand was worth the cost and effort. Marketing and design companies must have seen them coming, as the saying goes. Those bright red buses can be seen a long way off.

　

The visit - outside in

The 142 service bus’s PA announces the museum stop, so I had no worries about when to hop off. The problem came when I turned left onto the drive leading to the museum, for it was sealed behind closed and apparently locked black iron gates. A carload of visitors prompted the (civilian) security chappie to emerge from the nearby gatehouse, letting me in too and allaying my fears that I had got the opening days wrong.

The drive curved off to the left, and coming around the corner I stopped to savour my first real-life view of the former Headquarters of RAF Fighter Command.

The building is surrounded, mostly at a respectful distance, by upmarket housing built or clad in similar fashion (sandstone?) to the Priory, and you can’t wander off too far before seeing signs saying ‘Residents only’. Apparently, like many such buildings, the Priory was camouflaged dark green and dark earth on the outbreak of World War 2, but this wasn’t reproduced in the film and the museum has sensibly chosen not to deface the fine building for the sake of turning the clock back.

Of course, my first stop was the two aircraft prominently displayed outside.

There seems to be a significant market for fiberglass replica Spitfire and Hurricane ‘gate guardians’ these days, and my first few minutes were spent photographing these two at Bentley Priory. The Spit apparently replaced a real one, of a later mark, since restored to flying condition. The replica looks well, although purists might find minor faults here or there. I wasn’t interested in rivet-counting or nit-picking. Those over-wing Type B roundels do look a tad small, though...

Having built the Revell 1/32 Spit in the 1970s, I naturally recognised the squadron codes as belonging to 610 ‘County of Chester’ Squadron. There’s a plaque in front telling you the replica represents the aircraft flown by Cyril Bamberger.

On the other side of the big pine tree is the replica Hurricane. 

As the plaque says, this one is in the markings of a machine flown during the Battle by Pete Brothers of 32 Squadron, complete with that unit's oversized code letters.

Even though I knew these weren’t real aircraft, they made a suitable impression and of course I could not resist getting plenty of pics, despite the overcast skies.

Stepping into the museum, this is the impressive sight that greeted me.

Helpful staff on a desk ahead and right took my modest fee, gave me a site map and suggested I start by viewing the c.10 minute introductory film, run as required as visitors arrived. The staff immediately understood me when I described wanting to walk the scene at the end of the Battle of Britain film and I accepted their suggestion to ‘fly a holding pattern’ in one of the fine adjacent display rooms while waiting the few minutes for the next showing.

The intro film is projected onto a wall just in front of you and is conventional – until it cuts to describing the role of Dowding. Suddenly, camera obscura style, the light goes on in the previously blacked-out room on the other side of the wall-screen. Behind the projected images, you can now see Dowding’s actual office, complete with his desk, green desk lamp and other fittings of the time, as featured in the BoB movie. A uniformed actor speaks to some of Dowding’s pronouncements as the story continues, ending with the Battle won and the great man being bidden ‘Goodbye, sir’ as his silhouette leaves the office for the last time in his career. It avoids the controversy over how Dowding was let go with little recognition at the time, but it’s still ‘lump in the throat’ stuff and not to be missed.

After that you’re on your own, and can wander inside and outside at your leisure. Which is what I did, taking pictures as I went.

This statue is of Dowding, just outside the door into the screening room and his office next door.

A little further on is this group of typical RAF fighter pilots and the obligatory dog.

 

In a room beyond is a mock-up Spitfire cockpit, complete with leather flying helmet and goggles, primarily for selfies. Yes I did get in, to find that the flying controls don’t operate realistically. So I quickly abandoned any notion of dismantling, smuggling out 'one piece at a time' and shipping home for re-assembly as a simming cockpit.

And yes, as nobody was looking, I did don the gear and take the selfie, but I’ll need to be suitably bribed or have drink taken, to post that one!

On a mantelpiece dominated by a fine portrait of King George VI, next to a silver or pewter Spitfire - a Mk XIV by the look of it - is a trophy, engraved 'Air Defence of Great Britain' and 'Kenley Inter Flight Cup.' Note the framed 1930s cigarette cards, to the right - I still have a couple of mostly-filled albums of these from the 1970s, as distributed with Typhoo Tea when it was sold loose-leaf, inside those little folded paper 'bricks'.

Nearby is a wall display of squadron crests from the Battle, complete with their (mostly) Latin mottoes. I was soon to regret not paying the latter more attention.

Other items on display here include a glass table-encased model of the Operations Room...

...and an actual RAF Ops Room clock, whose coloured triangular divisions tied into the colour codes of the arrows used on the Ops Room's plotting table to indicate how up-to-date the raid's plots were, as well as their direction.

There's also a display of the Observer Corps, justly granted the 'Royal' prefix later, without whom enemy aircraft crossing the coast could not readily have been tracked, the RDF/radar stations of the time looking only out to sea - notwithstanding the Battle of Barking Creek when it all went a bit skew-whiff.

The next room is a circular one adorned with many modern air combat paintings of the Battle.

In this room there are also small consoles which invite you to take a quiz. I selected the ‘Expert’ version and only got 9 out of 14, earning me a ‘Wing Commander’ rating. If you want to do better, you will need to brush up on two topics – the meanings of the Latin squadron mottoes, and the phonetic alphabet used pre-1942. There are rather a lot of questions on these two things in the 'Expert' quiz, compared to what I would have expected would really represent expert knowledge of the Battle, if you will excuse my sour grapes!

The museum map showed the next room to be the Operations Room. But I knew this had been moved underground before the Battle (to a bunker nearby, replaced during the Cold War with a deeper, nuclear-hardened one, no longer accessible). The museum’s Ops Room is actually a recreation of the first operational Filter Room which was in this building before the move underground. The display comes with a lot of supporting and fresh-looking carpentry and some cast or sculpted figures of the operators at their own particular type of plotting table.

The Filter Room was where the actual reports from radar and other sources were first received and then compiled from the relatively raw data into usable information, before being passed on to the co-located Fighter Command Ops Room, and to those lower down the chain of command at Group and Sector level. There’s much good stuff on Wikipedia and other places online, but best single-source illustrated description I’ve seen of how ‘the Dowding system’ worked is in the Haynes 'Workshop Manual' title ‘Battle of Britain - RAF Operations Manual'.

The museum Filter Room display includes informative panels - visible on the right, in the picture above - illustrating the roles of the personnel involved, and the tools they used. One of these panels is pictured below.

Downstairs, there’s a corridor adorned with amusing, ‘gentle caricature’ portraits of RAF commanders from the Battle onwards. This opens out into another room displaying more aircraft paintings, like this one, which if a touch whimsical, I particularly liked and would consider buying as a print, if obtainable.

Retracing my steps, I passed through the pleasant tea room in a ground floor conservatory. Had I not been up against the clock, I’d have loved to sit there a while and sup a cuppa - two sugars, please! - but it was time to go outside and retrace those famous footsteps…

…to be continued!

[BlitzGreek 34]

Thank you...Thank you for sharing ... i am waiting for part II

[Blade1 4]

Thanks for sharing 33lima. For someone who would love to go there, and probably never will, this is as good as it gets. Of course you know that you have to share the pilot garb adorned selfie in the Spitty cockpit or you will have to stricken from the list of the few to the list of the many(whom haven't)! I have a volume of the Haynes ‘Battle of Britain - RAF Operations Manual on the way  and I purchased a copy of "Spitfire Ace" at your recommendation.  Now if I can just find time to actually read it.  Anyway, great pictures, glad you enjoyed yourself Bentley Priory and I am looking forward to part #2 Sir.

S!Blade<><
 

[33LIMA 972]

The visit - walking the walk

Before we move on, here's an amusing little Bentley Priory anecdote I remembered after reading a brief mention of it on the museum website. As recounted in David Irving's Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe, in October 1938 that force's principal architect, General Erhard Milch headed a delegation which visited France and England. During the latter visit, Milch '...livened up one formal luncheon held in his honour at Fighter Command headquarters [Bentley Priory] when in his own blunt way he appealed umprompted to his hosts. 'How are you getting on with your experiments in the radio detection of aircraft approaching your shores?' Glasses clattered on the floor and a very red-faced air vice-marshal tried to laugh the question off. But Milch persisted that there was no need to be coy. 'So are we, and we think we are a jump ahead of you.' Notwithstanding that, German intelligence during the Battle seemed not to appreciate how well the radar network was tied into a whole defensive system. But there I was, in the very place this exchange played out, just over eighty years later.

As head of Fighter Command and the principal architect of the air defense system, Dowding might have been the 'red-faced air vice-marshal' of Irving's account (supplied directly by Milch). I suspect the description of embarrassed surprise is over-egged for effect, although the reticent Dowding could reportedly become quite animated when talking about something important to him. Anyhow now was my chance to walk in his footsteps, out onto on the veranda at the front of his office at Fighter Command HQ.

Here's that clip from the film that I had in mind:

And here are some of the pictures I took of the same scenes, fifty years after they were filmed. I had to walk up the outside steps to get onto the veranda, as you can't step through the door of Dowding's office.

I went down the steps into the Italianate gardens and crunched along the gravel paths that Dowding, probably Milch, and many other famous historical figures must have trodden. Dowding lived close by with his sister and apparently frequently walked to work, chatting in these grounds with his friend and neighbour General Sir Frederick Pile, head of Anti-Aircraft Command.

Had I looked more closely at my museum map, I would have realised I could have followed a path off to the right in the above pics, which led to the entrance to the Cold War bunker, which you can see in this clip shot in 2011 before the site was preserved as a museum.

The Hurricane displayed outside in the above clip looks like the same one that's there today, albeit in post-Battle of Britain colours back then. The Spitfire is possibly another replica - of a Mk VIII or IX by the look of it - not the real aircraft I read it was elsewhere. The stained glass window you can see from about 1:02 is featured on a fridge magnet I bought as a memento of my visit in the museum shop. My other purchase there was a copy of Geoffrey Wellum's 'First Light' which is proving a good read - it was the subject of this BBC TV dramatization, which is also definitely recommended:

Finally, it was time to go, but this was a visit I'm very glad I made and will always remember. This was not merely an interesting museum, but one on an historic site which positively oozes...well, history! The Bentley Priory museum I would highly recommend to anyone contemplating a visit. If you can't make it, I hope this account will at least convey something of the impact the visit had on me. Tally ho!