The Airmen's Stories - S/Ldr. P W Townsend

Group Captain (Squadron Leader during the Battle) Peter Townsend, the much decorated Battle of Britain fighter pilot who has died aged 80, aspired to marry Princess Margaret after the Second World War.

One of seven children, Peter Wooldridge Townsend was born on 22nd November 1914 in Burma where his father was a member of the Burma section of the Burma Civil Service. Townsend was a baby when the family - his mother was a cousin of Hugh Gaitskell, the sometime Labour leader - returned to England. Although educating so many children was a financial strain Townsend followed his father to Haileybury where he was head of his house, swimming captain and in the XV. When he was 14 he had a joyride in a Bristol Fighter and decided to become a pilot. In 1933 he entered the RAF College, Cranwell where Frank Whittle, who had won a place from the ranks, was a fellow student. Townsend's flying instructor was struck by his sensitivity and warned that he might put up a brilliant performance or make a complete ass of himself. In another report Townsend was appraised as being reluctant to attempt anything that might make him noticeable and it was observed that his inner tensions induced the eczema which was to trouble him for some years.

Townsend was commissioned in 1935 and posted to No 1, a fighter squadron stationed at Tangmere near Chichester in West Sussex. The squadron, one of the RAF's three crack interceptor units, flew the Hawker Fury biplane; direction-finding was so primitive that the pilots often followed roads and railway lines, flying low enough to read the signs.

In 1936 Townsend joined 36 Squadron in Singapore, where he was introduced to the Vickers Wildebeeste torpedo-bomber, a lumbering aircraft capable of no more than 140 mph. The squadron was wiped out when the Japanese attacked Singapore in 1942, but Townsend was not there; by 1937 his skin problems had become so acute that the doctor recommended a complete rest from flying.
On the voyage home, though, his eczema cleared up completely. He was delighted to return to flying fighters at Tangmere, this time with 43 Squadron, save that his skin immediately erupted again in protest. To add to his woes he was transferred to a Coastal Command bomber squadron at Tangmere. Townsend threatened to resign unless returned to 43 Squadron and to fighters. He gained his point and six months leave into the bargain. When he rejoined No 43 in September 1938 his eczema had gone for ever.

The approach of war, and the challenge of learning to fly the Hurricane, transformed Townsend. "He used to be rather aloof, going to his room at night and avoiding our games and parties," observed a fellow pilot, "but we are bringing him out of his shell. He is very shy and has no idea of his courage"

On the outbreak of the Second World War, 43 Squadron was posted to Acklington, Northumberland. On 3rd February 1940 Townsend claimed his first victim, a Heinkel bomber. It crash-landed near Whitby - the first German aircraft to fall on English soil in the Second World War. As the Heinkel hit the ground Townsend was heard to murmur, "Poor devils, I don't think they are all dead”. He went to see the survivors in hospital; 30 years later one of them, Karl Missy, collaborated with him on Duel of Eagles, about the Battle of Britain.

The squadron was then posted to Wick to defend the naval base at Scapa Flow. Townsend emerged victorious from further tussles with the Luftwaffe, but though the passion for the kill ran in him as strongly as in his fellow pilots, he found that the sight of his victims spiralling to their deaths evoked only the desire to save them. In May 1940, after the Germans launched their attack on France, Townsend took command of 85 Squadron. During the first days of the Battle of Britain the squadron operated from Martlesham, on the North Sea coast.

On July 11 1940 Townsend was shot down while attacking a Dornier 17 over the North Sea. He parachuted into the sea, and was fortunate to be rescued by a mine-sweeper that was miles off course.

For the next few months he was continuously in action. In August, as the Battle of Britain reached its peak, 85 Squadron was moved to Debden, to the north of London, and then to Croydon. Of the 20 men Townsend took to Croydon 14 (including himself) had been shot down within 14 days, two of them twice. Yet he later recalled that "Those days of battle were the most stirring and the most wonderful I have lived." When he was shot down over Tunbridge Wells on 31st August he received a bullet in the foot. Soon afterwards his shattered squadron was withdrawn from the front line and posted to Church Fenton, Yorkshire, where Townsend, still limping, rejoined them. He was soon back in the South, attempting, without radar, to shoot down the bombers which were attacking London every night.

In June 1941, exhausted after 20 months of continuous flying, he was given a staff job. Its designation, Wing Commander Night Operations, provoked some mirth after his marriage that July to Rosemary Pawle, a brigadier's daughter who lived near the airfield at Hunsdon, Hertfordshire. Townsend returned to the fray in command of the fighter station at Drem, near Edinburgh, and flew Spitfires with 611 Squadron. Then, after a spell at Staff College at the end of 1942, he was given command of the fighter station at West Malling, Kent, until septicaemia forced him into a ground job. Townsend had been credited with 11 confirmed kills.

He was posted to training roles, first in Yorkshire and then at Montrose, Scotland. There he received a summons from Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal. "If you don't find the idea particularly revolting," Portal told him, "I propose to recommend you for the job of equerry to His Majesty. The appointment will be for three months." On 16th February 1944 he was being conducted through the corridors of Buckingham Palace after an interview with King George VI when he encountered "two adorable -looking girls, all smiles" - Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret. The well-decorated airman - Townsend had been awarded the DFC and Bar in 1940, and the DSO in 1941 as well as being mentioned in despatches - proved popular with the Royal Family, who, he later recorded, "made me feel more of a guest than an aide". He was a loyal and tactful courtier, who coped calmly with the King's occasional bouts of irascibility.

The three months contract was extended, and in 1945 Townsend was accorded a "grace and favour" house, Adelaide Cottage, in the Home Park at Windsor Castle. When his second son was born that year the King stood godfather.

In 1949 and 1950 he entered the King's Cup air race under Princess Margaret's name on the second occasion beating the world speed record over a closed circuit. The death of King George VI in February 1952, and Townsend's subsequent divorce, helped to bring the couple even closer. At Windsor Castle he confessed his love. "That's exactly how I feel," he recalled Princess Margaret replying. Townsend was appointed CVO in 1947. That year he accompanied the Royal Family on their tour of South Africa, with which he fell in love, to the point of seriously considering the possibility of starting a new life there. After the Princess's announcement that she would not marry him Townsend returned to an earlier post in Brussels, deciding to leave the RAF and in the autumn of 1956 embarked upon a 17-month tour of the world, under contract to write articles. After his return to Britain in March 1958 he saw Princess Margaret again, at Clarence House and at Windsor, but the consequent renewal of speculation in the press left him with a desire "to clear out once and for all".

In 1959 he married Marie-Luce Jamagne - not, he assured her, as a substitute for a lost love, but as "the ultimate", which she remained. In 1960 they settled in Paris, and then at Clos Sainte-Gemme to the west of the city, where they built up a beautiful garden. But earning a living proved a problem; after a spell in documentary films failed to yield sufficient funds Townsend took a job with an American wine-shipping company. That sufficed for a while but after moving to America in 1964 Townsend and his employers fell out. A brief spell with a London public relations firm led to an offer to set up an office in Paris. But after Paris Match published an article of his about the Battle of Britain in September 1966 he settled down to write Duel if Eagles (1970).

In 1968 Townsend bought a dilapidated farm, La Mare aux Oiseaux, some 30 miles south-west of Paris. His employment by Harry Saltzman to publicise the film The Battle of Britain (1969) helped pay to do up the property. He also wrote about the Israeli air force for Paris Match.

His other books included The Last Emperor (1975), Time and Chance (an autobiography, 1978), The Smallest Pawns in the Game (interviews with war victims, 1979), The Girl in the Mite Ship (1981), The Postman of Nagasaki (about the effects of the atomic bomb, 1984) and Duel in the Dark (1986).
In 1993 he met Princess Margaret again at a social function and the next year was invited to Kensington Palace; he also appeared in Border Television's series The House of Windsor.

Though the title of his last book, Nostalgia Britannica (1994), suggested otherwise, Townsend seemed well content with his life in France and at the end of his autobiography he wrote that he would like his ashes to be scattered there. "And if," he concluded, "the wind, the south wind on which the swallows ride, blows them on towards England, then let it be. I shall neither know nor care."

He had two sons by his first marriage, and a son and two daughters by his second.

With acknowledgments to the Daily Telegraph June 1995