A significant recent addition to the collection is a vivid memoir of 1940 written by Mrs Mary Connor, née Dodsley (1917-2001), who escaped from the island of Jersey as the Germans approached, married a Spitfire pilot and therefore had a close and emotional view of the Battle of Britain.
The pilot concerned was the 6ft 4in Flying Officer Francis “Frank” Connor, born in Burma and an old boy of Victoria College, Jersey. He served in the Battle of Britain with No 234 Squadron.
Frank and Mary’s wedding took place while he was at Aston Down converting to Spitfires. Many wartime brides would have had fellow feeling with Mary when she wrote: “Our wedding was far different from the one I had always visualised. I had no wedding dress, no trousseau, no cake, no church and none of our friends other than my sister-in-law. I was not even certain that the date was acceptable or that Frank would get the time off!”
On 16 August 1940, Frank Connor was shot down in combat with Bf 109s off Portsmouth and baled out, spending five hours in the sea before he was rescued by the Royal Navy. He had many pieces of metal embedded in his body and, despite Mary’s best efforts with tweezers, some remained to intrigue radiographers when he had X-rays in later life.
Frank Connor spent most of the rest of the war as an instructor. He left the RAF in 1946 in the rank of Squadron Leader, became an air traffic controller in Jersey and died in 1982.
The Memorial Trust is most grateful to Mary and Frank Connor’s daughter, Rosemary Sanchez de Vega, for providing a copy of her mother’s memoir for the collection at Capel-le-Ferne.
Geoff Simpson FRHistS
