Film show a sell-out success

A full house enjoyed the first of what the Trust hopes will be a short series of Sunday afternoon films in The Wing at Capel-le-Ferne.

The capacity audience enjoyed The King’s Machine, an exciting wartime tale of two fighter pilots who were killed over Kent’s hop gardens and orchards as they took on the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain.

Filmmaker Phillip Day was in the audience and later wrote to Trust Secretary Patrick Tootal to thank him and event organiser Janet Tootal for staging the showing and allowing him to “meet a whole host of new friends”.

Another audience member wrote to say how much they had enjoyed the film and described it as “informative, moving and engaging”.

The film, in Phillip’s words “traces the fascinating story of two young men from Yorkshire who went to the same school before the war and who signed up into the RAF Volunteer Reserve, one in a Spitfire, the other in a Hurricane”.

Just one of four private, non-commercial presentations put together using archive footage to tell spectacular and inspiring wartime tales of events over Kent in 1940, The King’s Machine is described by Phillip as “a fitting tribute to those who bravely faced frightening times with untold courage, fortitude and humour”.

Phillip is now working with the Trust on a two-movie session that is likely to take place in late February.