The Battle of Britain Hurricane pilot whose ambition to honour his fellow airmen was the inspiration for the National Memorial to the Few is the subject of a new book.
Documentary film maker, author and long-term supporter of the Memorial John Willis’ book is called Fighter Boy – The Many Lives of Geoffrey Page OBE, DSO, DFC and bar.
It was Geoffrey Page who persuaded a group of people - later the Battle of Britain Memorial Trust - to find the site, raise the funds and commission the statue that today remains the heart of the Battle of Britain Memorial at Capel-le-Ferne.
The replica Hurricane at the Memorial is painted in the colours of the aircraft in which Page, then a Pilot Officer, was shot down and badly burned during the Battle of Britain. He was treated by the legendary pioneering surgeon Archie McIndoe, making him one of his legendary ‘guinea pigs’.
As John Willis explains: “Page vowed to shoot down a German aircraft as revenge for every one of his operations, and hit his target, but it left him feeling hollow. ‘I had a kind of bloodlust. But when I shot down as many German planes as I had operations on my hands and face, I was just left with an empty feeling,’ he said.”
In the mid 1980s, the author produced a documentary for Yorkshire TV called Churchill’s Few, which the Trust screened on one of its Sunday afternoon film sessions earlier this year. The story of the Memorial's founding is also told in the new book.
A review of the book will follow in due course and copies will be available in the shop at The Wing.
