JS(BB)24 RAF Battle of Britain cover from our Battle of Britain mini-series. The cover artwork shows Hurricanes of No 32 Squadron being serviced and prepared for battle while Spitfires of No 610 Squadron fly overhead. Both squadrons served at Biggin Hill during the Battle of Britain, and the cover has been produced to raise money for the St Georges Chapel of Remembrance, at Biggin Hill. The covers bear poppy stamp cancelled with Rememberance postmark 6.11.08.
The cover is hand signed by Wing Commander Tim Elkington who served with Nos 1 Squadron during the Battle of Britain.
Wing Commander John Francis Durham Elkington Wing Commander John Francis Durham Elkington, nicknamed "Tim", was a fighter pilot who flew with the Royal Air Force during the Battle of Britain, and is one of the surviving aircrew known as "The Few" Elkington was born in Warwickshire on 23 December 1920. He joined the Royal Air Force in 1939 as a Flight Cadet at the Royal Air Force College Cranwell. He was commissioned on 14 July 1940 and joined No. 1 Squadron RAF at RAF Northolt. He flew Hurricanes with No. 1 Sqn during the Battle of Britain. Elkington was shot down and wounded on 16 August 1940. After further duty with No 1 Squadron, he was posted to No. 55 Operational Training Unit as an instructor. In May 1941 he joined No. 601 Squadron RAF. He was promoted to flying officer on 14 July 1941. From there he joined No. 134 Squadron RAF at RAF Leconfield. The squadron embarked on HMS Argus and took off from the carrier for an airfield near Murmansk. He then served with the Merchant Ship Fighter Unit until returning briefly to No. 1 Squadron. Elkington then joined No. 539 Squadron RAF flying Hurricanes alongside Douglas A20 Havoc aircraft on night operations. He was promoted flight lieutenant 14 October 1942. He then joined No. 197 Squadron RAF at RAF Drem flying the Hawker Typhoon aircraft. After operations from RAF Tangmere he was posted to No. 67 Squadron at Alipore, Calcutta. After 3 years commanding AFDU and T&WDU at Armarda Road & Ranchi he returned home in 1946. Elkington was promoted squadron leader in 1946[5] and wing commander in 1961. Elkington retired from the Royal Air Force on 23 December 1975, retaining the rank of Wing Commander.
His Times Obituary reads
Tim Elkington, buoyed by his first victory in the Battle of Britain on August 12, 1940, painted a picture on his Hurricane fighter for good luck. His triumph in combat had come within a month of his being commissioned into RAF No 1 Squadron as a pilot officer, and only days after he had first flown a Hurricane at all. He had seen his first kill, a Messerschmitt Bf 109, plunge smoking to its end, down through the clouds over Harwich.
His happy “nose art”, completed on August 15, was a bright yellow figure called “Eugene the Jeep”, from the Popeye cartoons, a character that was supposed to have powers to see into the future. Nineteen-year-old Elkington’s luck would take an unexpected turn just 24 hours later when he was involved in one of the most widely remembered grand encounters between British and German fighters, played out in front of a watching civilian population all along the coast by the Solent. He would live to tell the tale, but only just.
Among the mesmerised onlookers was Elkington’s half-American mother, Isabel, observing the many dogfights from her balcony on Hayling Island, through her new husband’s naval binoculars. She and Elkington’s father, Alan, an army major, had divorced when the boy was 14, and Elkington, an only child, had taken to the RAF joyfully as a substitute family.
That day, with several RAF squadrons scrambled to intercept a force including Stuka dive-bombers and 100 Bf 109s that were hell-bent on destroying the RAF base at Tangmere, three miles east of Chichester, Elkington had the job of being “top weaver”, flying to and fro above his mates in No 1 squadron to provide early warning of approaching enemy. Their flight leader that day was Sergeant-Pilot Fred Berry, at the ripe old age of 26 a father-figure with many years’ flying experience.
The German raid was to prove the worst on Tangmere, with buildings destroyed and 20 ground staff and civilians killed. The RAF that day would lose eight pilots, gain a Victoria Cross and log several spectacular crashes and rescues.
Elkington’s mother trained her binoculars on a lone Hurricane, pursued by three Bf 109s. It was a lovely sunny afternoon. She knew about the “nose art”, and recognised the plane.
Elkington’s Hurricane took a hit: cannon fire from one of the Bf 109s chasing his tail. It was later established that this was being flown by the Luftwaffe ace Major Helmut Wick, so as Elkington, his 18th victim, was later to recall: “He was quite an experienced chap, so I’m not too put out!”
Wick’s burst made his starboard fuel tank, positioned in the wing, explode and erupt into flames. It took the injured Elkington two attempts to bale out. Having slid back his cockpit canopy, and slipped his safety harness, he forgot to disconnect his radio and oxygen lines. “No pain, just blood,” he recalled, and the fine view he had of Portsmouth “through the haze” was the last thing he saw before losing consciousness.
Elkington had not had time to inflate his “Mae West” lifejacket, and as he drifted down 10,000ft in his parachute, the flight leader, Berry, seeing that the teenager would certainly drown without help, performed the brilliant flying feat of using the slipstream of his aircraft to blow Elkington ashore, on to the beach at West Wittering. Elkington would thereafter think of Berry as his guardian angel.
Elkington’s mother, on receiving a telephone call, set off to visit him in hospital in Chichester within the hour: his back was peppered with fragments of shrapnel, and a freckle-faced ambulance girl cut his trousers away to attend to wounds in his legs from the impact of a German cannon shell. “A strange homecoming,” he recalled.
He recovered well enough to rejoin the squadron from October 1, and scored two more credits that month: a “probable” Junkers Ju 88 and a shared destruction of a Dornier Do 215.
A fighter pilot’s life expectancy during the Battle of Britain was 87 flying hours, but a fair number died before they even had time to unpack their kitbags. Elkington was lucky in another respect; just days after he was shot down, on August 18, came the “hardest day” of the Battle of Britain. As soon as he got out of hospital he tried to contact Sgt Pilot Fred Berry to thank him for saving his life — but Berry had been shot down and killed on September 1.
After a spell as an instructor, Elkington was sent to Russia in September 1941 as part of RAF 151 Wing, to deliver Hurricanes to the Soviet air force and train its pilots and ground staff in their use. He flew off HMS Argus to Vaenga airfield near Murmansk, and took part in actions against the Luftwaffe, sharing in the destruction of a Ju 88.
When he returned to England he had his second lucky escape: he survived hitting a 440,000-volt power cable across the Tyne, which plunged nearby towns into an inadvertent blackout.
During the rest of the Second World War he flew Typhoon ground attack fighters with No 1 Sqn and, promoted to flight lieutenant, served with No 197 Sqn; then on nightfighters with No 539 Sqn, before being posted to India in 1943. British victory over the Japanese at Kohima in 1944 freed him for early promotion and three years in command of the Air Fighting Development Unit (AFDU) at RAF Amarda Road, 140 miles southwest of Calcutta. In Delhi, while flying a Tempest II, fuel sprayed into his cockpit. He tried and failed to bale out, but managed to land instead, with fuel venting into the engine bay. Also that year he had a burst tyre on landing.
There was one more near squeak to come. In 1945 the engine of his Mustang failed on take off and he had to crash land. Trapped in the cockpit and enveloped in fumes he was, luckily, able to break open his canopy and get out before his plane might have exploded.
John Francis Durham Elkington, always known as “Tim”, was born in Edgbaston, Birmingham, in 1920 and educated at Packwood Haugh Prep School, Hockley Heath, and Bedford School. Aged 18, in September 1939, he entered RAF College, Cranwell as a flight cadet.
After the war he stayed in the RAF, commanding RAF Turnhouse, Edinburgh, before serving in Northern Ireland, Cyprus, and Christmas Island in the Pacific during British nuclear tests in the 1950s.
He retired in 1975 with the rank of wing commander. That year his nose-painted Hurricane was found by an archaeologist in ground near West Wittering beach. It had augered deep into the earth when it crashed there in 1940. He was given the plane’s vertical speed indicator as a memento and it remained one of his prize possessions.
In 2005, after years of trying to track down Berry’s family, Elkington finally made contact with the pilot’s daughter, and was able to tell her about how her father, with his incredible flying skills, had saved his life. She had had no idea.
In 1948 Elkington had married Patricia Adamson, whom he met in Edinburgh while paying a duty call on the owner of Castle Gogar close to the RAF base. She happenned to be visiting her aunt — the owner’s wife. Tim and Pat Elkington would have four children: John, a specialist in environmentally sustainable development; Caroline, an artist; Gray, a corporate culture adviser; and Tessa, a nurse.
They moved, after coming home from Cyprus, into Hill House at Little Rissington near Cheltenham, where they would live for more than 50 years. In retirement Elkington set up a picture-framing business.
In 2014 he received the Ushakov Medal from the Russian ambassador in London and two years later he, along with other remaining Battle of Britain veterans, attended a tea at Clarence House hosted by the Prince of Wales, who is the patron of the Battle of Britain Fighter Association. There are now just three members of the association left, though the exact number of “The Few” is slightly harder to pin down and may best be described as “a handful”.
Elkington had a flight in a Spitfire in his nineties, still with his old shrapnel scars on his legs. Even in old age, whenever he took a hot bath, specks of oxidised black metal from his Hurricane’s exploded fuel tank, embedded in his back since 1940, would pop out.
Wing Commander JFD “Tim” Elkington, Battle of Britain Hurricane pilot, was born on December 23, 1920. He died after a fall on February 1, 2019, aged 98
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BB24 Battle of Britain cover showing Hurricanes of No 32 Squadron and Spitfires of No 610 Squadron along with 1939-45 War Medal with MID clasp signed by Wing Commander 'Tim' Elkington