Flyer: Don Finlay DFC AFC; Battle of Britain Spitfire pilot and double Olympic medalist

Chapter One

Hampshire, 1909 – 25

Christchurch in Hampshire is an ancient place. Lying on England’s south coast, the town straddles the rivers Stour and Avon, and was more than likely settled first by the Romans. In the early years of the twentieth century, there were only two main streets, with minor lanes running off them. A sub-port of Southampton, there was a thriving salmon fishery, although beer brewing was the town’s chief industry.³ Like many small towns, there was a post office, a town hall and several pubs, as well as the usual small businesses that flourished in such communities. One of these premises was at 115 Bargates, where James Finlay lived and ran a newsagent’s shop.⁴ James was a former Royal Navy man, a Scot from Glasgow who was a coppersmith by trade and had joined the navy in 1888 at the age of twenty-five. James served aboard several warships as an engine room artificer (ERA), an engineer, working his way up the ranks to chief ERA second class. But he found himself in hospital in July 1907 with a serious illness that forced him to be invalided out of the service just over a year later, after which he settled in Christchurch, close to his home naval base of Portsmouth, and opened his shop. He reapplied for the navy when the First World War came and was accepted, serving ashore back in his native Glasgow at Dalmuir Naval Construction Works from January 1915 to November 1916. But James’s health was to fail him again – the diagnosis now was ‘organic heart disease’ – leading to a second medical discharge and a war gratuity.⁵

James had married Kezia Osborne, a local girl from Gosport who was nine years his junior, in 1903. The couple’s first child, a son named James after his father, was born in 1905 but died shortly after he was delivered. A second son, George, arrived in 1907, followed by their third boy, Donald Osborne Finlay, on 27 May 1909. By the time of the 1911 census when James was aged forty-eight and his wife thirty-nine, another son, Roy, had been born. The couple had two more boys in quick succession, Denis in 1912, and Andrew in 1914, and three more children, all girls, arrived in the following years.

A few years after Don’s birth, the family moved to 115 Macnaghten Road in the Bitterne area of Southampton, a working-class part of the town. The house was a small, terraced one that they rented from the owners, Southern Railways (the small train station of Bitterne is a stone’s throw away). The front room of the property was soon converted by James and Kezia into a general store, cutting down the available living space in the three-up, three-down house even further: ten people existing in such cramped conditions must have been a trial, especially as there was no electricity and no inside lavatory. To make matters worse, James died in 1921 aged just fifty-eight, finally succumbing to his heart condition, leaving Kezia to bring up her eight children and run the household and shop alone. Nonetheless, being a remarkable woman, she succeeded, no doubt enlisting the help of the older children with the shop and their younger siblings. She stayed in the house until 1952 when she moved in with her daughter, Agnes, for a few years until Kezia too passed away. But from such humble surroundings and difficult beginnings flourished the twin careers of Don Finlay.

For his secondary education, young Donald was sent to Taunton’s School in Southampton. Taunton’s was established in 1760 as an endowed grammar school from a bequest by Richard Taunton, a former mayor of Southampton, to be used for ‘bringing up children in work and industry, fitting them for place at sea’.⁶ In the late nineteenth century, the educational emphasis was to provide ‘a sound education with special regard to Technical and Commercial training’. By the time that Don started at the school in 1920, aged eleven, it had become a public secondary school under the Board of Education, but was to revert to grammar school status in 1926 shortly after he left.

Sport was an important aspect of life at Taunton’s, with emphasis placed on football, cricket, swimming and athletics. As well as the usual inter-schools team games competitions, Taunton’s entered the yearly Southampton Secondary Schools’ Athletic Sports tournament held each summer, as well as hosting its own annual inter-house (or ‘company’ as they were known at the school) athletics gala held at Hampshire County Cricket Club’s ground each April. It was at the school that Don Finlay’s sporting career commenced, with him showing early promise in both track and field events, but not as a hurdler since that discipline did not feature on the athletics curriculum. Rather, at this early stage, Finlay began to make his name as a sprinter and high- and long-jumper, with the occasional foray into longer-distance running as well. The first of his many successes over the coming years was in the school’s annual athletics competition of 1921, where, as a member of Chipperfield Company in the under-twelve age group, he won both the 100- and 220-yards sprints as well as the long-jump contest, and came second in the high jump and quarter-mile race.⁷ The following year he did not follow up on his sprinting wins, instead entering the juniors’ (ages twelve to fourteen) half-mile and high-jump events, although he failed to be placed in either. However, Don was part of the Chipperfield Company team that won the juniors’ relay race in a time of two minutes and eight seconds – the distance was not specified, but Finlay was to run in sprint relay events at the highest levels of athletics in later life, more of which below. He won the juniors’ long jump as well, with a distance of 14ft 1in.⁸

Also in 1922, Finlay competed for Taunton’s School in the aforementioned Southampton Secondary Schools’ Athletic Sports competition for the first time. This was a prestigious event, fiercely contested by the schools involved and again held on the county cricket ground. The victorious school was presented with the Kimber Shield to be proudly displayed in the trophy cabinet for the next twelve months. The tournament was no amateur affair, with a referee, starters, judges, a timekeeper, course stewards, a recorder and a lap scorer all appointed to oversee the events and ensure fair play. As a measure of the seriousness with which the competition was viewed, the referee the following year was the president of the London Athletic Club. In his inaugural year of 1922 (only the fourth time the competition had been held), Don came second in his under-thirteens 100-yards heat and progressed to the final but did not finish in the top three.⁹ Likewise, he was not placed in the under-thirteens 220-yards sprint. An inauspicious start in his first taste of a large athletics meeting perhaps, but the experience would serve him well in the years to come.

Finlay’s showing at the Southampton Schools’ event in 1923 was no better. This time he did not enter any track events, instead competing only in the under-fifteens long jump where he again finished outside the places. But in the Taunton’s School inter-company meeting of that same year, he fared much better: he came second in the juniors’ 100 yards, first in the 220 yards, and tied for first place in the juniors’ high jump with a leap of 4ft 2in. He took the junior long-jump title, recording 13ft 8in, but his relay team that year lost out to Corbin Company.¹⁰

The Southampton Schools’ contest of 1924 would prove to be a defining event for the young Donald Finlay. At that competition, which was held on his fifteenth birthday, Tuesday 27 May, he broke an athletics record for the first time in his sporting career; it was not to be the last. He won the under-fifteens long-jump title with a winning distance of 16ft 6in, beating the previous record, set two years previously, by half an inch. The narrative of the competition in that term’s school journal, though, concentrates on the seniors’ events, relegating Don’s achievement to an aside with a passing, almost dismissive, mention some way down the page that ‘Finlay broke a record in the Junior Long Jump.’¹¹ Had the school reporter been able to foresee what was to come, he would undoubtedly have taken greater notice. This record-breaking feat was not one that Don was to repeat in later school competitions, however – in 1925, his final year at Taunton’s (he had by then moved up to the senior age bracket), he was not placed in any event that he entered, either in the inter-schools competition or in the Taunton’s inter-company tournament.¹² For the time being, his athletics ability seemed to have peaked, but of course that was later to be disproven many times over. Of his introduction to athletics competition while at school, Don was later to say that ‘this training and these activities of our formative years make us what we are, and I owe much to Taunton’s School’.¹³

Aside from track and field events, Don Finlay was also a member of the school football XI in his latter terms. He most likely played for the lower XIs in his earlier years at the school before, in 1925, appearing at centre-forward for the first team. Of the team’s performance that year (played twenty-two, won nine, lost ten, drawn three; goals for – ninety-three, against – seventy-four), the school journal records that: ‘The 1st XI played well at the beginning of the season until Bournemouth defeated them heavily. This reverse seemed to affect the spirit of the team, and during the middle of the season the eleven rarely played like a winning side. … Trubridge, Jolliffe and Finlay have all tried the centre position with varying success. Want of ball control has been the chief fault in each case.’¹⁴ As we shall see, Don later overcame his lack of skill in controlling the ball and turned into a particularly useful and talented amateur footballer.

In the classroom, Finlay was probably an average student. Records of his academic prowess no longer exist, but to have set out on the path that he did after leaving Taunton’s in 1925 shows that he had a fair degree of educational acumen, more than likely passing his school certificate, the equivalent of today’s GCSEs. Given that he left Taunton’s at age sixteen, he would have been too young to have taken the higher school certificate for matriculation. However, he was not always on the right side of his teachers. While a member of Form IId, on 9 October 1920 he earned himself a detention punishment for ‘Direct disobedience. Class had been repeatedly warned against attempting to carry desk and chair at once. This boy knocked down two desks through his disobedience.’¹⁵ He was fortunate to avoid a harsher penalty since most of the other miscreants listed in the Taunton’s punishment book were awarded ‘strokes’ of the cane of varying amounts; for example, one of his classmates received two strokes for the heinous crime of ‘making a noise with his throat and then denying it several times’.¹⁶ As we shall discover, ‘direct disobedience’ was not a trait that Donald Finlay was to tolerate in his subordinates during his military life, so perhaps he learned his lesson well and formed his opinions about discipline while at Taunton’s School.

Chapter Two

Brat and Beyond, September 1925 – April 1935

Shortly after the Royal Air Force was formed on 1 April 1918, its founding father and first Chief of the Air Staff, Lord Trenchard, recognised the need for a specialist technical training school to provide highly skilled engineering airmen for the fledgling service. Since the RAF was all about the operation and maintenance of complex aircraft and engines, then its aeronautical engineers would need to have the best instruction and knowledge available. Trenchard introduced an apprentice scheme whereby boys between the ages of fifteen and seventeen-and-a-half could leave school and join the programme, which was established at RAF Cranwell and where the inaugural course was run in 1920. By 1922 the Aircraft Apprentice Scheme had moved to RAF Halton in Buckinghamshire where the Royal Flying Corps had earlier based its air mechanics’ school, and Halton became No. 1 School of Technical Training.

The young apprentices soon earned themselves the nickname of ‘Trenchard’s Brats’, a term intended by the longer-serving airmen as derogatory, but one which the boys came to use with pride. Competition for places at Halton was stiff, with typically twice as many, if not more, applicants than there were vacancies since the new and exciting world of aviation was an extremely popular career choice for the youngsters of the day. Gaining acceptance on to the scheme was therefore no easy task. First there was the educational entry requirement of the school certificate to be overcome but, if the hopeful candidate had either not taken or passed it, then he sat the RAF’s own qualifying examination in maths, English and science, which was set at the same standard as its civilian equivalent. Then there were aptitude and intelligence tests, and a thorough medical examination, to be successfully passed before joining the three-year course. On entry, the RAF assumed legal guardianship of the boys, who were signed up for twelve years’ service once they had reached the age of eighteen.

The training at Halton was not solely concerned with the hands-on engineering aspects, though. Run along the lines of a boarding school, with six weeks’ annual holiday and mid-term breaks, there was also great emphasis on cultural topics, hobbies and sport, with school colours being awarded for representation in a variety of sporting disciplines. The RAF also saw the apprentice scheme as central to developing the boys’ general qualities as servicemen, specifically:¹⁷

1. To produce completely reliable Airmen and skilled craftsmen of sound character, balanced judgement and good general education.

2. To develop in them a high sense of responsibility, pride in service and power of leadership.

3. To provide a body of men from which future NCOs and Officers may be selected.

The last of these three points is particularly noteworthy, since more than twenty-five per cent of former Brats (some 40,000 were trained between 1920 and 1993 when the scheme ended) went on to be commissioned, and several achieved Air rank – one even became Chief of the Air Staff, the head of the RAF. Among the many decorations and honours awarded to ex-apprentices are one Victoria Cross, five George Crosses, and nineteen knighthoods. Without doubt, Trenchard’s vision created opportunities for the advancement of social mobility and the development of meritocracy within the RAF, and was decades ahead of its time. Perhaps the finest accolade of the quality of the training at Halton came from Lord Louis Mountbatten who wrote after the Second World War that: ‘One thing is absolutely true. The air battles of Burma were won in the classrooms and work-shops at Halton; won not just by the knowledge and skill of your maintenance crews, it was won by the spirit that Halton has produced.’¹⁸ The young Don Finlay was not to know it then, but he would be a central part of that Halton spirit exemplified in the Far East.

Don left Taunton’s School and joined the RAF as an apprentice Fitter AE (Aero Engines) on 29 September 1925, a few months after his sixteenth birthday. His registration card for Halton¹⁹ states that his method of entry was via ‘Air Ministry’, meaning that he was nominated for a place by the Air Ministry, an endorsement given to sons of either serving or former military fathers, thereby providing him with an advantage over many of the other hopeful applicants. He was given the service number of 366278 and the rank of airman apprentice, and duly joined his new comrades of No. 12 Entry at RAF Halton to begin his three years of training. Years later he wrote of his experiences of being a Brat: ‘My early memories include the thrill of the spectacle of thousands of lights after dark [presumably the apprentices burning the midnight oil] and how tiny I felt in the great hive of industry; of tiredness, marching up the hill after [work]shops and the quickening to the RAF March-Past as we came past the Guardroom; of a 1,000-a-side snow-ball battle between the Wings with the resultant masses of broken windows.’²⁰ The mass snowball fight serves as a reminder that, even though the boys were now Royal Air Force servicemen, they were barely out of childhood.

Halton’s emphasis on sport as part of the apprentices’ curriculum was the making of Finlay as an athlete, although it was often to the detriment of his academic study. He admitted that ‘Wing soccer and the Barrington-Kennett Trophy became everything. All else was relegated, including my work, if necessary.’²¹ It was while an apprentice that he first tried the hurdles, and he immediately impressed as a natural talent. The respected athletics journalist, statistician and broadcaster Harold Abrahams (of Chariots of Fire fame, himself an Olympic sprint gold medallist), who would become a close friend of Finlay’s, later remarked that ‘even the earliest photographs of him in action reveal a style which had precious little wrong with it’.²² His first-ever race in the discipline, when he was eighteen years old, was at an RAF Halton sports day in June 1927: he won well inside seventeen seconds – 16.6 (or 16 3/5 as it was then recorded) to be precise – and beat the reigning RAF champion into the bargain. Of that victory, the Halton Magazine said, presciently: ‘A/A [Airman Apprentice] Finlay, No. 2 Wing, also is most promising; by winning the hurdles and the long jump he promises well for the future. When he has learnt to take his hurdles lower, he will accomplish some very good times.’²³ Don would later say that ‘I knew then that hurdling was going to be my special sport.’²⁴

Shortly afterwards he entered his first senior event, the RAF Athletics Championships, held later that month at RAF Uxbridge. Still a raw and novice hurdler, he nevertheless put in an excellent showing, finishing second: ‘Finlay put up a good performance by running the winner to 3 yards in the 120 Hurdles, which was run in 16 1/5 seconds, an Air Force record. This showed that Finlay’s 16 3/5 seconds at Halton was not a fluke.’²⁵ A fluke it certainly was not, for Don won his first RAF Athletics Championships hurdles title the following year, while in his final term at Halton, and in doing so broke the previous years’ service record time, crossing the line in 16.0 seconds dead. It was a title that he would win every year thereafter until the Second World War began, and thrice more post-war. Considering that the world record at the time was 14.6 seconds, he was already showing a good deal of promise. He also entered the high jump in that tournament, winning the event with a leap of 5ft 8in. Jimmy Green, one of his Halton colleagues, said: ‘We were RAF apprentices together at Halton from 1925 to 1928 and competed against each other with varying success on numerous occasions. In his last year at Halton, Don had already developed into a top-class hurdler and a more than useful long jumper.’²⁶ As Finlay himself mentioned above, football also featured prominently during his time at Halton. Another fellow apprentice and team-mate, Vic White, later wrote: ‘I recall Don Finlay as a friend in the 12th [Entry]. We were both regulars in the squadron soccer team. We won everything there was to be won, thanks largely to Don. It was a real joy to watch him strolling past the opposition or hurdling them if they came at him too low. Despite his supreme sporting ability, Don was the most unassuming and likeable character it has been my pleasure to know.’²⁷

In 1928, Finlay passed out from Halton as a fully qualified engine fitter and was promoted to aircraftman first class (AC1). He was ranked seventy-third overall among his peers, which, by his own admission, was not good enough and was due entirely to his involvement with sport: ‘I disappointed on passing-out, but then pulled up my socks and started to work hard.’²⁸ His first posting, on 24 August 1928, was to No. 1 (Fighter) Squadron, then based at RAF Tangmere in West Sussex and equipped with the Armstrong-Whitworth Siskin IIIA. For the new engine technician there was much to learn, and AC1 Finlay was expected to get to know the Siskin’s power plant – the supercharged Armstrong Siddeley Jaguar IV – thoroughly.

Finlay was promoted to leading aircraftman on 1 January 1930, but that would prove to be the sole advancement in rank that he gained in his trade as an engine fitter, and his first association with RAF Tangmere was only to last a little over two years. When Trenchard had established the technical school at Halton, he decreed that all apprentices would have the opportunity to volunteer for flying duties if they so wished, as long as they showed the necessary aptitude both for flying and leadership. Trenchard introduced a scheme whereby former Brats could be accepted for non-commissioned aircrew training, serve for five years as a sergeant pilot, and then return to their former groundcrew trade but retain their senior NCO rank. The thinking behind the system was that the chosen personnel would widen their service experience and knowledge, and then bring back a greater appreciation of the value of groundcrew when they returned to engineering. Don Finlay was one such volunteer for flying training. He passed the relevant tests and, on 24 October 1930, arrived at RAF Spitalgate near Grantham in Lincolnshire, the home of No. 3 Flying Training School (FTS). He spent almost a year at No. 3 FTS, first learning to fly on the dual-control Avro 504N before progressing to the Siskin with which he was already familiar, albeit from a mechanical perspective. He did well, qualifying as a pilot on 22 September 1931 with a distinguished pass that marked him out as suitable for the most demanding and prestigious of all flying roles, that of a single-seat fighter pilot.

Now proudly wearing his new stripes on his sleeves and with his ‘wings’ on his left breast, Sergeant Donald Finlay went back to RAF Tangmere, this time to C Flight of No. 43 (Fighter) Squadron, known as the Fighting Cocks, to fly the Hawker Fury I. The squadron was part of Air Defence of Great Britain (ADGB), the forerunner of RAF Fighter Command. Created in 1925, ADGB comprised not only the fighter squadrons of the RAF’s Metropolitan Air Force but also army anti-aircraft and searchlight units, as well as the part-time volunteers of the Observer Corps, and, as its title suggests, was responsible for the air defence of the British Isles. No. 43 Squadron was the first to be equipped with the brand-new Fury, which replaced the squadron’s Siskins in the May of 1931, just four months before Finlay arrived. With its excellent, fully enclosed, in-line Rolls-Royce Kestrel II engine, the Fury looked far sleeker than its predecessor and is often regarded as the epitome of British interwar biplane fighter design. It was the first operational RAF fighter aircraft to exceed 200mph in level flight and was sensitive on the controls, giving it superb aerobatic performance. That said, it was still a biplane, still had an open cockpit, and, since it was armed with just two .303 Vickers machine guns, in 1931 the Hawker Fury was little different (its speed aside) from late First World War aircraft designs. This was a situation that was not to change significantly for the RAF until almost the outbreak of the next global conflict.

1932 saw the 23-year-old Finlay’s personal life take a new turn. In October he married Gladys Selway at East Preston on the Sussex coast, not far from Tangmere. Gladys was two years younger than Don and was a native of East Preston, so it seems reasonable to assume that the couple met while Finlay was serving at Tangmere.

Don’s squadron duties did not solely rest with flying. He was expected to continue with engine fitting work, which was not then unusual for a former Halton apprentice turned pilot. As for aviation, the squadron Operations Record Book reveals