Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

‘You may imagine then with what distaste I view the prospect of returning to harness under the same yoke which has galled me so deeply … ’

An important hand written draft letter from Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding to Sir Archibald Sinclair, Secretary of State for Air, dated at ‘3 St. Mary’s Road, Wimbledon, October 28th 1941’, blue ink, two sheets of A4, with corrections and annotation:

‘Dear Sir Archibald Sinclair

I promised to write to you today and tell you whether I would or would not accept the proposal which you made to me yesterday about a return to the Active List.

If the files are still available for convenient reference I would ask you to refresh your memory by reading my letter dated 7th July 1940, written to Newall, with a copy to you.

Your reply dated 10th July and mine of the 12th, yours of the 13th and mine of the 14th (in manuscript); also the two official Air Ministry letters 809403/3837d dated 13th July and 21st August 1940.

On (I think) November 20th you informed me verbally that a successor had been appointed to my Command.

On June 29th 1941 I was informed for the eighth time in my service (for I was twice told that I should have to leave the R.A.F. in Lord Trenchard’s time shortly after the last war) that I should be placed on the Retired List (Air Ministry letter 809403/38 dated 29th June 1941).

This event took place in due course & I readjusted my whole life & ideas; took this house & furnished it; brought my sister up from the country to keep house for me & write a small book. I have in fact been completely happy as my own master for the first time in my life.

You may imagine then with what distaste I view the prospect of returning to harness under the same yoke which has galled me so deeply …

[Dowding goes on to recommend Air Vice-Marshal Pattinson in his stead, ‘an officer of unusual ability and force of character’]

If you will do me the honour of reading the latter part of my book when it is published, you will understand me when I say that I believe that my energies may perhaps be better employed outside rather than inside the service.

One final point, which I approach with some hesitation; some newspapers have printed paragraphs criticising the action taken at the Air Ministry in placing me on the Retired List. You probably know me well enough to need no reassurance that I have nothing directly or indirectly to do with any sort of press campaign, but these criticisms may possibly be the cause of some embarrassment to you.

If you would like me to do so, I will make a public statement, written or broadcast, saying that I am content with the situation as it exists and asking my unknown friends to desist from their well-meant efforts.

If you don’t like the suggestion, please forget that I have made it.

Yours sincerely

H. C. T. Dowding’


Original Ministry of Aircraft communications in respect of Dowding’s journey to the U.S.A. and Canada as a member of the British Air Commission, dated 19th and 20th November 1940, with separate list of delegates; an annotated typescript draft letter from Robert Wright to Dowding, dated 24th November 1940, in which he states what an honour it had been to serve as his chief’s personal assistant; typescript copies of a brusque exchange of messages between Dowding and Air Chief Marshal Portal, dated in November 1940, regarding the former standing down from Fighter Command; other typescript copies of exchanges between Dowding and Beaverbrook at the Ministry of Supply in 1941-42 (3); an original copy of The London Gazette, Wednesday 11 September 1946, containing Dowding’s Battle of Britain despatch; a newspaper cutting reporting on Dowding’s second marriage in September 1951, with margin annotation in pencil in his hand; and an old envelope, postmarked ’21 Dec. 14’ and addressed to ‘Captain H. C. T. Dowding, Royal Artillery, No. 6 Squadron, Royal Flying Corps, No. 2 Wing, British Army in the Field’, with forwarding note ‘No. 9 Sqdn., G.S.O. III, Saint Omer’

generally in good condition (Lot) £800-1000

Provenance: Ex- Sotheby’s, Aeronautica, 25 November 1995 (Lot 99a), when stated to be ‘from the collection of the late Wing Commander Robert C. Wright, author of Dowding and the Battle of Britain’.

The clumsy and contentious manner of Dowding’s removal as Chief of Fighter Command in November 1940 needs no elaboration here; as the author Basil Collier concluded in Leader of the Few, ‘it seemed an act of almost monstrous folly and ingratitude’. Small wonder that Dowding chose to refer to his distaste at being approached to return ‘to harness under the same yoke which has galled me so deeply’ in the above exchange with Sir Archibald Sinclair.

Robert Charles Wright served as Dowding’s personal assistant throughout the Battle of Britain and, according to his obituary notice in The Times, ‘dealt with all the Fighter chief’s paperwork, and controlled calls to the solitary telephone on his desk’. The same source continues:

‘In a foreword to Wright’s Dowding and the Battle of Britain (1969), the Air Chief Marshal described the author as ‘someone who I felt understood and shared, with discretion, my views on my career in the Royal Air Force’. After the war Wright devoted himself to seeking to set right what he described as ‘the grave injustice done Lord Dowding in November 1940’, when the victor of the Battle of Britain was virtually dismissed.’