In response to the crisis, the army shortened its Royal Military Academy course to one year. Dowding’s family could not have afforded the private income that their son would have needed in a smart regiment. Instead Hugh Dowding went to Woolwich but failed to get the exam results necessary for a commission in the Royal Engineers. He had to be content with gunnery. Second Lieutenant Dowding, of the Garrison Artillery, graduated but never fought the Boers. Instead he served in Gibraltar, Ceylon, Hong Kong, and with the Mountain Artillery in India.
By the time he returned to England the world had fundamentally changed: the Wright brothers had built their flying machine, and a Frenchman, Louis Blériot, had flown the Channel. The idea of learning how to fly attracted Dowding, in the same way that polo and skiing did. By getting up in the early hours he was able to have flying tuition at Brooklands before arriving at the Camberley Staff College each morning. The Royal Flying Corps had been formed the previous year, and anyone who could fly and was accepted by it could get the cost of his flying tuition refunded. Dowding persuaded the flying school to teach him on credit until he got the refund. It was on this ‘fly now, pay later’ arrangement that Dowding was able to afford his Royal Aero Club certificate. The school assigned a mechanic to be his instructor and he got his ‘ticket’ after a total of one hour and forty minutes in the air.
After a further three months’ instruction at the Central Flying School, Upavon, Dowding received his wings. Until then he had considered flying as a sport, or at best a help to his army career. But his short time with the men of the Royal Flying Corps – still a part of the army – made him think that he would like to stay with them. His father’s veto did no more than delay matters. It was 1914. Within weeks of getting his wings, war with Germany began. Dowding’s qualification as a pilot required him to serve with the RFC.
Dowding went to France. By 1915 he was a squadron commander. Dowding was considerably older than the average wartime pilot – ten years older than von Richthofen, for instance – and, as the RFC expanded and became the RAF, his military background brought him rapid promotion. By the time the war ended, Dowding was a Brigadier-General. Many rungs lower on the promotion ladder were three young squadron commanders. They were all to play vital roles in the Battle of Britain almost a quarter of a century later.
Commanding an army-cooperation squadron, there was Major Leigh-Mallory, who was to continue with this speciality in the peacetime air force. Leigh-Mallory, who later became Dowding’s severest critic, was ten years younger than Dowding. He had taken an honours history degree at Cambridge before becoming a soldier and, in 1916, an airman. Trafford Leigh-Mallory was a thick-set man with heavy jowls and a small, carefully trimmed moustache.
Major K. R. Park, MC and bar, DFC, was an astounding New Zealander who had fought at Gallipoli, been wounded on the Somme, and then, by losing his medical records, transferred to the air force and shot down twenty German aircraft.
Keith Park was a popular and persuasive man. He had quelled a near mutiny in 1918 by assembling the airmen and talking to them on random subjects and in such a monotonous voice for so long that all rebelliousness was destroyed by fatigue.
Thirdly there was Major W. Sholto-Douglas, DSO, MC, a fighter pilot credited with five victories. In another example of post-war Angst, Dowding was instructed by the Air Ministry to court-martial Sholto-Douglas over something that was in no way the young officer’s fault. In spite of a rather delicate situation that obtained between Dowding and the Air Ministry over his own retention in the RAF, Dowding refused to take any action. For this, Sholto-Douglas seemed suitably appreciative.
Dowding was an enigmatic man. His inability to make intimate friends will probably keep him so. It is difficult to reconcile a man who put on his hat before stepping into the next office, with a ski champion who seldom missed a season on the slopes, and eventually became president of the Ski Club of Great Britain. There was Dowding the diligent administrator, and Dowding the impatient technician; Dowding the devout and courteous, and Dowding of whom the Air Ministry was afraid. If Dowding remains an enigma there can be little doubt that that is exactly what he wished.
Already an abstemious and dedicated man, his social life virtually disappeared upon the tragic death of his wife after only two years of marriage. He was left to care for an infant son. Withdrawn and reflective, Dowding now devoted himself entirely to his work. Some mistook this attitude for ambition.
In the early 1930s Dowding was appointed to the Air Council as Member for Supply and Research. One of his first dicta was that wood must no longer be the structural base of combat aircraft. During Dowding’s time in this vital job, the RAF changed from biplane fighters to metal monoplanes. It was not done without strong opposition from the biplane lobby. In 1935 the first Hurricane flew, and the prototype Spitfire came a few months later.
It was on Dowding’s authority that Robert Watson-Watt of the National Physical Laboratories demonstrated the way in which an aircraft could reflect a radio beam (in this case a BBC overseas programme). They watched a pinhead of light on a cathode-ray oscillograph stretch to a tiny green line. It was the crude beginning of Britain’s radar.
Boldly Dowding assumed that radar would work, and went ahead with plans for a control system, and fighter tactics, on that assumption. Until radar was ready, the fighters emitted radio signals like echoes, so that plotting could be set up.
Because the original (10-metre) radar network could not detect low-flying aircraft, Dowding took the navy’s more complex 1.5-metre radar sets that were designed to detect ships. These sets had aerials that revolved, to scan the whole horizon. Adapted for the detection of low-flying aircraft, these sets became Chain Home Low (CHL). By 1940 Dowding was devoting a great deal of his time to the development of airborne radar fitted into night fighter aircraft.
In 1936, with the growth of Göring’s air force more and more in evidence, the RAF decided to reorganise into specialist Commands. All of the bombers in Britain would come under Bomber Command, sea reconnaissance units would be organised as Coastal Command, and training would be done by Training Command.
In March 1936, as the Spitfire prototype took to the air for the first time, and the radar he had nursed into being made rapid strides, Dowding ended his job as Member for Research and Development (the supply part of his original task had been given to another member of the Air Council). With a neatness usually only found in the pages of fiction, Dowding was now appointed to prepare these weapons and take them to war.
This appointment, to Commander in Chief of Fighter Command, was not due to any friends that Dowding had in the Air Ministry. On the contrary, plans were afoot to deprive Dowding of the promotion to Chief of Air Staff which had already been promised to him.
In July 1936 Dowding made a first visit to Bentley Priory, HQ of the newly created Fighter Command. Bentley Priory was an old Gothic house on a hill to the extreme north-west of London. At one time it had been a girls’ school. It was typical of this idiosyncratic man that instead of arranging the ceremony that would normally take place, he arrived at nine o’clock in the morning, unannounced and all alone. The guard was extremely reluctant to let him through the gate but after inspecting his papers, he handed him over to the most senior man there, a sergeant from the Orderly Room. The two men wandered through the grounds and then through the empty rooms. Selecting a room with a southerly view, Dowding asked the sergeant to put his name on the door, thanked him, and left.
By this time Dowding was 54 years old, a tall, thin, rather frail-looking widower. He set up house with his sister, just along the road from his office. Dowding’s son was preparing to go to the RAF College at Cranwell. In 1939 he would graduate and come under his father’s orders, as a Spitfire pilot in Fighter Command, just in time for the Battle of Britain.
Meanwhile there was the gigantic task of reorganising the fighter defences of Britain. Working with Dowding, as his Senior Air Staff Officer, there was a man who was perhaps the RAF’s foremost expert on fighters. Keith Park, now a 44-year-old Air Commodore, had followed his success as an ace fighter pilot of the First World War with time at the staff college and a short spell commanding a fighter station. Park was a tall, neat New Zealander of Scots origin. Thin-faced, with a military moustache,