Following last week’s review of the movie Battle of Britain, I received the following letter from our reader Barry Gillingwater. I’m quoting it in it’s entirety as today’s guest blog post.

Your piece on the Battle of Britain movie has stirred my memories. After the movie people had finished filming most of the flying sequences at RAF Duxford (most of the air fleet support and maintenance was carried out at RAF Henlow), the fleet was moved to RAF Bovingdon in 1969 for dispersal. Luckily I was serving as an instructor on 617 Gliding School which was based there at the time. We actually shared our hangar with lots of Me 109 Buchons, Spitfires, Hurricanes and a Mosquito which was used for some of the air camera work.There were also the two Heinkel 111′s parked at Bovingdon to film the scene in the movie where the He 111 is ‘shot down’ over central London. They erected a clever artificial ‘skyline scenery’ of the rooftops of London along the Northern taxiway and perimeter track at Bovingdon and filmed one of the Heinkels supposedly ‘crashing’ into the buildings. What he actually was doing was just diving behind the airfield into the valley behind Bluebell Wood at the edge of the airfield. They did the scene in a few takes so I bet the pilot was thoroughly enjoying himself.

We also had the two ‘Prukas’ in our hangar (the Proctor V’s you mentioned) (elsewhere referred to as “Proctukas” – Ed.). They were not in what you would call ‘mint showroom condition’ and I doubt if they ever flew again (or at all). I would rather have taken my chances flying a real Stuka in the middle of a Squadron of Spitfires in 1940, than to have tried to get airborne in one of those Prukas in peacetime 1969.

After the majority of the film fleet had been returned to their original owners, they set about fitting dummy belly airscoops under the Buchons and repainted then in US Army Air Corps colours to act as P51′s in the movie about General Patton, which was later filmed in Spain. In autumn 1969 I took a couple of photos of these Buchon/Mustang ‘wolf in wolf’s clothing’ hybrids when they were leaving for RAF Manston to clear customs en route to Spain, and have attached them for you.

Click to enlarge images
[Barry Gillingwater]

Another pic I took shows the approach to Bovingdon on a sunny day. The main runway you see was also used to film a ‘bouncing bomb’ sequence for the movie ‘Mosquito Squadron’ a couple of years earlier. In fact Bovingdon was also used to film most of the sequences in the ’633 Squadron’ movie in the mid-60′s. On one of these occasions they had dressed up the main gate and guardroom area to look like a Luftwaffe base, complete with a line of extras dressed up as German soldiers ready for inspection. One of our staff cadets was a bit cheeky and slowly walked along the line inspecting them, adjusting a helmet here, brushing off some lint on another, until the Director of the film yelled at him to go away as they were trying to film.

Click to enlarge image
[Barry Gillingwater]

Our Gliding School was transferred to RAF Manston in 1970 just before they closed RAF Bovingdon for all flying operations. Manston was steeped in history from the 1940′s, with lots of the B of B bomb craters and damage clearly visible on the airfield even in the 70′s. But that’s another story as they say.

Wonderful memories, and like the Proctuka, the Mustang-Buchon could cause some serious head-scratching in any “name that aircraft” contest… From my side I can only add that the Proctuka (Precival Proctor acting as a Stuka) did actually fly on occasion, albeit the handling was reportedly rather bad.

This is fun. If you have your own personal memories connected to the filming of the Battle of Britain, please share! My email can be found at the bottom of this page.