Battle of Britain map plotter dies in NZ
Joan Fanshawe, 98, who regularly visited, was with family in Auckland
One of the last surviving map plotters of the Battle of Britain, Joan Fanshawe, has died in Auckland.
Fanshawe, who was 98, was visiting her two daughters in the city and took ill while baking a Christmas cake. She died in hospital.
Fanshawe, whose maiden name was Moxon, joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force at 19 on the declaration of World War II, abandoning plans to study for a social work degree. She enlisted out of a sense of duty, saying that since her father had no sons to volunteer, she would do so.
She was on WAAF duty on September 15, 1940, the day the Battle of Britain came to a head with 1500 aircraft fighting for control of the skies above London. The Royal Air Force was stretched to the limit as the German Luftwaffe pressed to gain air supremacy.
One of 10 special duty WAAF staff, Fanshawe worked shifts in the operations room at RAF Uxbridge in West London.
Their role was to pinpoint both RAF and enemy aircraft positions using flagged blocks and arrows on a huge plotting table and grid reference map of southern England.
Britain’s wartime leader, Winston Churchill, visited the bunker on the Battle of Britain Day. It is recorded that he famously asked New Zealander Air Vice Marshall Keith Park — who was in charge of the set-up — about his reserve aircraft: “How many more have you got?”
Park replied: “None”. Witnesses of the event suggested that Churchill’s response to news of the lack of additional aircraft was “quite grave”.
In her diary of the momentous day, Fanshawe noted that she was “rather annoyed” the commander-inchief ’s visit had extended her shift by an hour.
In the last decade she became quite a celebrity in Britain, given her war role. She was an honoured guest this year at the RAF’s centenary celebrations in London, and in 2015 she gave a reading at the Westminster Abbey Battle of Britain Day service.
She was on hand in July this year for the premiere of the documentary Spitfire, an account of the famous fighter plane from the surviving pilots who flew them.
As one of the last of the map plotters, Fanshawe also appeared in a number of documentaries about the war. She once told an interviewer that it was not always frantically busy in the Uxbridge bunker.
“Some days you would have nothing on the table at all and nothing to do. We'd get our reading out or knitting."
Her funeral on Thursday, attended by about 60 people, was held in Manurewa at the St Elizabeth Anglican Church.
Fanshawe’s ashes will be returned to Britain where they will be interred in her local Anglican church’s cemetery in Stroud, Hampshire.
A regular visitor to New Zealand over the past 18 years, Fanshawe is survived by her son, Lionel, who lives in Stroud, Hampshire, and her Auckland-based daughters, Althea and Dionys.