Sheridan Smith backs £ 60,000 Spitfire campaign for Battle of Britain memorial

AN APPEAL to buy a £ 60,000 replica of a Second World War Spitfire has been launched by the backers of a campaign to install a permanent memorial to the Northern pilots who took part in the Battle of Britain.

The actress Sheridan Smith has agreed to become a patron of the project, which aims to install the plane alongside a memorial at the South Yorkshire Aircraft Museum in her home town of Doncaster.

“Many people think the battle was just fought by public schoolboys from the South of England but it’s not true – they came from all walks of life and all parts of the country including my part of the world,” Ms Smith said.

“It’s exactly 80 years since this country was fighting for survival in the Battle of Britain. There are many memorials in the South but sadly nothing in the North.”

The planned memorial will be sited in a reconstruction of a World War Two barricade being built on land next to the aircraft museum at Lakeside in Doncaster, which in 1940, as RAF Doncaster, was home to 616 ( South Yorkshire) Squadron, Royal Auxiliary Air Force.

It will include a visitor centre aimed at teaching younger visitors about the significance of the battle against the Luftwaffe in the summer of 1940. More than 3,000 aircraft were downed from both sides – 1,023 Allied craft and 1,887 enemy planes, according to RAF statistics. Some 544 RAF command pilots died.

Ms Smith, who won an Olivier Award for her role in Trevor Nunn’s revival of Terence Rattigan’s wartime love story Flare Path, was persuaded to join the project by a family friend, retired Air Vice Marshal Alan Johnson. She has taken part in several wartime commemorations, including last year’s Royal British Legion Festival of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall.

The national Battle of Britain Memorial is sited on the White Cliffs of Dover. It was initiated by the Battle of Britain Memorial Trust and opened by the Queen Mother in July 1993.