Lancaster hero who battled to honour the Bomber Boys
Dad was a gentleman through and through, always immaculate in his jacket, waistcoat and tie, and with a broad smile.
But you underestimated him at your peril, as the sculptor commissioned to create the Bomber Command Memorial in Green Park, London, discovered.
The sculptor, Philip Jackson, envisaged it as featuring a lone airman. dad, who flew with Bomber Command as a Lancaster pilot, insisted that because they had flown as crews of seven, they should be commemorated as such.
With fellow veterans, he spent years campaigning and raising funds to this end. and it was one of the proudest days of his life when the bronze statue depicting a crew — all seven of them — just returned from a mission was unveiled by the Queen in June 2012.
Raised the eldest of three in North London, dad was bright, athletic and adventurous. On his 19th birthday in december 1940 he joined the RAF and was dispatched first to Canada, then to alabama, where he undertook his first solo flight in a Stearman PT-17 biplane two days after Pearl Harbor.
after he was tasked with instructing other fledgling airmen, all of whom were older, he grew a moustache for added gravitas!
dad returned to Britain in 1943, where, from his base at Lossiemouth, he was asked to form a crew to undertake daring sorties, bombing targets in France and Belgium, to
support the pending Allied invasion of normandy.
It was treacherous work. On D-Day, Dad had to fly his halifax at just 3,000ft because of cloud cover, performing daring aerobatics to dodge the tracer shells. he was flying the plane at a 90-degree angle to the ground when a shell hit the rear window, leaving a hole the size of a dinner plate in the Perspex on each side. If he’d been flying level it would have hit the fuselage and exploded.
his luck didn’t last, though: on the crew’s 21st operation, in August 1944, an explosion sent their Lancaster into a spinning vertical dive. After ordering his crew to ‘abandon aircraft’, Dad regained consciousness just in time to open his parachute as he hurtled to the ground, the blazing Lancaster plunging down alongside him.
Two of his crew — bomb-aimer Brian Boston and mid-upper gunner Bill ‘Taffy’ Kinsey — lost their lives that night.
Dad and his four surviving crew spent the last nine months of the war in the German prisoner-of-war camp Stalag Luft 1, where he used the time to study French and mathematics. The camp was liberated by the russians on May 1, 1945, and, on his return to Britain, Dad was appointed a senior traffic officer at RAF Merryfield, in Somerset. It was there that he met and fell in love with our mum Joan, a WAAF officer in his section.
They married in 1949 and we came along over the next five years. By then Dad had joined his father’s jewellery wholesale business, which he later took over. We have happy memories of holidays spent travelling the country in the family caravan while Dad sold his wares.
Like many of his generation, Dad didn’t talk about the war, but as the years passed he opened up about his experiences. There was not a day, he told us, when he didn’t think about his lost comrades. As a founder member of the Sussex veterans group, Dad was invited to talk to schools and colleges about his wartime experiences. It was his way of honouring his fallen crew — and it brought him to the attention of the BBC, who interviewed him for the 2012 series Bomber Boys, presented by Star Wars actor ewan McGregor and his older brother Colin, a former RAF fighter pilot.
It was another proud moment for Dad, who, to our frustration, only mentioned that he was appearing in a film with a hollywood celebrity after the event. Dad nursed Mum with the greatest love and care through her final months and was devastated to lose her in 2008, aged 92. It was a comfort to us all that he found companionship in his twilight years with an old friend, Beryl Ward.
he died in an RAF nursing home, a much-loved father, grandfather and great-grandfather. Fly free, dear Dad — what a wonderful flight path you had.
Reg Barker, born December 11, 1921, died May 17, 2018, aged 96.