80 years on, Spitfires soar to honour Britain’s brave Few

GLEAMING in a cloudless sky, three Spitfires and a Hurricane flew over central London yesterday to remember the fallen heroes of the Battle of Britain.

The magnificent sight of the wartime aircraft flying in box formation greeted dignitaries as they emerged from a service in Westminster Abbey to mark the 80th anniversary of the battle.

Thanks to the pandemic those invited were few and far between. But the empty spaces inside only added to the poignancy of the service to honour the Few. The Abbey is usually packed with more than 2,000 people each year to commemorate the 1,497 pilots and aircrew who gave their lives preventing an invasion by Hitler’s Germany in 1940.

But yesterday only 79 invited guests attended and all were sitting in chairs two metres apart and wore a face covering.

It was Winston Churchill who uttered the famous tribute to the Battle of Britain heroes – ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few’. At yesterday’s service another

Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, a biographer of the wartime leader, gave a Bible reading. The passage from Philippians 2, reads: ‘Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.’

The Chaplain in Chief, the Venerable Air Vice Marshal John Ellis, gave an address in which he paid tribute to NHS staff and key workers in the ‘fight against an invisible army’. He drew comparisons between the Battle of Britain and the pandemic.