ST MARY’S, SWANSEA.

14^th SEPTEMBER 2008.

BATTLE OF BRITAIN COMMEMORATION

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Readings: Isaiah 40 vv 28-31.

Psalm 55 vv 1-8.

Matthew 10 vv 24-33.

Yesterday evening many of you will, perhaps, like me have settled down in front of the television to watch the second half of the Last Night of the Proms broadcast from the Royal Albert Hall in London. More sturdy souls may have ventured to Singleton Park here in Swansea to be part of Proms in the Park. I confess to having been a little disappointed, because (unless I missed it) one of the traditional features of the Last Night of the Proms programme, Sir Henry Wood’s ‘Fantasia on British Sea Songs’, wasn’t there this year. Shame! For me, the most evocative bit of Sir Henry’s collection and arrangement isn’t one any of the rousing and lively tunes which he incorporated and which may so readily spring to mind – Hornpipes, Rule Britannia, and so on - but the music of Charles Dibdin’s lament for a dead shipmate, ‘Tom Bowling’.

Dibdin’s tune and words are, to say the least haunting, the music expressing as vividly as the words themselves the melancholy and sorrow at the loss the comrade whom Dibdin calls ‘the darling of our crew’ and who now lay ‘a sheer hulk. No more he’ll hear the tempest howling, for death has broached him to. And now he’s gone aloft.’

The words and the music were written at a time when the seamen of Britain had been taken to the nation’s heart by a popular culture which made them out to be almost mythologically strong and virtually invincible individuals. These were the Hearts of Oak, popularized by the words of David Garrick’s ballad of the same name, Hearts of Oak, and by other offerings of a similar kind, as jolly tars who were seekers of honour and glory on the high seas. None, proclaimed the words of Garrick’s ballad, were so free as the sons of the waves.

(I should say at this point, in case you think that I’ve made some catastrophic mistake and that I think this a Royal Navy commemoration, that I use all of this to make an important point.)

So back to Tom Bowling.

It was and is, however, Tom Bowling, rather than the hearty and romanticised Hearts of Oak and such like which captured the truth of life on the high seas of the 18^th century and which so hauntingly alluded to the great risks which such a life inevitably brought with it. Honour and glory there might be – danger and mortal peril there certainly were.

To romanticise and present as great fun and as a totally fulfilling and splendid adventure that which is actually anything but romantic, anything but great fun and which, far from being a totally fulfilling and splendid adventure, is fraught with personal danger, and the ever present risk and sometimes certainty of death, is, I suggest, a device. It’s a device which might be used attractively to stir the spirits of others and to put steel into the resolve of those who face that danger and who dice with that risk of death, but it masks the truth

As we gather today to reflect upon the features of the Battle of Britain, the only major battle in history to have been fought in the air and which is still, to this day, remembered as the RAF’s finest hour, we can, I think, identify with this suggestion.

In August 1941, a little less than a year after the conclusion of the Battle of Britain, John Gillespie Magee was 19 years old. He had been born in 1922 to parents who were missionaries in China, he was, by 1941, an accomplished and skilful Spitfire pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force.

Magee had a bit of a flair for writing poetry, and the most famous of his works is ‘High Flight’, a poem which I am sure will be known to some of you. It was published posthumously after Magee had been killed in a flying accident in late 1941, and it is the official poem of both the Royal Canadian Air Force and our own Royal Air Force:

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,
I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untresspassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

These are very engaging and very vivid words, beloved of many. Nowadays they are sometimes used at ceremonies and services of remembrance alongside the familiar words of Laurence Binyon’s exhortation, ‘They shall grow not old’, and John Maxwell Edmonds’ Kohima Epitaph, ‘When you go home, tell them of us..’.

The words encapsulate something of what I might call the romance or, to use Magee’s own choice of word, the sheer delirium of flight. They are a profound expression of his personal sense of wonder at having escaped into a freedom which, only by virtue of flight, he was privileged to experience. They are words which seem to suggest complete liberty and total invincibility. Nothing matters; nothing can spoil this; nothing can cause me harm in this cocoon of bliss. They are words which are devoid of any hint of risk or danger and yet they were written by someone for whom both risk and danger in combat had become a commonplace experience.

In fact, so devoid of any expression of the understanding of risk or danger are the words, that some have suggested that Magee was experiencing the intoxicating sensation which results from oxygen starvation or hypoxia, something which can occur at high altitude or in a deep dive.

Whatever the circumstances might have been at the time of flight and the time shortly afterwards when Magee wrote the poem, the words may, to use a phrase which I used a few minutes ago, mask the truth of the risk and danger which Magee and others like him faced.

But masking truth or not, they are words which undoubtedly inspire, and they are words which leave us sensing that the writer’s experience of airborne freedom has left him feeling renewed and invigorated. Whether returning to earth or remaining free of the earth in what he evocatively called the ‘footless halls of air’, you sense that he feels able to take on anything and anybody.

For the prophet Isaiah this sense of being utterly capable and completely renewed resulted from a living encounter with the living God – ‘Those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.’

The psalmist, by contrast, wrote that, having the wings of a dove would enable him to escape from his enemies, rather than confront them. But the words of Isaiah proclaim that knowing God’s ways, being filled with a yearning to establish God’s justice will inspire his faithful servants not to run and hide but to steadfastly pursue the cause of goodness and, in that cause, to face the enemy from whom they might otherwise long to escape and of whom they were likely to be afraid, very afraid indeed.

And so it is that today we celebrate those whom we might imagine as mythically fearless and unconquerably optimistic, never sparing a thought for the danger which they faced or the risks which they inevitably confronted each time they took to the air, but for whom, I guess, the truth was somewhat different. In truth they faced overwhelming odds in almost every respect, but they were inspirationally led and deeply committed to the rightness of the cause, the very survival of the way of life which they treasured and the way of life which they themselves walked. Even though Jesus himself encourages us to have fear only of those who can harm both body and soul, I would scarcely dare say or ask anyone to believe that, however high the purpose, however true the ideal, being confronted with the threat which they faced and being faced with the odds which they faced would not have left them possibly gasping for their very breath as they took to the skies over our land to face the might of the Luftwaffe.

Victory in the Battle of Britain which came hard on the heels of the humiliation of Dunkirk and the so-called Battle of France, was secured with a rich measure of skill, bravery and not a little good fortune. For bravery in the face of that threat, for commitment in the face of those overwhelming odds, for sheer zeal for the cause of right, a zeal which enabled our fighter pilots to put the needs of others before their own safety and personal security, we give our thanks and praise.

And further, as we think of those who lost their lives in the Battle, we trust the words of Jesus that, just as not a single sparrow falls to the ground unperceived by the Father, so these souls, given up to death for the peace and good of others may find the peace of the God whose face, in the ‘high, untrespassed sanctity of space’, they felt they might even be able to touch.

So, to conclude. If this service is simply another in the round of commemorations and exercising of nostalgia, then it is danger of being an empty occasion.

If, on the other hand, it brings us face to face with the reality of fear rather than the myth of adventure, the reality of bravery rather than the myth of indestructibility, bravery which enabled others, for the highest of motives to do the job and be part of a finest hour, then it retains an immensely valuable place in our calendar.

Let us honour those who made it that finest hour and commit ourselves to serving others wherever we may be, at all times and in all places.