WILLIAM “SCOTTY” GORDON was barely 20 years old when he heard, over his crackling wireless set, Winston Churchill rising to new oratorical heights in his morale-boosting praise for the heroes of the Battle of Britain.
Already a veteran of almost a year of war, Pilot Officer Gordon was one of The Few, and four days later he would claim his first kill, shooting down a German bomber over the Channel.
Two weeks after that he was dead himself, his Spitfire shot down during a ferocious dogfight with three Messerschmitt 109s above the Sussex Downs.
It was September 6, 1940; the battle for national survival was at fever pitch; scores of other young men were dying every day and RAF Fighter Command appeared to be on the ropes.
The next day the War Ministry issued the coded warning “Cromwell”, indicating that the Nazi invasion was thought to be less than 12 hours away. The Home Guard was called out, bridges were blown and church bells rang across southern England.
Amid this mayhem, arrangements were made to dispatch Pilot Officer Gordon’s remains to his parents in Dufftown, Moray, and a funeral service was held, followed by burial at the cemetery at nearby Mortlach Church.
And that, publicly, was the end of the matter until last Saturday when a team of aviation archaeologists, who had received permission from the Ministry of Defence to dig up Spitfire No X4036, arrived at the crash site, which was marked by the slightest of depressions in a meadow beside the River Uck near Hailsham, East Sussex.
What they discovered alarmed them deeply and created uncertainty about the tragic events of that day.
Several feet below the surface, still strapped into the armour plating that surrounded the Spitfire’s seat, were the pilot’s remains. A name tag in the tattered slate-blue jacket made it clear that the archaeologists had stumbled across Pilot Officer Gordon’s body.
So who, they wondered — or what — was buried at Dufftown? Pilot Officer Gordon’s parents, Major William Gordon, DSO, Mc, and his wife, Maggie, died long ago and were buried beside the grave that they believed to be that of their only son. Major Gordon had become the district registrar after leaving the Army, and handled the paperwork for his son’s death.
The airman’s younger sister, Elizabeth Gordon, carefully tended the grave over the years that followed. She died last November, aged 72, and was buried in her brother’s plot, completely unaware that his remains lay in a valley 650 miles away, in Sussex.
One theory being considered by the archaeological team is that just a fragment of Pilot Officer Gordon’s remains were buried at Mortlach. Another is that civil defence rescuers were unable to locate the body, or were too busy dealing with the other casualties of the battle, and that the coffin sent to Scotland was instead filled with stones or earth. Another is that the remains of an entirely different airman have lain in the grave for 63 years.
In Dufftown, with its population of 1,700, Pilot Officer Gordon is celebrated as a hero. As recently as last month at Mortlach Junior School, which he attended as a boy before following his father into military service, a commemorative plaque was erected in his honour.
In the war memorial gardens on the outskirts of town, his name is emblazoned on the cenotaph along with those of the rest of the fallen of two world wars. But the mix-up over the burial will leave a bitter taste in the mouths of local people.
The Rev Hugh Smith, the minister at Mortlach Church, said that there would have to be an exhumation. “It’s the first one we have had here in the 21 years I’ve been in charge,” he said. “It will have to be done of course. We don’t know what, or who, is buried down there.
“These things must have happened frequently during the war. If there are some stones in that coffin, it was probably done with the best intentions — that of the family’s comfort.”
Steve Hall, a retired builder from Brighton who led the archaeological team, said yesterday: “We were very surprised to find the tunic, as we had been assured that all human remains had been removed and buried in 1940. “We had been following the rules of our licence very carefully, and when the bones appeared we looked at them reverently and immediately took them to Brighton police station.”
Another member of the team said: “You can imagine the horror of stumbling on this so unexpectedly. But there is pride, too, in finding him after 63 years. One of the team removed the bones to the shade of an oak tree and as he passed he involuntarily removed his cap in respect.”
The RAF’s records show that Pilot Officer Gordon died after the Spitfires of 234 Squadron were attacked by Messerschmitts at 24,000ft. The squadron claimed eight enemy kills and two “probables”, and Pilot Officer Gordon was the only casualty of the day.
The wife of the farmer at Howbourne Farm, where his Spitfire crashed, described in a letter that was passed to the young airman’s father how she had watched “a dog-fight high in the sky with three enemy fighters and one of ours engaged”.
She went on: “There were sharp bursts of machinegun fire and the machine your son was piloting then suddenly nose-dived and came down almost vertically to crash into the earth . . . the pilot was most probably killed in the air as the machine came down apparently quite out of control.”
A spokeswoman for the Hailsham Coroner said that no inquest would be held into Pilot Officer Gordon’s death, and that the RAF was responsible for his remains.
A Ministry of Defence spokeswoman said attempts would be made to find any surviving relatives, who could then decide whether to bury the remains in the grave at Mortlach or elsewhere. One of Pilot Officer Gordon’s comrades, who flew beside him that day, still lives almost within sight of the crash site, at Crowborough, East Sussex. Bob Doe, who had served as a wing commander, recalled: “I remember Scotty as a very quiet, retiring chap, who had been with us ever since we formed the squadron. When he was shot down, I remember that I was trying to avoid the yellow-nosed Messerschmitts and concentrate on shooting down a Dornier bomber.”
Wing Commander Doe and the rest of 234 Squadron could not have known that victory was just days away when Pilot Officer Gordon died.
The next day, the Luftwaffe changed its tactics, stopped targeting airfields and began bombing London in the hope of destroying the Nation’s will. This allowed the RAF time to regroup, and soon Fighter Command was inflicting heavy losses on the waves of German aircraft.
On September 15, nine days after Pilot Officer Gordon perished, the RAF was able to claim victory in what was already being called the Battle of Britain. Two days after that, Hitler shelved his invasion plans indefinitely.

Very interesting reading, Ozzy.

I enjoyed the entire passage. I get a kind of 'nostalgic' feeling when I read things like this.
I think it has to do with the fact that for these blokes, regardless of what side they fought on, time stopped on that day and they've been waiting for all these years to be found and put to rest.

I wonder how many there really are, in the waters especially, in the Channel and all over the Pacific, still strapped tightly into their seats, staring 'stoney' faced into "the last thing they saw".

God Bless Them.