"THERE can't have been many Second World War pilots who could claim that their mother watched them being shot down from the balcony of her own home. But Wing Commander "Tim" Elkington, who has died aged 98, was one. It was August 16, 1940, and the civilian population that lived along the coast by The Solent had a grandstand view of one of the most epic confrontations between British and German fighters of the Second World War. Several RAF squadrons were scrambled to intercept a massive raid by a group of Stuka dive bombers and no fewer than 100 Messerschmitt Bf 109s on the RAF base at Tangmere near Chichester in West Sussex. Ten thousand feet below, from her house on Hayling Island, Hants, Mrs Isabel Elkington trained her binoculars on one plane in particular, a lone Hurricane being pursued by three Bf 109s. She knew at once it was her 19-year-old son's because of the bright yellow figure of "Eugene the Jeep" on its nose.Her son had painted his plane with a picture of the Popeye cartoon character for good luck. But it failed to save him that day. Cannon fire tore through his starboard fuel tank and the injured Elkington was forced to bail out. He didn't have time to inflate his lifejacket before losing consciousness, and if it wasn't for the quick-thinking - and brilliant flying skills - of his flight leader Sergeant-Pilot Fred Berry he would certainly have drowned. But Berry used the slipstream of his aircraft to blow Elkington ashore and he was taken to hospital in Chichester where his mother was at his bedside within the hour. He was later mollified to find that the pilot who had shot him down was Luftwaffe ace Major Helmut Wick who had made him his eighteenth victim. "He was quite an experienced chap, so I'm not too put out!" he said. John Francis Durham Elkington - always known as "Tim" - was born in Edgbaston, Birmingham, in 1920 and entered RAF College Cranwell as a flight cadet aged 18. After the war he stayed in the services, commanding RAF Turnhouse, Edinburgh, before serving in Northern Ireland, Cyprus, and Christmas Island in the Pacific during British nuclear tests in the 1950s." www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1082974/war-hero-dies-98-years-old-wing-commander-tim-elkington
