This little metal Whitley Armstrong bomber was produced in the late 1930’s by Dinky Toys; a popular toy for boys in a country preparing for war. It depicts one of Britain’s newest and most up to date heavy bombers at the outbreak of World War Two. It was unheated, cramped, poorly armed and could not maintain height on one engine.
Into one of these, on the sleety, foggy late afternoon of the 1st January 1941, Sgt Thomas Behan and his crew clambered through too small hatches in cumbersome flight suits, carrying thermos flasks and talismen; Sergeants’ mess Hogmanay hangovers waning now, probably.
Oil drums had been set alight along the runways, the heated air above lifting the haar just enough for take off. They would be relit later when the bombers returned from the German industrial city of Bremen. Thomas Behans’ Whitley, my Whitley, would not be amongst them.
30 miles east of the Yorkshire coastal town of Withernsea, at around 7 o’ clock in the evening, Thomas Behans’ bomber disappeared silently into the North Sea. On his return to his airfield in France, night fighter pilot Feldwebel Hans Hahn claimed an English twin engined aeroplane off the Yorkshire coast.
Across the Vale of York, blackout curtains are being closed, fires stoked and family and friends gather; quiet talk on the war and its' inevitable stretch into the coming year. My Icarus, like Brueghel’s’, in a plume of water you could not see from the coast but if you had, would probably as Brueghel’s' ploughman did, turn away from and mark it as insignificant, had already fallen.
Over the years, Thomas Behan has crept into my work; haar and sea-fret cast a monochromatic pall over my work and subtly dictate the objects I collect – small leaden bombers; Eric Ravilious designed ceramics (Ravilious himself ending his life in another Northern Sea off Iceland in another wartime aircraft) and stories; lots of stories.
Thomas Behan was an Invernessian baker to trade and my Mothers’ uncle.
I have not bought a loaf of bread for close on ten years...I bake every second evening, no longer needing to refer to recipes any longer; baking from memory or perhaps to memorialise.
(edited version of a piece written for the Wunderkammer project, Critical and Contextual Studies Course at Grays School of Art).