While the short jaunt was trouble-free bar a bouncy landing, the skies over Europe were far more treacherous once Bill Warwick, who turned 100 on Thursday, was at the controls.
The post office worker and farmer turned greenkeeper took on a riskier pursuit in 1941 when he trained as a pilot before joining the Royal Air Force’s No. 504 Squadron.
Warwick, whose room at The Oaks Rest Home and Village, Upper Riccarton, includes a painting of his pride and joy on the wall beside his bed, was coaxed to reflect on his wartime exploits as a major milestone loomed on the horizon.
He gave very little away
which, according to his son Mike, is a time-honoured tradition.
“All us kids knew that our father had been to war but we never talked about it at all,” he said.
“Dad had a desk and I started reading his log book one day and mum said: ‘I don’t think he’d want you to be reading that’ so I put it away and never touched it again.”
Warwick revealed the Tiger Moth flight meant the air force took precedence – his father John fought in World War 1 with the Canterbury Yeoman Cavalry – when he chose to enlist.
“I just wanted to fly. I’d flown about 15 years before the war with one of those pilots who took Tiger Moths around the country.
“My brother and I got two and six from my father and we both flew off the golf links up at Hawarden.”
His first operational flight in a Spitfire was with a convoy escort over the English Channel in late 1942 and for the next two years he primarily flew bomber raid escorts, reconnaissance missions and he also strafed enemy positions.
“I was never shot down, I was chased a little bit, most of us were,” he said.
Warwick shrugged when asked if he had any near-death experiences in the cockpit.
“All the time. Everybody was in the same boat. A whole bunch of you were in danger simply because you were there. We got used to it, and just hoped to be home for tea.”
Warwick also served as a staff-pilot supervisor before returning to Spitfires with No. 74 Squadron in Holland following the D-Day landings.
When hostilities ended, Warwick was one of the first New Zealanders to fly the Gloster Meteor jet plane for ceremonial fly-pasts and victory parades before he returned home to the family’s Hawarden farm in 1947 with his Essex-born wife June.
“I’d have liked to have stayed on because we got in early on jet aircraft but Dad offered me the farm and I took it,” he said.
Warwick ran the sheep and crop farm until 1971, when he sold up and moved to Christchurch, where he was a greenkeeper at the Russley Golf Club.
One of the few World War 2 fighter pilots left in Christchurch after Dave Iggo died three months after his 100th birthday on August 23, Warwick downplayed his current status, and nor does he live in the past.
Watching The Battle of Britain wasn’t exactly a priority when he was toiling on the land.
“We had a movie a week in the Hawarden Hall. I didn’t have the incentive to watch (war movies) at the time. You were only seeing a repeat more or less.”
After all, he had occupied a front row seat in one of warfare’s greatest theatres.
