Eric Brown flying a Hawker P1040 (Image: Bonhams/Bournemouth News/REX/Shutterstoc)

As conversation-stoppers go, Captain Eric Brown’s assertion couldn’t have been extra arresting: “Well, of course, the second time I met Hitler, it was different,” he stated matter-of-factly.

Suddenly you can hear a pin drop amidst the noisy gathering marking his ninetieth birthday.

Then there was a clamour of questions. “What do you mean, the second time?”

Better referred to as ‘Winkle’, a naval nickname reserved for the smallest pilot within the Fleet, he recounted some unbelievable tales.

Whether he really met Hitler is open to conjecture, however he might have seen him on the Olympic Games in 1936.

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Eric in a German Starfighter or 'Widowmaker' airplane within the mid-Nineteen Sixties (Image: Bonhams/Bournemouth News/REX/Shutterstock)

He can also have met the German Chancellor two years later at Königsberg the place the Fuhrer was addressing younger aviators. 

The particulars are sketchy and can't be stood up, however there's each likelihood given his astonishing life that they're true.

As my new e book, which he solely needed written after his loss of life, reveals, Eric was a foundling, born in Hackney, East London, in 1919 and given up for adoption.

When no foster mother and father got here ahead, he was despatched to Edinburgh, the place he was given a house by self-declared First World War RAF hero Robert Brown, 43, and his spouse Euphemia, 42. From such humble beginnings, he went on to grow to be a record-breaking Naval take a look at and fighter pilot, flying 487 completely different planes and helicopters in all – a feat unlikely ever to be overwhelmed.

As a boy, he attended the Royal High School in Edinburgh and, later, that metropolis’s college. Despite his small stature, he performed rugby for the Scottish nationwide schoolboy workforce and achieved scholarship-level marks in fashionable languages and arithmetic. His two passions throughout the Nineteen Thirties have been flying and Germany. He learn the whole lot out there within the bookshops of Edinburgh and his hometown of Galashiels.

Writers then have been extolling the wonderful developments in Germany, particularly the Messerschmitt fighters and Heinkel bombers. Fortunately Eric’s adoptive father was additionally very eager, if not obsessive about, aviation. He claimed to have been a pilot within the Royal Flying Corps though, in actuality, his position was as a labourer on commentary balloons.

Eric was a lucky younger man. Having discovered to fly, he additionally had a uncommon two-seat MG, bought in 1939 to drive to France the place he was to be the ‘assistant’ at a college in Metz. On his option to take up the put up, simply days earlier than the outbreak of warfare, as a part of his diploma in fashionable languages, he couldn’t resist one other journey to Germany.

War clouds had been gathering and, on September 3 that 12 months, the heavens opened. Eric was arrested and imprisoned. Three days later, handled effectively however with caustic phrases concerning the MG, he was launched as a part of a scholar swap between Britain and Germany.

Making his method again to Britain by way of Switzerland and France, he noticed the lackadaisical warfare preparations in France though mobilising troops and army visitors on the Cross-Channel ferries meant he needed to go away the treasured MG at Dieppe.

Eric Brown in 2015 (Image: Eric Brown)

The variety RAC man stated if Eric joined, he would get it again to Galashiels.

He did and Eric remained a member for the subsequent 70 years till he stopped driving at 95. The MG didn’t honest so effectively and was written off in 1942 shortly after Eric bought it to an RAF engineer.

There is a facet story too: aged 93, he was delighted to be slapped with a dashing ticket. It was the final nice achievement of his life, he gleefully instructed a good friend.

Keen to assist the warfare effort, Eric discovered the Fleet Air Arm of the Royal Navy was the quickest option to be a part of the battle.

After all, he reckoned that being a non-public pilot, aerobatic educated and with 200 hours of flying time, he could be a shoo-in.

Not a little bit of it, although. Naval Seaman Second Class Eric Melrose Brown needed to begin on the very backside, at HMS St Vincent, Gosport.

He graduated among the many prime ten and was despatched to Northern Ireland for elementary flying coaching. Lucky for him, because it was there that he met Lynn, the bubbly schoolgirl who would grow to be his spouse of 57 years – supporting him by means of thick and skinny, together with air fight, crashes, and prolonged intervals of separation that warfare typically brings.

After gaining his pilot’s wings at Netheravon in Wiltshire, Eric was posted to battle pilot coaching on the newly constructed Yeovilton naval air station in Somerset the place his pure flying capacity shone by means of, as his confidential information present.

Allocated to the primary Martlet squadron within the Royal Navy, he was a pure on the trickiest aviation pursuit – touchdown at sea, in tough climate on a small deck in a good smaller fighter.

He fought gallantly within the Battle of the Atlantic, capturing down enemy bombers and strafing U-Boats.

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Winkle: The Extraordinary Life of Britain’s Greatest Pilot by Paul Beaver is out now (Image: )

It was aboard HMS Audacity, the primary of the small escort carriers that Churchill ordered into service, that he was found as a possible take a look at pilot.

“A waste if he is killed before he has shown us what he can do,” stated the captain simply days earlier than he himself was killed when the plane service was torpedoed and sunk in December 1941.

Eric survived by leaping 20ft into the freezing Atlantic. When rescued, he had briefly misplaced the usage of his legs.

Back house, first in Scotland coaching on new plane carriers after which on the world-famous Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, Eric proved his true price.

He was a pure; if there was an issue to resolve in the best way a fighter or torpedo bomber flew, he might resolve it.

He additionally developed a status for flying underneath bridges – bagging the Forth Bridge in a Seafire and the Tay Bridge in a Swordfish, with a terrified score within the again. He was additionally disciplined for taking an aeroplane with out permission, flying to Belfast to see Lynn, after which not returning in time.

It was not the one time it “incurred the displeasure of Their Lordships”, because the Royal Navy phrases it. Yet regardless of all this, he was awarded so many medals King George VI was heard to say as he introduced yet one more: “What, you again?

Towards the end of the war, Eric was assigned with the vital task of bringing back both German scientists and their technologies, including the early German jets, such as the Arado bomber and Messerschmitt 262 fighter. He compiled a list of 12 key figures he needed to find and from whom he wanted to extract details of the potential to break the sound barrier – the holy grail of aviation in the 1940s.

He was among the first Britons to witness the horrors of the Nazi death camps at Bergen-Belsen, Germany, recalling: “There were mounds of dead bodies, most female, all bulldozed grotesquely into pits. There were long huts... which held 250 dying women in indescribable filth. The stench of these huts has never left my nostrils.”

In Germany, by means of a cope with the Americans, he swapped two captured German jet bombers for the chance to interview Hermann Göring, the previous head of the Luftwaffe.

They chatted for almost two hours about expertise and jets, ending with the Nazi chief insisting to Eric that the Battle of Britain was a draw!

Post-war, take a look at flying continued as army developments have been being transferred to industrial plane, particularly long-range airliners. The new navigational gear, higher engines and different advances would make trans-Atlantic air journey doable.

As ever, Eric was there, testing the techniques and the aeroplanes.

In the early Nineteen Fifties, he went to America to take British naval expertise to the Americans because the Treasury wouldn't fund the security options on British plane carriers. The Americans welcomed him with open arms and there he met and educated a number of the naval pilots who would later grow to be astronauts.

Wishing to progress within the Royal Navy, Eric needed to cease take a look at flying and be taught a method referred to as “ship driving” and find out how to lead a squadron within the air. As a take a look at pilot, his flying had been very self-sufficient, and he was unused to working as a workforce.

He struggled with management.

He was, nonetheless, particularly with Lynn’s assist, a superb diplomat and was later despatched to Germany twice – the primary time to create the German Naval Air Arm and the second time as naval attaché in Bonn.

It was there he hosted the creator John Le Carre, who was researching his Nazi-hunting novel, A Small Town in Germany.

Eric was now senior sufficient to be making selections in Whitehall but nonetheless had his eye on a command, even together with his restricted sea time and nearly no watchkeeping expertise.

Driving a ship was by no means going to occur and he didn’t assist by questioning the loyalty of Denis Healey, then Secretary of State for Defence, by asking if he was nonetheless a member of the Communist Party after Labour cancelled the long run plane service.

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Eric’s remaining command was RNAS Lossiemouth the place he drove the station effectively however to the annoyance of the native laird. He stored flying so long as he might and even flew on his final day in command – a Whirlwind helicopter which really crashed in a snowstorm.

Everyone aboard was unscathed but it surely was not one of the best ways to depart the Royal Navy after 30 years of service.

Not content material to retire, Eric and Lynn moved to Surrey, and he began work as chief government of the British Helicopter Advisory Board in 1971, serving to with the brand new progress business of North Sea oil helicopter operations.

During this time, he met Neil Armstrong, who would stay an acquaintance for the subsequent 40 years. And he turned down an invite to grow to be a US citizen and prepare as an astronaut as a result of he didn’t wish to quit his British citizenship.

When Lynn died in 1998, Eric reinvented himself because the world authority on aeroplanes from the warfare and plane service operations, authoring a number of “how to fly it” books.

In truth, he modified from being a martinet of a naval officer right into a nationwide treasure till his loss of life aged 97 in February 2016.

And that's how I shall keep in mind him.

• Paul Beaver is 'Winkle's' official biographer. Winkle: The Extraordinary Life of Britain’s Greatest Pilot by Paul Beaver (Michael Joseph, £25) is out now. To order for £22.50 go to expressbookshop.com or name Express Bookshop on 020 3176 3832. Free UK P&P on orders over £25