This week, John Allman ‘Paddy’ Hemingway, the last of the WWII fighter pilots, died at the age of 105. Born in Dublin, Hemingway came to England in 1938 and joined the Royal Air Force.
At the age of 21 he fought in the Battle of Britain, a conflict which claimed the lives of more than five hundred RAF pilots.
According to his obituary, John Hemingway never saw his role as anything other than doing what he was trained to do. He never spoke about bravery or sacrifice, describing himself as a ‘lucky Irishman’ who simply did his job, like so many others of his generation.
One of the 544 RAF pilots who did lose his life during the Battle of Britain was Brendan ‘Paddy’ Finucane.
I have often wondered why Irishmen of this generation are so often referred to as ‘Paddy’. My father was known as Peter ‘Paddy’ O’Connell when he taught at St. Paul’s School in London. He considered it to be a mark of affection.
After Peter left St. Paul’s, he opened his own school in Folkestone, where our neighbours were the Finucane family. I was four years old and an only child which inclined me to bossiness, something three-year old Niall Finucane patiently and faithfully endured. The two of us became inseparable.
One day, while we were playing, Niall told me that his uncle had been a famous fighter pilot. My mother, who was witness to this conversation, told me, many years later, that in an obvious attempt to outdo Niall, I told him that my uncle could eat more sweets than anyone else in the whole world. Niall was staggered by this information and Uncle Brendan was never mentioned again.
On his next visit to Folkestone, Uncle Bobi, a man who did indeed enjoy the sweet things of life, was surprised to discover that he was an object of enormous interest to the little boy next door. Niall no doubt imagined that a world champion consumer of confectionary must, by definition, carry plentiful supplies about his person.
I was lying, but Niall, it turned out, was telling the truth. Uncle Brendan ‘Paddy’ Finucane was not only a fighter pilot but the youngest ever wing commander in the RAF and a hero on both sides of the Atlantic. Finucane, who was profiled in Life magazine and The New York Times, was known as “The Flying Shamrock – Terror of the Nazis”.
When a well-intentioned member of his ground crew added a circle of swastikas to the shamrocks on his personal aircraft, Finucane asked for them to be removed. He felt it was inappropriate to take pride in actions that had resulted in the death of an unknown number of young men.
Niall’s grandfather, Thomas ‘Andy’ Finucane, had fought as a volunteer alongside Eamon de Valera in the Easter Rising of 1916. A devout Catholic, Andy married Florence, an English Protestant. She converted to Catholicism and their five children were raised in the Catholic Church.
All three sons joined the British Army: Raymond Finucane followed his older brother into the RAF and Kevin, Niall’s father, was a captain in the Royal Artillery. In a 2004 Irish radio interview, Kevin recalled that it was a source of great disappointment to Andy Finucane that England and Ireland never united against Hitler.
Ireland was neutral during WWII and only a very small handful of Irishmen volunteered to join the Royal Air Force.
As Winston Churchill once said “Whenever a bitter feeling arises in my heart towards the Irish, the hands of heroes such as Paddy Finucane seem to stretch out and soothe the feeling away.”
Brendan Eamonn Fergus Finucane shot down thirty-two enemy aircraft before he himself was killed over the English Channel in 1942. He was twenty-one years old.
Three thousand people attended his Requiem Mass at Westminster Abbey.
On St. Patrick’s Day this year, John ‘Paddy’ Hemingway, the last of ‘The Few’, died peacefully in a Dublin nursing home. Hemingway was a modest man who remained puzzled by the many accolades he and his fellow pilots received during WWII.
“I don’t think we ever assumed greatness of any form”, he said. “We were just doing our job”.
John ‘Paddy’ Hemingway 17th July 1919 – 17th March 2025
Brendan ‘Paddy’ Finucane 16th October 1920 – 15th July 1942