The Royal Air Force Benevolent Fund has cared for the RAF family for a century. Lord Trenchard, the father of the RAF in 1918, was also the father of the Fund formed a year later. The need was manifest. Some 16,000 wartime Air Force casualties, 2,600 widows and 7,500 badly incapacitated men attested to this. In 1919 the Fund spent £919 helping young airmen get back on their feet. A century on and in 2018 the Fund spent over £21m supporting more than 53,000 current and former members of the RAF and their families.
The original Memorial Fund was formed to build an RAF memorial on the Embankment in central London. When the Prince of Wales unveiled the granite Memorial in 1923, the 27 schoolboys who raised their caps in three rousing cheers were from Vanbrugh Castle, the Memorial Fund’s school at Blackheath. As well as building a memorial and establishing boarding schools for deceased officers’ children, the Fund’s focus was on relieving distress among officers and men and their dependants, particularly through the provision of medical treatment. Funding was generated from various sources. Philanthropic businessmen like the oil magnate Alexander Duckham gave Vanbrugh Castle in 1921, the Air Council donated a slice of wartime canteen profits and from 1920 flying pageants, at home and overseas, generated significant income. As the RAFBF’s historian Edward Bishop wrote, ‘Such examples of service self-help were…an impressive feature of the Fund’s early income’. Major benefactors during the 1920s and 1930s included Lord Wakefield, the Chairman from 1934 until his death in 1940, and T. E. Lawrence ‘of Arabia’ (known as Aircraftman Shaw when he had served in the RAF), who donated a portion of his book royalties. Similarly, another RAF author, Roald Dahl, donated the proceeds from Gremlins, published in 1943, to the Fund.
The Fund’s first beneficiaries were servicemen returning from the First World War. In their hour of need, they received a shilling for a night’s lodgings or a few pennies to repair boots, essential for near destitute former airmen as they walked to find work. In the depressed economic conditions of the early 1920s grants were provided for hawkers’ licences, to redeem pawned goods and to purchase clothing. Serving personnel in the much smaller interwar Air Force were also eligible for assistance in instances of ill-health and family difficulties.
A valuable source of income emerged from RAF personnel voluntarily donating a half-day’s pay annually to the Fund, an innovation introduced in 1938 at the suggestion of Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding. In August 1940, as Dowding directed Fighter Command at the height of the Battle of Britain, the Fund launched a public appeal. By the end of the year this appeal, and a BBC broadcast appeal made by Lord Trenchard, breaking his self-imposed rule of radio silence, had raised over £400,000 in total. Indeed, donations and spending soared during the war years. In the post-1945 climate donations subsided but demands on the Fund were expected to increase. In 1948 the Fund made a record 32,541 awards. Shrewd investments and energetic fundraising helped to allow advances in the Fund’s provision of education and welfare from the 1950s. A stream of able and well-connected individuals, largely with wartime RAF service, took on the roles of President, Chairman and Controller of the Fund during the post-war period. Princess Marina, the widow of the Duke of Kent who died on active service in 1942, was the Fund’s President and was succeeded by her son the present Duke of Kent. The Queen has been the Fund’s Patron since 1952. The Fund’s flagship air show, now the Royal International Air Tattoo (RIAT) was inaugurated in 1976 with Group Captain Sir Douglas Bader its first President until his death in 1982. He was succeeded in this post by King Hussein of Jordan.
The 50th anniversary of the Battle of Britain in 1990 presented a unique opportunity for the Fund to exceed an appeal target of £20m. However, demands upon the Fund also continued to rise. The Fund has applied no ceiling to the amount spent on welfare in any given year. Spending rose more than three-fold between 1981 and 1988. Similarly, a decade later in the 1990s, when the youngest Second World War veterans and their widows were well into their 70s and many were much older than that, welfare spending doubled from £7m in 1991 to £14m by 1998. The Fund’s welfare activities widened. For nearly half a century Princess Marina House at Rustington, West Sussex has provided a combination of convalescent and residential care and recuperative seaside breaks for members of the RAF and their families. In the early 21st century the Fund built Childcare Centres and confronted the problems associated with personal debt, the challenges of mental wellbeing and the strains experienced by service families during periods of high operational tempo.
The RAFBF was one of the four RAF charities included in the RAF100 Appeal in 2018 which placed a focus on young people, serving personnel and veterans. The need for the Fund has sadly not disappeared. It has sustained and indeed widened, sometimes in partnership, its vital welfare work. Old problems persist, and new challenges emerge, as the RAFBF celebrates a century of supporting the entire RAF family in Britain and beyond.
RAF Benevolent Fund Announcement
2019 marks the 100-year anniversary of RAF Benevolent Fund and, in addition to our ongoing work supporting the serving Community, we are launching a major new campaign: a campaign to raise awareness of our services and find those veterans who are eligible for our support but are, for various reasons, either unaware or unwilling to access it.
We believe there are large numbers of our RAF family who are not getting the support they are due — the support we can provide. We want to change this and get these people back on our radar. Our centenary is the perfect moment to do so and we have set an ambitious target to double the number of people we help over the next three years, reaching them either directly, or through their friends and family.
As well as reaching out to support even more members of the RAF Family, we are launching new welfare initiatives for RAF personnel and their families, like free access to mindfulness app Headspace, a new social engagement worker scheme based on RAF stations and expanding the National Wellbeing Breaks service.
Biography: Dr Alastair Noble has been a Historian in the Air Historical Branch (RAF) since September 2015. He was previously a Senior Lecturer in Defence and International Affairs at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst and Senior Researcher in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Historians section.
