Geoffrey Leonard Cheshire

Geoffrey Leonard Cheshire was one of the most celebrated bomber pilots of the Second World War, and the only man to be awarded the Victoria Cross for sustained gallantry over a long operational career rather than for a single act. Born in Chester in 1917 and brought up near Oxford, he joined the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve and went on to fly through four years of operations, eventually as a Group Captain.

Cheshire flew with Bomber Command from the early war years, serving with several squadrons before taking command of No. 617 Squadron — the “Dambusters” — succeeding Wing Commander Guy Gibson. There he developed and perfected a method of marking targets accurately by diving in at very low level ahead of the main force, sometimes in a fast Mosquito and on one occasion in a borrowed P-51 Mustang, so that the bombers behind him could aim precisely even against small or defended targets. By the summer of 1944 he had completed around a hundred operations, and his Victoria Cross, gazetted in September 1944, recognised that long record of skill, leadership and courage.

His last operational flight was as the official British observer aboard one of the aircraft accompanying the atomic-bomb attack on Nagasaki on 9 August 1945. The experience helped turn him toward humanitarian work: after the war he founded the Cheshire Homes for disabled and incurably ill people, which grew into an international network of care homes. He was created a life peer, Baron Cheshire, in 1991, in recognition of that work, and died the following year. He was married to Sue Ryder, herself a noted humanitarian.