Boy's own war story of Flying Officer Guy Pease, who has died aged 100

When his single seater plane caught fire over France, he became tangled in the cockpit, so he deliberately tipped it upside down so that he fell out into the sea.

In another extraordinary escapade, he escaped down a rope of bedsheets from the top of a three-storey prisoner-of-war hospital with a one-legged New Zealander. The Kiwi’s artificial leg was strapped to Pease’s back as they made their daring exit.

“He was typical of those of his generation – reticent about discussing his war record,” says the obituary of the man who died in Australia on December 28, aged 100.

Pease was born in Gisborough Hall, at Guisborough, on September 2, 1922, as his mother, Cynthia, was the daughter of the 1st Baron Gisborough.

His father was Major Herbert Ernest Pease, who had won a Distinguished Bravery Order during the Battle of the Somme in 1916, and Guy’s great-grandfather was Edward Thomas Pease, a Darlington wine merchant, who in 1871, imported a 1,000 gallon barrel of brandy from France into Stockton, where it broke the arm of the crane unloading it. It is believed to be the largest barrel ever imported into the UK.

Guy went to Eton and showed much promise as a cricketer, playing for Yorkshire junior sides, but then war intervened. He joined the RAF when he was 19 in 1941, and went to train in the US on the North American Mustang – a single-seater fighter-bomber plane.

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By the spring of 1943, he was flying reconnaissance missions, which usually involved two Mustangs, over northern Europe. In July, he was flying low in bad weather alongside Flying Officer RJF Mitchell over Cherbourg when his engine caught fire, filling his cockpit with smoke.

He climbed out of the Mustang to jump, but his lifejacket had become tangled so Mitchell watched as he clambered back into the plane and flipped it upside down so gravity ejected him. His parachute opened just before he hit the water.

With Mitchell circling overhead, he trod water in full woollen battledress and flying boots for six hours in the English Channel before a flying boat dropped a dinghy to him. He climbed in, exhausted, and eventually a French ship picked him up.

On September 26, 1943, he took off accompanied by Flight Sergeant Walter Mell for Rouen but, as they completed their attack on a goods train, eight Focke-Wulf fighters appeared and strafed them. Mell was killed and Pease was forced to crash land with a broken left arm and hand, plus shrapnel embedded in his side.

He was taken prisoner to a military hospital in Rouen where he endured several operations without anaesthetic.

In his ward was Flying Officer MG Sutherland, whose leg had been amputated but who was desperate to escape. When a guard took Pease to the toilet, Sutherland grabbed the padlock keys left on Pease’s bed, traced their outline onto a piece of toilet paper and then used an aluminium spoon and a nail file to forge a key.

Unlocked in early December, the pair climbed out of their third floor window and scaled down on a bedsheet rope, Sutherland with his crutches tied his back and Pease with his co-conspirator’s artificial leg tied to his.

But as they were over the perimeter fence, their hands were cut so badly infection set in and, after a couple of days evading the Germans in freezing conditions, they gave themselves up. Pease was beaten by guards who couldn’t believe a one-legged airman had masterminded the escape.

Pease ended the war in Luckenwalde camp, near Berlin, which the Russians took over in 1945. Uncertain of their intentions, he escaped through the wire of the perimeter fence and reached the safety of US lines.

Pease’s father had been a military administrator in Sudan after the First World War, and after the Second, Pease himself fulfilled a similar role until the country became independent in 1956 when he was awarded an MBE for his services.

When his marriage broke down in the late 1960s, he emigrated to Australia where he remarried and successfully set up a management consultancy.

Aged 99 last summer, he flew into London for an “anticipatory 100th” birthday party in the RAF Club in Piccadilly, before returning to New South Wales to celebrate his centenary.

He died at the end of last year in Byron Bay, leaving four sons and ten grandchildren.

The Sydney Morning Herald finished its obituary by saying: “Always supremely modest, like a lot of his generation, it took a long time to get at least part of his story from him. He always felt bad about losing 'three kites in as many months' and didn’t feel he should be singled out for praise.”

Guy Pease had fabulously ancestry. He was the grandson of Richard Godolphin Walmesley Long, whose family had lived in Wiltshire for 400 years. In 1881, he changed his surname by licence to Chaloner so he could inherit the Gisborough estate from his maternal great-uncle, Admiral Thomas Chaloner. The Chaloners had owned Gisborough since the dissolution of the priory in 1558.

Richard fought in the Afghan and Boer wars in the 1880s, before becoming a Conservative MP for 17 years. When he stood down in 1917, he became the 1st Baron Gisborough. His 95-year-old grandson, and Guy’s cousin, is the current 3rd Lord Gisborough.

The other half of Guy’s genes came from the Pease family, and his great-great-grandfather Thomas was a cousin of Edward “father of the railways” Pease, who created the Stockton & Darlington Railway. It was said that in 1808, when Thomas switched from being a chemist on High Row to being a wine merchant, the Quaker railway branch of the family – who were very pro-temperance – had him kicked out of the faith and he became an Anglican.