Wing Commander Anthony “Tony” Lovell survived some of the RAF’s hardest fighting of the Second World War, only to die in an accident days after the war had already ended.
An unlikely path to the RAF
Born in Ceylon, Lovell moved to Portrush young with his widowed mother, settling on Ballywillan Road with his aunt, Miss K.D. O’Neill, long-serving honorary secretary of the Royal Portrush Ladies’ Golf Club. Educated at Ampleforth College with genuine intentions of becoming a priest or monk, he instead joined the RAF straight from school, citing a Christian duty to oppose Nazism.
From Dunkirk to squadron command
Lovell first saw combat as a 19-year-old with 41 Squadron in December 1939, scoring his first kill over Dunkirk in May 1940, and had become a flight commander by the end of the Battle of Britain that October. He went on to command fighter squadrons over Egypt, Malta, Italy and Corsica, finishing the war credited with 22 enemy aircraft destroyed — an unusually high total that came with an unusually high haul of decorations: the Distinguished Service Order, twice (an award second only to the Victoria Cross), the Distinguished Flying Cross, twice, and the American DFC.
Colleagues remembered a gentler side behind the record: Lovell reportedly arranged Requiem Masses for enemy airmen killed in combat, and visited surviving downed German aircrew in hospital bringing cigarettes and chocolate. His elder brother, Flight Lieutenant Stuart Lovell, had been killed 18 months earlier, shot down over a low-level raid on a French airfield and buried in Brest.
A quiet ending
On 17 August 1945 — just days after Japan’s surrender ended the war — Lovell’s Spitfire clipped a hen house shortly after takeoff at Old Sarum, Wiltshire, and crashed. A Court of Inquiry attributed it to pilot error, though there was quiet speculation at the time about reversed aileron control wires, or simply the accumulated strain of years of combat flying. He was buried with military honours at Ballywillan Cemetery, beside his brother’s memorial, and is remembered as the last Irish airman to die in the Second World War — marked by a 50th-anniversary ceremony in 1995.