Plaque unveiled for Battle of Britain hero Ginger Lacey on the site of his family home — now German supermarket Aldi
Over the course of the war he downed 28 enemy planes and survived nine crash landings
LEGENDARY Second World War fighter pilot Ginger Lacey has been commemorated with a blue plaque on his family home – now the site of an Aldi, a German supermarket chain.
Born James Harry Lacey in Wetherby, West Yorkshire, the pilot became an unlikely hero of the Battle of Britain.
Over the course of the war he downed 28 enemy planes, with four “probales” and nine damaged aircraft also on his slate.
He survived nine crash landings and famously shot down a Luftwaffe plane that had just bombed Buckingham Palace.
Commenting on the fact his former home is now the home of a German business, his daughter, Min Lacey, said: “Dad would have enjoyed the irony.”
Speaking to the BBC Ms Lacey, 57, revealed that he almost didn’t join the RAF at all.
She said: “He desperately wanted to join the RAF, but his dad wanted him to be a farmer – it wasn’t until his father died that he managed to convince his mum.”
“He was a pale and skinny kid and his mum thought he would fail the medical, but of course he didn’t.”
His daughter thinks his hit rate was all down to his skill as a marksman because ammunition was in such short supply.
“He was a very good marksman, he brought down aircraft with five shots, so he was never going to run out of ammunition, was he?” she said.
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“He was also able to conquer sheer terror day after day. Can you imagine being in that tiny cockpit, frozen, terrified, doing seven flights a day and not knowing if you were going to come back from any of them?”
Lacey – who died in 1989 at the age of 72 – was one of the few pilots to serve from the beginning to the very end of the war.
The blue plaque was officially unveiled on Sunday, with the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight –a fleet of Second World War fighter planes – performing a flypast.