When The Royal Air Force Benevolent Fund was founded by Air Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, it was named The Royal Air Force Memorial Fund because one of its earliest objects was to raise a memorial to airmen who died in the First World War.
The memorial was completed in 1923. A simple monument in Portland stone, it is surmounted by a gilded eagle and on sunny mornings railway passengers arriving at London's Charing Cross terminal can glimpse it glinting in the sunlight from its riverside position on the Victoria Embankment.
The original intention was for Mr W. Reid Dick's sculpted eagle to face inwards to the embankment road traffic, but Sir Reginald Blomfield, the Fund's consultant architect, altered his design to allow the eagle to face across the river, symbolically to France.
In the summer of 1923 the memorial was unveiled by a youthful Prince of Wales who spoke prophetically of 'our cloud armies of the future'.
When the flags fell away from the memorial a Royal Air Force guard of honour crashed into the 'present arms', and a carefully marshalled contingent of twenty-seven small boys lifted their caps. The boys had come from Vanbrugh Castle, where the Fund had already established a school at Blackheath in south-east London. They were the sons of airmen who had died in the Service.
The Thames embankment might not seem the most appropriate place for a flying men's memorial. This position was not the first choice of the Royal Air Force Memorial Fund. Discarding a proposal to join the Army and the Navy in building a memorial opposite Buckingham Palace, the Royal Air Force Memorial Fund had hoped to raise a Cross on the ground between Westminster Abbey and St Margaret's Church; a hope that the Dean of Westminster was unable to approve because he preferred not to consider a memorial for the Royal Air Force alone. In any event, as the Dean explained, the particular piece of ground belonged to St Margaret's.
In the centuries preceding the Armistice of 1918, a year in which men had sincerely believed that they had fought the war to end war, warfare of the past had so sprinkled Britain with memorials that the selection of places prominent enough to commemorate the dead, as well as to symbolise the end of war, was limited. But sites were found and in village, town and city, on the hills and in the valleys, the stonemasons chipped away until the nation had remembered its dead, sailor for sailor, soldier for soldier, and the new airmen too.
Thus when the Office of Woods and Forests offered the new Royal Air Force a site at the head of the Whitehall Stairs on Victoria Embankment about midway between Charing Cross and Westminster Bridge, the offer was accepted thankfully, though only as a second best.
However, the passage of time has confounded any intention, if such it was, of keeping a somewhat junior Royal Air Force in its place. Years on, and showing honourable scars from bombs in the Second World War, mere accident has placed this discreet monument neatly in view of the Air Force Board at the Ministry of Defence. It is tidy, too, that, as a result in 1956 of the placing of Lord Trenchard's statue in Whitehall Gardens below the windows of the present Ministry of Defence, the Royal Air Force Memorial stands in line of sight from the martial figure who conceived both the Royal Air Force and the Royal Air Force Memorial Fund. Here by the Thames, the man who started it all has, since May 1975, been joined by Marshal of the Royal Air Force Lord Portal, Chief of the Air Staff in the Second World War and Deputy Chairman of the Royal Air Force Benevolent Fund from December 1947 until his death on 22 April 1971.
