He got on the tail of one of the 109s and fired &ndash the 109 slowed and then dived away

He got on the tail of one of the 109s and fired – the 109 slowed and then dived away. He followed, firing in short bursts, and saw the pilot bale out and his machine crash in flames.Harbourne MacKay Stephen, affectionately known as Steve, was born in Elgin, Morayshire, and educated at schools in Elgin, Edinburgh and Shrewsbury. He travelled to London in 1931 to work with Allied Newspapers as a copy boy and in 1936 joined the advertising staff of the London Evening Standard. A year later he joined the RAFVR and learned to fly at White Waltham. He seemed to be a born flyer, for, after only nine hours’ dual instruction, he made his first solo flight.At the outbreak of war Stephen was called up and posted to 605 Squadron as a Sergeant Pilot. He was commissioned early in April 1940 and joined 74 Squadron. Sailor Malan, who commanded the squadron, had spent his early days in the Navy and was a strict disciplinarian.

In the air Malan was very forthright and would yell over the radio, “Get your machine tucked right in and don’t bloody well move away!”On 24 May 1940, during the British Expeditionary Force’s retreat to Dunkirk, Stephen opened his account by sharing in the destruction of a Heinkel Hs126 over the beaches and that afternoon also shared in a Dornier Do17. Two days later he got his third when he shared in the destruction of another Hs126. The following day he shot down his first Me109 and rounded off the day with the shared destruction of a Dornier. The RAF came under some criticism for its seeming inactivity over Dunkirk. Stephen answered this without difficulty:What Dunkirk did for air fighting was to move fighting, which we had always thought we would do from around 7,000 to 10,000ft, straight to over 20,000ft in about four days.

For every time we went over we said, right we must be higher than they are, so we’d go up another 4,000ft When we got there, they would be about 2,000ft above us. In no time at all, air fighting changed from the traditional pattern where one could see the ground, to right on top where you couldn’t see it at all. This is one of the reasons, I’m sure, the Army has often said, where were the fighter pilots? We were there all right, but they couldn’t see us.On 28 July, during the early part of the Battle of Britain, 74 Squadron attacked 36 Me109s at 18,000ft over Dover, destroying seven of them Stephen accounted for one of these. It was the beginning of a brilliant period of air fighting for the young Scot, for during the next fortnight he destroyed 11 more enemy aircraft. He continued these successes throughout the Battle of Britain and emerged as 74 Squadron’s top individual scorer.

He later had this to say of this period:We fought hard and we played hard. The great thing was that whatever time you flopped into bed someone was bound to get you up within a very few hours and expect you to be up and at it And we were. We could cope with the hectic social life and then switch off completely and concentrate on the job in hand, never the worse for wear and always at the top of our form. We were young – that was the simple secret.On 14 November he engaged and destroyed a section of three Stukas and celebrated the award of a bar to his DFC the next day by damaging a Me109 over Bognor Regis. By this time the station score at Biggin Hill was nearing the 600 mark and quite naturally every pilot was hoping it would fall to his lot to shoot down the station’s 600th victim. Stephen and Mungo Park, with whom he flew many missions, shared the honours on 30 November when they shot down a 109 at over 30,000ft: action at that height was almost unheard of at that time.On 5 December he shared in the destruction of a 109.

The same month he was given the first ever immediate award in the field of the DSO: a remarkable award for a pilot officer. In January 1941 he was posted to 59 OTU at Turnhouse as Chief Flying Instructor and promoted to Flight Lieutenant. But he was soon seconded to the RAE, Farnborough, to test fly new aircraft. In June he was posted to Portreath to help form 130 Squadron, but a month later was given command of 234 Squadron, then based at Warmwell.