New honour for author Dilip

The Battle of Britain Memorial Trust has invited top historian and author Dilip Sarkar MBE to become an Honorary Vice-President of the Battle of Britain Memorial Trust.

The invitation – the first of its kind - marks Dilip’s outstanding achievement in creating an official history of the Battle in association with the Trust. Volumes one to four of the eight-part work are now on sale in our online shop.

Dilip’s remarkable history of the 1940 aerial battle, which runs to one million words, is being published by Pen & Sword in association with the Trust and marks the climax of a career that has seen the author devote many years of his life to researching the historic conflict that saw the Royal Air Force defeat the Luftwaffe in the summer and early autumn of 1940.

Dilip’s Honorary Vice-Presidency is the first to have been awarded by the Trust, which considers the work to be the ‘official’ history of the Battle. In a letter to the author, a Fellow of both the Royal Historical and Aeronautical Societies, Trustees said it wanted to “show the gratitude of the Trust and allow you a more formal association with the Memorial”.

Dilip commented: “Having spent a lifetime dedicated to commemorating The Few, many of whom I knew personally as friends, it has been the pinnacle of my career as an historian to see all that brought together in the eight-volume, one million word, official history completed for the Battle of Britain Memorial Trust.

“The Trust’s work in maintaining the National Memorial to the Few and the other aspects of the clifftop Memorial at Capel-le-Ferne in Kent is vital, and the invitation to become an Honorary Vice-President in recognition of my work was a complete surprise and an enormous honour. I look forward to continuing to support the Trust however I can.”