High Street, Tonbridge,
Kent, TN9 1JP
Sholto Douglas entered Tonbridge as a day boy in 1908. He became a School Prae and played for the Rugby 1st XV before winning a classical scholarship to Lincoln College, Oxford in 1913. His Oxford career was interrupted by the coming of war and he was commissioned into the Royal Field Artillery in 1914. He transferred later that year into the fledgling Royal Flying Corps as an observer but qualified as a pilot in July 1915. By 1916 he had won the MC and was commanding a squadron. He ended the war as a Lieutenant-Colonel with a DFC to add to his MC.
He left the RAF in 1919 to take up a post in civilian flying but returned to the service in 1920 and was one of the first students to attend the new RAF Staff College in 1922. His career prospered in the inter-war years at staff level and, when the Second World War broke out, he was deputy Chief of the Air Staff, responsible for operational policy at the highest level. He succeeded Dowding as head of Fighter Command in November 1940 by which time he was an Air Marshal and knighted.
In December 1942 Douglas was promoted Air Chief Marshal and became head of RAF Middle East. A possible move to become Allied Commander in South East Asia appears to have been blocked by the Americans but in January 1944 he came back to England to become head of Coastal Command where he remained until the end of the war. He held the position of head of British air forces of occupation in Germany and then in May 1946 he succeeded Montgomery as head of all British occupation forces and British member of the four-power Allied Control Commission, a position in which he found himself having to confirm the sentences of the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal. He retired from the RAF in November 1947.
In 1948 he became a peer and sat on the Labour benches, and then from 1949-1964 he was Chairman of the newly created British European Airways, which was under state control. He presided over a period of huge expansion in business and leisure travel – from 750,000 BEA passengers in 1949 to 5.6 million in 1964. He published two volumes of memoirs ‘Years of Combat’ and ‘Years of Command’ in the 1960s and died in 1969.