That's new, that is

Mary Whitehouse Experience star Rob Newman talks tour buses, The Cure and escaping to the 'relative tranquility of the Second World War' in his latest novel

- BY MATT NIXSON

ON November 20, 1944, a US P-47 Thunderbolt nicknamed Peggy III was hit by flak while returning from a dive-bombing mission over German city Bonn.

Its 25-year-old pilot, Captain Robert J Bradford, was killed trying to escape his burning aircraft, which crashed near the village of Liblar.

The young US Eighth Air Force pilot, a member of the 56th Fighter Group, 63rd Fighter Squadron, had grown up in Dallam County, Texas, and trained as an architect before learning to fly and fighting the Nazis.

Fellow airman Randel L Murphy Jr recalled: "The last time I saw him was at approximately 11.20 hours and it looked as though he had broken for the deck from which there was a lot of light flak and 40mm. I called him and there was no reply." Some 26,000 members of the Mighty Eighth were killed in the European campaign during World War II. But intriguingly, the Texan airman, whose remains were eventually interred at the Ardennes American Cemetery in Belgium, was the grandfather of British comedy legend and author Robert Newman.

Having dated a young divorcee while posted to RAF Boxted outside Colchester in Essex, he left her pregnant, likely without knowing it, when his aircraft fell from the sky in flames.

"It's an incredible story," Newman says. "I've thought a lot about my grandfather over the years. A young man who came to Europe and never left..." Neither does the remarkable tale end there. Newman's mother was subsequently adopted and her own child, the comedian himself, was also put up for adoption after being born in Hackney, east London, in 1964. Out of respect for their family, he doesn't name his mother or his grandmother.

"I never got to meet them but it was good to find out my mother had been adopted because she was a GI baby," he says. "I don't know if he even knew she was pregnant, but apparently it's not that uncommon to repeat the pattern."