Frank Wootton

Wartime RAF artist who illustrated many 1950s car brochures and magazines

- DELWYN MALLETT

AT 11.15 ON a sunny Sunday morning, 3 September 1939, Frank Wootton took a break from mowing his lawn and tuned into the BBC to hear Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain confirm what the nation was dreading: that Britain was 'now at war with Germany. The following morning he volunteered himself at the RAF Recruitment Centre in Brighton.

A successful commercial artist with a passion for aircraft, Wootton wanted to fly but Air Commodore Harald Peake suggested that he would better serve the effort by putting his artistic skills to use recording the RAF's participation in the war. Wootton applied to the War Artists Advisory Scheme to become an official war artist but was turned down by Kenneth Clark (later fêted as presenter of the BBC's acclaimed Civilisation) in what some considered an act of artistic snobbery.

Undaunted, Peake and Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory opted for technical and figurative accuracy over the looser, more 'impressionistic' interpretations favoured by Clark and appointed Wootton as the RAF's official artist. Throughout the war, he recorded the RAF's exploits from Biggin Hill to Burma, gaining a reputation as the finest aviation artist of his era and, so many say, of all time.