Veteran, 103, says going to RAF hero fiance's grave was 'like a gift I'd waited 81 years to receive'

SECOND World War heroine Robbie Hall turns 103 today and reflects on spending all that time never knowing what her name was meant to be.

- BY GILES SHELDRICK Chief Reporter

Her father was sent to register her birth in 1923 but forgot his daughter’s intended name on the short bike ride to the registrar's office.

So she was christened Queenie Evelyn Robinson and has never forgiven him. She said: “To be honest, I am fed-up with being called Queenie.

“All my life, people have asked me whether it’s my real name or my nickname. It’s neither.

“I am known as Robbie because it’s an abbreviation of my surname. I have no idea what my mother wanted to call me and I shall never know what I was going to be called.”

When she was born, Stanley Baldwin was Prime Minister and a pint of beer cost 5 pence.

She had four brothers and four sisters and lied about her age to join the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force at 17.

Robbie became a plotter with Bomber Command, the elite RAF unit led by Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris, who hatched the plan to blitz Nazi Germany into submission by reducing its industrial heartland to rubble.

Three of Robbie’s brothers also served with the RAF — as did her childhood sweetheart, Frank Vincent, who was a Flight Sergeant based at RAF Mepal, Cambs.

The couple got engaged but Frank and six crew mates were killed on August 25, 1944, when their Lancaster Bomber exploded over Nunkirchen in Germany. He was 21.