The watch that led me to Australia's forgotten air ace

Pat Hughes X4009

It started with a watch.

Earlier this year I acquired a REC X4009, a limited-edition timepiece made in collaboration with Hunter Fighter Collection in Scone, New South Wales. The watch is built from components of a real aircraft: Supermarine Spitfire Mk Ia, serial number X4009. It's not a replica or an homage. Actual aircraft material, machined into a watch case.

I bought it because it was beautiful, but what I didn't expect was where it would take me.

Because X4009 wasn't just any Spitfire, it was the personal aircraft of Flight Lieutenant Paterson Clarence Hughes DFC, Australia's highest-scoring fighter ace of the Battle of Britain, and one of the most remarkable pilots this country has ever produced.

Most Australians have never heard of him.

And I think that needs to change.

A boy from Numeralla

Pat Hughes was born on 19 September 1917 in Numeralla, a small community near Cooma in New South Wales. He was the eleventh of twelve children; his father was a teacher and amateur writer. Pat inherited a sense of restlessness.

At eighteen, when asked why he wanted to join the Royal Australian Air Force, he gave an answer that turned out to be prophetic: "It will be the thing in a couple of years."

He trained as a pilot at RAAF Point Cook, a base that sits a stone's throw from where I live in Melbourne's west today. Walking distance from suburbs I know well, the same flat Victorian landscape, the same Port Phillip Bay on the horizon. A young man from the bush, learning to fly at the edge of a city that would one day spread almost to the base perimeter.

He graduated in December 1936, aged nineteen. Within weeks he had sailed for England on a Short Service Commission with the Royal Air Force, exchanging the Australian summer for an English winter and the trajectory of his short life for something none of his classmates could have imagined.

He kept his dark blue Australian uniform; he never switched to the RAF's lighter blue, a small detail that says everything.

The making of an ace

Hughes joined No. 64 Squadron in July 1937, flying Hawker Demons and later Bristol Blenheims. By late 1939, with war declared, he had been posted to the newly formed No. 234 Squadron as a flight commander, one of the most experienced pilots in a unit that was learning to fly Spitfires from scratch.

He took ownership of that role, whilst his commanding officer rarely flew. Hughes effectively led the squadron through its transition to the Spitfire, training pilots, flying constantly, imposing standards. He was, by every account, the driving force behind a unit that would become one of Fighter Command's most effective during the battle ahead.

His tactics were distinctive and, in retrospect, almost suicidally aggressive. Hughes attacked from close range, sometimes as close as 50 yards, roughly three Spitfire lengths. Most pilots opened fire at 300 yards or more. Hughes closed until collision seemed inevitable, then fired. The results were devastating, but the risk was enormous.

Between 8 July and 7 September 1940, sixty-one days at the height of the Battle of Britain, Hughes was credited with 17 aerial victories: 14 confirmed solo kills and 3 shared. He shot down Junkers Ju 88s, Messerschmitt Bf 109s and Bf 110s, and Dornier Do 17 bombers. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his first seven kills, an award he would never receive in person.

By early September 1940 he was the sixth-ranked ace in all of RAF Fighter Command. The highest-scoring Australian in the battle, at only twenty-two years old. On 7 August 1940, in the middle of the battle, he married Kathleen (Kay) Brodrick of Hull, they had a mere five weeks together.

7th September 1940

The day Hughes died was the day the Luftwaffe turned its attention to London.

It was the largest air attack the city had yet seen, wave after wave of bombers, escorted by fighters, heading up the Thames. Fighter Command scrambled everything it had.

Hughes, flying X4009, intercepted a formation of Dornier Do 17 bombers. He attacked.

What happened next has never been fully resolved.

His wingman, Keith Lawrence, saw Hughes strike the Dornier hard. Moments later, a Spitfire was spiraling downward with part of its wing missing. Two aircraft came down near the village of Sundridge in Kent, the Dornier into the River Darent, and X4009 into a field between Sundridge and Bessels Green.

Hughes was found not in the wreckage of his aircraft but in a garden on Main Road, Sundridge, not far from where X4009 came down. His parachute had either failed to open, or he had been unable to deploy it. The Australian War Memorial records that witnesses saw him collide with the Dornier's wreckage, leaving him no opportunity to escape before the Spitfire became uncontrollable. Whether he made it out and the parachute failed, or whether he never left the aircraft, remains uncertain.

He was twenty-two years old, had been married for five weeks, and Kay discovered she was pregnant a week after his death. She later miscarried.

"I wept until I could cry no more."

His dog, Flying Officer Butch, an Airedale Terrier who had occasionally flown with him, against regulations, ran out of the mess on the day Hughes died and was never seen again.

X4009: from a Kent field to a Scone workshop

X4009 was recovered, as crashed Spitfires were, and its story became one of those threads that aviation history occasionally pulls back to the surface.

The aircraft, or what remained of it, was eventually repatriated to Australia, where it is now undergoing restoration by Hunter Fighter Collection in Scone, New South Wales. A not-for-profit organisation, Hunter Fighter Collection received $150,000 in federal government funding under the Saluting Their Service Commemorative Grants Program in 2021 to begin fuselage assembly. The work continues.

The REC watch I wear on my wrist is made from components of that aircraft. The same airframe that Hughes flew on his final sortie. It is one of the more unusual connections between an object and a story that I've come across in a long career around aviation.

I bought it because it was beautiful, and I kept it because of what it represents.

Why he matters

Pat Hughes is not a household name in Australia, but he should be.

In sixty-one days of combat over southern England in the summer of 1940, a twenty-two year old from Numeralla, flew one of the most effective individual performances of any pilot in the Battle of Britain.

He did it in an aircraft type he had helped his own squadron learn to fly. He did it with tactics that were, by any rational measure, too aggressive for his own survival. And he did it at a moment when the outcome of the battle, and arguably the war, was genuinely uncertain.

The Battle of Britain is often framed as a British story. It was also an Australian one. Fourteen Australian fighter pilots were killed in the battle. Hughes was the best of them, and one of the best of anyone.

He trained a stone's throw from Melbourne. He died a stone's throw from a Kent village.

And somewhere between those two points, he flew seventeen missions against the Luftwaffe and came back every time, until the 7th September 1940.

The restoration of X4009 at Scone is more than a warbird project. It is the return of a piece of Australian aviation history that spent eighty years in a field in Kent.

I think, it deserves to come home and its story told.

To support the restoration of Spitfire X4009, visit Hunter Fighter Collection at hfcscone.org.au

Jotore Aviation Consulting provides maintenance strategy, regulatory compliance, and CAMO/AMO advisory services to Australian aviation operators. For more aviation history and industry analysis, visit www.jotoreaviation.au