Pilot Officer, RAF
Born: January 30th 1914
Died: July 10th 1942
Age at Death: 28
Presumed killed on active service, July 10th 1942
Alfred was born on 13 January 1914 in Portsmouth, to Alfred Fleming, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a fine art and antiques dealer with shops in Portsmouth and Pall Mall Place, London, and his wife Louisa (née Roberton). After leaving the College Fleming joined the family business, while playing rugby for Hampshire and serving for a while as captain of the famous Portsmouth Rugby Football Club. The Fleming firm supplied, among others, Queen Mary, wife of George V, and the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. In 1938 Fleming married Ivy Kerridge.
In March 1939, six months before the war began, Fleming opted to join the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, perhaps with a presentiment that he might be needed. He was commissioned as a pilot officer in late 1940, flying the Bristol Blenheim bomber with 53 Squadron. In only five months he completed 31 sorties, attacking German torpedo boats, submarine pens and other targets in occupied France. He also twice participated in an attack on the Admiral Hipper, a German heavy cruiser, in Brest harbour.
In 1941 he was transferred to 58 Squadron, flying the Whitley bomber on missions over Germany, France and the Netherlands, and was promoted to flight lieutenant. Late in the year Fleming volunteered for 138 Squadron, a Special Duties Squadron that dropped special forces into occupied France and undertook secret operations in the Middle and Far East. He then re-joined 58 Squadron, now tasked with patrolling the seas as part of Coastal Command.
In June 1942, he was offered the prestigious post of aide-de-camp to the governor of Gibraltar, but he turned it down to continue flying in a combat role for 58 Squadron. On 10 July he took off from his base at St Eval in Cornwall to fly an anti-submarine patrol over the Bay of Biscay, but never returned from this, his 50th operational mission.
Fleming received the Air Crew Europe Star campaign medal, and is commemorated on one of the panels at the RAF Memorial at Runnymede. The Memorial remembers 20,455 air force personnel who perished in the war without a known grave, with the collective inscription: ‘Their name liveth for evermore’. He was survived by his wife Ivy and their son Alfred, and by an older and a younger brother, fellow Old Brightonians who both survived the war after serving with distinction.