Air Marshal Sir Charles “Peter” Portal

May 21, 1893 – April 22, 1971

No one remembers quite how Charles Portal, the fourth of eight brothers, came to be known as “Peter,” but the name stuck. As a young man, Portal loved motorcycles. He joined the British Army during World War I as a motorcycle dispatch rider, but after a year, he sought an even greater thrill: flying. Throughout World War I, he flew incredibly dangerous missions in a biplane, quickly rising through the ranks. When the Royal Air Force (RAF) was officially established as a distinct branch of the British military in 1918, he was already a squadron leader. By the time World War II broke out, Portal was one of the most senior members of the RAF. In 1940, he was tapped to head Bomber Command, and in 1944, he was promoted to Marshal of the Royal Air Force, the highest position in the RAF. He travelled with Churchill to all the major wartime conferences and established excellent working relations with his American counterparts, no doubt in part thanks to his quick sense of humor. After the war, Portal retired from the RAF and was raised to the peerage as 1st Viscount Portal of Hungerford. But the Portal family’s connection to Winston Churchill continued: Peter Portal’s niece, Jane Portal, would become one of Churchill’s secretaries during his second tenure as Prime Minister. (And it is her son, Justin Welby, who serves as the Archbishop of Canterbury today.)

Photograph: Wikimedia commons, public domain