Shrine Stories: Tony Gaze

If you’ve ever heard a story and thought, “this should be a movie", then this episode is for you.

From flying as a fighter pilot, to being shot down and escaping over the Pyrenees on foot, to later racing in the Grand Prix, Squadron Leader Tony Gaze’s life reads like a Hollywood script.

Listen as we uncover Tony's fascinating story and legacy.

Transcript

LAURA THOMAS: If you’ve ever heard a story and thought, “this should be a movie,” then this episode is for you. From flying as a fighter pilot, to being shot down and escaping over the Pyrenees on foot, to later racing in the Grand Prix—Tony Gaze’s life reads like a Hollywood script. Joining me today to bring this extraordinary story to life is Tony’s stepson, Chris Davison. Thank you for coming in today.

CHRIS DAVISON: Thanks very much. It's a great honour to be here.

LAURA THOMAS: So Tony was born in Melbourne in 1920, but he moved to Cambridge to attend Queen's College, and he was there during the outbreak of the Second World War. So why did he enlist in the RAF?

CHRIS DAVISON: Well, his father, Irvine Gaze, who had a great history in his own right, being on the Shackleton's expedition, actually flew in the First World War in a particular squadron. So, when Tony was at Cambridge in 1940, he wanted to join his father's squadron. So subsequently, he flew with the RAF and not the RAAF, and that's why he joined that particular Squadron, because it was his father's squadron.

LAURA THOMAS: And what was he doing once he got posted to the squadron?

CHRIS DAVISON: Well, if I could just go back one step from there. Tony was a student at Geelong Grammar School. He loved rowing, rowed in the head of the river, and he had his life planned out for him, really, that he went to Queen's College to study, but I think he went to Queen's College to row in the boat race, which he did. He did row in the Cambridge Oxford boat race and was then due to go to the Harvard Business School for a year on the way back to Australia and take up a life in business. But destiny intervened, didn't it? 1940, you know, he was 20 years of age. There were so many, I suppose, opportunities calling, the romance of it all, I guess

LAURA THOMAS: Seeking a sense of adventure.

CHRIS DAVISON: I think so. Didn't many, like that? Didn't many young Aussies go and end up in Gallipoli looking for a sense of the adventure. "I need to get over there before it's over", I think they used to say.

LAURA THOMAS: Which is terrifying to think of now

CHRIS DAVISON: It is. And they got over there, and it wasn't anything like what they thought it was going to be.

LAURA THOMAS: Tony's brother, Scott, also joined the squadron, but he suffered a tragic fate. Can you unpack what happened here?

CHRIS DAVISON: I think Tony was very like his mother, Freda, tall and elegant. And his younger brother Scott was more like his father, Irvine, tough, resilient, knuckly, sort of a bloke. His father, Irvine, had gone on Shackleton's expedition on the Ross River party, was quite a tough sort of a guy, and I think Tony probably enjoyed being over there on his own. But Scott was very, very insistent. In fact, we have the letters at home where Scott wrote to his father on numerous occasions, saying, "Can't I go over and get into it before it's over?". And so eventually, his father relented, and Scott went over there and joined Tony in the squadron. And of course, it had a tragic, and I'm going to say ongoing effect.

Tony told me on number of occasions; the reason he survived was he was cautious. The highly experienced pilots, I mean, you think of 1941, 1942 you had the highly experienced pilots had been through the Battle of Britain, and the younger pilots that had very little hours would then go up and take on these highly experienced pilots. And they had no hope. Had no hope at all. And I think it's, it's very well reflected in the movie Battle of Britain, where they have a little section in there of some younger pilots that come in full of blusto and are just blown out of the sky on their first few flights. And Tony used to say he kept out of trouble for a long time, and it wasn't that he wasn't doing his job, he was just cautious. Whereas Scott, on the other hand, was more bumptious and probably a bit like his dad. And the sad part was he got shot down and killed on his first sortie. And although Tony didn't see him shot down, he actually flew over the wreckage on the ground, Spitfire on the ground, on fire. And he just said, that was obviously Scott.

LAURA THOMAS: He knew.

CHRIS DAVISON: He knew, yeah.

LAURA THOMAS: How did that then impact, because he continued to serve, how did that loss sit with him?

CHRIS DAVISON: Well, the mortality rate was very, very high. So, when you're surrounded by that on a regular basis and you've got your own mortality to deal with, you've just got to get on with things. And I'd imagine Tony would have just got on with things. Interestingly enough, he didn't really talk about it through his life. He always used to clam up if Scott's name came along, you know, and the mortality rate was enormous. You know, just on that, you need to sort of understand how it worked, and Tony explained it to me, that once you became an experienced pilot, especially in a dogfight, and there was a high likelihood, because of the mortality rate, that the person you were going to come up against wasn't very experienced. So, the highly experienced pilots, the number of people that they shot down just grew exponentially, and so many of the young pilots didn't survive their first one or two. There was always something and still doesn't sit very squarely with me, and that is, they use the expression when you shoot someone down, they call it a kill. And Tony never liked the expression, and I don't like the expression, and they'd call it a victory. And I said to Tony, "Why? Why do you feel that way?". He said, "because I think of the troops down on the ground, and they're having hand to hand combat". He said "we never fought a man. We fought an aeroplane". Do you understand that?

LAURA THOMAS: I do. It makes it easier to kind of depersonalise from exactly what's going on.

CHRIS DAVISON: So, I suppose the loss of, they were dealing with the loss of close friends and family every day, these young men, young people, because there were wives, girlfriends, mothers living at home. They're all dealing with it. But you had to just get up the following day and get on with it. How would the people today cope with it? It's a question.

LAURA THOMAS: It is. But his flying career did throw up many more challenges. He had quite a long and varied career, as we'll continue to talk about, but one that I found really interesting was his demotion after a bombing raid in France. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

CHRIS DAVISON: It was something that didn't sit very squarely with Tony at all. I think he'd come up the ranks to Squadron Leader, and of course, you know, we think of GPS and computers and satellite weather forecasting. Back in 1940, we had to look out the window to see what the weather was doing. Very, very archaic type of radar. And he was leading this Squadron, and they were flying around in the mist and the thing, and they got, basically got lost. But they got lost because the people back at the head office or the radar were telling them that they were in a particular place, but they weren't. And they told them that they were over the English coast. As it turned out, they were over the French coast. So, when these guys peeled off and Tony didn't peel off, he said, "Don't go down. It's not certain". Tony being cautious again there. They all went down. I think 11 out of the 12 planes were shot down. Head office decided that they would blame Tony, and he kept on saying that they completely misread the tail winds or the high winds or the jet streams that were there, and we weren't in where we were supposed to be. So, when these guys peeled off and went down through the clouds, they went straight into an ambush. Yet Tony was blamed. And it never sat with him at all well. Now, Tony wasn't someone who was vindictive. He'd never say anything negative about people, but in that particular instance, he wasn't at all comfortable with the fact that he was blamed. And I think that history shows, once they did a review of it all, he regained his rank and, but you know, what do they say? The branding iron: pain goes away, but the scar stays forever, and there was definitely something that never sat very well with him at all.

LAURA THOMAS: So, he was pulled off the same duties for a little while, but then was rejoined, promoted, as you said, and posted to Number 66 squadron. And this is in 1943, and then he was actually shot down in France by a German plane. And the story that comes next is really incredible. I was hoping you could tell it...

CHRIS DAVISON: He ended up gaining his rank back and was shot down over northern France or Belgium. And ironically, you know, the guy that shot him down had 20 victories up at that particular time and went on to have 50 victories. Think about what I said to you before about these highly experienced pilots, once they became highly experienced, if you weren't experienced, you had no hope, no hope in the wide world. But when he was shot down and crashed, he wasn't badly injured. He had some facial, neck and facial injuries, eye injuries, for example, I think was probably glass. He was picked up by either the underground or the resistance, I don't know enough about the politics of that to understand who was who, and they got him back to health, and they said, "Well, look, there's two different options for you. One is we can wait until we can get a plane in here, but we might have to wait, you know, for a month or two. Or you can take the risk and walk from Northern France right down and climb over the Pyrenees and get out that way". Tony said that "I'll go that way. I don't want to be sitting here for a couple of months. I want to get back into the action." And I was so proud that after Tony passed away, we found in his papers that document from the French underground of resistance, which was his identification document. And of course, they had a photograph of him there, very youthful, looking Tony, and they called him Francois Gazier. And he was an organist.

LAURA THOMAS: An organist rather than a fighter pilot.

CHRIS DAVISON: Yeah. So, it wasn't going to be a bit of a giveaway, wasn't it? And so that was his identification document. But one of the other things they did is because he had carried some injuries, and they had to, how were they going to overcome the issue of language? And Tony had some French, but not much. They bandaged up his neck. So, if anyone was going to pick him up, he could always point at his neck and go (mumbles) However they worked it, and that was a way of deflecting the language issue. So, the resistance, or the, I think it was a resistance, they would walk to one village, and they'd meet him on the north side of a village. They'd walk through the village, obviously get more stores or food or wine, I'd imagine for him. But even when he said, you know, "when we walked through the village, that was the time we were most vulnerable". Because there was German spies there, there was obviously there was elements within the French communities were pro German as well. So, he'd have to walk on one side of the road, and they'd walk about 100 metres behind him on the other side of the road.

LAURA THOMAS: The resistance, you mean?

CHRIS DAVISON: Yes, so that they were always there to keep an eye on him, but if he got picked up, they weren't connected to him. So, they'd walk him out of the village and re-equip him, then he'd walk onto the next village, and the same thing happened. He then arrives at the Pyrenees. I mean, they're not hills, you know, they're mountains, you know, with a pair of dacks on and a jacket and a pair of shoes and no oxygen, no weatherproof clothing, no nothing. Climbs out, gets out, comes out the other end, walks down to Barcelona, ends up back in England.

LAURA THOMAS: How long did that journey take him?

CHRIS DAVISON: I think it was only 10 days or two weeks or something.

LAURA THOMAS: You say only, but that is a long journey, as you said, when you're not equipped.

You've been shot up, and you've got no idea who you're looking at, who's looking at you, and you could be one inch away from ending up in a POW camp or just being shot. Tony was pretty cool under pressure, I think. He got back and started flying again. In between time, he picked up a couple of DFCs, Distinguished Flying Crosses. Done some pretty amazing, pretty amazing things. He never, really, he never talked about it. He was very happy to accept the honour, but he never talked about it.

LAURA THOMAS: Well, maybe we should talk about it, these DFCs. Can you tell us a little bit more about them?

CHRIS DAVISON: Well, obviously, you know, you don't nominate yourself and I gather at the end of every day and every sortie, they used to sit down and do a big debrief. You had to prove, for example, if you shot someone down, that's why Tony's record is, I think he's got 12 confirms and two halves and a possible, whatever that means, but it all comes out of the debrief. And I suppose there'll be other pilots saying, "Oh, you should have seen what Gaze did here. And he went in and rescued these people here". He did something and then gets nominated for a DFC. And I mean, there's one particular episode, is that he was flying back from over the channel. And you have to remember that they had to fly from England over to France, and then they had to fly back. So better than 50% of their fuel was being used up getting there and getting back. So, they had limited time when they got over there. He said, "You suddenly get involved yourself in a dog fight, and you crank the throttle up, and it goes from 40 gallons an hour to 150 gallons an hour, and suddenly you're going to run out of fuel". So, there's a lot of you know stuff that was required planning and that sort of thing.

And he was coming back, and he saw a RAF Bomber trying to get back to England, smoke pouring out the back of it. And he thought, "Well, these guys are just easy pickings for the German fighters. They're gone". With that, he looked up and there was a couple of German fighters coming along. So, he took them on, he damn took then on and shot them both down. Barrel rolled, waved and flew off into the sunset. You know, there weren't complicated radios. You couldn't contact someone through their email address or their Facebook page, right? And a significant number of years later, there was a guy doing beautiful war drawings, and he'd go through particular episodes or people's logbooks. He'd find a particular episode, and he found this episode of this Australian pilot who flew out of the sun, shot the two German planes down, barrel rolled and disappeared into the distance. And so, he did this beautiful painting of this plane flying, bomber flying with smoke coming out the back of it, and two fighters and Tony coming flying down in the Spitfire. So, he brought it down to Tony and asked Tony to sign it. And do you know what Tony found? He found the pilot's signature on the other side of it.

LAURA THOMAS: As in the pilot that he was the pilot protecting?

CHRIS DAVISON: Yeah. And Tony said, "Where did you get that from?" He said, "I got him to sign it". He said, "Oh, I didn't even know who it was". He said, "he lives 50 kilometres up the road from you. Do you want to meet him?"

LAURA THOMAS: You're joking

CHRIS DAVISON: No. So, they met.

LAURA THOMAS: And what was that experience like?

CHRIS DAVISON: Well, knowing Tony, he just would have taken it in his stride, but he never sort of made much fuss and bother about things. So that was one, one episode, I think he got a DFC for that, but he didn't talk about it a lot.

LAURA THOMAS: Why do you think that was?

CHRIS DAVISON: I think that generation had tremendous humility. And also, while your friends are doing just the same things as you and they're getting killed, maybe you don't want to wear too many medals. You go, what have I done? I've survived. Now that's probably my words, not Tony's words, but I don't think it'd be too far away from the truth. You know, you didn't go out and big note yourself, did you? It was just that generation didn't do it.

LAURA THOMAS: But there's no denying, on reflection and in hindsight, that he was an incredible pilot. I mean, by the end of the war, he'd flown 485 sorties, and as you said, received the Distinguished Flying Cross three times, which made him one of only 47 men in the Second World War to do so. So, his achievements speak for themselves.

CHRIS DAVISON: Yeah, but there were probably many other people doing lots of other wonderful things that didn't survive. And, you know, he survived. He always said, "I survived because I was very cautious early", which is rather interesting way of putting it. And he said, "I flew around for weeks and months," he said "I couldn't hit a barn door at five, five metres, but I kept out of trouble. I did my job. I escorted the bombers or whatever I had to do". And ultimately, you know, he had to get into a dog fight with someone. You know, towards the end, there was lots of interesting things happening.

The Germans were developing the V1 and V2 bombs, the jet engine so there was subsequently the first jet engine fighters out there. I think Tony was one of the first to actually shoot down a Meteor or whatever they called themselves with a propped aeroplane. No but the Spitfire at that stage had become terribly advanced. Now, from the original planes Tony flew, you know, the early Spitfires that they would have had in the Battle of Britain were nothing like as sophisticated as Spitfires later on in the war that had huge, big engines, far more guns, far more fuel capacity. You know, they were, they were quite a machine. But one of the stories that I always loved Tony talking about said, you know, it's all about tiny little bits when you get into one of those fights, it's a bunch of one percenters. And, you know, he used to go down to the hangar at night and polish his wings. And he'd say that the air resistance over polished wing is just that little bit better. I get a little bit more performance out of my plane with polished wings. So other guys going down there having a few noggins if they've survived, and there's Gaze down in there polishing his wings. Pretty amazing.

LAURA THOMAS: It is, it's that one percent.

That's why when we were in car racing, he always insisted on you have a highly polished car. And you never, you never argued about it.

LAURA THOMAS: Well, let's talk about his car racing, because it's an interesting part of his career post war, but it has links to his time in service. So, tell me about how this world started for him.

CHRIS DAVISON: You can imagine the fighter pilots. They were the Michael Caine Uxbridge boys, weren't they? And at Westhampnett in particular, which was on the Goodwood estate, around the outside of the airfield was the service roads where all the fuel trucks and the fighter pilots with all their sports cars at the end of the day, mind you, the ones that had survived at the end of the day used to race their cars around the outskirts of the airfield. And the Duke of Richmond came down at the end of the war at the famous circuit Brooklands had been bombed and was out, and they were going to set up a new Grand Prix circuit somewhere. And Tony said to the Duke of Richmond, "You don't need to look, this would make a wonderful Grand Prix circuit". And it became Goodwood Grand Prix circuit. And Tony was thereafter known as the father of Goodwood. You know all those biggest states struggle to survive financially these days, and Lord March, who is the son of the Duke of Richmond, many, many, many years later, resurrected through the revival movement, the connection between the motor racing and the flying and so they were still flying, you know, Spitfires in and out of Westhampnett, racing around the track.

So, Lord Charles March has been really wonderful. And when Tony, you know, got on latter in his years, he contacted us and said, "What's going to happen to Tony?" And he came back to me and said, "We have the memorial garden here, where the Grand Prix circuit meets the airfield. Would you consider having Tony's ashes interred here?" Well, what are you going to say to that? You say, "Wow, how amazing". And my daughter, and after Tony passed away, my daughter Claire and my sister Kath, at the bequest of Lord March actually took Tony's ashes back there. But you know, occasionally in your life you get unusual requests, and Lord March said to me, "Would you let me know what size urn Tony's ashes are going to be in?" He said, "I want to make sure it fits in the cockpit of a Spitfire". And I said, "I don't have a lot of Spitfires over here to figure that out. So, if I send you a photo and the dimensions". So, when my sister and my daughter took Tony's ashes, a Spitfire came in and landed, and they carried his ashes out to the Spitfire, and they took the squadron leader for his final laps. Isn't that amazing?

LAURA THOMAS: It's incredible. The collision of two of his passions with the flying and the racing.

CHRIS DAVISON: And he'd been there for the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain. It's one of those 'can only happen to Tony Gaze stories', and the guy flying the Spitfire, doing the demonstrations, came and landed and the first thing he said was "I want to meet Squadron Leader Gaze". So Tony was non flustered about these sorts of things. So, the pilot came over and done a brilliant job flying the Spitfire, said “I always wanted to meet you Squadron Leader Gaze", and Tony just turned around to him and said, straight away, "Why weren't you on full throttle when you were on the climb?" And everyone said, "How would he know that he's not on full throttle?" He said, "Because I could pick it up by the sound of the engine that you weren't on full throttle". He said, "Well, excuse me, Squadron Leader, but the last time you flew, the king was paying for your petrol". What a great line, hey. Brilliant! So, Tony then married an English widow whose husband had been a Spitfire pilot and a Grand Prix driver and started racing in England. Racing in those days was very different. He became the first Australian to compete in Formula One Grand Prix, did three Formula One Grand Prix. Didn't qualify for a couple of others and then came back and did some racing in Australia and New Zealand, which is where he met my parents, which is how our family then became very closely intertwined, where my godfather became my stepfather.

LAURA THOMAS: Yes, you might have to explain this and explain it slowly, because it's kind of a bit of a mixed world.

CHRIS DAVISON: Yes, well, Tony and Kay Gaze were friends of my parents, Lex and Diana Davison, you know, from the other side of the world. And their common interest was motor racing. The war had been finished, 6, 7, 8, years at that stage. And when I was born, my parents asked Kay and Tony if they'd be my godparents. And I always knew when I was a little kid growing up that I had godparents that lived in England but didn't really know who they were. And then when I was 20 and I went to live in England, worked on their property for a while, got to know them quite well. And of course, the irony was when my father had been killed 1965 and then Kay Gaze died in the early 70s, and Tony came back to Australia and subsequently married my mum. So, you know this interconnection between Tony Gaze and the Davison family, it's been very strong. I always used to say about Tony, love me, love my dog, because I think you inherited Mum's seven children.

LAURA THOMAS: Seven children.

CHRIS DAVISON: Yeah, he adored my mother. Absolutely adored her. They had the property at Nagambie. I used to go down, because I'm in the cattle business, used to go down and help them time to time. Tony always used to like to do his own thing, but he loved the car racing. So subsequently, myself and two of my brothers raced, and then a number of my nephew’s race. And Tony would love being connected. And they were always wonderful to him, always try and involve him as much as possible. And Tony and Diana Gaze became really the father figures, or the matriarchs, as it were, patriarchs of Australian motorsport. They were really the royal family, in many ways, for what Tony had done. And then, you know, my mother's association, and multi generations later, that they were terribly highly regarded in in the motor sport. But interestingly enough, again, the name of his book is Almost Unknown, because he hardly ever raced in Australia. Hardly ever.

So, in the middle of it all, of course, when he gave away the flying as such, he took up gliding and represented Australia in the world gliding championship. You know, there was always something happening, but at Tony pace. You know, he never was flustered. He never big noted himself. He was happy to go off and do his own things. Very humble, sort of a man in many ways. But you know, you think of something, those young people, men and women, whose lives were hanging by a thread on a minute-by-minute basis, and then "Hello, the wars over. Let's go and have a celebration". What are you going to do the following morning when you get up? What does life look like when you've been through that? How do you recover?

You know, my generation, for example, had the Vietnam War to deal with. So many people came back from the Vietnam War so damaged by that, but there was no network to look after them. They carried lots of scars. The older generation, well, you were supposed to just put up with it. You know that wonderful song 'The Band played Waltzing Matilda' b Eric Bogle, absolutely wonderful. And it gets towards the end of the song, and he said, "I'm sitting out on my veranda, and a young person says, why are those men marching? And he said, I asked myself the same question". Isn't it a brilliant line. So how did those young people cope? Well, Tony jumped out of a Spitfire and jumped into a racing car, didn't he? And, you know, and was lucky to survive. He had some monumental shunts, but yeah, lived a very full life, and I'm just very, very happy and proud, really, that he is being well remembered.

LAURA THOMAS: As you've mentioned, we've got many of his items here on display at the Shrine for people to come and see. So, what do you hope that people take away from this quite remarkable story of Tony Gaze?

CHRIS DAVISON: I think in these current times, 2025, is history is being devalued, and everyone's looking at a comfort of their current life in 2025 value judging what happened in the past with no context. There was a lot of terrible things that happened back in the past, in our history, but it was tough going. And I think if, if Tony's story can help younger people understand in some way or another, that there were people before them that did amazing things to create the environment that they live in. So I'm hoping if Tony's story, along with a lot of other people's stories is told, that a lot of young people, when I pulled up at the Shrine today, there was a whole lot of kids playing out in the park, and I was so delighted to see it, because if they can come in here and gain some context, then it'll give them a broader scale of things. And I hope that if Tony's story gets told, that it might give them a better perspective on the history.

LAURA THOMAS: Well, thank you so much, Chris for coming in today and sharing this story. It's been fascinating.

CHRIS DAVISON: Well, thank you and thank you for honouring Tony. You know, in Tony's words, 'Remember I was only part of the team', so that's the way he liked to do things. So, thank you to.