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Concept
Noel Stephen Paynter
Summary
Air Commodore Noel Stephen "Peter" Paynter, (26 December 1898 – 16 March 1998) was a Royal Air Force officer who served as chief intelligence officer of Bomber Command. Paynter was a senior member of the team that ran Bomber Command under its formidable commander-in-chief, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, throughout the last three years of the Second World War. His reports, as head of intelligence, lay behind many of the raids on German cities, which remain the subject of controversy. Paynter insisted to the end that reliable sources had led them to believe that the Nazis had hidden large munitions stores in such historic towns as Dresden; Hitler thought that the Allies would not attack them.
Noel Stephen Paynter had been born in Essex where his father, Canon F S Paynter, was rector of Springfield. But the family has a long history in West Cornwall, with a coat of arms dating from the 16th century and a place in Burke's Landed Gentry. He married Barbara Grace, daughter of artist Fredereick Hans Haagensen of London. They had two children, Francis and Rosemary. His brother Charles Theodore Paynter (Lieutenant, R.N.) was killed in when it was sunk in 1918 by coastal artillery near Zeebrugge.
Paynter had been carefully chosen for the post in 1942 after spending the previous three years as head of RAF Intelligence in the Middle East – for which he had been mentioned in dispatches. He was to establish a close working relationship with his new chief, reflected in a painting by Herbert Arnould Olivier, now hanging in the office of the C-in-C RAF Strike Command, which shows Harris sitting at his desk with Paynter leaning across it at a briefing session. His loyalty to Bomber Harris, however, was evidenced more dramatically after the war, when Paynter was director of intelligence at the Air Ministry. Incensed by the Attlee Government's refusal to give Harris a place in the victory celebrations, he resigned his commission in protest. His decision meant losing £100 from his annual pension – a more significant sacrifice then than it sounds today.
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