A Second World War Battle of Britain pilot has finally been given the memorial he deserves, thanks to the generosity of an American admirer.

Flying Officer Peter Pease crashed his Spitfire into a field adjacent to Gravelly Bottom Road in Kingswood, Maidstone on September 15, 1940, after he was shot down by a Messerschmitt 109 while attacking a formation of Heinkel bombers.

He was killed, aged just 22.

Scroll down for video

Before the crash, he had been on a collision course with homes in the village, but was heard to rev his engine to take his aircraft safely past them.

After the war, grateful villagers planted a tree to his memory near the crash site.

F/O Pease was well connected: the son of Sir Richard and Lady Pease of Richmond, Yorkshire, he had been educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read history and became a member of the University Air Squadron.

He was commissioned in the RAF Volunteer Reserve in September 1938, a year before the start of the war.

F/O Pease was engaged to the debutante and author Denise Maxwell Woosnam, who was the daughter of the celebrated all-round sportsman Max Woosnam.

His family history came to fascinate John Oakley, a professor of law at the University of California, but himself a former pilot, who visited Pease’s grave site in the churchyard of St Michael and All Saints at Middleton Tyas in Yorkshire.

So much so that he commissioned The Stone Shop in East Farleigh, run by Gordon Newton, to fashion a suitable memorial.

It was unveiled on Thursday by Kingswood ward councillor Gill Fort, watched by a small crowd of villagers.

Professor Oakley said: “Pease was one of life’s heroes.”