A PETERSFIELD woman was at the centre of operations during the Battle of Britain.

Joan Fanshawe worked in the Operations Room at RAF Uxbridge in 1940.

On September 15, while Churchill was at the west London base, the most intense day of the battle began.

It was later acknowledged by historians as being the turning point of the aerial conflict, and for the past 75 years it has been known as Battle of Britain day.

On Saturday, Joan, who is 95 and lives at Stroud, will read one of the prayers at a memorial service in Westminster Abbey, attended by the Prince of Wales.

She said: “I feel very honoured to be asked to read a prayer, deeply honoured.”

Aged 19, Joan joined the Woman’s Auxiliary Air Force in 1940 and was posted to Uxbridge, the headquarters of 11 Group air wing, made up of squadrons of Spitfire and Hurricane fighter planes.

On September 15 she was one of 10 special duty WAAFs in the operations room.

Their job was to track Royal Air force (RAF) aircraft and German planes of the Luftwaffe, on a huge table top map of southern England.

"I was in there when Churchill came into the ops room. It was very tense. It became more and more hectic for us to find spaces to put the plots on the table, we realised that this must be such a battle going on," she said.

During the summer of 1940 the Luftwaffe tried to wrest domination of the skies over England from the RAF.

If the campaign had succeeded, the German army in France was to launch a seaborne invasion of England across the channel.

Although Churchill made some mistakes during the war, Joan says his leadership was inspirational.

“Apparently it was in his car after he left us that he wrote his famous ‘never in the field of conflict’ speech.

“We also didn’t know until later that the Germans realised they couldn’t win the Battle of Britain and had called off the invasion that September,” she recalled.

After the Battle of Britain Joan was posted to various airfields, but she was stationed at RAF Tangmere near Chichester during the D-Day invasion of Europe, which began on June 6, 1944.

She was ‘demobbed’ from the WAAFs in 1945, with the rank of section officer.

She and her husband, a Royal Navy officer, moved to Petersfield in 1950, and in 1964 to Stroud.

The memorial service in Westminster Abbey on Saturday is being broadcast on BBC 1 at noon.