On this ANZAC Day 2025, the NFSA Owls remember Flight Lieutenant Robin Ordell D.F.C., whose plane was shot down during a bombing raid over Europe in 1945, eighty years ago.

Assigned to number 100 squadron RAF, Robin served as an Avro Lancaster bomber pilot.

Flight Lieutenant Ordell and five of his crew lost their lives during a bombing raid over Europe on 03 February 1945. Only their tail gunner survived. 

Robin Ordell had been an actor, entertainer and radio broadcaster in Australia;  and while on active service, presented entertainment for troops and also broadcast for the BBC.

The son of actor, writer, director and broadcaster, Tal Ordell, Robin was born in 1920. As a six-year-old, he played the lead role in his father's endearing and enduring silent feature film The Kid Stakes 1927. Acting as "Pop" Ordell, Robin was a delight as the screen's incarnation of Fatty Finn. The Kid Stakes feature was based on the popular comic strip characters created by Syd Nicholls.

The Kid Stakes 1927, is one of the all too few surviving films from Australia's Era of Silent Cinema. Filmed mostly on location at Woolloomooloo, Sydney, the film also featured a billygoat cart race that was staged in Rockhampton, Queensland, as goat racing was banned in New South Wales at the time.

Robin acted and broadcast with his father through the 1930s. Their ABC radio children's serial "Wattletown" ran for five years.

Robin left a successful radio career with 2GB Sydney when he enlisted in the RAAF in 1942.

Flight Lieutenant Robin Ordell service number 422251 was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. The citation is written up as " Fortitude, courage and devotion on numerous sorties." A presentation of the insignia to his next of kin, his father, by the Governor of New South Wales, took place at Government House, Sydney on 27 February 1947.

Robin's remains are interred at Mierlo War Cemetery, the Netherlands.

The Australian War Memorial's Last Post Ceremony honouring Flight Lieutenant Robin Ordell can be watched on the AWM website.

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