Nov. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Keith Park is credited by some with winning the Battle of Britain, yet there is no statue of him in England. That changed today, thanks to the rearguard action of a finance executive he never met.

Terry Smith, chairman of U.K. stockbroker Collins Stewart Plc and chief executive officer of inter-dealer broker Tullett Prebon Plc, says the U.K. had forgotten about Park, a New Zealand native who commanded one of the Royal Air Force fighter groups that bore the brunt of the Nazi assault in 1940.

A pilot and historian in his spare time, Smith says he spent at least two years and almost 1 million pounds ($1.65 million) on his campaign to put a likeness of Park on the Fourth Plinth, a vacant platform at London’s Trafalgar Square that was intended to support an equestrian statue in 1841 and instead has held a series of contemporary artworks over the past decade.

“The planning commission said, ‘Heavens no, you can’t have something that looks like what it’s meant to look like!’” Smith, 56, says in an interview. “There’s also a lobby that says you can’t have a statue of a Caucasian war hero. He doesn’t tick any of the boxes of being from an ethnic, religious minority, not female, etc.”

Proposals for the plinth have included a family of meerkats and a burnt-out car shipped from Iraq. Most recently it served as the stage for 2,400 people who each got one hour on the plinth. After his election in 2008, London Mayor Boris Johnson decided Park’s statue would go up for six months, followed by a resumption of the rotation.

Right Subject, Wrong Place

“Keith Park is a very deserving subject, but the fourth plinth is the wrong place,” says Sandy Nairne, director of the National Portrait Gallery and a former chairman of the plinth commissioning group. “It’s not what I would’ve chosen, but it’s what Boris Johnson decided.”

A group of World War II veterans, one of them 96, and Park family members today unveiled the statue after a Spitfire and modern Typhoon jet fighter plane flew overhead.

Johnson described the process of erecting the statue as almost as difficult as the Battle of Britain itself. The mayor said that when Smith first told him about Park, he jokingly suggested renaming central London’s Hyde Park as Park Park.

“Indeed there were times when it looked easier to rename Hyde Park than erect this in Trafalgar Square,” Johnson said.

Winning the Battle

The Battle of Britain lasted from July 10 to Oct. 31, 1940, when about 640 RAF aircraft fought off 2,600 German bombers and fighters. A planned invasion was canceled after the Luftwaffe failed to defeat the RAF.

Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding, head of fighter command, developed Britain’s air defenses, while Air Vice-Marshal Park and Air Vice-Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory led the fighter groups at the center of the fighting, according to the RAF.

“If ever any one man won the Battle of Britain, he did,” Marshal of the RAF Arthur Tedder said of Park in 1947.

Park, realizing the RAF was outgunned and outnumbered, chose to act defensively rather than offensively, leading to criticism from some colleagues, according to the Battle of Britain Historical Society.

Smith says he borrowed Park’s technique of avoiding direct confrontation in his fight against London’s modern art scene.

“We didn’t go for a full frontal assault,” Smith says of his fight to put Park on the plinth. “If you go around jabbing people in the chest, quite often they respond by fighting.”

Subterfuge

Smith says his campaign started with “a bit of subterfuge.” He suggested a Financial Times columnist write an article about Parks on Sept. 15, 2007, the anniversary of the decisive confrontation of the Battle Britain.

“I then wrote one of these outraged-in-Tunbridge-Wells- type letters to the editor of the FT saying this is appalling,” Smith says. “And then I waited.”

Over the next three weeks, so many letters poured in backing Park that the FT had to print a special letter to the editor page, Smith says. With support secured, he began plans to build the statue, which will be 5 meters (16.4 feet) tall and feature Park in his goggles and flight gear.

The Park campaign is just the latest fight for Smith, who boxes every day and spends a week a year kick-boxing in Thailand.

Tullett Prebon sued BGC Partners Inc. in U.S. District Court in Newark, New Jersey, last month, seeking at least $1 billion in damages for allegedly raiding its brokers around the globe. New York-based BGC believes the claims are unwarranted, said spokesman Robert Hubbell.

‘Mythical Warrior’

The son of an East London bus driver, Smith studied history at University College Cardiff and considered teaching before heading to London’s financial district.

He was a bank analyst in London from 1984 to 1989, then joined UBS AG in 1990 as head of research. He was fired after publishing a book called “Accounting for Growth” that questioned the accounting practices of some of UBS’s clients.

Smith says Park became one of his causes because he was shocked at how little recognition the pilot received.

“If he had lost, the world would have been a very different place,” Smith says. “He’s almost like this mythical warrior out of ‘Lord of the Rings.’ He travels half way around the world to a country that he has no association with to save us, then disappears and goes back home again.”

WWI Ace

Park also fought at Gallipoli and the Somme in World War I. After being blown off his horse by a shell, he was declared unfit for active service. Instead, he learned to fly and joined the precursor to the RAF in 1916. Before the war was over, he took out at least 19 enemy aircraft and was shot down twice.

A smaller bronze version of the Park statue will be placed permanently on Waterloo Place in London on Sept. 15, 2010. There is already a Battle of Britain monument in London and a national memorial at Capel-le-Ferne in Kent.

Smith is as forceful as National Gallery Director Nairne on what should be displayed next to Nelson’s Column, the centerpiece of the square erected to commemorate Admiral Horatio Nelson’s death at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.

“I’m not anti-contemporary art. It has its place, just not in that place,” he says. “It’s called Trafalgar Square. It’s named for the last time someone won a great big battle to stop us being invaded.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Tom Cahill in London at tcahill@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: November 4, 2009 11:45 EST