Tinker, it's absolutely true, I've seen the photos. What the disgruntled farmer actually wrote on his roof was "P*** Off Biggles".
Incidentally, one of Brian Cosgrove's less well known books is a guide to airfield planning, published by the BMAA. He recounts a story of a noise complainer, who got the local TV company involved. In his back garden (next to said airstrip) he was complaining during an interview about the noise of landing aircraft in particular. During the course of the interview, and visible on camera behind him, 4 microlights landed, to which he remained completely oblivious.
Not disimilar to Beagle's style, I saw a masterful bit of handling of a phoned noise complaint once. I only heard one side of the conversation (by a QFI) which went something like this:-
"Hello I understand you have a complaint about an aeroplane"
"So it was flying low over your house, could you tell me the registration"
"It was too high to read the registration, okay, was it Blue by any chance"
"I thought it might be, not one of ours - we've had trouble with this chap ourselves. No idea who he is, but not based at our airfield - all our pilots are briefed not to fly over local houses, and we haven't anything based here with a blue wing".
G