The Ideals and Training of a Flying Officer  [978085979130]

This little book is charmingly bound as a facsimile of an old notebook, with the script being presented as if tapped out on a manual typewriter. It contains extracts from the letters home of a young Canadian pilot, Ward Maclennan, during the period July – December 1917. He firstly underwent training at Oxford, Netheravon and Upavon before being posted to No 60 Squadron in France. His writing style is direct, engaging and descriptive, “It is interesting from a height to watch other aeroplanes sliding along far below, giving the impression of flat, white fish swimming at a lower level in the sea.” or “A flock of sheep moving across a meadow resembles, from 400 feet, a mass of white maggots crawling, a rather nasty description, but so it seems to me.” It is evocative of the times – he was one of many adventurous and idealistic young “colonials” seeking to flight for the “Mother Country” in her time of need. He took to flying very quickly and was the first of his batch to solo, “landing an aeroplane was like bringing a sailboat into a wharf.” Though he did suffer motion sickness when on leave and out with a girl in London on the top deck of a tram. He shows a keen appreciation of the sights of Old England – Oxford, Salisbury, Stonehenge, the White Horse cut onto the chalk. His candid views give a real flavour of the period and of the procedure at a flying training school. He enjoyed mess life, his tent and the ministrations of his batman, Brown, once he got used to the idea. He noted that flying in the rain was not pleasant, “At 80 miles an hour the raindrops cut into one’s face like hailstones.” He grew in confidence rapidly and wrote about how easy it was to fly an Avro 504 for 20 minutes with his hands in his pockets. Other types included the ubiquitous Shorthorn and BE2c, as well as the more unusual Morane BB, which he didn’t like and the aircraft that he would fly in France, the SE5, which he was most impressed.
He put up his Wings at the end of October and was posted to the Western Front, with 43 hours solo and less than 10 on the SE5 – which was more than some but scarcely adequate. In his first week or two with the Squadron he did no flying but enjoyed a ride on an artillery horse sent back for a rest, punting a rugby ball, listening to the gramophone and taking the tender into Boulogne or St Omer. He was greatly looking forward to exciting times with such a famous unit and made his first patrol over the lines on December 17.

This is a splendid little book, beautifully produced and nicely illustrated – it is an ideal stocking filler that can be read with pleasure and also sadness. It is a fitting and poignant tribute to a lost, patriotic and optimistic generation that Ward Maclennan’s papers were retrieved from a library archive and are now being aired.

by Guy Warner