shillings—for a “joy ride” in the rear cockpit of an Avro 504K. He studied aviation periodicals, and one—The Aeroplane—published his account of an air display at Ipswich Airport.
The “germ” grew at prep school when he was riveted by the sight of a close formation of Bristol Bulldog fighters flying overhead, and at college when he participated in anti-aircraft drills, firing blanks from a .303 Enfield rifle at an attacking Hawker Audax. Flying became “a full-blown fever” in 1937, when he invested his life’s savings—£35— in flying lessons at the Ipswich Aero Club. Meadows had set his sights on an RAF career, carrying on the military aviation traditions of his bookshelf heroes. Instead, he would log 1,600 hours instructing Allied pilots on thirty aircraft types across England and Canada before he eventually went day-fighting in Spitfires in 1943 and later night-fighting in Beaufighters and Mosquitoes.
For Gene Vollick, who lived in Hamilton, Ontario, a summer morning when he was nine years old changed his whole life. Somewhere between six and eight o’clock on the morning of August 11, 1930, the British dirigible R100 motored overhead en route from Toronto to Niagara Falls as part of its North American publicity tour to promote commercial airship flights. Gene was thunderstruck. From that moment on, he abandoned his old hobby of collecting baseball cards and began to collect aviation cards. When the war began, he enrolled in an aero-engineering course at the Galt Aircraft School, but later remustered into air crew and trained RCAF pilots at the Service Flying level until the war ended.
The R100’s trip over southern Ontario affected many others who saw it. The night before, August 10, the dirigible passed over Ottawa, and as she reached the Peace Tower on Parliament Hill six powerful searchlights illuminated her silver shape, creating an unforgettable sight. American millionaire Howard Hughes was rumoured to have offered $100,000 to have the R100 do a fly-past over New York. Toronto motorists got a free look as they stopped their cars in the streets to watch her circle the city.
One of the best spots for dirigible viewing was a house in the Cabbagetown section of Toronto. As the R100 circled the city, thirteen-year-old Allister Rutherford scrambled to the rooftop of his Winchester Street house and gazed at it until it was a speck in the distance. Rutherford lived with his bicycle at the ready; whenever there was the slightest indication of air traffic at the Leaside Aerodrome, he and his friends were off like a shot, pedalling uptown to watch what they called “the flying circus.” His fascination for flying as well as mathematics led him into navigation instruction for the wartime RCAF; he served the Air Training Plan from coast to coast, from Chatham, New Brunswick, to Comox, British Columbia.
The Roaring Twenties and the Dirty Thirties—the best and worst of times—provided youngsters with plenty of opportunity to fall in love with flying. Wing-walkers, barnstormers, transoceanic daredevils, former First World War aces, aerobatic teams, and flying circuses of every shape and size gave demonstrations and shows all across Canada. On June 5, 1928, Amelia Earhart stopped in Halifax en route from Boston to Wales; on June 17, she became the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air. Ford Trimotor airplanes conducted National Air Tours that stopped at centres all across North America in the 1920s. In April 1930, the RCAF inaugurated a demonstration flight of Siskin fighters; they were Canada’s first touring aerobatic team. In July 1933, Charles Lindbergh made short stopovers in Halifax and St. John’s on his way to Greenland, and Edmonton’s Blatchford Field welcomed Wiley Post and his Lockheed Vega “Winnie May” in the midst of a solo round-the-world flight.
Owen Sound, where teenager Charlie Krause attended high school in the 1930s, was the birthplace of Canada’s most celebrated fighter pilot, Billy Bishop. Krause remembers one of Bishop’s homecomings, when he landed in a farmer’s field on the outskirts of town. But the event that left a greater impression on him was a fly-past that didn’t land in Owen Sound.
In July 1933, pioneering Italian aviator General Italo Balbo launched his historic Second Atlantic Aeronautica—a six-week mass transatlantic flight of seaplanes from Orbetello, Italy, to Chicago and back. Balbo wanted to commemorate the first decade of fascism in Italy and to impress his superior, Benito Mussolini. About noon on Saturday, July 15, Balbo’s aerial armada of twenty-four Savoia Marchetti seaplanes (en route from Montreal to Chicago, where a huge reception awaited them) passed the southern edge of Georgian Bay, right over Charlie Krause’s home town. “I always wanted to fly,” Krause recalled, “I guess because for a country kid growing up on the farm, airplanes were fascinating. But the day that Italian outfit flew over town, that sort of sealed it.” Eight years later Krause would join the RCAF, serve several years as a pilot instructor in the BCATP, and still make it overseas in time to fly night operations in Mosquitoes and survive the war.
Young Charley Fox of Guelph, Ontario, used to listen to his father’s war stories. Thomas “Will” Fox had fought in the Boer War, serving with the British cavalry in the 10th Hussars, the same regiment as Lord Baden-Powell. As a result, Will Fox raised his sons, Ted and Charley, in a pretty strict fashion. But Charley’s decision to join the war effort had much more to do with a summer day in 1934 when the RAF paid an unexpected visit.
“I never was one to make airplane models, or even think of getting up in the air,” Fox said. “In fact, one time when they offered me a flight over the fair in Hamilton, I said, ‘No. I’m afraid I’ll be sick.’ But that year there was a flight of Hawker Furys visiting from No. 1 Squadron of the Royal Air Force. I had read about them. They were silver-coloured fighter biplanes. They were doing demonstrations over Ontario and Quebec. And all of a sudden one day I hear this roar. Five silver airplanes came zooming from over the top of College Hill, glinting in the sunlight. Then swoosh . . . they were gone. But I never forgot it.” By the time No. 1 RAF Squadron was in full combat back in Britain in 1940, Fox had enlisted in the RCAF. Before he went overseas in 1943 to fly Spitfires, he taught scores of BCATP trainees how to prepare themselves for the toughest flying assignments of their lives.
Others caught the aviation bug in more casual ways. Alan Stirton, the third son of six children in a Saskatchewan farm family, was smitten by flying entirely by accident. Each weekday he would hitch up the family pony, Fanny, to a buggy and head out for the Petrolia schoolhouse near Moose Jaw.
“One day in the fall of 1930, luck was with me. I was driving home from school, and a small airplane landed in our neighbour’s stubble field. We hustled old Fanny into the barn and ran across the fields to admire this wonderful machine. Lo and behold, if the pilot didn’t offer me a ride. What a thrill. I was only twelve at the time. But from then on I dreamed of becoming a pilot.” Stirton did learn to fly, but getting his pilot’s licence was a painful experience.
In spite of British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s assurance from Hitler in September 1938 that there would be “peace in our time,” the Canadian government prepared for war by offering private flying clubs a $100 grant for every student pilot who received a licence. Dick Ryan, a First World War fighter pilot who managed the Moose Jaw Flying Club, placed ads in local newspapers offering to split the grant with any aspiring pilots.
“One free ride to assess your ability to become a pilot,” Ryan promised, and offered a private pilot’s licence if the trainee passed the tests after twenty hours of flying time. Total cost to the student: $150. The ad attracted a local RCMP constable, a couple of auto-mechanics, and a few others, including Al Stirton, who admitted, “I didn’t know a rudder from an aileron.” But it didn’t take him long to scrape the cash together, and by October 1 he was airborne in a ten-year-old Gipsy Moth with Ryan himself. After seven and a half hours of dual instruction, Stirton did his first solo flight. And on November 14, 1938, he took his private pilot’s test from an examiner visiting Moose Jaw from Edmonton.
“In those days,” Stirton remembered, “no examiner dared risk his life by riding in the airplane with a student, but stayed on the ground and ‘observed’ the flight from the seat of his car. I was instructed to climb above the aerodrome, do a medium turn to the left, then one to the right, followed by a steep turn each way;
