Flyaway

Joyce went away and I opened the envelope and took out a four-page article, a potted history of the life and times of Peter Billson, Aviation Pioneer – Sunday Supplement instant knowledge without pain. It was headed: The Strange Case of Flyaway Peter, and was illustrated with what were originally black-and-white photographs which had been tinted curious shades of blue and yellow to enliven the pages of what, after all, was supposed to be a colour magazine.

It boiled down to this. Billson, a Canadian, was born appropriately in 1903, the year the first aeroplane took to the sky. Too young to see service in the First World War, he was nourished on tales of the air fighting on the Western Front which excited his imagination and he became air mad. He was an engineering apprentice and, by the time he was 21, he had actually built his own plane. It wasn't a good one – it crashed.

He was unlucky. The Golden Age of Aviation was under way and he was missing out on all the plums. Pioneer flying took money or a sponsor with money and he had neither. In the late 1920s Alan Cobham was flying to the Far East, Australia and South Africa; in 1927 Lindbergh flew the Atlantic solo, and then Byrd brought off the North and South Pole double. Came the early 'thirties and Amy Johnson, Jim Mollison, Amelia Earhart and Wiley Post were breaking records wholesale and Billson hadn't had a look-in.

But he made it in the next phase. Breaking records was all very well, but now the route-proving stage had arrived which had to precede phase three – the regular commercial flight. Newspapers were cashing in on the public interest and organizing long-distance races such as the England-Australia Air Race of 1934, won by Scott and Campbell-Black. Billson came second in a race from Vancouver to Hawaii, and first in a mail-carrying test – Vancouver to Montreal. He was in there at last – a real heroic and intrepid birdman. It is hard to believe the adulation awarded those early fliers. Not even our modern astronauts are accorded the same attention.

It was about this time that some smart journalist gave him the nickname of Flyaway Peter, echoing the nursery rhyme. It was good publicity and Billson went along with the gag even to the extent of naming his newborn son Paul and, in 1936, when he entered the London to Cape Town Air Race he christened the Northrop 'Gamma' he flew Flyaway. It was one of the first of the all-metal aircraft.

The race was organized by a newspaper which beat the drum enthusiastically and announced that all entrants would be insured to the tune of?100,000 each in the case of a fatality. The race began. Billson put down in Algiers to refuel and then took off again, heading south. The plane was never seen again, Billson's wife, Helen, was naturally shocked and it was some weeks before she approached the newspaper about the insurance. The newspaper passed her on to the insurance company which dug in its heels and dithered.?100,000 was a lot of money in 1936. Finally it declared unequivocally that no payment would be forthcoming and Mrs Billson brought the case to court.

The courtroom was enlivened by a defence witness, a South African named Hendrik van Niekirk, who swore on oath that he had seen Billson, alive and well, in Durban four weeks after the race was over. It caused a sensation and no doubt the sales of the newspaper went up. The prosecution battered at van Niekirk but he stood up to it well. He had visited Canada and had met Billson there and he was in no doubt about his identification. Did he speak to Billson in Durban? No, he did not.

All very dicey.

The judge summed up and the case went to the jury which deliberated at length and then found for the insurance company. No ?100,000 for Mrs Billson – who immediately appealed. The Appellate Court reversed the decision on a technicality – the trial judge had been a shade too precise in his instructions to the jury. The insurance company took it to the House of Lords who refused to have anything to do with it. Mrs Billson got her?100,000. Whether she lived happily ever after the writer of the article didn't say.

So much for the subject matter – the tone was something. else. Written by a skilled journalist, it was a very efficient hatchet job on the reputation of a man who could not answer back – dead or alive. It reeked of the envy of a small-minded man who got his kicks by pulling down men better than himself. If this was what Paul Billson had read then it wasn't too surprising if he went off his trolley.

The article ended in a speculative vein. After pointing out that the insurance company had lost on a legal technicality, it went on:

The probability is very strong that Billson did survive the crash, if crash there was, and that Hendrik van Niekirk did see him in Durban. If t his is so, and I think it is, then an enormous fraud was perpetrated.?100,000 is a lot of money anywhere and at any time. ?100,000 in 1936 is equivalent to over?350,000 in our present-day debased currency.