Lady St. Helier was independently wealthy. Her husband, a judge of England’s Probate Court, had left her an estate of half a million dollars when he died in 1905, a few months after being created Lord St. Helier. But her role of society hostess was only part of this remarkable woman’s activities. She was an elected alderman of London County Council and a tireless fighter for legislation to better the lives of London’s lower-paid workers, and of defective children.
When the First World War broke out she added to her other interests the organization of auxiliary services for the hospitals turned over to ill and wounded servicemen. In this last role she came that day in May, 1916, to the bedside of Lieutenant Billy Bishop.
“I saw your name on the register,” she told him, “and I was sure that someone named William Bishop, from Canada, must be the son of my friend Will Bishop. And when I looked at you I was sure of it, you look very much like him.”
Bishop stared at her uncomprehendingly. He thought the drugs he had been given must have affected his understanding of what this unusual visitor was telling him.
“My father’s name is Will,” he said, “but he lives in Owen Sound, a small town in Ontario . . .”
“Then you are Will Bishop’s son,” said Lady St. Helier, beaming. She explained that before the war she had visited Ottawa and had been introduced to Will Bishop at a reception given by Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier. It was an indication of Lady St. Helier’s boundless capacity for friendship, for “collecting people,” as well as of her incredible memory for names and faces, that out of the scores of strangers she had met on an evening more than five years before, she instantly remembered the name and appearance of one of them—and remembered him, moreover, as “my friend.”
When Bishop asked his father why he had not given him a letter of introduction to his charming and influential English friend Lady St. Helier, Will Bishop had no idea what his son was talking about. When Bishop went into detail, Will could conjure up only a vague recollection of having met Lady St. Helier.
By the middle of June Bishop was allowed to leave the hospital. At Lady St. Helier’s insistence he became one of her “lodgers” in her four-storey mansion at 52 Portland Place. A strong bond of affection had grown between the young Canadian country boy and one of Britain’s most sophisticated noblewomen during her regular visits to the hospital. She told him of her own only son, member of a Guards regiment, who had died of typhoid years before in India. In a rare sentimental moment this indomitable woman told Bishop: “You are the kind of grandson my son would have given me if he had lived.”
Her voice was choked. She was close to tears. It was the first time Bishop had seen her show anything but cheerfulness and self-assurance. He tried to comfort her in the only way he knew, by saying with an impertinent grin: “Yes, Granny.” From then on he called her “Granny”—and she introduced him to her vast array of friends as “my grandson.”
Life at 52 Portland Place was much more exciting than in the hospital. But although Bishop knew he was fortunate to be there, he found it impossible to enter into the spirit of Lady St. Helier’s perpetual house party. He was exhausted and dispirited.
“You need home leave,” Lady St. Helier told him.
“Not a chance,” Bishop said. “I’ve done nothing to deserve it. A few months ago when my father was ill I thought of applying, but it turned out I didn’t need to.”
“Your father was ill?”
“A slight stroke. But he recovered quickly. My mother cabled: ‘Stay where you are. You’ve never done anything so well before.’”
Lady St. Helier laughed. “I still think you should have a holiday at home,” she said. A week later Bishop was summoned before a medical board. The verdict came quickly: indefinite home leave.
Bishop suspected that “Granny” had pulled some of the numerous strings at her disposal, but he was too elated with the outcome to question how it had been arrived at.
Joyously Bishop boarded a ship for Canada, for a reunion with his family—and with Margaret Burden. The visit could only be described as uneventful. In a country busily mustering its manpower, men in uniform were everywhere, and even though the natty double-breasted jacket and jaunty cap of the RFC had rarely been seen in Canada, Bishop attracted few glances during the long journey from Halifax to Montreal to Toronto and finally to Owen Sound.
In his home town Bishop’s arrival attracted a little more attention, in the form of a newspaper item that hinted he was something of a war hero, back home to convalesce from wounds received in action; Bishop was acutely embarrassed. “If 21 Squadron ever reads this,” he told his parents gloomily, “I’ll never hear the last of it.” But somehow his proud mother and father regarded the fanciful newspaper report as no more than he deserved.
Margaret Burden’s father, a stern and righteous man who had married into a wealthy family and was therefore suspicious of the motives of the young man who seemed interested in his daughter, had been less than enthusiastic over Bishop’s courtship of Margaret. But now he gave his consent to the marriage. Margaret seemed to be as much in love as ever. Charlie Burden had hoped that the long separation would make her forget Bishop, but she had not looked at another man during his months at the front.
Billy and Margaret decided to postpone their wedding, however. He was determined to become a fighter pilot; he was realistically aware that as such his chances of survival were rather less than even, and he did not consider it fair to Margaret to make her a widow almost as soon as she became a wife. Bishop did finally present her with a proper engagement ring, however.
Early in September, 1916, Bishop returned to England. From the start everything went awry. When he reported to the War Office he was told that he could not collect his back pay until he reported to another medical board. The board’s findings were disheartening: he was still unfit for active service. It would be at least a month before he would be allowed to return to France. Moreover his records had been lost, and this meant, for some reason Bishop could not fathom, that an application to train as a pilot was out of the question. That meant that when he eventually returned to the front it would be as an observer, with a new squadron, for by then 21 Squadron probably would not exist. The news from the front had shaken Bishop: the Suicide Squad had lived up to its name. It had been practically wiped out in the summer battles over the Somme.
Bishop lay on a bearskin rug in front of the fireplace at 52 Portland Place and grumbled to Granny St. Helier about War Office red tape. “Here I am, perfectly fit, and they won’t take me back. They half promised that I could take pilot training, you know.”
Lady St. Helier was sitting at an antique desk, writing letters. She had a unique method of turning out her correspondence. As each letter was finished she tossed it to the floor. From time to time a footman entered the room, gathered the scattered sheets and put them into the appropriate envelopes. Bishop never tired of watching this strange performance. Granny had explained that she evolved this system because her desk was so cluttered with letters, cards, invitations, London County Council reports and other assorted paperwork of an incredibly busy life that there was no room on her desk for her own letters.
“What can I do?” Bishop asked.
“Do about what?” said Lady St. Helier.
“You know—the War Office not accepting me for pilot training.”
“Oh, I’m going to have a talk with Hugh Cecil and Winston Churchill,” said Lady St. Helier casually.
“You know Mr. Churchill?”
“My dear boy, of course I know him—not that I’ve ever trusted him absolutely, or his father for that matter. Clementine Churchill is my greatniece, and I introduced her to Winston in this very room. As a matter of fact, their wedding reception was held here.”
The wedding of Winston Churchill and Clementine Hozier in the spring of 1908 was, in fact, the highlight of the long and distinguished social career of Lady St. Helier. It was on a Saturday, and half of London lined the streets between St
. Margaret’s Church in Westminster and Lady St. Helier’s house in Portland Place to cheer the young couple.
Churchill’s proposal to Clementine Hozier was the coup of Lady St. Helier’s matchmaking career, which had led to many of the most important matings in Britain’s ruling classes. For years Churchill had been the most eligible—and most elusive—of bachelors. Time and again rumour had him engaged to one girl or another, but always the young statesman emerged unscathed. Then Lady St. Helier arranged an intimate dinner party that included her great-niece and Churchill.
“He didn’t have a chance later that evening, ”Granny St. Helier told Bishop with a chuckle. “In fact, it was Clementine who kept Winston guessing for several weeks before she accepted him.”
The Hoziers were far from wealthy, and their small house in Kensington was quite unsuitable for a fashionable wedding. So Lady St. Helier took over the arrangements. Clementine moved into 52 Portland Place four days before the wedding, was entertained at a glittering bridal tea, and left there for St. Margaret’s Church. When the bridal party returned to Portland Place, rose petals from the bridesmaids’ bouquets were strewn over the bride and groom instead of the traditional rice.
What Lady St. Helier said to Churchill and his erstwhile best man, Lord Hugh Cecil, Bishop never learned. But a few days later he was summoned back to the War Office. “Compared with the previous visit it was positively embarrassing,” Bishop recalled. “Stiff formality was swept aside. Bureaucratic procedure became friendly co-operation. The brick walls of English protocol suddenly developed with open doors. My papers appeared from nowhere. I felt like saying, ‘look, chaps, I’m only a lieutenant and observer asking for a chance to prove I can become a pilot.’”
But no influence could excuse Bishop from the necessity of a medical examination, and he became increasingly worried as the day of his appointment with the doctor drew near, only a few days after a medical board had ruled him not yet medically fit. He need not have worried. His own description of the ordeal suggested that Lady St. Helier’s influence might, indeed, have penetrated into the medical service of the RFC: “After the doctor listened to my heart and banged my lungs and persuaded me to say ‘aah’ and ‘ninety-nine,’ he put me into a swivel chair, spun me around sharply, and suddenly invited me to spring to attention. Since I did not fall flat on my face I was presumed to be healthy and fit to fly.”
A week later, on October 1, 1916, he was on his way to Brasenose College, Oxford, for a month of ground-school training at the School of Military Aeronautics. Bishop braced himself for a month of hard work. But he soon discovered that his training and experience as an observer put him at the top of the class in map reading, wireless and meteorology. He was one of the few in the class who had ever actually been in the air. He breezed through the examinations with high marks.
Next he went to Upavon Flying School on Salisbury Plain. Learning to fly, he soon discovered, was a casual and perfunctory process, which perhaps accounts for the large number of student pilots who crashed on their first attempt to solo.
The Farman “Shorthorn,” one of the trainers used in those early days, was not a very great advance on the early machines of the Wright brothers, either in appearance or performance. Its fuselage, for example, consisted of open spars joining the wings and tailplanes. Instructor and pupil squeezed into a pod situated just ahead of the seventy-horsepower motor and its pusher propeller. In the event of a nosedive, the engine was almost certain to fall on the occupants, with fatal results. The Shorthorn barely topped sixty miles an hour, and a patient pilot could sometimes attain an altitude of three thousand feet in fifteen minutes.
The grim possibility is that some student pilots who crashed on their first solo flights did so because they had never actually been in control of a plane before. Instructors who were relative beginners in aviation themselves—but experienced enough to know how skittish and eccentric those early planes could be—were understandably nervous of trusting their lives to wholly inexperienced hands. Subconsciously some instructors kept a hand and foot on the dual controls throughout training flights. In most training planes the student was ahead of the instructor and could not see what the latter was doing. And a student had no way of knowing the difference in feel between controls wholly in his hands and those under the gentle guidance of a nervous instructor.
A young Scottish student pilot who took his training at the same time as Bishop suspected this was happening to him and accused his instructor of hogging the controls. The instructor indignantly denied it. The next time they went up on a training flight everything went off perfectly. After a smooth landing, the instructor praised the student for his progress.
“Congratulate yourself,” said the student bitterly. “I never put a hand or a foot to the controls!”
Bishop felt that his own experience as an observer, a veteran of several missions over enemy territory, should again give him an advantage over student pilots who were starting from scratch. But from his first flight in a dual-control Farman trainer (disrespectfully referred to as a “Rumpty” because of its ungraceful lines) he discovered that “all the time I had been an innocent bystander.”
“I tried very hard but it seemed to me that I just could not get the proper ‘feel’ of the machine. Sometimes my instructor would roundly curse me for being ham-handed when I gripped the controls too tightly, every muscle tense, in my anxiety to do well. That would send me to the other extreme and I would become ‘timid-handed’—and when you go timid with a Rumpty she is very likely to fly you into the ground. She didn’t like to be rough-housed, either, but she needed to be treated with a firm hand. My instructor and I both suffered tortures. So when suddenly one day—after I had logged just three hours of actual flying time—he told me I could go up alone, I had my doubts as to whether it was confidence or desperation that influenced his decision.”
The moment when he climbed into the cockpit, alone for the first time, Bishop remembered as the loneliest moment of his life. Off to one side stood an ambulance with its engine running. Bishop knew that in the aerodrome hospital a doctor and nurses were on standby duty, “with knives sharpened and needles at the ready.” The aerodrome personnel went about their duties with all the unsmiling efficiency of undertakers’ helpers.
Bishop waved a “ready” signal with a cheerfulness he was far from feeling and took off in a shallow, staggering climb.
Once in the air I felt better [Bishop wrote to Margaret that night]. In fact, I felt like a king. I wasn’t taking any liberties. I flew as straight ahead as I could, climbing steadily. At last I had to turn, and I tried a very slow gradual one. They told me afterward that I did some remarkable skidding, but I was blissfully ignorant of a little detail like that. Suddenly an awful thought came to me: sooner or later, somehow or other, I would have to get that plane down to earth again. It would have been so much more pleasant just to stay up there . . .
At last I screwed up all my courage, shut my eyes and pulled the throttle back. The engine almost stopped. I knew the next thing to do was to put her nose down, so down it went at a steep angle. Too steep. I opened one eye and pulled her nose up a bit, then put it down again, and in a series of steps descended toward the ground. The watchers on the ground must have got the impression that my machine was walking down an invisible staircase.
Finally I levelled off and executed to perfection everything I had been told to do in order to make a perfect landing. The only thing wrong was that I did it forty feet off the ground! I hastily put her nose down again, and executed another perfect landing—from a mere eight feet up. This time I didn’t have enough altitude for another nose-down manoeuvre, so I just sat there and suffered. The temperamental old Rumpty took matters into her own hands, and pancaked the distance to the ground with a spine-jarring “plonk!” There was no damage, except (momentarily) to my pride. Training machines were built sturdily to cope with pilots like me.
How did he survive two hundred flights into danger to become the g
reatest fighter pilot to survive World War I? It was a question that intrigued many of the airmen who flew with him—and the ground crew who worked overtime to keep his plane airworthy. Bishop was primarily a superb marksman, a gunner whose reflexes were uniquely attuned to placing bullets in a target. To him an airplane was little more than a mobile gun mount, and rather an unwieldy one—until the prey came into sight.
At that instant, by some alchemy, the clumsy plane became part of the gun and under Bishop’s will, his to control and aim as he would a light handgun. Bishop was also endowed with extraordinarily keen eyesight, and continually searched the sky for his prey. He invariably saw the enemy first, and was himself seldom the victim of surprise. Indeed, he searched the sky so intently that the back of his neck was often raw where his uniform chafed from the constant turning. Then he was a peerless pilot who could do no wrong. But a few minutes later, the enemy vanquished or in flight and Bishop back over his own airfield, he was apt to smash an undercarriage or crack a wing in a landing even less delicate than his first solo effort. It was not, I believe, an inability to learn but an impatience with the comparatively unimportant process of getting to and from the element in which he was supremely at home.
There was, however, no sense of failure in Bishop that November day in 1916 when he climbed out of the cockpit after his first flight alone. “That is the greatest day in a flying man’s life,” he wrote. “Certainly I did not stop boasting about it for weeks. I felt a great pity for all the millions of people in the world who would never have a chance to fly solo!”
Bishop’s jubilation was somewhat premature. He still faced an advanced course, including night flying, before he could claim his wings.
For this he was transferred to No. 11 Squadron at Northolt, a home defence station. Bishop apparently felt that having survived three hours of solo flight he had nothing more to learn, and immediately he ran afoul of the strict discipline with which Northolt’s commanding officer, Major B. F. Moore, ran his station. Many years later Bishop’s instructor, Squadron Commander (then Captain) Tryggve Gran, who took a lifelong pride in the fact that he had trained the great Bishop, gave a softened version of the twenty-two-year-old Canadian’s conduct at Northolt: “He was full of joie de vivre and high jinks, and hated discipline, with the result that he was always in conflict with the squadron regulations.”
The Courage of the Early Morning Page 6