The Courage of the Early Morning

by William Arthur Bishop

  By June of 1920 the Bishop-Barker Company was ready to operate as passenger carriers. The seaplane was designed to carry three persons in addition to a crew of two. But Bishop and Barker managed to crowd in five. Behind the passengers the two pilots operated the machine jointly. Barker manipulating the controls, Bishop the throttles.

  The airline route was from Toronto harbour on Lake Ontario to the Muskoka Lakes vacation area one hundred miles north. The first flights were heralded with much publicity. Wireless stations along the route telegraphed reports of the progress of the lumbering machine. There was nothing unusual about the flights other than the celebrity of the pilots and the fact that it was the first time an aeroplane had flown that exact course. True, there was the constant hazard of a seaplane having to come down on land if the engine failed at a point too far from one of the numerous lakes for a glide-in. The partners acknowledged this danger by a solemn ceremonial which the passengers, fortunately, were unable to witness. As the plane climbed north from the safety of Lake Ontario, Barker would produce a flask, announce “over the land, brother,” and share the contents with his copilot. Bishop’s tongue was at least partly in his cheek when he advertised his airline in the Toronto newspapers as offering “safe and sane flying.”

  And what Bishop and Barker did next scarcely carried out the theme of safety and sanity. They bought a pair of Martynside two-seaters and offered to put on exhibitions of aerobatics, or, to put it bluntly, stunting. In the summer of 1920 they signed a contract with the Canadian National Exhibition to stage a daily show. One of the provisions of the contract was that the pilots must not stunt over the site of the exhibition itself, but must perform their aerobatics over the waters of Lake Ontario which bordered the area.

  But the partners decided they should give the customers more for their money. On the second evening Bishop, stunting over the lake, suddenly broke off and dived toward the grandstand. At a height of fifty feet—“I could see thousands of frightened faces,” he recalled later—he pulled his plane’s nose up, turned on its back, and executed a loop that brought the roaring machine even closer to the crowd.

  Barker quickly followed, and dived even closer to the grandstand before pulling up. Then Bishop did another loop, and so did Barker. One eyewitness insisted that they repeated the manoeuvre “nearly one hundred times.”

  On the ground there was pandemonium. Many people fled the stands in fright. The noise of the stunting Martynsides drowned out the band and the stage performance came to a halt. Three horses reared and one of them jumped the rail in front of the spectators. One woman fainted from fright and another claimed she had suffered a miscarriage. “It was,” one spectator declared flatly, “the most frightening thing I have ever seen.”

  Further performances were cancelled by the directors of the exhibition. Bishop and Barker paid dearly for their fun. The company could ill afford to lose the contract. It already faced bankruptcy. A substitute pilot had crashed one of the H.S. 2L’s, the government’s flying certification branch was investigating the accident and meanwhile, in view of the Canadian National Exhibition performance, officials were considering suspending the Bishop-Barker licence to operate. Among the evidence against them was something that had nothing to do with their conduct aloft, but was indicative of their status as “safe and sane” citizens: between them they had collected more than one hundred traffic tickets and summonses for various driving offences including recklessness. The accumulated fines could have amounted to thousands of dollars—and jail terms if they were unable to pay the fines. Bishop’s own account of what happened next (and anyone is entitled to doubt it) was this:

  We arranged a cocktail party to which we invited various civic dignitaries, magistrates, judges, aldermen and the like. The first drink to each was free, but after that there was a price—a cancelled summons for each drink. Fortunately, the dignitaries entered into the spirit of the thing, everybody had a good time—and the summonses were disposed of.

  The partners decided, however, that there was no immediate future for them in aviation. But before they could liquidate Bishop-Barker they must raise enough money to pay off the businessmen who had financed them. The only business they knew well enough for the purpose was, of course, flying. They would abandon passenger flying and solicit air freight, which they felt would be both less hazardous and more profitable. But before they could get the cargo business started another disaster struck the partnership.

  Tom Sopwith, the English aircraft manufacturer for whom Bishop-Barker had been serving as Canadian sales agents, sent out a new model, a Dove two-seater. Bishop was eager to test it, and as soon as it was assembled he took it up with a passenger, Andrew Maclean, son of a Toronto magazine publisher.

  Bishop put the plane through its paces with a practised hand. It was fast and manoeuvrable, and the only fault he could find was that it was somewhat nose-heavy. But that, combined with Bishop’s traditional difficulty in executing smooth landings, very nearly ended his career and that of his young passenger.

  As Bishop levelled out the machine to touch down, the wheels struck a deep rut on the edge of the field. The machine nosed over, struck the ground hard and came to a violent stop. Bishop’s face smashed against the cowling above the instrument panel and his knees dug into Maclean’s back. Both men were knocked unconscious.

  Barker, who had been watching from the other side of the field, rushed across in a car. With the help of bystanders he pulled the two men from the wreck. When Bishop regained consciousness Barker leaned over to him and said calmly: “I’ve just talked to the doctor—you mustn’t blow your nose.” However, the truth was he had practically no nose to blow. It had been flattened across his face. Maclean had not been any luckier. His back had been broken in two places and for a long time he had to wear a support.

  With his head swathed in bandages Bishop lay for three weeks unable to see. But what bothered him most was a pain in the toe of his right foot. It throbbed continually. Actually it had been broken but no one paid the slightest attention when Bishop complained of it. Everyone was too concerned about his shattered nose, afraid that he might be permanently blinded.

  When the doctor removed the bandages no one knew what to expect. Everyone stood anxiously around. But a smile appeared on Bishop’s bruised face. “I’m not blind anyway,” he announced happily. “In fact I can see twice as much as anybody. Everybody is double.”

  The double vision gradually disappeared, although occasionally when Bishop became tired it would return. But his nose, even after surgery, never looked the same again. Once straight, it was now and for the rest of Bishop’s life squat and bulbous.

  By February 1921, Bishop had recovered and could go back to work. But he was not allowed to fly. There remained the danger that the double vision might return while he was in the air.

  He now faced a major personal crisis. The one thing at which he had excelled, the thing he enjoyed most and for which he had become noted, had been shorn from him. Added to this, the Bishop-Barker Company continued to lose money in his absence and the shareholders still had to be paid.

  Then the old “Bishop luck” returned. Looking for a new enterprise to which to turn his hand, he and the company’s master painter experimented with a quick-drying paint, the most important new ingredient of which was the dope used to shrink airplane fabric. No sooner had the formula been perfected than an opportunity for its profitable use presented itself. At that time the Toronto city government had decided not to renew the franchise of the Toronto Railway Company. The cars were to be taken over by the Toronto Transit Commission, and the price paid to the railway company for its equipment would depend on the condition of the cars at the time of purchase. Therefore the railway company decided to have the cars painted.

  Bishop submitted a tender of $300 per car, and in addition guaranteed to deliver one painted car per day, ready for service. Since the company’s revenue lost while the cars were idle would be sharply reduced by such fast service, Bishop was
awarded a contract to paint one hundred cars. He and his master painter had to do most of the work themselves, since the painters they hired objected to the acrid fumes of the dope. Both men were half-ill for months afterwards, but the venture earned $30,000 for the Bishop-Barker Company. This added to the sale of assets and some profit which Barker accumulated flying cargo raised enough money to pay off the investors and liquidate the enterprise.

  Barker decided to return to the air force and re-enlisted as a wing commander. He died not long afterwards in a crash at Ottawa. Bishop was tempted to return to the service, but remained a civilian and at the end of 1921 he was back in England, a situation brought about by an odd mixture of good fortune and personal tragedy.

  Margaret gave birth to a son, who died not long afterwards. Grief, added to his own financial misfortunes, made Bishop decide on a change of scene. In England, Bishop had always been happy and confident, and when an opportunity arose to return there with good prospects of making a comfortable living, he did not hesitate.

  The opportunity was provided by a Toronto friend, Gordon Perry, who was involved in a venture to sell foreign rights to a new method of producing iron pipe, invented by a Frenchman, Dmitri Delavaud. Perry needed someone who had wide contacts. Bishop’s London friends, such as Granny St. Helier, made him the ideal front man. He became sales representative for the company, with headquarters in London. Bishop’s friends and the celebrity of his war record helped his new career, but in addition he proved to be an unexpectedly shrewd negotiator. Gordon Perry said to Margaret, “In a business deal he has the face of an angel and the mind of a murderer.”

  Soon the Bishops’ personal grief and frustration were forgotten. They settled into a house in Chester Terrace near Regent’s Park and became Londoners. Granny St. Helier continued to exert her influence on their behalf. They soon became very much a part of the London set of the twenties.

  And Bishop began to amass a fortune. In addition to the Delavaud dealings, he also represented Frank N. Pickett, who dealt in surplus scrap metal left at ammunition dumps in the Pas de Calais area in France. As an enjoyable sideline he bought and traded polo ponies for his employer.

  All this allowed Bishop, still in his twenties, to live in luxury. He had plenty of money, and did not have to work too hard for it. He therefore had lots of time for recreation. He played polo and played it well, a four-goal handicap man. He captained his own team, the Birds, which in 1924 won the Cirencester Senior Cup matches.

  One of his polo teammates was Winston Churchill, whom he had first met at Lady St. Helier’s during the war. In his diary he noted an incident at Templeton in May, 1925:

  Scored the winning goal in the last few minutes of play with a right hand shot to the goal line from an impossible angle under my pony’s neck. Because I was leaning out of the saddle, the correct backhand shot to keep the ball in play was almost impossible. Winston, who was playing back, was in a perfect position to receive a backhand from me. He was unguarded and shouting at the top of his Winstonian lungs: “Backhander, Bishop!”

  I reached out of the saddle and somehow hit the so-and-so ball. It sailed through the posts at an unbelievable angle. To say that I was pleased is putting it mildly, but as we rode off the field Winston said to me in no kind voice, “Why didn’t you hit a backhander to me? your shot was not polo.”

  Later in the dressing room when we were changing he said, “You know I was right, that shot was not polo. But my dear Bishop, who can criticize success?”

  Churchill and Bishop became close friends. Churchill tried to interest him in politics, which he himself had entered successfully at an early age. But Bishop refused. His excuse was that his father, who was a minor political figure as an organizer of the Canadian Liberal party, had once advised his son: “Don’t go into politics unless you are absolutely sure you are going to be at the top of it.” Bishop did, however, stump for Churchill in the election of 1925. Closer to the truth is that Bishop preferred the privileges of prosperous private life to the responsibility of political office.

  In addition to polo, Bishop played golf in the low eighties. He ran around the block each morning. He took boxing lessons from a professional at his house twice a week. He never stopped proving himself, and exercise gave him a sense of being stronger, and better attuned physically than others.

  By night he was a man-of-the-world figure in café society, a regular visitor to such well-known places as the Embassy and Buck’s Club, to which he was driven in his Rolls-Royce by Percy Leth-bridge, a quick-witted Londoner from Kentish Town, whom he fondly called “Leffo.”

  He and Margaret holidayed at Le Touquet and Cannes. They mingled with the celebrities of the “roaring twenties” and he soon became a celebrity in his own right. He became friends with Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Josephine Baker. Through Princess Marie Louise he mingled with royalty—the Prince of Wales and Prince Albert. And this developed an almost unreasonable loyalty to the Crown. He knocked down a man who announced to him in 1936 that King Edward VIII had abdicated. He felt it his duty to defend the King’s honour.

  Bishop’s maturity was late in developing, but this was belied by the fact that before he was thirty his hair had turned completely grey. It tended to make him look about ten years older. And he was still haunted by memories, and one persistent nightmare plagued him. It was a frighteningly clear re-enactment of the time he crashed in flames in the S.E. 5 and was left hanging upside down in the burning machine. Even the sounds were accurate: the clanking of the engine, the crackle of the flames, the shearing, crunching sound of the wings striking the trees.

  In March, 1928, nearly ten years after the war ended, Bishop met some of his former foes in Berlin. He had travelled to the German capital in connection with the Delavaud interests. At first his visit was a lonely one (“Not one German invited me to his house”) and he spent most of his leisure time in his hotel.

  One morning he visited Mercy Cemetery where Manfred von Richthofen had been buried. The baron’s remains had been taken there in 1925 from Bertangles, in France, where he had crashed and been buried with full military honours by Australian troops in 1918. At the cemetery gate Bishop registered, and the alert gatekeeper contacted the German Ace Association. The news that Colonel Bishop, V.C., was in Berlin was quickly transmitted to Ernst Udet, Germany’s top living ace, with sixty-two planes to his credit.

  That afternoon Bishop received an invitation to attend a special luncheon in his honour at the Berlin Aero Club the next day. It turned into quite a party. After several toasts had been drunk Bishop became the first and only foreign member of the German Ace Association and was presented with the emblem of membership—a tie pin with gold propeller mounted in a blue enamel roundel. Among those who applauded enthusiastically was a forceful, jovial man who had taken over command of Richthofen’s circus after the baron’s death, and had been credited with a score of twenty Allied planes. His name was Hermann Goering. Champagne flowed freely, and after a toast proposed by Goering, Bishop said with wry humour: “You honour me for having shot down more German planes than any other Allied airman. But I now ask you to honour me as Germany’s greatest ace.” When his former enemies looked puzzled, Bishop added with a grin: “I personally destroyed more Allied planes by my own method of landing than all of you combined!”

  The party continued all afternoon and into the night. Old fights were discussed and compared. At one point Bishop told Goering, “I’ve always been curious to know what you called us. We always referred to you as Huns because it was the worst thing we could think of.”

  “Oh, we just called you Britishers,” was Goering’s good-humoured reply. “We always considered that quite bad enough.”

  The celebration might have continued all night if Bishop had not had to catch a train for Paris, where Margaret was waiting. Before he left for the station he phoned to say that he would soon be on his way. At the same time he thought it opportune to introduce her to his hosts. Somewhat aghast she listened as the effer
vescent Udet came on the line, buoyed up with the best of champagne, to announce blandly, “I speak no English. Haff a cocktail! Haff a drink!”

  Three months later Bishop renewed another attachment with the past. In June, 1928, when he and Margaret were staying at Le Touquet on the French coast, they drove to Filescamp Farm, the old base of 60 Squadron. The church still stood intact and proud in the centre of the town of Izel-le-Hameau. But the other buildings were new.

  “It was wonderful,” Monsieur Tétus, who owned the farm, told Bishop. “After you left we were bombed and the government rebuilt all our houses.”

  When Bishop politely asked after Madame Tétus, the Frenchman replied: “Yes, she too was destroyed in the bombing. So me, I marry the maid.”

  Later that summer Bishop returned the hospitality of his German hosts by giving a festive dinner for them in London. “Colonel Bishop’s breaking of bread with his old foes is an example to us all,” editorialized the influential Ottawa Journal. “It would be a great pity, and a great loss if this spirit were retarded by acts of Germany’s conquerors. A far better and wiser course has been shown by Colonel Bishop.”

  But Bishop himself had developed an uneasy feeling about the Germans which he could not explain. But he was certain of one thing. He did not trust them.

  On the black day in November, 1929, when the New York stock exchange crash was heard around the world, Bishop was playing golf. When he returned to the clubhouse there was a telephone call from his broker informing him that he had been wiped out. Apart from a few thousand dollars he possessed in cash, he had lost nearly a million dollars in paper assets. He had no debts, however. His only outstanding obligation was a new record player, one of the first with a remote control, that he had allowed to be installed in his house on a demonstration-and-trial basis. When he got home he walked over to this coveted instrument, leaned over and kissed it solemnly, and said, “Well, it was fun while it lasted.”