The Pilot

On April 18, 1945 at Hawarden base in north Wales, his comrades thought Arthur had died. He had been flying a Spitfire and had landed in the slipstream behind a big Lancaster bomber. The air sucking behind the big plane tipped him up so that he landed nose-down, damaging the nose and wingtip. In order to get over the shock of that crash and to ensure he did not lose his nerve, the ground crew pulled him out of the plane, put him in another one and sent him right back up. Unfortunately the others on the base, particularly the Jamaicans, did not see him and didn’t know what had happened to him. They just saw the crashed plane he had been flying, so they assumed that he was dead, and word spread rapidly through the Jamaican community, to the point where Norma, his girlfriend (later his wife) wrote a letter of condolence to Arthur’s brother, and someone else wrote to his mother in Jamaica. It wasn’t until a month later that she heard it was a false rumour (today known as "fake news"). .