Leaving school at 13, a young Australian learns to fly
OPERATION Jericho was one of the most spectacular operations of the war. Three squadrons of Mosquito bombers carried out a low-level attack on Amiens prison, blowing down the walls and enabling Resistance prisoners to escape. This is the inspiring story of one of the pilots, Sqn Ldr Ian McRitchie, DFC, Royal Australian Air Force, as told to me by his daughter Anne in Australia.
Around 1800 a young Scotsman called Thomas McRitchie left his wine business in Leith, the port of Edinburgh, to become a merchant in St. Helena, the island in the South Atlantic. Today it is isolated but it was then a very busy supply stop for sailing ships which would follow the trade winds around the world, the journey from London taking a year or more.
Its best-known if unwilling resident was Napoleon Bonaparte, exiled there after the battle of Waterloo, and Thomas’s name appears on a list of those suspected of smuggling letters for Napoleon during his exile. A century later the McRitchies had emigrated to Australia, where Alexander Ian McRitchie was born in Melbourne on 16 June 1915.
Ian, as he was known, was educated at St Kilda College and South Melbourne Technical School. When his father, a stonemason, died in 1926 at the age of 62, the 13-year-old boy had to start work to help support his widowed mother and brother. He continued his studies at night school and in 1935 he gained an engineering cadetship with BHP. Between 1935 and 1940 he worked as a metallurgist at Newcastle (New South Wales) and Whyalla in South Australia.
In 1936 he was placed in charge of the Heat Treatment Plant at Whyalla, supervising the controlled heating and cooling operations used to change the physical properties of a metal to improve its structural and physical properties for some particular use.
It was in Whyalla, a remote part of Australia blessed with clear blue skies day after day, that Ian began what was to become his lifetime hobby – flying. He was so determined to fly that he purchased a second hand book on flying for one shilling and after studying it he entered a competition and won free flying lessons! He was the first person to obtain a pilot’s licence with the Spencer Gulf Aero Club in 1937 and by 1939 he was chief flying instructor of the Club.
But meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the clouds were gathering ...