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Old 27th Oct 2019, 16:30
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Geriaviator
 
Join Date: Dec 2012
Location: Co. Down
Age: 82
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Australia honours her returned hero


RETURNING to England, Ian McRitchie was reunited with his wife Joyce, sister of a fellow airman whom he had met in 1941, his daughter Anne who had been born in 1943, and her little sister Lynne whom he met for the first time as she was born while he was in prison camp.

His duty done, Ian did not stay long in England and after His Majesty presented him with the Distinguished Flying Cross in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace, the McRitchie family set sail for Australia to his home town of Melbourne where his mother Cassie was waiting to welcome him. As he had left for the war while he was working in Whyalla, the town honoured him by naming McRitchie Crescent after him.

His return as a distinguished RAAF pilot in World War II was announced with a full page photo spread in the Australian Women’s Weekly on 20th October 1945 although most of the photos were of Anne as a baby and the heading was ‘Australian Baby on British Posters’. This was a reference to the fact that Anne had been chosen by the British Ministry of Food to model for a series of posters on ‘How to Bring Up Baby’!

His Service days behind him, Ian and his ex-prisoner friend Sqn-Ldr Ken Watts founded the Watts McRitchie Engineering Company in Hawthorn with Ian as managing director. The company soon became established as a leader in metallurgy and Ian had neither time nor money for flying which had once been such an important part of his life.

By 1962 Ian had become Honorary Secretary of the Australian Institute of Metals and then Federal President. He was a Fellow of the Institute of Metallurgy. One of his greatest loves was his association with engineering and manufacturing colleagues – in the Metal Trades Industry Association, the Institute of Metals and especially the Vernier Club, which had been established in 1942 in Melbourne as a fraternity of down to earth engineers whose purpose was to promote dialogue amongst those with a practical day-to-day involvement in the technical world. He was President of Vernier on two occasions, about 20 years apart and a long-time member of the Vernier Committee.
After many years of successful operation, Watts McRitchie Engineering Company was sold to McPhersons and Ian stayed on until 1964 when he formed his own firm, Melbourne Heat Treatment and Metallurgical Services Pty. Ltd and worked there almost every day for the last 33 years of his life until the end of 1997.

To many people in engineering manufacturing at that time, heat treatment was considered to be a ‘black art’. Ian saw the need to improve technical knowledge and scientific understanding and he encouraged learning and professional activities in this field. Every year he hosted a dinner sponsored by Melbourne Heat Treatment to which he invited many of his friends and clients. It was always an occasion for Ian to have as his guest speaker someone who reflected his own ideals of courage and independence such as the Antarctic explorer Dr. Philip Law or Dr. Reg Spriggs AO, a well-known geologist and petroleum explorer. But eventually he found time for relaxation, and took to the air again.
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