Page 93 - The Wish Stream Year of 2020 Crest

ber 419, flying a Bristol Boxkite. Unfortunately, he had not told his Colonel of his intention to travel to England and, when required for a board of enquiry, he could not be found. Facing a court martial, his father, a retired General, per- suaded the regiment to allow his son to resign his commission.
Minchin, known to his friends as Dan, travelled to Canada where he set up an aviation company in Winnipeg. Upon the outbreak of war, he enlisted in Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry and accompanied it to France where he fought in the trenches at Ypres. In March 1915 he trans- ferred to the Royal Flying Corps as an observer with 1 Squadron. Despite being a qualified pilot, he took part in numerous bombing raids drop- ping the devices over the side of the cockpit in the somewhat forlorn hope of hitting the target. Finally, in the August he was allowed to upgrade his licence to RFC standards and was posted to 14 Squadron in Egypt.
Awarded the Military Cross in May 1916, and a bar in October, he rose to Lt Col, being awarded the Distinguished Service Order in 1918, a CBE for service in India in 1919 and three mentions in despatches. In the early 1920s, Minchin left the forces and joined Instone Air Line, one of the first British Commercial Airlines, operating out of Croydon airport. In 1924, Instone merged with
three other airlines to form Imperial Airways and Minchin flew pioneering routes to the continent. Imperial was set up to compete with state-sub- sidised French and German airlines and intro- duced many innovations such as, in 1925, the first in-flight movie.
In 1927, Princess Ludwig Loewenstein- Wertheim, the 60-year-old widow of a German Prince, funded an attempt to become the first to fly across the Atlantic East to West. She hired Minchin as pilot and Captain Leslie Hamilton DFC as navigator for the attempt and a chance to win the $25,000 prize (about $350,000 today). This was the third attempt at the cross- ing, the first claiming the life of French fighter ace Charles Nungesser and a German flight was forced to turn back by bad weather. According to a contemporary newspaper report, the Prin- cess arrived with plenty of clothing to wear on her arrival in Canada and received the benedic- tion from an Archbishop before boarding the aircraft.
Flying in the Fokker monoplane, St Raphael, they left RAF Upavon at 0730hrs on the morning of 31 August for the non-stop flight to London, Ontario, a distance of 3200 miles. 800 miles west of Ireland they sighted a steamer, the SS Josiah Macy, and made radio contact before thick mist rolled across the Atlantic. The fate of the St Raphael and its three occupants remains a mys- tery, although they almost certainly crashed into the sea. The newspapers of 2nd September car- ried the headline: ‘All hopes lost for Air Princess.’ Also lost were the Princess’s jewels, valued at around $3,000,000 at today’s prices. Hamilton had also purchased 600 £1 notes for the trio to autograph in Canada and then sell for $25 each. Lt Col Dan Minchin CBE DSO MC was declared dead in absentia in 1927.
TONY ROLT
1939 Rifle Brigade
Anthony Rolt was born in 1918 and educated at Eton. He began motor racing in 1936, soon gaining a reputation as a fearless driver. On one occasion, a broken exhaust filled the cockpit with flames, which he duly smothered by stuffing one of his gloves into the hole while driving to victory. On the outbreak of war, Rolt immediately enlisted and attended one of the first wartime courses at Sandhurst, being commissioned into the Rifle Brigade in 1939. As part of the British Expeditionary Force, he took part in the battle for
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