Page 105 - They Also Served

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Frederick Minchin 1910.
Frederick Frank Reilly Minchin was born in Madras,
India, in June 1890. Educated at Eastbourne
College, he graduated from Sandhurst in October
1910 into the Connaught Rangers, serving in
Ireland. In late 1912, during a spell of leave,
Minchin returned to Eastbourne to learn to fly. He
obtained his Royal Aero Club Aviator’s Certificate
(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 at his unit, he could not be found. Facing a court martial, his father, a retired general, persuaded 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 transferred to the RFC. Despite already being a qualified pilot, he took part in numerous bombing raids as an observer, dropping the devices over the side of the cockpit in the somewhat forlorn hope of hitting the target. Finally, in August, he was allowed to upgrade his licence to RFC standards and was posted to 14 Squadron in Egypt.
Awarded the MC in May 1916, and a bar in October, he rose to lieutenant-colonel, being awarded the DSO in 1918, a CBE for service in India in 1919, and was MiD three times. 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-subsidised French and German airlines and introduced many innovations, such as, in 1925, the first in-flight movie.
In 1927, Princess Ludwig Löwenstein-Wertheim, the 60-year-old widow of a German prince, funded an attempt to become the first to fly across the Atlantic from 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 crossing, the first claiming the life of French fighter ace
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