The Edwards crew went missing on the Courtrai operation of 20/21 July 1944. No trace of them was ever found, and they are commemorated on the Runnymede memorial. The bomb aimer on the crew was Jack Skingley. He was married with two children. His daughter, Jackie Maude, recently gave the manuscript of her father’s poem
Surviving photographs of RAF funerals are very rare. Although many were taken officially during the war, so that relatives living abroad could see that their loved ones had been buried with honour, it seems that such photographs were too sad to keep. Norman McIntyre (fourth from left) with two of the men who were killed,
The lure of flying for people growing up in the 1920s and 1930s is hard to appreciate now when commercial flying is so commonplace. Then, flying was ultra-modern and incredibly glamorous. For aeroplane-mad children, there were a large number of books, comics and magazines, featuring real aviators and fictional ones like the famous Biggles. Many
