WANTED: A chap with lots of the devil in him.

Canadian-trained pilots included novelist William Faulkner, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and actor Richard Arlen, who starred in Wings, the first motion picture to win an Academy Award.

Probably the most famous Canadian who undertook wartime pilot training with RAF Canada at that time was another Nobel Prize winner, Lester B. “Mike” Pearson. Following an initial stint with the army medical corps, he transferred to the RAF for pilot training in 1918. It wasn’t to be. He survived a training crash and then was severely injured when hit by a London bus during a blackout. However, those accidents didn’t seem to be omens of any sort. Pearson won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957 for his work in helping create the first United Nations peacekeeping force, and he was Prime Minister of Canada from 1963 to 1968.

O angus scully brings to life some of the worst fears of the early pilots. One is the mystery of what was then called the spinning nose dive, now just called a spin. Put simply, a spin is a nosedown, out-of-control, ever-faster spiral dive. Until 1916 it was considered a death sentence. Then one Royal Navy Lieutenant Parke recovered from a spin by inadvertently doing everything wrong. The initial urge was to pull back on the control stick, whereas counterintuitively, Parke’s recovery started with full-forward stick. Ever since, spin recovery is a standard part of all pilot training curricula.

my life and lost your own / In that dark dreadful night above the sea / When you talked reassuringly to me / As we sailed lower—though you must have known / How great our danger was … then I was thrown….”

Flying was a new adventure to these young men, and flying in combat had a glamour that was denied to the troops in the trenches. It was also dangerous: the average life expectancy of a combat pilot in 1917 was 69 flying hours

(roughly 30–35 flying missions). Yet despite this terrible mortality rate, for many the call to fly was irresistible.

A good percentage of these pioneering “flyboys,” as they were known, went on to distinction. Roland Michener became Governor General of Canada. Mitchell Hepburn became Premier of Ontario. James Forrestal, one of the Americans who trained to be pilots in Canada, became US Secretary of the Navy and Secretary of Defence. Other

Postwar, In Our Youth delves into how these young men became entrepreneurs and pioneers integral to the birth of commercial aviation in Canada in the 1920s and 1930s—like Osborne Orr, Major Earl Godfrey and George Trim George Taylor was a founder and the first president of the Aerial League of Canada in 1919, which had the goal of applying aviation to business. The first flight across the Rockies, aerial mapping, and the formation of the Pacific Aviation Company in 1920 (BC’s first commercial aviation venture) are among the detailed.

An excellent selection of vintage photos is liberally sprinkled throughout. For readers whose appetites are whetted and are excited about learning more, Scully provides a thorough bibliography and source listing.

9781772034219

Vancouver-based writer Graham Chandler writes frequently on aviation topics.

A graduate of the U.S. Naval Test Pilot

Veronica Strong-Boag ’s impressive biography explores the flawed legacy of a pioneering BC feminist.

A Liberal-Labour Lady: The Times and Life of Mary Ellen Spear Smith by Veronica

Strong-Boag (UBC Press $32.95)

BY TOM SANDBORN

“I would be ashamed to admit that I had risen from the ranks. When I rise it will be with the ranks, and not from the ranks.”

—EUGENE V. DEBS, US labour leader and socialist agitator

While Mary Ellen Spear Smith was a rough contemporary of Eugene Debs, an American firebrand whose life engaged many of the issues that defined Smith’s life and career, she would not, we can assume, have unequivocally endorsed the sentiment of the quote above. Much of Smith’s life was spent on a concerted effort to rise from the working class to middle-class gentility. And yet this complicated and imperfect woman also emerges in Veronica Strong-Boag’s biography A Liberal-Labour Lady as an important pioneering advocate for women and workers, so long as they were “white.”

Like most of us, Smith “contained multitudes,” and she was perfectly capable all her life of holding positions that to 21st century readers will seem wildly inconsistent, some even repulsively racist. Together with too much of the province’s labour movement in her era, Smith supported Asian exclusion and ignored the oppressed and colonized situation of the province’s Indigenous people.

However, Smith was a significant figure in Canadian history, campaigning for women’s suffrage, mothers’ pensions and other pro-women reforms