The Making of Billy Bishop: The First World War Exploits of Billy Bishop, VC

245 Pages·2002·1.29 MB·English

by  Brereton Greenhous

The
Making
of
Billy
Bishop
Brereton Greenhous
The
Making
of
Billy
Bishop
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The
Making
of
Billy
Bishop
The First World War Exploits of
Billy Bishop, VC
Brereton Greenhous
the Dundurn Group
Toronto • Oxford
Copyright © Brereton Greenhous, 2002
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or oth-
erwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn
Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.
Copy-editor: Lloyd Davis
Designer: Jennifer Scott
Printer:Transcontinental
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data
Greenhous, Brereton, 1929–
The making of Billy Bishop
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-55002-390-X
1. Bishop, William A., 1894–1956. 2. World War, 1914–1918 — Aerial operations, British.
3. Great Britain. Royal Flying Corps — Biography. 4. Fighter pilots — Canada — Biography.
I. Title.
D602.G74 2002 940.4’4971’092 C2002-901064-0
1 2 3 4 5 06 05 04 03 02
THE CANADA COUNCIL LE CONSEIL DES ARTS
FOR THE ARTS DU CANADA
SINCE 1957 DEPUIS 1957
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council
for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of
Canadathrough the Book Publishing Industry Development Programand The Association for
the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontariothrough the Ontario Book
Publishers Tax Creditprogram.
Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author
and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credit
in subsequent editions.
J. Kirk Howard, President
Printed and bound in Canada.e
Printed on recycled paper.
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✞
In Memory Of
Lieutenant
ERNEST BRERETON GREENHOUS
1st Battalion, Royal Scots Fusiliers
and
Number 9 Squadron, Royal Flying Corps
Killed in action
in the air over Flanders
26 August 1917
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments 9
Introduction 11
Chapter 1: “The Greatest Game in the World” 29
Chapter 2: A Pilot at the Front 55
Chapter 3: Tricks of the Trade 81
Chapter 4: Flight of Fancy 107
Chapter 5: Flying High 129
Chapter 6: A Statistical Interlude 151
Chapter 7: “I Have Never Been So Furious in My Life” 169
Epilogue 199
Appendix 207
Endnotes 211
Publisher’s Afterword 225
Index 227
Maps: Bishop’s Bases and Units in France, 1917–1918 54
Possible Bishop Targets, 2 June 1917 106
Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Notebooks [1978]
Acknowledgments
My debt to the late Phil Markham goes beyond words. He
was a knowledgeable researcher and a regrettably mod-
est gentleman. I say “regrettably” because that modesty made
him reluctant to place his meticulous explorations of the
Bishop canon before the public. I (and others) spent several
years, on and off, trying to persuade him to put his evidence
and conclusions into print, and happily, shortly before his
death, he did publish his paper on “The Early Hours of 2 June
1917” in a specialist American journal. I have reached different
conclusions about Bishop’s possible destinations that day, but
we shared a common disbelief in Bishop’s account of where he
went and what happened, and my explication owes much to
Phil’s original research. His widow, Jo, was good enough to give
me access to his papers.
Arthur Bishop did scholarship a service when he deposited orig-
inals and/or copies of his father’s papers with the Department of
National Defence’s Directorate of History (as it was then known),
making them available without restriction to interested historians. I