No flying for Greg today. As he wasn’t keeping up his diary any longer, we don’t know the reason. But we can take the opportunity of an off-day to look a little more at Bill Ledlie.
Captain William Ledlie RAF
Bill Ledlie was the Commanding Officer of B Flight, 42 Squadron RAF. In the post for 25 August 1918, a couple of days ago, he was to be seen sitting (in shorts!) front-and-centre of the group photographs of the B Flight officers.
Ledlie was an Ulsterman, born on 16 April 1894 according to the IWM’s Lives of the Great War, who attended Banbridge Academy. Banbridge is a town in County Down that grew wealthy on the linen industry. It is on the A1 between Lisburn and Belfast to the north, and Newry and Dublin to the south.
Ledlie was some five years older than Greg, and was his commanding officer. But the two became friendly, as evidenced by the several photographs of Ledlie in Greg’s collection.
After the War
Ledlie and Greg had apparently made some tentative plans for after the war. They would go into business together, drawing on their aviation skills, but nothing ever came of it.
Although Ledlie survived the Great War, he died during the Second World War on 23 October 1940 when co-piloting the sole example of a de Havilland DH.95 Hertfordshire, no. R2510. The Hertfordshire was the military transport variant of the de Havilland DH.95 Flamingo. The IWM has a photograph of this aircraft here.
According to Peter Clare, in a post on the WW2Talk forum ‘The War in the Air’, Air Vice Marshal Charles Hubert Boulby Blount was on board. Peter Clare writes:
The aircraft took off on a sortie to Belfast and was carrying a crew of five and six passengers. Shortly after taking off the aircraft crashed into some houses at Woodlands Way [sic, should be ‘Woodland Way’], Mill Hill, London and all those on board were killed. The aircraft was the sole Hertfordshire in use with the RAF and it was a military version of the Flamingo aircraft. No Accident card was found for this aircraft nor could any reference to the outcome of the Board of Enquiry be located. AVM Blount was AOC 22 Group at the time of his death and was on a scheduled flight to Belfast to discuss joint training exercises with the GOC Northern Ireland.
Wikipedia records that the cause of the crash was jamming of the elevator.
Woodland Way is a short residential road just over a mile (about 2 km) north of what was then RAF Hendon (now the site of the RAF Museum) by Mill Hill Broadway Railway Station and backing on to the M1 motorway: