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and was fortunate enough to have his wife and (I think it was two) small children with him. Eileen was a quite beautiful American girl. But Tolly, whatever he was at the controls of an aeroplane, seemed slightly vague and unworldly in other ways. He must, in fact, have been a clever engineer, for I met him years after the War ended when he was working with the engineering company which was part of the Dunford and Elliot Limited group on whose main board I served after they had taken over my Brown Bayley Steels Limited company, of which I was Chairman and Chief Executive, at the end of 1973. Tolly had apparently invented, or designed, equipment for turning municipal rubbish into compost and the Dunford company was producing it. That news was surprising, for I had certainly failed to associate him with


that sort of ability. In fact, my early experience of him centred around the progress of one of my pupils, Cadet Wrench, who was a young Australian among the four who had been allotted to me. As Wrench’s instructor I seemed to be making little headway in turning him into a competent handler of a Harvard’s controls. I struggled with him for the usual number of hours it took to send a pupil solo but I was coming to the conclusion that he was unlikely to make the grade on a Harvard, which was a somewhat different animal from the Tiger Moths he had been flying at his Guinea Fowl EFTS nearby. When an instructor finds he is having difficulties with a pupil, it is easy for him to blame the pupil – but wrong. The first thing is to blame oneself. There may be some block in the relationship between the two, something which fails to ‘click’, or which makes the pupil trust his mentor less sincerely than he should. So the correct drill is to ask another instructor to take over the pupil and see what he makes of him. After all, I was pretty raw at instructing on this single-engined aircraft, however experienced I was by this time in handling pupils of various types. I felt personally sure that it was Wrench who was useless, not myself. But I followed the drill and asked Tolly, as my Flight Commander, to take Wrench up and see what he thought of him, explaining that he really had flown enough hours with me to have been sent solo, but that I feared he would never make it. Off went Tolly with Wrench and I retired to the crew room to await their return and my Flight Commander’s verdict. It was not long in coming. Tolly came in about twenty minutes later and dumped his parachute. ‘How did you find him?’ I asked. ‘Oh,’ said Tolly, ‘I’ve sent him solo!’ I was astounded – or perhaps appalled would be a better word. We both went out on to the tarmac and identified Wrench in his Harvard coming down wind, turning across wind, descending and turning in to land. He landed – several times – cartwheeled across the grass field and wrote the Harvard off. Wrench by some miracle was unhurt, but the Harvard was in several pieces.


58


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