In May 1917, a German fighter plane made an unusual delivery to a British airfield in France.
A brick fell from the sky. It carried two folded notes, one in German, the other in English.
“Herewith a German patrol sends you news of Lieut. Mactavish and Captain Allen,” the first note read.
Capt. Arthur Spencer Allen was dead, but Duncan Mactavish survived after the Germans shot down the BE2e reconnaissance plane he piloted during the Battle of Arras.
It was his first and last flight; Mactavish was captured. But before he headed to Germany as a prisoner of war, his captors allowed him to write a few lines in pencil.
“In the First World War, there was a much more genteel custom whereby if an aircraft was shot down, the pilot, if he survived the shooting down, was allowed to write a note and send it across to his squadron commander,” said Anthony Inglis Howard-Williams, the grandson of Mactavish’s commander.
One hundred and seven years later, Inglis Howard-Williams still has Mactavish’s note. He recently brought it across the ocean from London to Ottawa to recreate a tradition tying together two families.
The tradition started when Inglis Howard-Williams’ grandfather, the former squadron commander, died in the late 1960s.
“My father was going through his effects and found one of these notes and he thought, wouldn’t it be wonderful if some of his family were still alive?” he said. “Wouldn’t they like to hear this story?”
After a lengthy search, he said, his father learned that Mactavish himself was still alive and living in Winnipeg. They met in 1976. Inglis Howard-Williams still has the photo of his father with Mactavish, then in his 80s, holding his note.
That could have been the end of the story, had Michael Payne not started digging into the papers of his mother-in-law, Barbara Welch, Mactavish’s daughter.
“We discovered this material, my wife and I,” said Payne. “When I looked at it, I thought, this is an amazing story.”
He had a copy of the note. As a trained historian, he wanted to know more.
‘Expect tears’
Inglis Howard-Williams isn’t hard to find. He’s a famous orchestra conductor in London and an ambassador for the Royal Air Force Association. Payne said he thought there was an “outside chance” he might still have the letter.
“I wrote to him an e-mail,” said Payne. “I was absolutely astonished when he responded in about 15 minutes, saying, ‘I know exactly what it is that you’re talking about and I could tell you a lot more about this letter — and I still have it.'”
Inglis Howard-Williams said he was astonished to learn that Welch, Mactavish’s daughter, was still alive and living in Ottawa at age 92.
“It took me about 15 minutes to book a flight to Canada to come over and see her and recreate the photograph that was taken in 1976,” he said.
He arrived in Ottawa on Thursday. Sitting in the Château Laurier cafe, preparing to head to Welch’s seniors home, he shared his excitement.
“Expect tears. Being a musician, it’s one of the curses we have to suffer,” he said. “We are very emotional people.”
‘He refused to eat sauerkraut ever after’
Welch was waiting with her family on Thursday when Inglis-Howard Williams knocked on the door.
“What a thrill to meet you,” she said.
Inglis Howard-Williams greeted Mactavish’s granddaughter and his great-great grandson before sitting down to ask Welch what she knew about her father’s military service and his time in the POW camp.
She didn’t remember much. It had been so long, and her father said little about his time in the war.
“I suspect it was a traumatic enough experience for him that he didn’t talk about it a great deal,” Payne explained. “The only story that I have heard was that, based on his experience in the prisoner of war camp, he refused to eat sauerkraut ever after.”
“You’ve never seen the actual original note that your father wrote from the battlefield?” Inglis Howard-Williams asked.
Welch replied that she’d only heard stories, seen copies. “Would you like to see it?” Inglis Howard-Williams said.
“Oh sure. Have you got it? Wow,” she said. “That’s amazing. Look how old it is.”
Taking the paper in her hands, Welch began reading the faded first words of the note, which reads in full as follows:
Dear Williams, Just a line to let you know that we were brought down this morning. Poor Allen was killed and I was wounded in the right foot and left leg. We got five German Albatross on us and they gave us hell. The fellows who brought us down are here and are very decent to me. They are taking this across. Would you write to my brother and see about sending my kit home? We were brought down on fire and hit the floor with a hell of a whang. Allen was killed when we hit. Good bye old thing. Give my love to everyone.
Yours to a cinder, Mactavish
“He had very nice penmanship,” Welch noted.
She told Inglis Howard-Williams that, as far as she knew, her father never piloted a plane again after his ill-fated first flight.
Inglis Howard-Williams asked her to pose with him to recreate the photograph almost 50 years after that Winnipeg visit.
“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if it became sort of a family tradition every 50 years?” he said. “My father would be absolutely thrilled.”
“I wish he was alive,” Welch said of her own father. “He would have been thrilled to know what went on, to meet Anthony and all the rest of it. It really would have made his day. But unfortunately, you know, it’s all in the past.”
A letter written by WWI pilot Duncan Mactavish to his commander E. L. Howard-Williams has united the two families for three generations. Howard-Williams’s grandson brought the letter to Mactavish’s family in Ottawa, showing them the last words the pilot wrote before going to a German POW camp.