Ottawa also sent for Clennell Haggerston Dickins in Winnipeg. At the time “Punch” Dickins was in his thirties and working as the general superintendent of Canadian Airways. He was in charge of all air mail service from the Great Lakes to the Pacific and the Arctic. Dickins, like May, was a First World War veteran in the Royal Flying Corps with a DFC to his credit and had pursued his aviation career in the bush, flying in and supplying prospectors in the North. His flight for Dominion Explorers in 1928 was the first ever to survey the barren lands of the Arctic. In 1929 Dickins had been the first pilot to fly over the Arctic Circle in Canada. The call from Canadian Pacific president Sir Edward Beatty about “a wartime job” for Dickins turned out to be crucial to the launching of the Atlantic Ferry Organization.
Calls also went out to a couple of commercial pilots flying in Quebec— Charles Roy Troup and Walter Woollett. “Peter” Troup had served in the RAF’s peacetime No. 39 Bomber Squadron but had resigned his commission, emigrated to Canada, and pursued a career in Quebec’s bush country with Fairchild Aviation. Not long thereafter, “Babe” Woollett did the same, leaving No. 29 RAF Fighter Squadron to seek his fortune at Fairchild in Canada.
Between them, Troup and Woollett did every conceivable kind of flying in the 1920s and 1930s. Troup raced seaplanes at the Canadian National Exhibition and led the Trans Canada Air Tour of eight Bellanca aircraft as part of a sales promotion. Woollett flew some of the first survey crews into northern Quebec and Labrador, flew an international mail route, and led countless rescue missions, including one to locate and retrieve his friend Peter Troup. But the greatest of their collaborations cast Troup and Woollett as co-designers of the BCATP Air Observer Schools, right after war was declared.
The skill of the air observer was viewed by the RAF military establishment with awe that bordered on reverence. In its air crew training manuals the British Air Ministry went so far as to say that “in many respects the air observer has the most responsible and exacting task in a bomber aircraft. . . . Mentally he must always be on the alert. . . . He must estimate and plot the course, be able to take snap readings, judge weather conditions, look out for ice and keep alternative objectives and landing grounds in the back of his mind . . . He must show a marked ability to handle figures, and be sufficiently skilled in signals to take a portion of work off the wireless operator. Above all he must never make mistakes . . . He is a wise and considerate pilot who appreciates the difficulties of his air observer.” Few flyers had greater respect for the air observer than did Babe Woollett.
Woollett’s high regard for the skills of air observation came from one of his earliest flying experiences. As an RAF elementary flying student training at Duxford EFTS in 1924, Woollett quickly adapted to doing “circuits and bumps” with the instructor in the second cockpit of his trainer aircraft, an Avro 504K biplane. On the day he soloed, leaving his instructor, Flight Lieutenant Sutherland, on the ground, Woollett became so enraptured by the sights of nearby Cambridge that he headed for home in the wrong direction. After buzzing the horseracing crowd in the grandstand at Newmarket on Classic Race Day, “my main concern became finding my way home. Fortunately, I happened to know that the main road from Newmarket to London ran right through the middle of Duxford Air Force Station.” When he finally landed back at Duxford he was nearly court-martialled for flying so low over the standing-room-only Newmarket grandstand; but he gained a life-long respect for those who navigate aircraft to and from given points on the map.
Probationary Pilot Officer Woollett advanced from his Avro trainer to the presentation of his RAF wings and confirmation as a pilot officer. After five years of peacetime service in No. 29 RAF Fighter Squadron, he emigrated to Canada in 1929 and spent ten years “flying in the backwoods of [northern Quebec and Labrador with its] uncharted lakes. . . . We’d go through the ice, hit rocks and driftwood . . . through a lot of very dangerous and dashing flying.” In addition to navigating his way around the bush, Woollett had worked his way up to operations manager of Dominion Skyways, based in Rouyn/Noranda. But in 1939 he was prepared to leave all that behind to fly once again with the RAF.
Two things prevented his repatriation to England: at thirty-three he was too old by air force standards for Fighter Command, and secondly he was encouraged by an old RAF friend to stay in Canada to play a much larger role in the war. “Air Chief Marshal Sholto Douglas wrote back to me,” Woollett said, after appealing directly to Douglas to pull a few strings and get him back into the RAF. “Douglas explained that . . . the same way they were going to call on the private aero clubs [in Canada] to operate the elementary flying training schools in the BCATP . . . they were going to call on civil air operators to help set up another dimension of the BCATP. . . . They felt that from this colossal group of experienced and resourceful people— the mechanics [or air engineers] and bush pilots—they could develop schools [in Canada] operated without drawing on the people with potential fighting or military value.” That’s how “Dougie,” as Woollett knew him, wanted him to fight the war.
Thus, as Lord Riverdale and the British delegation grappled with Prime Minister Mackenzie King over quotas, national identity, and the budget of the air training plan, the civilian operators were invited to study the requirements for running Air Observer Schools (AOSs), to draft construction and operating plans, and to submit tenders to the government.
The original BCATP document, signed December 17, 1939, called for ten AOSs, capable of graduating 340 observers a month, or about 4,000 a year. Most AOSs would be at municipal airfields, sometimes sharing facilities with EFTSs. The RCAF would supply the basic facilities and equipment, while the former bush flying companies would organize and carry out all operating services—from catering to classroom maintenance. In addition, the civilian companies had to hire civilian pilots to chauffeur the air observers on training flights.
“We gathered in Ottawa,” Woollett remembered. “All the major bush contractors throughout Canada were requested to submit estimates to the Department of Defence: Dominion Skyways, Yukon Southern, Canadian Airways, Wings, Prairie Airways, Mackenzie Air Service, Starratt Airways, Leavens Brothers, Ginger Coote Airways, Quebec Airways, and others. . . . While a lot of us were under the umbrella of Canadian Pacific, the companies retained their individual identities . . . ensuring the government a real competition, plus a variety of approaches and totals from which to choose.”
Peter Troup and Babe Woollett virtually lived at the Château Laurier hotel in Ottawa as they dug up every shred of information they could to win for their company, Dominion Skyways, the business and the honour of organizing the Air Observer Schools. Among the big questions facing the “Château Rats,” as they were called, was the cost of heating. None of the bush operators had heated more than sheds and hangars to that point, and the BCATP required the heating of administrative buildings, mess halls, barracks, classrooms, and other structures at each of the planned ten schools. Feeding the AOS recruits posed another problem. How could the schools guarantee the highest quality of food—such as meat—for air observer students, while such food was rationed in the civilian communities where the schools were to be located? Then there was the janitorial problem. What would it cost to hire staff to clean everything from sheets and kitchens to washrooms? On the flight line they had to estimate the costs of aircraft maintenance, fuel and oil consumption, and maintenance crew salaries, all “pretty monumental considerations for a bunch of half-assed bush pilots.
“Eventually, our group had to wind up our effort to make the presentation deadline for the Department of Defence,” Woollett said. “We bundled the necessary sets of papers into their separate envelopes, and I stood waiting to take over the baton, like a chap in a relay race. With only about thirty minutes to get over to Defence Headquarters, some meticulous member of our team suddenly gasped: ‘My God! We haven’t any sealing wax, and they have to be sealed!’
“Finally, I had to run over to this office and hand in our submission without sealing wax, but with the prescribed number of copies all sealed in separate envelopes with tape . . . I was out of breath as I handed the bids over to some rather stuffy old general, who refused to accept them because they were not all sealed with red sealing wax . . . I rushed to the outer office where they helped