In the 1930s, flying was all the rage. All over Britain women and men had grown up watching wartime flying aces perform aerobatics in the sky. Now they too were learning how to fly.
Robert Owen is the only son from a Welsh vicarage, now a brilliant pilot and flying instructor, recently of the Royal Air Force. He has taken a new job at the flying school at Best, a prosperous cathedral town in England.
Flying has never seemed so alluring and so terrifying. Human frailty is tested in the drilling and repetition of hours in flight, and Robert’s skills as a pilot and in diplomacy with pupils with delusions about their competence are tested to their limits. And then he falls in love, risking his heart as well as his body in the air.
John Llewelyn Rees (Rhys was his pen-name) was born in Abergavenny on 7 May 1911, the son of a Church of England vicar. He left Hereford Cathedral School in 1929 at the age of eighteen. In the early 1930s he earned his living by writing short stories for English and American papers and magazines, and by driving his father around the parish as a chauffeur. His father tried to dissuade Rees from taking up flying and to concentrate on his writing, for which he had a clear gift, and also tried to steer him towards the ministry. But Rees gained his pilot’s licence in July 1934 and joined the RAF as a Reservist in 1935.
His first novel, The Flying Shadow, was published in 1936, under the pen-name J L Rhys. His second novel, The World Owes Me A Living, was written in between shifts as a pilot, and is about the life of pilots in a flying circus and on a record-breaking flight. It was published in 1939 and did well: it was serialised in the News Chronicle, and the film rights were sold. It was reviewed in The Times as a depiction of ‘an isolated and completely unfamiliar way of life’ (J S 1939), suggesting that Rhys was clearly exploring new subjects in his fiction, bringing to life the glory and danger of flying in peacetime. But the approach of war intensified his work in the RAF and left him even less time to write.
On 5 August 1940 Rhys was killed in a flying accident, aged 29. Nothing is known about what caused the accident, but the Wellington bomber he was commanding stalled at 14.45 in the afternoon on a training flight at Harwell, north of London. As a flight lieutenant Rhys was the senior officer on board, presumably the flight instructor. He and the two pilot officers in the bomber were killed on impact. He was buried by his father, the Reverend Nathaniel Rees, in his parish of Arthog, Llangelynin, in the west of Wales.
When he died John Rhys had been married for fifteenth months, to another pilot who was also an author. The novelist Jane Oliver had written in admiration to J L Rhys on reading The Flying Shadow, so completely had he captured her own experience of flying in his writing. They began to correspond, became friends, and on 25 March 1939 she and Rhys were married. In the Preface she writes movingly of their fifteen months of marriage in the shadow of war. After his death, completed the arrangements for Rhys’s last book, England Is My Village. Jane Oliver, the pen-name of Helen Rees, née Evans, was an experienced novelist, and seven years older than her husband. Her first novel had been published in 1932, and her biggest success to date had been Business as Usual, also published by Handheld Press, which she wrote with her writing partner Ann Stafford.
When faced with the task of assembling her husband’s last book for publication, Jane Oliver had the professional experience to know how to present his short stories to a publisher. It is likely that she decided on her own initiative to supplement the seven stories he had already selected with three extracts from Rhys’s two novels. In 1942, England Is My Village brought J L Rhys the posthumous award of the Hawthornden Prize, one of the two oldest literary prizes awarded in Britain.In 1942 Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford founded the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize, an annual literary award in Rhys’s name, funded by Rhys’s royalties as well as Jane’s own. The John Llewelyn Rhys Prize would be awarded for sixty-eight years up to 2010.
