Subtitled The life and letters of Denys Corbett Wilson 1882-1915, this book is the story of a rich young man who learnt to fly at the Bleriot Flying School in Pau before the War, having fought in South Africa.

He was, according to this book, the first person to fly across the Irish Sea; I thought it was Robert Loraine, a well-known actor, but he never claimed to have succeeded, because he crashed into the sea some distance off-shore and swam the last bit. Strangely, Loraine flew as Wilson’s observer (having been taken off piloting because of defective eyesight!) in 1914, and was seriously wounded whilst with him. He survived the war as a much decorated Lieutenant Colonel.

Corbett Wilson joined the RFC and No 3 Squadron as soon as he could, and was shot down and killed in May 1915, having spent most of his service spotting for artillery. The book is mainly the (astonishingly large number of) letters he wrote to his mother – one about every three or four days, from 13 August 1914 until his last on 9 May 1915. The terribly cold and wet winter of 1914 is covered, and it is clear that the aircraft suffered worse than the personnel. Generally, there seems to have been no form of censorship, and everything going on was faithfully described. Wilson was, apparently, a great friend of Trenchard, and the pair of them conceived a plan to bomb Berlin (in 1914), which the ultimate powers-that-be would not condone. James McCudden when he was a mechanic also flew with Wilson.

The Index is rubbish, starting with the Toyal Flying Corps in the preamble. I looked up Loraine’s multiple entries none of which were correct, although his name appears often in the text. Likewise ‘Mons, Retreat from’, which is mentioned but not where the Index says. There are also some rather irritating mistakes in the author’s, not Wilson’s, text: the Blériot’s fuselage was covered in fabric from the back of the wings forward, and not the other way round, and Wilson drove a car called a Ralle of which I have never heard, although there is a picture of him in a Rolls Royce.

Don’t let the above put you off reading a splendid piece of period writing, containing a lot of previously unknown to me information about the very early days of The Great War.